Dawn of Man and Myth - Cult of the Bear - Part 2 of 2

Alright, bear with me (excuse the pun) because we’re making a rather quick leap from Middle Paleolithic Europe (+/- 300k to 40k years ago) to Late Paleolithic Asia(+/- 40k to 10k years ago).

Close to Beijing in China is the cave system of Zhoukoudian, alternatively spelled as Choukoutien. These caves, called the Dragon Bone caves (where have we heard that before?), have been excavated by archaeologists since 1921. The site was inhabited as long as 700.000 years ago as determined from the fossils found of Homo Erectus, the most famous of which was dubbed Peking Man. In the cave called the Upper Cave remains of Archaic Homo Sapiens, Early Modern Humans, have been found as well as a variety ornaments. Estimated age of these fossils has been set to around 30.000 years old. The combination of the fossils, their dates and location support the theory that Homo Sapiens in the area could have taken advantage of the land-bridge that connected Japan to the mainland of Korea some 15.000 years ago during the glacial period.

These people then started what is now known as the Jomon culture around 12.000 years ago. Eventually the Yayoi people coming from China displaced the Jomon culture. Modern Japanese are descended from both Yayoi and Jomon but the ancestry of the Ainu is still being researched and debated. These Ainu, that have lived in Japan and also in Sakhalin, that’s now part of Russia for thousands of years are the focus of this second instalment. The Ainu do not look like the average Japanese or Asian person. In fact they may not belong to the Mongoloid race at all. For a long time the Ainu have been a marginalised culture and officially they were not even recognized by the Japanese government as an indigenous people until 2008.



When genetic testing was performed on them it was discovered that they belonged to Y-haplogroup D.

It is found today at high frequency among populations in Tibet, the Japanese archipelago, and the Andaman Islands, though curiously not in India. The Ainu of Japan and the Jarawa and Onge of the Andaman Islands are notable for possessing almost exclusively Haplogroup D chromosomes, although Haplogroup C chromosomes also occur among the Ainu at a frequency of approximately 10%, similar to the Japanese.

Not wanting to turns this into a paper on genetics I’ll not delve further into that specific side of things here, but it should illustrate that Ainu are rather unique and present a problem in determining their ancestry that has not yet been settled. There is a fair amount of information to be found on it however, if you feel like untangling the DNA strands.

Most of the pictures here of the Ainu are taken between 1880 to 1930. In the time when westerners came upon them while travelling around Japan and became intrigued by tales of strange, extremely hairy folk living on the island of Hokkaido in Japan. They don't however have inordinate hair growth, the males simply stop shaving after a certain age. Rumours and superstition probably took care of the rest. The Ainu had been living in a manner that had gone virtually unchanged for millennia. Aside from perhaps the addition of trading and some domestication of animals and metal tools their mode of life was like that of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer people. But what has also carried over from those times to the present is their mythology, and the central character of that is the bear.

“Particularly instructive and well reported is the instance of bear cult of the Ainu of Japan, a Caucasoid race that entered and settled Japan centuries earlier than the Mongoloid Japanese, and are confined today to the northern islands, Hokkaido and Sakhalin--the latter now, of course, in Russian hands. These curious people have the sensible idea that this world is more attractive than the next, and that godly beings residing in that other, consequently, are inclined to come pay us visits. They arrive in the shapes of animals, but, once they have donned their animal uniforms, are unable to remove them. They therefore cannot return home without human help. And so the Ainu do help--by killing them, removing and eating the uniforms, and ceremonially bidding the release visitors bon voyage.”

Joseph Campbell, Myths to live by – p.33

A great many rituals are, or were originally, intended to appease the gods or at least waylay their wrath or vengeance. The Ainu beliefs have some similarities with the Shinto (Way of the Gods) religion of Japan. ‘Ainu’ means human, as opposed to ‘kamui’ (compare to Shintos kami) which means spirit. Everything that is not 'ainu' is thus 'kamui', so there are kamui of nature, animals, plants and objects. In the Shinto religion reverence for life and paying proper respect to all things spiritual is of great importance. The same we find here in the Ainu with this wonderfully complex yet basic ritual. What this ritual and its accompanying belief allow for is that they are no longer just killing sacred life and damning themselves in the process of survival. Instead they are performing a service of reciprocal nature to the animal. What was at some stage guilt or fear of retribution is transformed into a life-affirming ceremony where the victim is now the sacrifice as well as the deity, he is both dinner and the guest of honor.

Now while I wish I came up with that all on my own, I took a page from the book of Joseph Campbell, literally. So here is him filling you in on the rest of it.

