The Likho, The Slavic Peddler Of Catastrophic Whispers
The epitome of what it feels like to have negative, obsessive thoughts intrude on a fragile mind, the Likho is much more than you’re average ‘Scary Lady In The Forest’.
Pulped leaves rustle in the heights of the Library of Found Things before a dainty folio, light and unassuming, flutters to our feet. When the delicate spine touches the ground, however, a world of strife and chaos unfurls and we learn all about the Likho and her uncanny ability to get in our heads.
One day, so very long ago it’s difficult for even the forest to remember, there lived a smith. He was an excellent smith and he had a wonderful relationship with all his customers and neighbours. He wanted for little, and admittedly his wants were modest anyway, but he did have a curious streak that itched like a gadfly bite somewhere in his heart.
“People often tell me that there is great evil in the world and that I should be glad that my forge keeps me home, where it’s safe. But I would like, just once, to go out into the world and see if that evil truly does exist and, if so, to see it with my own eyes.”
The smith was young and, despite his skill with hammer and tongs, rather foolhardy in his youth. So, he put on his ankle-length coat made of sheep skin, with the fluffy clouds facing inwards upon his skin because it was autumn now and winter was already knocking at their doors.
On the way out of the village he met another young man, the tailor, who also lamented how his work kept him from seeing the world. The smith told him that he was looking for evils and the tailor, yearning to see anything that wasn’t needle or thread, told him that it all seemed like a jolly plan to him and he would come along.
Before dusk began her brief dance, the smith and the tailor arrived at the edge of the forest. It was foreboding but the two young men walked without hesitation until they came across a small cottage that showed almost no signs of ever being inhabited. This, they thought, is where evil must dwell, just look at it! They weren’t wrong, its beams were crooked and gnarled and its insides looked as cold as they were dark. Cobwebs strewn the windows, the door was ajar. But once inside they saw no signs of any real evil of any kind. Disappointed, they turned to leave and discovered their unwitting host was occupying the open doorway, twitching her head to one side to look at them.
The Likho was crooked in every way yet she walked with a certain assured grace. Her hair was lank and she stood a man’s height again above each of the artisans' heads. Naturally, this meant she had to stoop beneath the cottage’s low roof but this gave the young men a perfect view of the Likho’s defining feature, a single bloodshot eye in the centre of her head.
“Good day, grandmother,” they both said in the hopes of attenuating her ferocity with a little familial conversation, “we have come to spend time beneath your fine roof.”
“Very good,” she said in a voice as withered as her arms, “then we shall have something upon which to sup.”
With this, she disappeared outside and returned some moments later with an armful of firewood. She stoked them beneath her oven until it was ready, then a blade flashed and her ragged clothes billowed before she sliced the tailor’s throat from ear to ear. She defied her obvious disabilities by trussing up the bleeding young man as a butcher might a goose, then she placed him in her oven and took a seat next to the horrified smith.
I am witness to evil in the world, he thought to himself trembling, and now I must try to get home to my safe little village outside the forest. He watched as the Likho took the tailor out of the oven and ate him with all the relish of a starving creature. She sat back in her seat, barely noticing the young lad at her side.
“I’m a smith, you know?” He stuttered.
“Oh yes?” her voice sounded like dry wood cracking, “Can you forge me a new eye?”
“An eye? Why, yes! Of course, I can! The problem is, however, that we would have to tie you up because you have no extra socket and I can’t have you writhing around when I’m trying to hammer your new eye into your skull.”
The logic seemed reasonable to the unfeeling creature who was still licking the tailor’s fat off her lips and she allowed the smith to take a thick rope and tie her up. Then the smith took an awl - a leather punch - and let it rest in the oven’s fire until it was white hot. Once it was at the right temperature, the smith gripped it in one hand and hammered it into the Likho’s only eye with the back of the creature’s axe. She screamed and writhed and broke the cord that bound her. Blinded, she chose to cut off her attacker’s only escape by running to where she remembered the door was and she sat on the threshold.
The smith sat by the oven, never once taking his eyes off the creature in the doorway, for a few hours until he heard the footsteps of the Likho’s sheep that had been out grazing for the day. She cooed at them and guided them inside her small cottage for the night, as she always did. It became cramped and the warmth of the oven made the lanolin steam above their wool and nearly suffocated the poor smith but still he waited. Until daybreak, when the Likho carefully allowed the sheep out to graze again. She stroked their wooly backs as they left and could not tell them from the thick coat on the crawling smith’s back, which he had turned inside out so the wool was its defining feature.
When he was a few metres away from the Likho, the smith turned around and jeered at her. He cursed her lack of hospitality but his bravery had its limits and he ran as fast as he could as soon as her crooked head twitched in his direction.
