The Divine Hag Goddess

By Katie Bennett

October 28, 2021

Around Halloween, when I was very young, my dad would terrify me by putting on a mask shaped like an old woman's face. The woman had a beak-like nose, a pointy chin that curved upward in a reverse question mark, and a globular, oozing wart on her cheek. Her three teeth were rotten and her white hair jutted out from underneath a red babushka. I remember this woman's face greeting me at my bedroom door, and being so afraid that I couldn't even run away — I would just drop to my knees and scream. Eventually my mom would come and rip the mask off my dad's face, but by then it was too late; I wouldn't be able to sleep that night, the old hag's image burned into my vision, haunting me.

Why was an old woman's face — a caricature of one, at least — so terrifying to me? It's no secret that old women are often seen as second-class citizens in modern society, exemplified by the many products and plastic surgery procedures that aim to "fix" their wrinkles and unruly bodies. Words like "hag" and "crone" are now slurs for older women that mean ugly and irksome, but in pre-Christian societies, before the Inquisition and the witch hunts that sought to strip power from women, these words were positive descriptors. Writer Jean Shinoda Bolen says that crone comes from "crown," indicating wisdom emanating from the head, and hag from "hagio," meaning "holy." Ancient Pagans revered hags and crones, which is one reason I've recently started to incorporate Pagan traditions into my holiday celebrations. During Samhain, the Pagan precursor to our modern-day Halloween, hag and crone goddesses were particularly glorified for their ties to darkness, death, and the regenerative powers of rest.

Samhain is celebrated in the northern hemisphere between October 31 and November 1 and is known as "The Witch's New Year." It marks the end of the Wheel of the Year, a calendar of seasonal holidays based on Celtic and Germanic Pagan traditions. Samhain ritualizes the encroaching darkness in the sky and the "death" of the fields after the final harvest. It's believed there is a "thinning of the veil" between the spirit world and our own, and that spirits freely walk the land. People leave offerings for ancestors, and traditionally disguised themselves from evil spirits in costumes made of animal skins.

According to Scottish lore, at the beginning of Samhain, Cailleach, the divine hag goddess of winter, freezes the land with a rap of her magical staff. She has a bit of a bad reputation as a result, but she is also deified and respected for initiating winter, because Celts believed that darkness was regenerative and necessary for birth and light. Many landmarks in Ireland and Scotland are named for Cailleach's likeness, including Slieve na Calliagh, which means "the hag's mountain."

I love that there are ancient holy places that celebrate the "hag." It makes me think of Rebecca Solnit's City of Women, her feminist re-imagining of the street names and monuments of New York City, of which she said,

"I can't imagine how I might have conceived of myself and my possibili­ties if, in my formative years, I had moved through a city where most things were named after women and many or most of the monuments were of powerful, successful, honored women. Of course, these sites commemorate only those who were allowed to hold power and live in public; most American cities are, by their nomenclature, mostly white as well as mostly male."

How would I have conceived of myself and my possibilities, if, in my formative years, I'd stood at the base of the hag's mountain and looked up at the glorious manifestation of Cailleach's power, or if every Halloween I celebrated the many goddesses of death and rebirth that modern practitioners of Samhain now associate with the holiday, such as Kali, Morgan le Fay, Persephone, and Demeter.

Or if I knew about Baba Yaga, the mystical crone who is one of the most powerful figures in Eastern European folklore. Growing up I sometimes called my grandma "Baba," which means "grandmother" in Ukrainian. The mask my dad used to scare me with those childhood Halloweens looked like depictions of Baba Yaga's face, and of my grandma's (his mother's) too. It was a gross distortion of my grandma, to be sure, but there were similarities in the droop of their cheeks, the brown age spots on the skin, and the babushka tied under the chin.

My grandmother, Anastasia, was definitely a wizened crone. She survived bombs being dropped on her rural Ukrainian farm village, being captured by Nazis when she was fourteen and imprisoned in a slave labor camp as an ostarbeiter for ten years, the death of her young lover and the father of her first child (likely at the hands of Nazis, but she'd never say), a cleaving from her family as she fled across the Atlantic to America, and a fall that cracked her skull and wiped out much of her memory. She survived factory work, raising three boys, and a husband she repeatedly told me, in the year before her death, was "not nice, no good."

She survived more than I can imagine, but as a kid I couldn't see that. I saw her as foreign and strange. She couldn't read me bedtime stories when she babysat because she couldn't read English, and it pains me to admit that, as a five year-old, I sometimes called her "stupid." I remember her house being decorated year-round with painted eggs and ominously large wooden crosses. She picked plums and figs from the trees in her backyard and cooked them into tarts, when I would have rather eaten cake slathered with chocolate Crisco icing. But she made the best mashed potatoes, and after dinner at her house my family would sit with her and my grandfather to watch her favorite show, "The Price is Right." Contestants won new cars and enough money to drive them straight to new lives.

I'm thinking a lot about my grandma, Anastasia, as I prepare to celebrate Samhain for the first time. I'll still be joining in all the campy Halloween fun, sitting on my porch in the city to hand out candy to neighborhood kids while wearing my default knife-thru-head "costume," watching '80s movies about possessed dolls and teen witches, and visiting the pumpkin patch. But this year I've prepared a small altar, on which I'll light a candle next to a picture of Anastasia and of my grandma Elisa ("Mimi") as well.

Mimi, who spent hours each morning meticulously applying her Clinique make-up and was named campus "Queen" in college, would probably hate to be associated with words like "hag" or "crone." But the terms reflect the power she held, via her keen fashion sense and ability to build a home within herself after Castro destroyed her home country of Cuba. Our relationship was a little more complicated than mine with grandma Anastasia because she lived longer, long enough to continuously criticize the artist's path I'd chosen for myself in adulthood and for me to question how healthy our relationship was. But she also told me I had good taste, was smart and beautiful, and would leave messages on my phone in the evenings telling me to sleep and dream with the angels.

As Samhain nears and my grandmothers' spirits draw closer to earth, and to me, I've been thinking about what I want to say to them. "Thank you" is the first thing that comes to mind. I want to thank them for loving me the best they could, through their own trauma and a world that tried to make them invisible as they aged. And I want to thank them for making me a biological reality, of course. I remember reading somewhere that everyone has been in their grandmother's womb because a female baby develops all the eggs she will form in her lifetime in utero. After learning that, I understood why I looked so similar to pictures of Mimi when she was younger.

When I was little, grandma Anastasia gave me a set of Russian dolls. I now imagine myself as a small doll, inside the doll of my mother, inside the doll of my grandmother, inside dolls I'll never know the names of but whose influence I can point to in the fleck of orange in my eyes or my mysteriously double-jointed fingers. The doll set regenerates continuously, and I grow larger, containing a baby or maybe just my dreams.

Katie Bennett is a writer and musician from West Philadelphia. She writes a monthly newsletter about personal ghosts, feminist lit, and creative process, where she recently shared short essays on mess and devotion. For most of her 20s she played music under the name free cake for every creature. You can follow her on Instagram @katiepbennett.