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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 5:32:47 GMT -5
Continued.... Several researchers have taken that step, some of them early on, relying both on the evidence just mentioned - images, skulls, bones, locations, and arrangements - and on ethnological comparisons with societies that until recently practiced the cult of the bear, and sometimes even continue to do so. They include the Ainu in Japan and Sakhalin; various native peoples of Siberia such as the Ostyaks, the Evenks, and the Yakuts; the Lapps in Scandinavia; and the Inuit in Canada and Greenland. In historic times, the cult of the bear, in one form or another, has been thoroughly substantiated in several northern hemisphere societies and has been the subject of investigations and publications. Does this mean it is legitimate to go back millennia and project onto societies of the Paleolithic much more recently documented beliefs and rituals? Some prehistorians believe that it is and, combining evidence and comparisons, have confirmed the existence of a paleolithic religion of the bear, perhaps connected to specific hunting techniques, the ritual deposit of the skull and bones of the animal that had been killed, and to the fabrication of tools from the bones of the cave bears.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 5:33:39 GMT -5
Continued.... First I would like to consider one of the recent discoveries and some paleolithic sites that were more than simple caves frequented by bears and men, perhaps authentic sanctuaries. The first of these sites is the Chauvet cave in Vallen-Pont-d'Arc in Ardeche, whose discovery in 1994 shocked both specialists and the general public, challenging some received ideas about the origins of cave art. Its painted and carved bestiary contains between 350 and 400 animals ( they have not yet been completely catalogued ). Among them, exceptionally, dangerous animals predominate ( lions, panthers, bears, rhinoceroses ), not the large herbivores hunted for food. The bestiary at Chauvet is the oldest one known: precise carbon 14 dating of micto-samples indicates a range between 32,410 and 30,240 BC, that is, more than fifteen thousand years before the bestiaries of Lascaux and Altamira. It is also the most original, varied, and spectacular animal collection, with verying techniques and a homogeneous style, vigorous and controlled drawing in various flat tints ( red, black, brown, and yellow ), use of the contours of the walls to convey volumes, and use of superposition to create an effect close to modern-day perspective.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 5:34:42 GMT -5
Continued.... The animal most abundantly represented in the Chauvet cave is not the bear but the rhinoceros, forty-seven examples of which have been counted so far; next come cats and mammoths, with thirty-six each. However, the twelve images of bears that can be seen on various walls are the most numerous ever found in a single cave. They are remarkable in their imposing size, firm outline, and red or black color. Most important, they seem to echo the many vestiges left by bears who had lived in the cave: scratches, traces of fur and rubbing, paw prints on the walls and the floor ( including those of a she-bear and her cub ), trails, hollows and depressions trapped in the clay, very numerous bone remnants, and a collection of at least 150 skulls. This cave does indeed "smell of bear," perhaps more than any other.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 5:35:35 GMT -5
Continued.... But it does more than that. It puts the bear on stage and, more than anywhere else, it seems to make it an animal worthy of veneration: in the center of a circular chamber from which all bones, fragments of bones, and anything else movable was removed, a large skull is set on a block of stone with a flat surface resembling as altar; on the floor around it several dozen other skulls are arranged in a circle. This was obviously a stage setting, not the work of bears or the consequence of geological or climatic accidents, but clearly due to voluntary human action.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 5:36:23 GMT -5
Continued.... If we move forward in time to the Magdalenian period and enter the cave-corridor of Montespan in Haute-Garonne, discovered in 1881 but not systematically explored until 1922 and 1923 by Norbert Casteret, we find, in a small but in every way startling chamber, the oldest statue ever made. It dates from 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, and it is the statue of a bear. It is a three-dimensional clay statue set about a meter from the wall on a kind of platform that seems to have been specially designed to hold it. One hundred ten centimeters long and sixty centimeters high, the statue represents a large animal without a head, crouching, forepaws stretched out, the left mutilated, and the right intact. The very visible digits and claws are certainly those of a bear, as the general outline of the animal suggests, with its rounded hindquarters and a posture that would be impossible for any other animal. The question of the head has caused a lot of ink to flow. Why is it missing? The severed edge of the neck is smooth and polished like the rest of the body; it is neither broken nor damaged. While it may not have lost a sculptured head, whic perhaps never existed, it did lose the skull that Norbert Casteret had found on the floor between the forepaws, which was stolen a few days after the discovery.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:16:48 GMT -5
