Bear

by Wolf D. Storl

  Then, the dead bear was taken through a door on the east side of the lodge where it was skinned. The head and fur (still connected) were then let down into the house through the chimney—the spirit entrance. Like a rug in front of a fireplace, it was placed on a mat and decorated with earrings, pearl necklaces, and other ornaments. Sacrificial staves, dried fish, millet dumplings, bowls of millet beer, and also even a plate of its own cooked meat were placed in front of the snout. In Sakhalin, a pipe with tobacco and matches were put in front of it. An old man spoke to the bear once more: “Dear, young bear. We offer all of this to you. Bring it to your parents. Tell them that your Ainu father and Ainu mother raised you with many sacrifices [and so on].”

  Hedge of sacrificial posts with bear skulls

  For the Ainu who follow their ancestry back to a bear ancestor, this sacrifice is a sacrament. The sacrificed animal is the messenger to the god that lives in the mountain forests and simultaneously radiates down from the constellation Ursa Major. The bear feast is no less a meal of communion than the Last Supper of the Christians. (During the ritual, each tribe member takes a swig from the cup that the sacrificed animal also used to drink from.) Just as a Christian shows himself or herself to be a Christian by partaking of the Holy Communion, so does an Ainu show himself or herself to be a genuine Ainu by partaking of the bear feast. (The word Ainu means “human.”)

  The bear as a divinity: procession to the fishing holes. The women in the background beat a drum made out of a tree trunk (L. v. Schrenck, Reisen und Forschungen im Amurlande, Petersburg, 1881).

  Each part of the sacrificial animal was taken in the ritual. The guts were salted, cut up into small pieces, and eaten raw. The men drank the still warm blood and rubbed it into their long beards to partake of the power, courage, and virtue of the one that was sent from heaven. The hunters moistened their clothes with the blood for good luck in hunting. At the end, the skinned skull was put up on a forked pole, called the “pole of sending away,” in front of the house. The pole was carved and decorated—similar to the Christian cross—and remained there as an object of worship.

  Bear festival of the Gilyaks; the dead bear participates in the festival (L. v. Schrenck, Reisen und Forschungen im Amurlande, Petersburg, 1881).

  The Gilyaks, another Paleo-Siberian tribe that is at home in the Amur River delta, had a similar bear festival. They also kept a bear in the village as an honored guest. The welcome guest was seen as a kind of higher human and a delegate of the forest god; they believed its presence brought blessings and drove off bad spirits. After the villagers had fed it for a couple of years, the time came for it, too, to be sent back home during the time of the winter solstice. Before it was sacrificed, it was brought to the fishing holes on the frozen river to bring blessings. Then, it was taken through the settlement and brought from house to house. Everywhere the bear was greeted with joy and laughter and was fed with delicacies. Courageous young men jumped up onto it to give it a kiss on the cheek. If they got an ear cuff from one of its paws, they were considered blessed and would be proud of the scars left by the sacred bear for their entire lives. Just as with the Ainu, after this round came the lashing on the stake and death through a shot in the heart. The bear’s head and fur, left connected as well, were pulled over a frame and worshiped. A bowl of its own meat and that of a dog that had been sacrificed for it were put in front of its head. The women wrapped cloth around its cheeks and nose to dry its tears. Its brain, the seat of magical power, was stirred into rice wine and consumed. In the wild orgy that followed the sacrifice, the power of life was unleashed and nature was charged up with new fertility.

  The Tlingit, Kwakiutl, and Nukta on the West Coast of North America (Washington and British Columbia) practiced bear sacrifices similar to those of the Siberian aboriginals. The Algonquian tribes also knew these bear rituals (Lissner 1979, 22).

  Visiting the King of the Forest

  For Siberian and North American hunting peoples, a bear is not just an animal that is hunted and utilized. For these forest peoples, “grandfather” or “grandmother” bear has a human soul. A bear is a hidden relative that is only wrapped up in a lot of thick fur and has the same ancestors as humans do. A story of the Gilyaks gives us a glimpse into the way that these peoples feel about the nature of bears (Findeisen 1956, 22, author’s translation).

  Once in the deep winter, a fisherman from the Gilyak tribe walked up river to see about some fish that he had caught in the fall and had stored on a platform. The snow was deep and he couldn’t find the path, so he began to go in circles in the endless forest. Days and weeks went by, and it turned into spring before he finally found the scaffold where he had stored the fish. But a stranger was sitting next to it.

  He spoke to the fisherman, “Come with me. Let us go to my village; it is not far from here. You will be our guest.”

  It was not long before they came to a big winter house and were greeted by many barking dogs. The Gilyak fisherman was quite surprised that he knew all of the dogs. They were the dogs that his people had sacrificed during former bear feasts. In the first room, he saw many bearskins on the floor. The warm inside room was full of women, and an old man sat in the seat of honor.

  “You are a person from the lower end of the river, I see,” said the old man. “We ourselves are forest people. You used to kill dogs for us and send us salmon skin, fish blubber, and cranberries. We would be happy if you would live with us for a while.”