He ran and ran until he could almost see the roofs of the village between the dense trees. As he squinted through the trees at his safe haven, his eyes flitted away from his goal and fell upon a solid gold axe protruding from a deep wound in a tree. Thoughts of the Likho evaporated for a moment as the smith stopped running and reached for the shining axe. As soon as his skin touched the cool gold, however, he heard the Likho scream and he could hear her footsteps like that of a bear approaching him.
He tried to pull the axe out and it would not budge. He tried to pull his hand off the gold and it too was stuck. He could see the faint angles of his home, his community in the distance and he was horrified that he might bring not only his own demise but that of his fellow villagers if he brought the Likho to their doors. So, taking a small knife from his coat, he began to hack at his wrist until the only thing left clinging to the golden axe was a severed, bleeding hand.
Losing blood quickly, the young smith used up all of his energy by the time he arrived in the village. When he woke up, one hand and one friend less in this world, he asked about the Likho but nobody had seen her. He lay back and convalesced and vowed never to wake the evil in the forest again.
Most references to the Likho in the English language tend to give a simple description of the character as “the Slavic Embodiment of Evil” and while archetypes are no doubt present in mythology, a simple brute-force label like this one misses out on much of the depth of this mythological character.
We can detect a few well-known tropes in the story above that give us clues to how the Likho was viewed by the slavic people who know about her. There’s the ‘Hansel & Gretel” style cottage in the woods, not to mention the cooking of a human there. This is very well-known, just as the smith’s escape using the same tactic as Odysseus and his run-in with a Cyclops. To get to the heart of what the Likho his, however, is to take a step back and analyse the smith’s motivations.
The smith wanted to leave because he had heard of all this evil but had never really encountered it himself. That’s because he has work and is a valued member of a pleasant, safe community. The houses, the full bellies, the location outside the dreaded forest. This is a state of mind rather than a real-life village of the ‘golden years’. He knows no evil because he knows no worries, essentially.
This brings to mind what the great philosopher Alan Watts once said about worrying:
“Worry is simply a chronic condition and people who worry are going to worry no matter what happens because when one possible threat is exterminated, they will immediately discover another because worry is an infinitely skinned onion … if you are disposed to worry, there is always plenty to worry about. You make plenty of money, then you start worrying if you’re going to get a disease. The doctor says there’s nothing wrong with you and you start to worry you’re going to get into an accident. You take precautions and then you worry that there’s going to be a political revolution. If we don’t do it we begin to feel guilty because it’s somehow put into us that a proper amount of worrying is showing a good sense of responsibility.”
The smith ‘wanted to see if evil really did exist’ but isn’t that just another way of describing worry? It’s this suspicion that something bad is going to happen and, in the case of the smith, by dwelling on it he actually brought it about. What’s more, he almost brought it back into his safe little community.
This is at the heart of what the Likho is about. You could read ‘safe little community’ as his inner peace, his content mind. Or, you could take it literally and consider how ‘evil thoughts’ affect communities on a wider scale. The Likho, as well as trussing up and eating young tailors, was known in Slavic communities for her ability to whisper evil thoughts into our ears and to make us think evil things.
The Likho is named in present-day sayings such as “Don’t wake the Likho when it is quiet / sleeping” which align closely with the English-language saying “Let sleeping dogs lie” but it’s much more than that. Her lies are the kind that lead to family discord, romantic break-ups and even wars.
DEFINITION WARNING!!
Likho (and its kin across Slavic languages) is an adjective that has two opposing meanings: firstly, something that is evil, hurtful or malicious but it also means something that is bold, vigorous and therefore to be admired, if only in the sense that you might admire the speed of a hungry tiger bearing down on you.*
She’s also cunning. That golden axe buried in the tree. How do you think it got there? It screams of a trap, one that a cunning predator would lay and would require a huge sacrifice to avoid. This isn’t 127 Hours where we watch a man cut his own hand off for the fun of the body horror. Losing a hand for a mediaeval peasant would have been a catastrophe, not least because the wound would likely get infected and kill them soon enough. It would also make somebody like a smith, who needed both hands to work, worry about starvation and a pretty fast death too. This makes his sacrifice all the more impressive.
This does not seem like a story recommending people - usually children - to not be so curious and to stay out of the woods. It is a warning not to allow baseless worries and fears into our minds, not to keep skinning that onion because it will only lead to more and more tears. It is a cautionary tale that we would do well to heed, especially with all the things on social media designed to raise our cortisol levels.
The notion of a malevolent tinkerer in our affairs is not too dissimilar to our discussion of gremlins in a previous chapter but the Likho does so by creating bitter thoughts within us. Fears, suspicions and worries that strike at the heart of our psyches and society. They’re the fears people have of immigrants snatching up our share of resources, despite the fact that there is plenty to go around. (Or there would be if the aristocrats in our world didn’t like to hoard them like greedy dragons.) Alan Watts’ “worriers” are the people who wake the Likho; they will never be at peace until they learn contentment and society will never be free of tribal, famine-mentality driven discord until they do too.
*You can find this and many other Slavic myths here.