Continued.... At least sixty millennia separate the graves of Regourdou and the statue of Montespan. Between these two exceptional sites there is a good deal of evidence attesting to and displaying the privileged symbolic relations connecting bear and man - Cro-Magnon as well as Neanderthal, brown bear along with cave bear. Using the word "cult" to characterize these relations may create a debate among specialists. Seeing magical or religious motives in each representation of a bear, each remnant of bone or skull set in an unexpected place is no doubt excessive. But denying that ancient peoples in the Paleolithic considered the bear a creature apart, an animal that possessed powers that other animals did not, would be to deny the evidence and exhibit bad faith. If men did not ritually arrange the remnants of a brown bear in Regourdou or symbolically organize the skull chamber of the Chauvet cave, the only ones who could have done so were the bears themselves. Should we conclude that prehistoric bears buried their dead? That they experienced a certain kind of religious feeling? That they practiced various rituals deep in the caves that ancient peoples, much later, ended up imitating? Should we go so far as to imagine that bears transmitted to them the idea of religion, as well as all the beliefs and rites that go along with it? Should we go that far? I for one will not, although I know of a Russian researcher who thinks he has found vestiges of the worship of bears by bears themselves in Siberian caves of the Paleolithic that had not been penetrated by men at the time and which men had reached only in the Iron Age. I prefer to remain in Europe and follow the course of time down to historic ages. In Greco-Roman, Germanic, and Celtic mythologies in the West of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, there is a good deal of evidence attesting to the existence of a cult of the bear that took on diverse forms but certainly goes far back in time.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:18:09 GMT -5
Continued.... When one observes, for example, the considerable efforts expended by the medieval Church for nearly one thousand years to eradicate pagan cults connected to the bear, one senses that those cults had very deep roots, stretching back before earliest Antiquity and even to the Neolithic. Why have prehistorians shown so little interest in these cults, which have been solidly documented in historic eras? Why have they never really looked toward the European Middle Ages? Ethnological comparisons with recent practices of Asian or Amerindian societies are, of course, legitimate and sometimes fruitful, but wouldn't real historical inquiries focused on Antiquity and the Middle Ages be just as fruitful, if not more so?
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:19:01 GMT -5
Continued.... Greek myths, to be sure, the bear is not itself a divinity, but only an emblem of some of the gods. However, some tales involving a bear seem to have retained traces of the role it may have played in very ancient times. This is particularly the case because, in most of these myths, caves play an important and often ambivalent role: they are dark and fearsome places inhabited by monsters and evil spirits, places of ignorance, suffering, and punishment, like the cave of Plato's 'Republic'. But they are also sanctuaries where humans forge alliances with the gods, harness magical powers, or draw new energies. They are also places where many heroes are born and others initiated, fortified, liberated, or metamorphosed. Entering a cave always means passing from one state to another.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:19:37 GMT -5
Continued.... The Greek bear is not the cave bear, which had become extinct between 12,000 and 15,000 BC. It is always the brown bear, the brown bear, the strongest of all native European animals, and along with the pig, the animal considered biologically and symbolically closest to humankind. It is the emblem of several divinities, primarily the great goddess of the hunt, Artemis, twin sister of Apollo, daughter of Zeus, and goddess of the moon, the woods, and the mountains, and therefore protector of wild animals. Untamed and vindictive, Artemis has vowed to remain eternally virgin and takes pleasure only in the hunt: armed with her bow, she pursues and kills any who challenge or betray her or thwart her will.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:20:08 GMT -5
