For a little over three years now, I have had a devotional relationship with Baba Yaga. It’s been an intense, complicated, sometimes harrowing relationship; Baba Yaga is neither kind nor loving, and devotion to her has not been like a parent-child relationship nor even like the relationship between close friends. The message, rather has been, “You do not have to like me, but you will respect me.” There are four basic acts of service that I rendered to Baba Yaga as part of our relationship: I kept her image in my home, I marked myself so the world would know I was hers, I kept a light in my home and did not let it go out, and I made offerings of vodka and chicken bones.

When I first received the instruction to mark myself, I bought a skull ring to wear on my right hand. Two weeks later, I showed up for a tattoo appointment (my first tattoo). I had given the artist a basic concept, but left the detail and embellishment open to her taste. When I arrived for the appointment, seeing the design for the first time, I was astonished to see a chicken foot as a central feature of the drawing. (For those who are unaware, Baba Yaga lives in a hut mounted on chicken feet.) You will mark yourself so the world will know you are mine. Fair enough, then.

I kept wearing the ring, though. For the past three years, that ring has been a central symbol of my dedication to Baba Yaga, and has been a focal point throughout my relationship with her. My mother hates the ring and has taken every opportunity to comment on how ugly it is; when my father died, I felt it would be gauche of me to walk around her house wearing a garish skull ring, so I discreetly tucked it into my luggage and kept it out of sight so that I could still have Baba Yaga with me through the ordeal of funerary arrangements and other after-death messiness.

I’ve written a few times on the blog about Baba Yaga and my veneration of her—what she’s like, my theological perspectives on her, etc.—but most of that relationship has stayed offline. Most of it has been private, not because there’s anything particularly secret about it, but just because there are some things that are intimate and not appropriate to blast all over the internet. Nonetheless, Baba Yaga has been a cornerstone of my religious and magical practice for the past three years.

And then a couple months ago, a funny thing happened.

While I was doing some yard work, I lost my skull ring. It fit my finger very well and I’d never had issues with it falling off, but it somehow slipped off my finger and disappeared into a pile of autumn leaves. I sifted through the leaves looking for it, but I wasn’t able to find it again.

No matter. These sorts of things happen. I ordered a new ring, the same size as the old one, but with a slightly subtler and less garish skull design. I had the inside of the ring engraved with Baba Yaga’s name in Cyrillic. All was well.

And then, a short while later, I was attending a Heathen blot. The horn of mead came around for us to make our toasts, and as I reached my hand out to take it, the ring slipped off my finger and fell straight into the horn. I had to wait until the blot was over (and the horn completely drained) to get my ring back.

Huh. Kind of weird. I like to pay attention to unusual things that happen in ritual spaces. But let’s not overreact.

Fast forward again to another day, and my ring disappears off my finger. One minute I was wearing it, and the next… I wasn’t. I looked all around the room. I looked everywhere I’d been since I last remembered having it. Nothing. I simply could not find my ring.

At this point, I sat up and paid attention. People in online hoobedy-hoobedy spaces (and especially newcomers to witchcraft) often make a big deal out of signs and wonders. I saw a spider in my house—is it a sign from Athena? A crow landed on the lamppost outside my office; is the Morrigan reaching out to me? Oftentimes, the answer is “No, that sounds like an animal just doing animal things.” Generally speaking, unless you’ve specifically asked for a sign, it’s easier to take an occurrence (even an unusual one) as just an interesting accident of the universe. Shit happens all the time, and not all of it is communication from gods or spirits. (There’s a great blog post about this by Thumper Forge over at Patheos.)

But when the same unusual occurrence happens several times in quick succession, and it’s tied to something that already has religious or magical significance (like, say, a piece of jewelry you wear as an act of devotion to a particular spirit), there’s a damn good chance that’s a sign, and you’d be a fool not to pay attention. So, I did what any enterprising witch would do. I went and got a reading.

“Hm,” my High Priestess said, looking at the Tarot cards she’d drawn, “It’s your choice. Baba Yaga is saying she’s willing to let you go. She’s opening the door if you want to walk through it. You don’t have to, but it’s very all or nothing. Either you give her everything or you call it quits.”

In a way, this reading didn’t really surprise me. As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, my Slavic polytheist practice has been flagging lately because of how overwhelmed I’ve been at work. Along with it, my devotion to Baba Yaga flagged as well, and the things I did for her started to feel kind of rote and empty. It didn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that the dip in devotion garnered some attention and a demand for more serious devotion. The message of the reading was basically “Shit or get off the pot.”

But I didn’t want to get off the pot. I didn’t want to let Baba Yaga go. Working with her has been incredibly meaningful for me, and has hugely shaped my practice and who I am as a person. I didn’t want that just to be a three-year phase. What’s more, I have her tattooed on my body, and I resented the idea that she could have claimed me as hers and then been willing to discard me after only a couple of years. You don’t get to sew your name into the label of a rented tux, if you get my drift.

I threw myself into the devotional work, lighting incense, making offerings, saying prayers—the whole shebang. For a while, it seemed like things were ticking upward, until a couple of days ago. As I was lighting my incense, I heard a voice in my ear, as clear as a bell:

I came to you because your father was fated to die. I will return to you when it is time for you to know death again. But I live across thrice-nine lands in the thrice-tenth kingdom, far from the lives of men. I am not suited for everyday worship. I will be back, but it is time to say goodbye for now.

Well, fuck.

Sometimes we get clear communication from deities or spirits, and sometimes that communication isn’t what we want or expect. I believe Baba Yaga when she says she’ll be back—I have no reason not to—but she unequivocally kicked me out of her hut and shut the door behind me. It was time for me to go.

I’m still processing the abrupt end (or rather, pause) of my devotional relationship with her. In a way, it feels right; being released from my service to her, I feel lighter, like I’d been carrying around something heavy and finally been told to put it down. I have taken her image down, put away the nightlight I’ve had lit for the past three years, packed up the various doodads and thingamabobs I had collected and offered to her. Clearing all of that out feels right in a hard-to-define witchy way, and even though part of me doesn’t want to let Baba Yaga go, I think it needed to happen. I don’t really know what comes next—if other devotional relationships will spring up in place of this one, or how my Slavic polytheist practice will be affected, or if I’ll just stick to honoring the Gods of the Wica. Whatever comes, though, I am grateful for the time I spent with Baba Yaga and the lessons I learnt from her. Now I return from the thrice-tenth kingdom, carrying a blazing brand and riding a horse swifter than death.