The Architecture of the Uncanny: A Comparative Study of the Witch Archetype in Russian, German, and Indian Folklore

There is something deeply unsettling about the witch. Not in the way that a monster is unsettling, something wholly alien, safely other, clearly demarcated as not-us, but in a quieter, more disturbing way. The witch unsettles because she is almost recognizable. She is the old woman who lives alone, the healer who knows too much, the mother whose love has curdled into something consuming. She is familiar, and that familiarity is precisely what makes her frightening. This quality, of the familiar made threatening, the homely made horrifying, is what Sigmund Freud, writing in 1919, called the unheimlich, translated into English as “the uncanny.”

Freud’s essay The Uncanny begins with a close reading of the German word itself. Heimlich means “belonging to the home, domestic, familiar”, but Freud notices that in its secondary usage, the same word also means “concealed, kept hidden, done in secret.” The unheimlich, the un-homely, is therefore not simply the opposite of the domestic but its dark underside: what is uncanny is something that was once familiar, once intimate, but has been repressed or hidden and now returns in a distorted form. Freud’s examples include automata that look almost human, the dread of being buried alive, and, crucially, the figure of the witch and the supernatural woman. The uncanny, from its very origin as a critical concept, was entangled with the representation of women.

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This entanglement is not coincidental. Across literary and folkloric traditions, the uncanny has been most consistently projected onto female figures, and for a reason that feminist critics have since made visible: in patriarchal societies, women who step outside their assigned domestic roles who are too old, too powerful, too autonomous, too connected to nature and death become culturally unmanageable. The uncanny is the aesthetic register in which this cultural unmanageability is expressed. The witch is its most enduring embodiment.

Long before Freud gave the concept a name, writers and storytellers were building female figures whose power to unsettle came from exactly this quality of distorted familiarity. In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe turns men into pigs — overwhelming, terrifying — and yet she is also beautiful, hospitable, knowledgeable. She looks like a benefactor and acts like a predator. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the three witches are described as figures who “should be women, and yet their beards forbid it” — their uncanniness is literally located in the transgression of gender. They are women who do not look like women, and their prophecies are dangerous not because they lie but because they tell a truth no one wants to hear.

The Gothic tradition of the nineteenth century pushed this further. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason is confined to an attic — a domestic space made monstrous — and her laughter haunts Thornfield Hall in exactly the way Freud would later theorise: she is the repressed returning, the hidden wife, the secret that will not stay concealed. In Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the vampire appears to Laura as almost a sister, a double, an intimate — before revealing herself as a predator. In each case, the uncanny woman works through the same mechanism: she comes close enough to the familiar that her deviation from it produces dread rather than simple fear.

The twentieth century made this tradition self-conscious. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) rewrites the witch figures of European folklore from the inside, making visible the patriarchal machinery that constructed them as monstrous in the first place. Carter’s witches are uncanny not because they are threatening but because they reveal how much the “normal” domestic woman was always already a constructed and constrained figure. Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus does something similar — her speaker rises from the dead and devours men, deploying the language of the uncanny not to frighten but to reclaim.

Three Witches, Three Worlds

What makes the witch so durable across cultures is not just a shared psychological structure but the way each tradition bends that structure to fit its own specific fears. Look at three very different folklore traditions — Russian, German, and Indian — and a pattern emerges.

In Russian folklore, Baba Yaga lives in a hut on chicken legs at the border between the living and the dead. She is simultaneously a devouring monster and a helper, a maternal figure who might feed you or eat you depending on how you approach her. Her ambivalence is the point. Rooted in a pre-Christian cosmology where the boundary between life and death was navigable rather than morally absolute, Baba Yaga exists outside the binary of good and evil entirely. She is not evil — she is something older and stranger than evil.

The German witch of the Grimm tradition is far less ambiguous — and that shift tells us a great deal. In Hansel and Gretel, the witch constructs a house made of food, the ultimate symbol of domestic comfort and nurture, in order to lure children to be eaten. The home itself becomes the trap. The gingerbread conceals a cannibal’s appetite. This is the heimlich become unheimlich in its most literal form. In Snow White, feminine vanity, knowledge of poison, and the corrupted gift of an apple combine in a figure whose monstrousness is inseparable from her femininity. The Christian overlay of the Germanic tradition transformed the witch from an ambivalent figure into a thoroughly demonised one — a woman who had crossed to the side of Satan.

The Indian tradition challenges the very category most productively. The Churel — found across North Indian, Bengali, and Pakistani folklore — is the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth or in ritual impurity, denied proper funeral rites. She haunts crossroads, seduces men, drains them. But here is what distinguishes her: she is not born monstrous, and she does not choose monstrousness. She is made monstrous by a specific social injustice. The violence done to her in life — the inauspicious death, the denied rites — transforms her into a threat in death. Her haunting is, structurally, a form of revenge.

The Dakini, from Tantric and Shakta contexts, takes this further still. She inhabits cremation grounds, consumes flesh, possesses tremendous occult power — and is simultaneously sacred, an attendant of Kali, a figure of enlightenment in Vajrayana Buddhism. The Indian tradition does not resolve the tension between the divine and the demonic feminine; it holds it open. Kali herself shares every iconographic feature of the witch — darkness, skulls, the cremation ground, the devouring mouth — and is worshipped. The Indian witch is uncanny in a different register: not because the familiar has been made strange, but because the divine and the terrifying have been revealed as the same thing.

What They Share, and What They Reveal

Across all three traditions, four things remain constant: liminal dwelling, transgressed gender, bodily excess, and ambivalent power. Baba Yaga, the Grimm witch, the Churel, the Dakini — each life at the edge of the social world. Each refuse or inverts normative femininity. Each is associated with consuming, overflowing, exceeding the limits placed on women’s bodies and appetites. Each holds a power that is simultaneously desired and feared.

But what the differences reveal is just as important. Baba Yaga’s moral ambivalence reflects a world that had not yet fully decided that feminine power was evil. The German witch’s demonisation reflects a Christian patriarchal order confronting women who refused its constraints — and the historical violence of the witch trials lurks just behind the fairy tales. The Churel is the ghost of a wrong that was never righted.

The witch, in other words, is not just a figure of fear. She is a record. Each tradition’s version of her encodes what that society could not openly say about women — about their power, their knowledge, their sexuality, their grief, their rage. She is the heimlich that became unheimlich: the domestic, the intimate, the familiar — turned inside out, pushed to the edges, and there, made monstrous.

She has always known too much. That has always been the problem.