Kikimora

What it is

The kikimora is a female spirit of the Slavic house, usually set against the domovoi rather than beside him: where he is the family's protective ancestor, she is the one whose mood the house has to manage. When things are as they should be she tends the chickens and helps with the housework. When they are not she whistles, breaks dishes and makes noise all night. The recorded remedy is unusually blunt — reverse your own behaviour and she leaves.

But the household version is only half of her, and the name points at the other half.

The name is the experience

Kikimora breaks into two parts, and the second is the one that matters. -mora descends from Proto-Slavic and Proto-Germanic words for a night spirit or a bad dream, and it is the same element that gives English its nightmare. The word did not drift into that meaning by accident. In Slovene, Croatian and Serbian, mora is simply the ordinary noun for a nightmare; the spirit and the bad dream are not distinguished at all. In Polish and Czech the same word also means moth, because the soul was held to leave a sleeping body as a wisp or a moth — so the insect at the window and the thing on your chest are named together.

And the behaviour attributed to the mora is not a monster's behaviour. She comes in through the keyhole, settles on the sleeper's chest, and tries to strangle them. That is a report of an experience: the weight, the immobility, the presence in the room, the inability to call out. Whatever one makes of the cause, the description is first-hand and it is consistent across a very wide area.

This makes her unusual among the figures on this site. Most of them explain something in the outside world — a forest, a river, a failed harvest. She explains something that happens inside a person, in the dark, and the vocabulary built around her is still the vocabulary we use for it.

Two kikimoras, two husbands

The tradition divides her cleanly, and the division is by marriage:

• the house kikimora is the wife of the domovoi
• the swamp kikimora is the wife of the leshy

That makes her the hinge between the two halves of the Slavic spirit world — the domestic and the wild — and the two versions behave accordingly. The house one is a difficult member of the household. The swamp one frightens travellers, leads them astray, drowns them and takes children, which is her husband's repertoire rather than her own.

The swamp form has one detail worth separating out, because it is the most concrete piece of social history in this whole cluster: she was identified by wet footprints, and builders were said to send her into a house to harm the person who bought it. A spirit used as a contractor's revenge. The belief is doing work here that has nothing to do with explaining nature.

What it looks like

What the record describes. She is always female and otherwise almost unfixed. A dog's snout, a chicken's beak, goat-like features with horns and glowing eyes; she can take on the features of any animal. In human form she appears as an old woman, as a beautiful girl, or as a dead relative — the last of these placing her close to the revenant category where the rusalka sits.

The swamp form is described more consistently and much less grandly: small, hunched, thin and scruffy, with a pointed nose, dishevelled hair, and clothing of moss and grass.

What the overlap obscures. Because mora became the common noun for nightmare in the South Slavic languages, and because the same word means moth further west, writing about the kikimora tends to collapse three things — a house spirit, a night-pressing entity, and a word — into one creature with a single appearance. They are related but they are not the same, and the appearance belongs mostly to the first.

What people did at bedtime

The anti-mora measures deserve recording as a set, because together they describe a nightly routine rather than an emergency rite:

• turn to face the window
• turn the pillow over and make a cross on it
• stand a broom upside down behind the door
• lay a belt on the sheets
• say a prayer before sleeping

Four of the five are things done to the bed itself. This is not how people guard against a monster in the forest; it is how they guard against something that happens where they lie down.

Origin and sources

The etymology is solid and is the best-documented part of the figure: Derksen's Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon (2008) for the -mora element, Karadžić's Serbian dictionary for the South Slavic sense, with Éva Pócs's Between the Living and the Dead (1999) supplying the comparative frame for night-spirit belief and the departing soul.

The folklore itself is less well served in English. Much of what circulates comes from general mythology encyclopaedias — Dixon-Kennedy (1998), Leeming (2005) — which are compilations rather than fieldwork, and which tend to merge the house and swamp figures. The Russian regional material behind the distinction is thinly represented in translation.

• Rick Derksen, Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon (2008)
• Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead (1999)
• Vuk Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1818). First edition, Vienna. Trilingual: Serbian with German and Latin glosses, 27,270 entries. Second, much enlarged edition 1852 (47,500 entries).