“We have a number of detailed accounts of the ceremonials, and even now one may have the good fortune to witness such an occasion. The bears are taken when still cubs and are raised as pets of the captor's family, affectionately nursed by the womenfolk and allowed to tumble about with the youngsters. When they have become older and a little too rough, however, they are kept confined in a cage, and when the little guest is about four years old, the time arrives for him to be sent home. The head of the household in which he has been living will prepare him for the occasion by advising him that although he may find the festivities a bit harsh, they are unavoidably so and kindly intended. "Little divinity," the caged little fellow will be told in a public speech, "we are about to send you home, and in case you have never experience one of these ceremonies before, you must know that it has to be this way. We want you to go home and tell your parents how well you have been treated here on earth. And if you have enjoyed your life among us and would like to do us the honor of coming to visit again, we in turn shall do you the honor of arranging for another bear ceremony of this kind." The little fellow is quickly and skillfully dispatched. His hide is removed with head and paws attached and arranged upon a rack to look alive. A banquet is then prepared, of which the main dish is a chunky stew of his own meat, a lavish bowl of which is placed beneath his snout for his own last supper on earth; after which, with a number of farewell presents to take along, he is supposed to go happily home.

Now a leading theme, to which I would call attention here, is that of the invitation to the bear to return to earth. This implies that in the Ainu view there is no such thing as death. And we find the same thought expressed in the final instructions delivered to the departed in the Ainu rites of burial. The dead are not to come back as haunts or possessing spirits, but only by the proper natural course, as babies. Moreover, since death alone would be no punishment for an Ainu, their extreme sentence for serious crimes is death by torture.
A second essential idea is that of the bear as a divine visitor whose animal body has to be "broken" (as they say) to release him for return to his other-worldly home. Many edible plants, as well as hunted beasts, are believed to be visitors of this kind; so that the Ainu, killing and eating them, are doing them no harm, but actually a favor. There is here an obvious psychological defense against the guilt feelings and fears of revenge of a primitive hunting and fishing folk whose whole existence hangs upon acts of continual merciless killing. The murdered beasts and consumed plants are thought of as willing victims; so that gratitude, not malice, must be the response of their liberated spirits to the "breaking and eating" of their merely provisional material bodies.”

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By p.33-34


Some other important facts to mention are that the Ainu consider the bear to be a mountain god which has led some to argue that this may have been why the cave bear skulls are found high in the mountains as well. Furthermore the Ainu preserve all the skulls of the sacrificed bears, so too we have seen in the caves of Europe, but here they are put up for display on poles. Also during the bear feast the goddess of Fire, Fuji, is invited to join the celebrations and in the Neanderthal caves as well as those of Zhoukoudian, fire hearths been found.



There is one final interesting connection with the Ainu and bears. The Ainu brought a breed of dog with them which is known the Ainu-ken but the Japanese call it Hokkaido-Ken. This dog has been with the Ainu since their arrival in Japan and is important enough to them to receive the same burial a human gets.

You would not say it by looking at it but this dog has the ability to take down brown bears, it manages to do this by climbing on the bear’s back and then biting down into its neck until it leaves or possibly dies. It also helps the Ainu with catching salmon.

To summarise: between the Neanderthals and CroMagnons of Europe and the Ainu of Japan I think there is a fair amount of material available to support the notion that mythology and mankind developed side by side from the beginning. There exists of course a great variety of ancient mythologies, but few (that I can think of) that date as far back as that of the cult of the bear.

Dawn of Man and Myth - Cult of the Bear - Part 1 of 2

When was it that mankind started to devise ideas about matters beyond the sphere of physical existence? What gave rise to mythological thinking?
Before trying to answer those questions, let me first clarify what I mean when I say 'mythological thinking'. I am not here referring to myth as meaning something false or untrue. Instead I am referring to myth and mythology as being patterns of thought and belief which constitute an intrinsic and accepted part of the world view, if not the whole world view, of those that the particular myths belongs to.

Mythological thinking is thinking that extends past that which we can see and touch and into matters that go beyond the earthly and yet are experienced as/believed to be entwined with it. Mythological thought is invariably accompanied with rites and rituals. Examples of such are burial rituals, totems and the use of talismans and rites of passage (eg. childhood to adulthood or marriage). It would be erroneous to assume that mythology belongs only to ‘primitive’ cultures, for even to this day rites and rituals are common occurrences in all cultures.