Continued.... Daughter of King Lycaon of Arcadia, Callisto was extraordinarily beautiful but avoided all men. She preferred to hunt in the company of Artemis, because, like the goddess herself and all her followers, she had made a vow of chastity. Zeus saw her one day and became infatuated; to approach her, he took on the form of Artemis and forced himself upon her. The young woman became pregnant and the time came when she could no longer conceal it. Violently angry, Artemis shot her with an arrow, which immediately delivered her of the child and also transformed her into a she-bear. Thereafter she wandered in animal form in the mountains while her son Arcas grew up to become the king of Arcadia. One day out hunting he encountered his mother, still in the form of a she-bear. He was about to kill her when Zeus, to avoid such a crime, changed him too into a bear, or rather a bear cub; then he lifted them both into the heavens, where they became the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:20:43 GMT -5
Continued.... In some version, she is not changed into a bear but a doe or a heifer before being carried off. But the bear story seems to be the oldest, the most frequent, and the most in conformity with the powers of Artemis. She is the goddess not just of wild animals but especially of bears, whose appearance she sometimes assumes. Her name itself is constructed from the Indo-European root for most of the words designating the animal ( art-, arct-, ars-, ors-, urs-, and so on ), notably the Greek word arktos. The legend of Callisto and her son Arcas is also linked to this etymology: Arcas bears a name that directly evokes the bear, and his rich kingdom, Arcadia, located in the center of the Peloponnesus, is etymologically "the land of the bears." In his description of Greece compiled in the second century AD, the great traveler Pausanias describes how "in the past" the men of Arcadia at war against Sparta put on bearskins before going into combat.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:21:24 GMT -5
Continued.... But Arcadia does not have a monopoly on bears. They are encountered practically everywhere in the toponymy of ancient Greece, primarily in mountainous country and particularly where there are sanctuaries dedicated to Artemis, whose priestesses were sometimes called "little she-bears" ( arktoi ). The oldest of these sanctuaries was not in Arcadia but in Attica at Brauron ( present-day Vravrona, not far from Athens ). From the sixth century BC to the Hellenistic period, a strange spring ritual was conducted there every five years: little girls younger than ten were dressed in yellow and white, acted as priestesses, and participated in the great festivals performed in honor of the goddess. The ceremonies concluded with the sacrifice of a she-bear. It is probable that this was a toned-down form of an older ritual in which these same girls were perhaps violated and then sacrificed. The legend explained that the sanctuary at Brauron had been created to appease the anger of Artemis after the inhabitants of the village had killed a bear that had not devoured a female child. The goddess had let it be known through an oracle that she demanded that the villagers ritually devote their daughters to her, first as immolated victims, later as devoted priestesses.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:22:13 GMT -5
Continued.... The motif of the young child sheltered and nursed by a wild animal appears in most mythologies and legends about the origins of heroes. The Roman she-wolf remains the most famous example, but classical Antiquity produced several others just as memorable: for example, there are two stories in Greek mythology highly relevant to the subject at hand, since they feature not a she-wolf but a she-bear.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:22:49 GMT -5
Continued.... The first concerns Atalanta, a heroine with extraordinary physical abilities that, in some versions, earned her a place as the only woman Jason accepted on the expedition of the Argonauts to seek the Golden Fleece. The story of Atalanta, however, began badly and ended even worse. Her father King Iasos of Arcadia ( Arcadia again, the country of bears ) wanted to have only sons. When Atalanta was born he abandoned her in the heart of a forest on Mount Parthenion. There she was found by a she-bear who nursed and protected her and taught her to walk. Then hunters took her in and gave her a rugged masculine upbringing. Atalanta became a formidable huntress, and like all disciples of Artemis, vowed to resist the temptations of love and to remain forever a virgin. When she grew into a beautiful and strong young woman, she was besieged by men. Several tried to violate her, and she killed all of them.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:23:38 GMT -5
Continued.... The second tale concerns one of the most celebrated heroes of Greek mythology, Paris, the youngest son of King Priam of Troy. Before his birth, his mother Hecuba had dreamed that she would give birth not to a child but to a kind of flaming torch that would set fire to the entire city - a premonitory dream foretelling the destruction of Troy. Terrified, Priam decided to get rid of the newborn child and ordered one of his servants to kill him in the forest. But the servant took pity on the infant and exposed him alive on Mount Ida, where he came close to dying from cold and hunger. A she-bear discovered him, warmed him, and cared for him. Paris was later taken in by shepherds and grew into a magnificent young man.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:24:43 GMT -5