  After saying this, the old man fell asleep. He slept for three days and three nights. Then he got up and spoke again, “Today your people will celebrate a festival. Many good foods will come to us from the lower river.” Turning to the women, he added, “Clean the floors and benches!” The women began to clean everywhere and put down pine boughs on the last sleeping place.

  In the evening, when the sun went down, the old man opened the door of the house. Ten bowls with different sumptuous meals and berries floated through the door and found their place on the decorated sleeping place. The fisherman was invited to try some, and after the old man had also eaten some, he spoke, “We old people still observe this custom. You know, we acknowledged you and we will let you return to your village. Now you have experienced something new and have something to tell your people.”

  After three days of feasting, during which the Gilyak fisherman feasted well, too, the old man fell into a deep sleep again. When he finally woke up again after three days and three nights, he spoke to his people, “The people from the lower end of the river will go out looking for a bear again today. My children, please think about that!”

  Most of them had worried faces. One of them said, “My heart hurts!”

  Another said, “My throat hurts!”

  The old man spoke again, “My dear ones, think about it. One of you must go!”

  Now a man got up who had been lying on a bench quietly. Without a word, he took off his cloak; then he said, “If no one else is willing to go, then send me.”

  Hereupon the old man went into the first room and took one of the many bearskins. “Here, my son, take the bearskin and put it on. And now be on your way to my children that live on the lower end of the river.”

  When the quiet, good-natured man put on the bearskin, he turned into a bear. Grumbling as bears do, he walked around the fire in the middle of the room before he went outside. The old man accompanied him to the river; then, the bear stomped on alone through the snow in a downriver direction and disappeared.

  Many months passed; then, the bear returned. He brought a sled along with him that was full with various foods and was pulled by many dogs. The delicacies were bedded in moss. There were also onions. The bear took off his bearskin and turned back into a man. He told the old man how well the people downriver had treated him and how well he had eaten there. He also told the old man, who was none other than the lord of the forest, about the worries and wishes the people had and how they wished for luck when hunting, many salmon, an abundant berry harvest, health,
and peace with their neighbors.

  And then, after the Gilyak fisherman had seen and heard all of this, he was sent back to his people downriver. He lived there for one more month and told about what he had experienced, and then he died.

  The kind of bear ceremonies that Paleo-Siberian hunters and gatherers celebrate must be very old. They must be as old as hunting techniques and shamanism with songs and chants, frame drum and spirit flights, as old as the knowledge of a “lord of the forest,” or “mother of the animals,” as old as the cone-shaped, teepee-like leather summer tents and the half-subterranean winter houses with a fire in the middle. These cultural elements go back to the early Paleolithic and the Paleolithic peoples who brought them over the Bering Strait some twenty to thirty thousand years ago into the New World.

  A bear cult with bear sacrifices in Paleolithic Europe was previously described in Chapter 2. Further such evidence was found in Montespan Cave (Haute-Garonne, France), deep inside the mountain, in which a life-sized clay model of a bear with only its head missing was found next to wall drawings of horses, deer, and bison. On the floor, between the front paws of the clay figure, the man who discovered it, Comte Bégouen, found the skull of a real bear. The back of the clay figure is smoothly polished, and a triangular cavity is located at the neck. It can surely be concluded, from this evidence, that the Paleolithic hunters must have pulled the fur, with the head still attached, over the clay figure and fastened it with a wedge at the neck. Comte Bégouen explained, “We can assume that we found the skull that was left there from the last ceremony” (Lissner 1979, 282). That was over twenty thousand years ago. Was that also a “ceremony to send the bear away”?

  Paleolithic clay figure of a bear without a head (Montespan Cave, France)

  But that is not yet all. The clay figure shows some thirty round holes, as if—as with the Siberian sacrifice—dull arrows had been shot at it. In the famous Trois-Frères Cave (Ariège), a drawing shows a bear spewing blood out of its mouth. The body is covered with small round circles, and the arrows that hit the bear are also drawn. A stab wound to the lungs must have killed it, the only explanation for a stream of blood from the mouth (Lissner 1979, 284).

  Bleeding bear (Trois-Frères Cave)

  Prehistorians found the fossilized skull of a young brown bear in Silesia with the incisors and canine teeth removed or filed by people of the Aurignacian culture—also from the early Stone Age. As we have seen, this ritual also happens to the “divine guest” when it is “visiting” the Ainu or other native peoples (Eliade 1981, Vol. I, 26).

  Of course, that which the prehistorian’s shovel and the cave researcher’s studies reveal can be interpreted in various ways. Nevertheless, these definite traces of a prehistoric bear cult remind us of the bear sacrifice and bear cult of the last primitive peoples of Siberia and North America. There is no coercive reason to doubt a continuation of these cultural practices. The traditional tales of bears, bearskins, or women espoused with bears are probably just as old.

  The last Iomante, sending-the-bear-away ceremony, of the Ainu took place in the early 1930s. No divine guest comes anymore; no one calls him and hosts him. For that reason, according to the Ainu, the bear is disappearing from the mountains and forests of the northern Japanese islands and Sakhalin. The people who honored him are being absorbed by Japanese mass society, and their culture is dying out.

