Issue 1: HAG

Have you ever seen such long, yellowed, fingernails?

Jan 29, 2023

The Hag is part of the stories the human family has told its children since humans and story telling (and children) began. I didn’t invite her in but I’m glad she has claimed a corner in my brain.

For context, a little flash-montage of growing up in rural Lincolnshire (UK) in the 80s & 90s:

DIY bookcases stuffed to a bulge with books of all creeds. Cheese on toast (salad cream, cucumber), sometimes soup, Bourbon Creams, Paris Texas, Sacher Torte, The Moomins, Morph, Encyclopaedia Britannica, REM, Reeves & Mortimer, stay out of the spare room: there’s a presence in there, don’t think about it. Eurotrash, The Word, Saturday log fires, Radio 4 plays, supermarket felt-tipped pens in mega-packs, classical music (‘will you children SHUT UuuUUp? I am trying to listen…’) projects: cardboard, sellotape, paper, wool, garden wire, kapok, sometimes polymer clay, paint, Dad’s old wool jumpers, Mum’s fabrics from the 70’s. Picture books collected up in armfuls in the small hours from the abundant bookcases and carried back to my creative raft of a bed for focused nocturnal studying of the visuals.

Outside: Open fields, spinneys, hills, hollows, wirey-armed trees, sticks - the swords of knights, conkers in tiny green armour helmets, devil’s toenails in the gravel, tiny wild strawberries in clumps, watch out for nettles. Dry, dead wood - the pretend banquet chicken of Vikings, woodpeckers, limestone chunks pushing out of the earth like a buried giant’s teeth, crunchy burnt stubble, stoats, weasels, the cuckoo’s morning ‘cuck… oo’, deer, concrete hard-standing slabs (or were they space station platforms?) ploughed earth geranium smells,haystacks, mud clodded wellingtons (come ON! LIFT your legs for goodness-aches). Dogs, blackberry bushes, angry grey geese, yellow greengages glowing and plump with resiny drips at their navels, friendly white ducks, rivers, hares. Pigs, chickens. Dearly beloved goats stretching up for Turkey Oak leaves. Vicious and not so vicious cats padding through the garden. Paddles upriver to the graveyard and white bridge beyond with Sindy dolls tied on strings behind us ‘swimming’, clearing wet half-mulched leaves with wet half-mulched hands from the garden, the spectral giant eel of our imaginations skimming past our vulnerable pale bare feet in the water. There was something of the fairy tale setting about all of it.

I was about 5 when the Hag carved herself into my psyche, with her wicked yellowed fingernail. My first ever trip to the cinema. I was unexpectedly disappointed by the baby-headed sickliness of Snow White. She kept on singing and mooning about a drippy Prince in a horrible cloak and trousers, amongst other unfathomable behaviours. The Hag (secretly the evil queen) wasn’t my idea of best friend material - but she was entrancing, far more interesting to me than the dumbling (who I had so wanted to love) Snow White. The woodland setting of the story felt so visually close to my experience of the world. In my small head that meant the Hag could be lurking in my own village - I thought I better be on my guard.

The wicked Witch of the West (The Wizard of Oz) made herself at home in my head too. She, like Snow White’s Hag, inspired real gut-flipping fear in me. The short scene in which she mocks Dorothy through the crystal ball sent SHiii-VERS through my whole body.

A little older and sneakily watching (off limits in our house) Dynasty, I met Alexis Colby. She was deliciously, unpleasantly bad. Rude to everyone - even her oil tycoon Lover. Alexis was selfish, petty and decadent. A total anti-role model, I kept an amused eye on her too. I was starting to admire Hag qualities.

When small, I unquestioningly knew it was important to be good and kind and fair. I was able to be very black and white about it and irritatingly good at home: dobbing siblings in for misdeeds, being almost creepily helpful and gracious. Hags were a curious anomaly to me and an example of how not to be because of their breaking all the sacred rules. Quietly, as the little pious person that I was grew, I noticed that these rude grotesques seemed to be able to get everything they desired, dancing outside the lines we were all supposed to stay within, pushing noisily to the front to take what they wanted with mega-relish. There was a real temptation in that.