Joseph Campbell once said “Mythology is other peoples’ religion.” He is referring here to the tendency that we hold our own adopted views as truth and those conflicting or different views of others as untrue. Therefore they are relegated to the realm of mythology. However in so doing we miss the point altogether, but more on that another time. I’m using the quote here also to point out that mythological thought and religious thought are essentially synonymous. But let’s get back to looking at the proposed origins of mythological thinking.

Several years ago I was reading in Joseph Campbell's, Myths to Live By how the earliest evidence for this emergence of mythological thought is found with the Neanderthals.
“Our first tangible evidences of mythological thinking are from the period of Neanderthal Man, which endured from ca. 250,000 to ca. 50,000 B.C.; and these comprise, first, burials with food supplies, grave gear, tools, sacrificed animals, and the like; and second, a number of chapels in high mountain caves, where cave bear skulls, ceremonially disposed in symbolic settings, have been preserved. The burials suggest the idea, if not exactly of immortality, then at least of some kind of life to come; and the almost inaccessible high mountain bear skull sanctuaries surely represent a cult in honor of that great, upright, manlike, hairy personage, the bear."Joseph Campbell, Myths To Live By p32

Now I am well aware that the above is speculative in nature but it is informed speculation. Moreover there is little else we can do when interpreting such archaeological findings since obviously the Neanderthals left no written history for us. It may well be that this is not yet convincing enough for you so here’s a more detailed look into the Neanderthals, bear worship and the first known burial sites of hominids. By the end you will see how we can link the pre-historical to modern times.

Amongst various archaeological sites where remains of Neanderthals have been uncovered there have been those that contained what appear to be burial sites. In a cave at Shanidar in Iraq one of those sites included large amounts of pollen in the immediate area around the body, indicating that the dead were ritually buried. However some scientists claim that the pollen comes from flowers that burrowing animals had collected and stored.
Another site is found in the Atapuerca mountains in Spain. There they have uncovered the earliest known European hominids. Particularly in "Sima de los Huesos" (translated : pit of bones) a great amount of, yes you guessed it, bones have been found. Bones belonging to 30 different specimens of Homo Heidelbergensis have been identified. Along with these remains many animal bones have found; foxes, wolves, lions and bears. There is a debate as to whether these remains have been buried there or as the competing theory goes, that natural causes account for their presence there.

While most likely the disagreements like those described above will continue, as seems to be the case with most discoveries, I shall leave the final word on that to the experts. However I am quite certain that the ritual burial answer is a very possible and, with the scientific data, also a very probable reality. It serves my purpose therefore to indicate that there have been more than one type of hominid to bury their dead. And in the case of H. Heidelbergensis also extending this practice even further back in time than H. Neanderthalensis.

Aside from the burials there is the matter of Neanderthals taking care of members of their group that were injured or debilitated. Here too the site at Shanidar is a good example. A skeleton designated as Shanidar 1 his skull bears evidence of massive trauma and likely blindness in the affected side of the head. Examination determined he was only able to use one arm, possibly he suffered from partial paralysis and his right leg was crippled. His age is another distinguishing feature, being around 40 years of age would have made him a geriatric in modern terms. All this points to the group having a social awareness and taking care of those that could not do so themselves. Also the cave at La Ferrassie in France was an important discovery, yielding one of the most complete skeletons and leading to the discovery that the Neanderthals were not as different anatomically from modern man as was previously thought.



There remains one more point and that is that of the bear skulls. When discoveries of cave bear fossils (Ursus speleaus) first started to be described in the 18th century they were thought to have belonged to dragons or even unicorns. Exemplary of this is Drachenhöhle (Dragon’s Cave) in Austria, discovered by soldiers during WW I. Fossils, stone tools and open hearths were discovered there. The finding of cave bear fossils became so prolific at a time that they were simply used as phosphates for industry and obviously destroying a lot of potential evidence in the process. Also the earlier discoveries and following excavations in the 1900s were not conducted as carefully as present day archaeological digs are. But nothing we can do about that now, it's all in the past. (OK that was bad, I apologize)
In Switzerland in the Drachenloche (Dragon's Lair) cave the remains of more than 30.000 cave bears have been found. This seems like a very high number, but the time span during which cave bears could have lived there can account for the high number of fossils. Given the fact that bears regularly die during hibernation for example and by just having a single or several deaths a year over the course of many thousands of years this comfortably accounts for such numbers. At the Dragon’s Lair cave not just cave bear fossils were found but also tools made and used by hominids. Now while just the presence of both at the same cave is not proof in itself of bear worship the way that the skulls were found seems to indicate that this was the case. Some of the cave bear skulls appear to have been specifically arranged. Either in their orientation; skulls all facing same direction, or composition; the skulls had the limbs positioned under them or bones placed through the eye socket.

