Throughout North America and Eurasia, many preagricultural populations saw bears through a filter quite different from the dominant Western one which still relies on a stark human vs. animal divide with an ontology grounded in a dualism of culture vs. nature, as opposed to the animist relational ontology typical of many native cultures even today. In societies were bear ceremonialism was or still is practiced, bears are understood to be ‘other-than-human persons’ (Hallowell, 1960). As such, they have been portrayed as possessing specific spiritual powers, including the ability to cure. A review of the ethnographic and ethnohistoric literature currently available on this topic “suggests that bears have consistently played particular roles human society; specifically, bears have served as kin, healers, food providers, and supernatural guides capable of connecting the human and spirit worlds” (Kassabaum & Peles, 2020: 208).
The geographic extent of these common beliefs, as documented in the ethnographic and ethnohistorical record, suggests that they have great time depth. All this material, in turn, allows analogies to be drawn when dealing with European materials which appear to reflect similar beliefs and social practices. Stated differently, evidence for bear ceremonialism in Native North America could be used to develop ethnographic and ethnohistoric analogies. And these analogies could help reframe the way that certain the European beliefs and ritual performances are interpreted. At same time, the European material sheds light on aspects of Native American beliefs and practices that to this point have gone relatively unnoticed.
The monograph seeks answers to questions relating to the stark human vs. animal divide that has characterized Western thought for so long. Specifically, it examines the way that two contrasting belief systems interacted once they came in contact with each other. One of them, the most recent, was fully anthropocentric in its orientation and the other totally opposed to that position. In what follows, we discover that these two worldviews often ended up fused together in truly remarkable ways. The result was a kind of compromise, one that gave birth to hybrid entities.
Two genetically unrelated and geographically distinct datasets consisting of ethnographic and ethnohistoric materials are analyzed along with linguacultural elements related to these materials. One of the datasets comes from Native North America and draws heavily on research that has been done on the Lenape Delaware people, an Algonquian-speaking group. It brings into view the nature of the ritual practitioners and bear impersonators who have played a central role in their traditional ceremonies and performances. The second dataset consists of European ethnographic and ethnohistoric materials with a concentration on traditional performance art and vernacular beliefs that have survived on the margins of European culture. And again, in the case of Europe the focus is also on those performers who appear as bear impersonators as well as the ritual healers who often either dressed as bears or were, in fact, flesh and blood bears themselves, i.e., “bear doctors”.
In the cosmology most familiar to readers, human beings are conceptualized as having been created by an anthropomorphically configured deity, e.g., the Christian God, whereas other animals are assigned to a lower rung on the great Ladder of Being (Latin scala naturae). Implicit in this quite well-known and widely accepted Western paradigm is the assumption that agency should be solely assigned to the realm of the human. In addition, forms of superhuman agency and power are commonly attributed to anthropomorphically conceived figures, for instance, beings that fall into the category of deities. Even saints and priests are often believed to be able to carry out otherwise supernatural acts by means of divine intervention, including the ability to heal the sick and exorcise demons. On this view, agency is conferred to humans but not to animals, such as bears. As Thompson (2018: 74) has noted, “[s]uch an assumption is in line with Abrahamic mythological discourses that emphasize the absolute categorical difference between humans and all other forms of life (‘God made man in His image’).”
In the second, far less familiar cosmology examined in this study, human animals are viewed as descending from bears. And that means that the so-called animal nature of human beings is not questioned. Rather it is a given. Similarly, agency is no longer assigned exclusively to humans. Obviously, the ursine cosmology represents a challenge to the commonly accepted Western human-animal binary. However, it coincides with the rethinking that has been going on with regard to our most basic ontological category: what it means to be human.
Whereas evidence for the belief in an ursine oriented cosmovision and what is defined globally as bear ceremonialism has been well documented among the indigenous peoples of North America and Eurasia, that such a belief once informed the daily lives and social practices of Europeans has not been contemplated until quite recently. Yet, as will be demonstrated, in Europe there are many folkloric traces pointing to the veneration of bears, particularly in the Pyrenean region and even more concretely in Euskal Herria, the historical Basque Country.
An axillary topic treated in this study is the way that the syndrome referred to as “sleep paralysis” has been interwoven into the belief system of the Native American groups studied as well as into the network of traditional beliefs still surviving in Europe. Indeed, people who experience sleep paralysis also commonly experience an “ominous sensed presence” and that preternatural entity appears to have played a major role in structuring the animist ontology encountered in both the New World and the Old World materials.
This monograph is the first part of a three-part series exploring these and other related topics. The second in the series focuses on bear healers and how they became Christian saints while the third delves much more deeply into the lexical evidence that has survived in European languages and that is directly linked to the ursine cosmovision.