Being able to see unpalatable feelings and behaviour (like rage, jealousy, insecurity, selfishness, acquisitiveness and spite) that I secretly felt inside too, existed somewhere inside other human bodies was important for a goody two shoes square like me. My disobedient streak (my individuality?) needed oxygen too and I needed to know that I wasn’t maladjusted because of that.

There is a vulnerability that dwells in being fearfully preoccupied with maintaining a constant level of ‘niceness’, I suspect that little girls (little boys too) who grow up overly concerned with personification of virtuousness become tightly wound, quivering ‘people pleasers’. The danger for them (us) in adulthood is the façade cracking to reveal insubstantial goo where there should be the roots of an individual, a personality (I’m talking about my own experiences). So much time spent trying second guess, respond to and simulate other people’s thoughts and opinions, in place of getting to grips with my own.

For me the cracks and breakages have been opportunities to drain out the goop and hopefully culture something more honest and personal in its place. In those significant cracking moments, I have reached for the gnarly hand of the Hag, tremulously calling for her in the dark. When defeated, ill and not ready to go back into the world, she showed me what grit looked like. When feeling flat and ready for upheaval that I want to avoid, she irrevocably announces the truth. When feeling insecure and small she mockingly crows ‘I’m frightened auntie Em’ in my head and cackles, a little dose of theatrical cruelty, gives me perspective (a camp version of ‘this too shall pass’). When I am being fun killingly square, she appears to tip me out of the piety chair.

I have come to see the Hag as a symbol of liberation, elevation above the unimportant nonsense I spend too much time worrying about. She’s a cackler with her own strange habits - which makes it ok to be like that too. She doesn’t care about her dark circles, facial hair, her pot belly, her drooping boobs, her ample, lumpy thighs and bottom and her broad ankles. She doesn’t waste her time suffering fools or shielding the world from her shadows. She is who she is and she doesn’t mind if you like her or not - she knows she can’t control it. Her unveiled capricious complexities are a refreshing rebuttal of artifice, self deception and the half truths we accidentally sometimes find ourselves stranded in.

I’ve done a fair bit of reading around Hags and Witches and a large proportion of the paths lead me back to Baba Yaga. She seems to have dominated in the fairytale scene visually and really set up ideas about how a Hag looks (hook nose and chin coming to meet in the middle, yellowed fingernails and a hunched over posture) I wanted to resist her a bit - She felt too obvious to choose for this issue. But she pushed her way ahead of the other ideas and demanded to be drawn.

There is an irrepressible lineage from the Triple Goddess of the ancient religions, taking in Odin’s Wild Hunt, Witch Trials and ‘othering’ of women, to our modern representations of Hags. Versions of Baba Yaga seem to be what we see, when we think about what a Hag looks like. Disney’s Hag in Snow White is a great example - very Baba Yaga.

Baba Yaga appears in multiple stories in Slavic tales. She is an ‘of the woods’ supernatural being with a fierce temper. Her appeal as a subject to draw is partly her accessories (human skulls, mortar/cauldron/spaceship, house on chicken legs) and partly her badness - she eats men, women and children and grumpily murders passers by if the mood takes her. Happen upon her on a good day and she will likely (irrationally) leave you alone.

LOTS of drawings over pages and pages this month and experiments in different ways of describing Baba Yaga. Quite a lot of trying to make her more willow-the-wisp ghostly and trying to steer clear of the old expected visuals (nose, chin, hunch). I thought about what Baba Yaga would look like: to eye witnesses, in the woods what might they see and think they had seen her? I thought about her bird of prey character. I went to images of Goshawks and Little Owls as source material, going with remorseless eyes that would work in the dark and a sharp, neat flesh tearing beak shaped nose.

The Illustrations have arrived at fairly classic Hag visual tropes in spite of my efforts to move away from them. Don’t think I mind that though. I also see a touch of Regan MacNeil in there. One more drawing of her needs to be made, my learning this month is to write less, draw more, so maybe she’ll appear (scratching eerily at your window) next month…

Thank you for reading! I have loved working on this, this month. Be sure to subscribe and keep a peeled eye on your inbox for your free download-and-printable card arriving next week.

See you soon x