"In a chamber of the Drachenloch in Switzerland, a stone cist had been built to house stacked bear-skulls: piles of sorted long bones were laid along the walls of the cave. Another heap of bones contained the skull of a bear through which a leg bone had been forced, the skull resting upon two other long bones, each bone was from a different beast."

J.M. Coles, E. S. Higgs (1969): The Archaeology of Early Man, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969, p. 286-287.

But Neanderthals were not anatomically modern humans, they were archaic homo sapiens, just like H. Heidelbergensis and neither of which were direct ancestors of us. They did however have similar brain size to modern humans and one could therefore assume they at least had the potential to achieve the same level of thought as anatomically modern humans could. The archaic humans and anatomically modern humans (the Cro-Magnons) co-existed in overlapping time and space. The oldest discovered Cro-Magnon made figurines include zoomorphic/anthropomorphic ivory carvings belonging to the Aurignacian period. The Lion-Man figure (shown below) that was discovered in Germany is a great example and it is dated to be around 32.000 years old.



So there we are, archaic humans and anatomically modern humans both with evidence that indicates the development of mythological thinking and rituals. But I did say I was going to link this to modern times didn't I? I will, in part 2.

Thunder on the mountain

As one of the impressive natural phenomena thunder and lightning have been ascribed to the domain of many different deities by many cultures since time immemorial. But just where do all these different gods come from and are they really all that different?

Everyone will be familiar with the image of Zeus hurling thunderbolts at mortals and deities alike for overstepping their boundaries or meddling in divine affairs. But while Zeus may be the most well known he is but one such example and far from the oldest. Usually the deity of a specific pantheon that has control over thunder and wields the lightning bolt as a weapon is also the head of that pantheon; Zeus as ruler of Olympus being case in point, although he did have to overthrow the Titans first but that is where the thunderbolt came in handy. They are also invariably male deities. While for instance solar deities can be male or female in various cultures, the thunder deity is always a god and never a goddess.


The Greek Zeus was the same as the Roman Jupiter, also head of the pantheon, and this applies to the Etruscan Tinia as well, both a result of syncretism. Syncretism in mythology is a form of assimilation, occuring when different cultures adapt one anothers' deities or and equate them to their own.
Zeus likely originated in the Hurrian deity Teshub. The Hurrians in turn probably borrowed him from Hattians who called him Taru and the Hittites used the name Tarhun. The Hurrian, Hattian and Hittite peoples inhabited northern Mesopotamia, (present day Anatolia , Turkey). Teshub’s origin myth is closely resembled by that of Zeus. Teshub was often depicted with a triple thunderbolt and a mace or axe. And it is the axe that also stands in relation to various other thunder deities. Of particular interest here is the double-headed axe, which is also called a labrys. The African thunder deity Shango from the Yoruba religion is associated with a labrys. The Minoans of Crete in particular often made use of symbolic axes of this type. Though the word labrys is not Greek but possibly Lydian in origin. There is no surviving mythology from Lydia (also present-day Anatolia, Turkey) save for various characters of Lydian origin that appear in Greek mythology, such as Omphale who is given a labrys by Hercules, a son of Zeus.



To name some other examples: In Gaul and Britain there was Taranis, here too the name can be traced to Tarhun/Taru. But also Thor and his hammer (which is also called an axe at times) Mjöllnir, in Germanic/Nordic mythology. Thor, known also as Donar, from which are derived 'Donner' meaning thunder in German and the English word thunder itself. From India we have the god Indra* and in Japan there is Susanoo as the god of storms. It is not solely by the attributes that these deities are connected, many of their respective myths have close resemblances with their counterparts. Teshub/Tarhun fights and kills Illuyanka, a great serpent-dragon. Zeus at one points wages a hardfought battle against Typhon a Titan whose upperbody is that of a man and his lower halve that of a serpent. While Indra has to do battle with Vritra, another evil serpent deity and Thor clashes with Jörmungand the giant sea serpent. Even Susanoo fights and kills a serpent-dragon, Yamata no Orochi, the Eightforked Serpent.
In both Tarhuns and Zeus' battle they lose the first encounter. Zeus' sinews are cut and taken by Typhon into his mountain and Tarhun loses his eyes and heart. Also their lost bodyparts are retrieved by intermediaries, after the return of which they again face the serpents and finally defeat them. (The giant serpents are another ubiquitous mythological element which likely will be featured seperately here at another time.)