  Chapter 19

  Bear-opolis—Berne (City of Bears), Switzerland

  The bear, seen from the outside, was always the same! However, the ones who wore its fur were often replaced, so that the city mascot could always start up with new strength with its joyful or threatening gestures.

  Sergius Golowin telling about the bearskins of the Berne Carnival (1986)

  One need not travel to Hokkaido or Alaska to meet up with the bear spirit and experience a living-bear cult. One can discover it in the middle of Europe. Bears, everywhere bears! Brown bears with a long red tongue hanging out can be seen everywhere—painted on walls, carved into wooden gables, printed on labels as a trademark, chiseled into stone, as sentinels for public buildings, or as a guardian of a well. As an animal of power, illustrated bears can be seen playing “Hornussen,”1 wrestling (Schwingen2), or drumming troops into battle. Signs on inns, flags, and crests show a bear lumbering down a golden, honey-colored path in a red field. Newspaper kiosks sell the Berner Baer daily, plastic or wooden bear souvenirs for tourists, and chocolates sweetened with honey boasting a bear on its label.

  As an American exchange student, I spent the first few days in amazement of the picturesque, old streets of Berne. The bear spirit is present everywhere, and I would not have been surprised to happen upon a pile of bear droppings, as I would have seen in the Rocky Mountains, on some dark side street or under a huge tree along the Aare River. Not far from the entrance to the anthropology department that I frequented daily, a bear stands in full armor over a well in the medieval-looking street called Kramgasse. On the other end of the street, above the arch of the Zytglogge Tower (Clock Tower), an armored troop of bears marches out of a small door and disappears again at the top of each hour. Today, if one continues down the cobblestone street to the Nydegg Bridge, living bears can be viewed at the Bear Pit—a spacious enclosure that opened on the Aare in 2009. Here, constantly surrounded by admirers, the big Mani (male alpha bear) reigns. He is the patriarch and the incarnation of the city totem. Next to him, younger bears and mother bears romp around with cute cubs. Otherwise taciturn Bernese talk to the bears as one would talk to grandchildren or old folks. They carry on conversations with them as if no one else were around, affectionately talking to them as if with their innermost selves.

  Bernese flag

  “Chum Baerli,” (“come, dear bear”) says an old grandmother standing next to me, kindly tossing a carrot as she would give her beloved grandchild a cookie. Across from me, a corpulent park employee looks at the Mani with admiration and says, “Mol, mol, du bisch e Guete” (“Yes, indeed, you are a fine fellow”). It is not the kind of normal gawking one would see in a zoo.

  Bears Who Have Become Human

  There is no doubt that one can experience a living-bear cult in this city on the Aare. The Bernese bear cannot be compared to its cousin, the rather skinny Berlin bear that is a mere heraldic animal and is awarded as a film prize but no longer corresponds to the soul mood of the population. The more time I spent in the bear city and bear surroundings of Berne, the more the population seemed to be made up of bears who had become human. Their earthy appearance, the strong, sturdy stature of not only the farmers in the Emmental (Berne surroundings) but also many city Bernese, accredited the comparison. Their expression seldom changes much more than that of a brown bear. And the obstinacy! This thick, round skull, this Baeren Gring (“bear skull”) of which they are so proud! As an example of the quality of this thick skull, a story is told of a Bernese who was weary of life and jumped from the tower of the cathedral. On impact with his skull, the only damage was a smashed cobblestone road.

  Someone with such a thick skull is about as easy to push around as a grizzly that happens to be snooping around in a garbage bin in Yellowstone National Park. Such a character neither needs to be talkative, like the businessman from Zurich, nor demonstrate affected citizen-of-the-world sophistication, such as a cultured Geneva resident. He is, like the bear, slow and deliberate. But if he becomes convinced that his point of view is right, neither death nor the devil can argue him out of it. He remains steadfast with both feet firmly planted on the ground and is by no means gullible; like a bear, he remains skeptical when confronted with unusual, outlandish thoughts. Indeed, bold, high-flying thoughts were never for the Bernese. Just like their totem, they remain steadfast and matter of fact and never leave down-to-earth reality out of the equation no matter what kind of ideals are presented. Because the bear is an earthy animal, it follows that the Bernese could not be enthused by the flying imperial eagle, which they removed from their crest as early as two hundred yea
rs ago.

  Seal of the city Berne, from 1470

  The favorite sport of the Bernese, Schwingen, says a lot about their bear-like character. Schwingen is an old Alemannic wrestling sport in which—originally played by local farmers—one of the stout, colossal hulks will try to grab the other by his belt or rolled up pant leg, move him from the spot, and finally pin him to the ground. It is often the well-placed “bear grip” that decides the match, and the winner is awarded a bull (Muni). The sport reminds one of sumo wrestling in Japan, but also of how befriended male bears greet each other. The winner is celebrated as an alpha bear, the strongest among the bears.

  Swiss wrestling, “Schwingen”