Continued.... Another figure in Greek mythology had sexual relations with a bear. This was not a woman, but Cephalus, a young hunter of remarkable beauty and the hero of a number of rather disparate myths. Childless, having tragically killed his beloved wife Procris by accident, and wanting to have sons, Cephalus consulted the oracle Delphi. The oracle told him to have intercourse with the first female creature he encountered on his way home. He did as the oracle said: the creature was a she-bear, and their union produced a son, Arcisios - another name based on the word for bear - one of whose descendants was the extraordinary character Odysseus.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:25:13 GMT -5
Continued.... The case of King Arthur, whose name is directly related to the word for bear and who will be considered later, is different. He is not a divinity but a monarch, the most famous in medieval literature. His story is partly connected to an ancient ursine myth, various traces of which are found in several Celtic legends. The figure of the king is associated with the figure of the bear, because for the Celts - as for the Germans, the Balts, and the Slavs - the bear is the king of all the animals, and hence the quintessential royal animal. He retained that status in a large part of Christian Europe throughout the High Middle Ages and even in the period immediately after the year 1000, until the Church, the sworn enemy of the bear, finally succeeded in installing on the throne another animal, the lion.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:26:35 GMT -5
Continued.... KING of BEASTS... At one point or another in its history, every culture chooses a "king of the beasts" and makes it the centerpiece of its symbolic bestiary. Forms of expression, oral traditions, poetic creations, and insignia and representations of all kinds grant the chosen animal superiority over all others and a central place in belief systems, forms of worship, and rituals. Despite the extreme diversity of societies, it can be said that the choice almost always derives from the same criterion: the designated animal is chosen because of its reputation, justified or not, for invincibility. Everywhere and always, the king of the beasts is the one who cannot be conquered by any other animal. This means that choices are restricted. In Africa, it is sometimes the lion, sometimes the elephant, less frequently the rhinoceros; in Asia, it is sometimes the lion, the tiger, or the elephant. In America, the choice falls on the eagle or the bear, and, in regions where it can be found, the jaguar. In Europe, the king was for a long time the bear, and later the lion. There have been occasional scattered variants, but they are limited in time or space, whereas a "true" king of the beasts has to last and flourish in several different cultural regions. With this in mind, looking at the entire planet, there are, so to speak, only four kings of the beasts: the lion, the eagle, the bear, and the elephant. Each of them holds or held that rank not only in its place of origin but also sometimes in other cultures and on several continents. This is particularly true of the lion, which, already the king in Asia and Africa, slowly took the place of the bear in Europe.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:27:46 GMT -5
Continued.... The Herculean strength of the bear, the fact that no animal can best it ( man is its only predator ), and its long history of being admired and feared in all European regions were not enough to keep it on its throne. The foreign lion, preferred by the medieval Church, gradually drove it off, demonstrating that, despite the criteria set out above, cultural history always wins out over natural history.
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Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2017 6:28:20 GMT -5
Continued.... No animal indigenous to Europe gave an impression of strength comparable to the bear's. All the ancient authors who wrote about the animal emphasized this impression, and it gave rise to many proverbs, images, and metaphors. The expression "as strong as a bear" exists in all European languages and matches a reality already described by Aristotle in his 'History of Animals' and adopted by all his imitators and successors, notably Pliny and the medieval tradition he gave rise to. The bear was the strongest of all the animals in Europe. Subsequently, modern naturalists from Gesner to Buffon explained what made up that strength, where it came from, and how it manifested itself. And although nineteenth - and twentieth - century naturalists contributed some supplementary incidental information, they hardly changed a picture that was already well established by the time of the Renaissance.
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