A further commonality lies in the meaning of Vritra, ‘the enveloper’ and Jörmungand is so large that he encircles Midgard with his body. If we look further into these stories some other related details appear. The number 3, and its multiples, being one such detail. For instance Indra has a three-headed elephant as a mount and Vritra himself has three heads. In one of the stories Vritra has 99 castles that Indra destroys while fighting the serpent to release the primordial waters that he had stolen.
Thor, when fighting Jormungand at Ragnarok, will kill the serpent but will be poisoned by the serpent and then die himself after having taken 9 steps. While Thor is not the head of the Nordic pantheon, the deity that most resembles him is. The god Perun from Slavic mythology is the chief god and wields thunder and lightning.
Perun rides a goat-drawn chariot and carries an axe or hammer that when thrown returns to his hand, all of which goes for Thor as well. Further their respective mythologies include the oak as being important to them and their ability to level mountains. Also like Thor/Donar the word ‘perun’ today still means thunder/lightning in the slavic languages. Both these deities are traced to have originated from Perkunas a Baltic thunder deity. Here too we find the goat-drawn chariot, the axe, the oak-tree and mountains connected to the deity. Similarly the name survives in common usage in Lithuania and Latvia as a word for thunder. Yet Perkunos is not the proverbial ‘pater familias’ of all these deities, for that we need to go even further back in time to the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE) date to the Bronze Age or the late Neolithic. This an area of history that is fairly foggy. The currently accepted ideas are mainly arrived at through a combination of comparative linguistics and archaeological data from the Indo-Europeans as well as tracing genetic groups and distribution. What does seem certain is that the PIE had a sky deity called Dyeus Phater, meaning Sky Father. It also becomes clear that Dyeus gets turned into Zeus by the Greeks and Dyeus Phater into Jupiter by the Romans. The concept of Sky Father is wide spread and occurs in many mythologies, the Egyptians being a notable exception. And while the term is of considerable antiquity it continues to find contempary use in the Vedic religion as Dyaus Pita.
Since we are now on the Eastern side, here are some more words on Indra.
Indra’s weapon is called a vajra in Sanskrit and dorje in Tibetan which means thunderbolt and diamond and is symbolic for spiritual power and indestructibility.
It’s name is also lend to the Diamond Cutter Sutra, a 9th century copy of the Sutra is the oldest known printed book in existence, which at the end reads:

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

There are other sky/thunder deities in just as many cultures and they all have different inflections where they occur but I think the above should be sufficient to illustrate the commonalities between them and their likely origin in Dyeus Phater.

Chaiten volcanic eruption May 2008 -click picture to enlarge

Archetypes in film : The West

“How the West was Lost” is a 90-minute documentary on the emergence, evolution and ultimate decline of the Western movie genre. Now while I’m not a great fan of westerns I was drawn to this documentary on account of it being presented and written by Rich Hall. Rich Hall, formerly part of Saturday Night Live and currently a comedian based in the UK. He is one of my favorites so I shelved my non-affinity to Westerns for the duration and gave it a viewing.

Hall is quite the grouchy, darkly humorous but intelligent character and he stays true to form here. We start off with Rich Hall becoming annoyed at an arrogant ‘know-it-all’ brat while he’s trying to read his paper. Their encounter serves as the kickoff point for the documentary.

Rich Hall: “You said the Western was dead, well that might be true, but the day it started dying is the day it got interesting. And you and I are gonna discuss what killed it.”
The Brat: “OK, I get it. This is a documentary... like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’."
Rich Hall: “No, that was a PowerPoint presentation. This is film history.”

More than just a chronology or anthology of Western movies the documentary takes us on a journey through of a variety of backgrounds, literally and figuratively. Moving from Tombstone to stretching desert roads, saloons and tourist traps we are presented with the historical West and the fictional, a variety of well-known actors and their characters and from directors to US presidents. We are told of where, according to Hall at least, American culture intersects with Westerns and of how the western genre changed in line with changes in the culture or as the directors themselves changed. We are shown a great many clips from Westerns but also historical footage. Aside from Rich Hall himself there are several experts chiming in such as a historian, a gun expert and a film historian. All in all it’s an entertaining watch for when you have a bit of time to kill.

If I did a good enough job of selling it, you can watch it right here as an 11-part playlist.
Update: Video is no longer available on YT unfortunately, the only other place I can still find it online requires downloading and installing a codec, which I don't recommend.

And if I didn't manage to convince you to watch the documentary, don't worry, I won't leave you empty handed. Here are clips of two routines performed by Rich Hall at the Apollo in London.







Hope you enjoyed that since if you didn't I would think that a)you've undergone a lobotomy, or b) you should get one.