Over the past twenty years I have collected and published substantial ethnographic evidence for the belief that Europeans once believed humans descended from bears. I first came across this belief nearly forty years ago in an article by the Basque anthropologist Txomin Peillen. In 1986 the belief was still alive as documented in Peillen’s interview with two of the last Basque speaking bear hunters of Zuberoa (Soule). Subsequently, it became clear to me that there was abundant additional ethnographic evidence for this belief in the rest of Europe. Moreover, these survivals appear to be closely connected to and influenced by a pan-European folktale that talks about a young woman going into the woods and encountering a bear. The couple lives together and the human female give birth to a child, a boy who because of his mixed heritage is half-bear and half-human.
The more I worked with these materials, the more I suspected that with the introduction of Christianity, the two narratives must have come into contact and even conflict. At the same time, it is evident that when compared to the basic tenets of Christianity, the ursine ancestry is rooted in a much older hunter-gatherer mentality, an ontology that sets up no opposition between humans and animals. Hence, we are talking about a belief not founded on the concept of human exceptionalism. Obviously, if you believe that bears are your ancestors, you are already part of Nature, not standing outside and apart from it.
As more evidence accumulated, it became increasingly apparent to me that as Christianity was introduced, the hybrid ancestry of the bear’s son must have allowed him to be viewed as the ursine equivalent of Jesus Christ, the Christian intermediary, whose immaculate birth is a centerpiece of Christian belief: his mother was a human female miraculously impregnated by the Holy Spirit. Even though it had occurred to me that the Christian authorities were aware of the two belief systems and had recognized that the belief in the ursine genealogy would need to be countered in some fashion, it was not until I began looking into the odd etymology of the word Chandeleur, the French term for Candlemas, that I began to figure out what had happened.
It was something the French anthropologist Michel Pastoureau wrote that initially caught my attention, namely, that in most rural areas of Gaul and then France, from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, the feast we know as Candlemas was often called not Chandeleur but Chandelours, an expression that contains the French word ours ‘bear’. In his book The Bear: A History of a Fallen King (2011) Pastoureau writes that the inclusion of ours in the name of the feast was a mistake made by unlettered French peasants who had kept a memory of ancient bear-linked cults celebrated on and around that same date, February 2. They had inserted that memory in their name for the festival.
However, as I later learned, Pastoreau’s assumption was incorrect. Rather than being misguided, the members of that French lay public had retained the older original name of the festival, a name that was based on the name of the hero of the Bear’s Son story: Jean de l’Ours (‘John of the Bear’). In other words, it was the festival of Jean de l’Ours that was celebrated on February 2. Indeed, even today bear-oriented festivals still take place in the Pyrenees. Whereas today they are no longer held precisely on February 2 but rather on the weekend, in the past February 2 was the designated date. The linguistic clue that allowed me to unravel what had happened was provided by the Dublin-born research scientist and historian of religion Dr. Lloyd Graham in his article “The Bear, the Harlot, the Magician and the King” (2017). In that work he pointed out the near homophony of the expression Jean de l’Ours and Chandelours (Chan-de-l’ours). The similarity is a bit clearer when the name of the main character is spelled Xan de l’Ours, as it sometimes is.
In short, the original name of the festival honored the Bear’s Son, and it appears to have been a decision taken by Church officials that converted that name into Chandeleur allowing it to be reinterpreted as if it referred to ‘Candles’ (Chandelles), rather than the Bear’s Son himself. This helps to explain why, in many parts of Europe, February 2 is still known by two names: Bear Day and Candlemas. Only after discovering the phonetic similarity between Chandelours and Chan-de-l’Ours did I begin to realize that the Christian authorities themselves must have been keenly aware of their competitor: they knew that when proselytizing and trying to spread the Christian gospel among the pagan masses, they were competing with this older and deeply entrenched ursine genealogy.
In the pages that follow the details of the process by which I came to this conclusion are laid out. Hopefully, the reader will be as intrigued as I was with the way that previously identified pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place, revealing a secret that until now has gone undocumented. However, I must confess that I would never have been able to access this remarkable secret without first having gained access to the linguistic clue provided by Dr. Lloyd Graham. None of this would have been possible without him having supplied me with the ‘missing link’.