An Offering To Kikimora

…all the gossip from the ancestors about our little house spirit.

Kikimora is a kind of spirit creature. She lives in your house. Some say she’s a banshee. Others say that she is a soul who couldn’t go home to the Milky Way. She may sweep your floors and do your laundry in the night. Does she steal eggs? Maybe. Act as an intermediary to your ancestors as she brushes you with soft moth wings? Also maybe.

Often in modern fairy tales, women are either beautiful and without agency or powerful but bad. In the Slavic tales, it is different. Female characters here can be purposeful, strong, whimsical, good and even a little bad. Or all the way bad, depending on the day. In this way, Kikimora and her peers are just like me… and probably you too.

I can’t say where the Kikimora came from or what she wants, but one lives in every home. She’s a neat-nit, so if you keep a tidy house you’re in luck! Kikimora will help with chores while you’re asleep. Slack on your housekeeping? You know that dreadful falling feeling you have sometimes when you’re just staring to fall asleep? That’s Kikimora! She loves to annoy bad housekeepers with whistling, spinning and dropping dishes on the floor all night long.

I hear that if she’s stealing your eggs, you can leave a juniper branch near the chicken house and she will take that instead. If you give enough offerings, she will protect your chickens. Some people call her the “night butterfly,” because of the moth wings she flies around on. She’s little, as little as a whisp of straw. She slips through keyholes to get around when your doors are all closed. Although she appears as a mousey creature mostly, she can also wear the face of your ancestor. Glimpses of the Kikimora in my house suggest she does not have a nose and I swear sometimes I see antlers.

One of my little sisters gave me an envelope of orange slices and star anise just before Christmas and I made a garland of it. I thought it was a nice offering for Kikimora, although the grandmothers say she likes milk or porridge. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t appreciate an orange in the dead of winter.

All of my ancestor paintings tell ancient Slavic folk tales using female forms from the Neolithic. The statuette on which my Kikimora is based is from the Cucuteni culture in what is now northeastern Romania. The painting is acrylic & ink on 24x26” canvas.