Meeting Baba Yaga at the Crossroads
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Madame Pamita, author of The Book of Candle Magic and the new Baba Yaga’s Book of Witchcraft.
The crossroads hold a magical association in many spiritual traditions, and Slavic magic is no exception. The crossroads, or rozdorizhzhya, are a liminal place where spirits like to linger and so are a place that is feared or revered depending on how comfortable you feel mixing and mingling with the spirit world. In my book, Baba Yaga’s Book of Witchcraft, I have an entire chapter dedicated to traditional spells and divination that can be done at the crossroads, but one of my favorite workings is the most daring—to meet the spirits at the crossroads.
If you’d like to meet Baba Yaga, the legendary Slavic witch of the woods, you might invite an encounter with her at the crossroads. If you do, it’s recommended that you first find a dirt path that has a fork in the road. It’s important that it be Y-shaped rather than X or T-shaped. X-shaped crossroads can be good but are for different kinds of magical workings, while T-shaped crossroads are believed to block magic rather than open it up.
Once you’ve located the perfect spot, venture out to this crossroads at midnight by yourself, bringing only several coins that you plan to leave behind as payment to the spirits. Sit quietly and wait at the spot until you have an encounter of some kind. It may be a vision, it may be hearing meaningful sounds, or it may be meeting an actual being of some kind. Baba Yaga is a notorious shapeshifter, so she might even take the form of a bird or an animal.
Once you encounter this spirit in whatever form it takes, you may ask it one question and receive a truthful answer to it. The answer could be verbal but is just as likely to come to you through an inner voice in your mind’s ear. Once you receive your answer, turn back the way that you came and throw your coins over your shoulder saying the words, “It is paid” out loud. This payment ensures that you are not in debt to the spirit for the encounter or the information given. It is essential that you not look back at the spirit or the crossroads after you turn away even if you hear your name being called. To turn back and look after the encounter is considered highly insulting to the spirits as it is an unauthorized peek into the their world.
Meeting Baba Yaga or any other spirit at the crossroads can be an exhilarating experience, a way to test your spiritual mettle and can open up a deeper relationship to the spirit world. Take the appropriate physical and spiritual precautions and you may come away with wisdom, power and, of course, an amazing story of your own to tell.
Madame Pamita is a Ukrainian diaspora witch, teacher, author, candle maker, spellcaster, and tarot reader. She has a popular YouTube Channel for teaching witchcraft; she hosts two podcasts, “Baba Yaga’s Magic” and “Magic and the Law of Attraction,” and she is the author of Baba Yaga’s Book of Witchcraft, The Book of Candle Magic, and Madame Pamita’s Magical Tarot. She is also the proprietress of the online spiritual apothecary, the Parlour of Wonders and lives in Santa Monica, California. You can find her at parlourofwonders.com.
Our thanks to Pamita for her guest post! For more from Madame Pamita, read her article “How to Create an Altar to Honor Baba Yaga.”
