Hunting the European Sky Bears: Ursine cosmology and beliefs in Mummers' plays and Pyrenean Basque performances

What you have before you is a copy of a talk I gave in Oxford, England, more than twenty years ago, entitled “Hunting the European Sky Bears: Reflections of ursine cosmological beliefs in English Mummers' plays and Pyrenean Basque performances.” The talk was a presentation at The Fourth Conference on the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena (INSAP 4). Magdalen College, Oxford, England, August 3-9, 2003. At that point in time, I had become intrigued by the following question, a question that no one else was asking: why do the costumes of so many European “bear impersonators” involve the use of straw in some fashion? These are performers who still today show up regularly in small villages and towns all across Europe. Whereas perhaps the best-known examples are the German “strawbears”, there many ingenious variants of the costumes. I recognize that the information I discussed in the Oxford talk was a very preliminary attempt to formulate an answer to this question and for the most part all I did was review the variety of the straw costumes without providing any solid explanation for why straw shows up so often in their confection. Since that time, I have explored this problem in far more detail and greater chronological depth, asking whether a diachronic oriented investigation into the changing nature of the costumes worn by these European “bear impersonators”, understood here as ritual practitioners, can provide clues about the way these actors dressed, but much earlier, that is, at a point in time for which we have no visual or written documentation. Over the past two decades the ethnographic and ethnohistoric evidence has been discussed in several additional works, such as the following: https://www.academia.edu/473481/Hunting_the_European_Sky_Bears_German_Straw_bears_and_their_Relatives_as_Transformers (2004); https://www.academia.edu/47735169/Concerning_Germanic_Straw_Bears_St_Nicholas_and_The_Last_Sheaf 2021); and finally, https://www.academia.edu/95747727/What_Makes_the_Early_History_of_European_Shamanism_and_Ritual_Healers_So_Unique_Some_Thoughts_on_a_Little_Studied_Question (2023)