The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature

The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature (1985) by Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders includes a lot of interesting details about bear ecology, folklore, and religion, but you have to slog through a nonsensical overarching argument in order to gather them. The central chapter of The Sacred Paw concerns ceremonies of the “slain bear,” a set of similar rituals enacted by hunting peoples across the northern circumpolar region. The authors offer a convincing argument that these rituals, perhaps stemming from a common tradition, involve honoring the bear as an intermediary between people and animals. The bear is like humans in its omnivorous exploitation of a wide range of food sources, its dexterous use of its front legs and paws, its tendency to stand on hind legs, and its physicality—a skinned bear is anatomically similar to a human. In slain bear ceremonies, people thank the bear for giving its life to humans, and believe that if they treat the bear respectfully in death its spirit will intercede on their behalf and tell other animals to give themselves up for human consumption. The bear becomes a vehicle for humans to not only to ensure future hunting success but to assuage their guilt about killing animals by telling themselves that, if treated well, the animals actually die voluntarily.

Unfortunately, the discussion of bear mythology did not stay grounded in specific examples such as the rituals of the slain bear. The authors seem to believe that, in Europe, northern Asia, and North America, all religion ultimately descends from worship of the bear, and all mythology stems from the myth of the Bear Mother, a human woman who marries and has children with a bear. I don’t think this is much of an exaggeration of their argument—they write that the Bear Mother myth “may be the most persistent and widely told tale ever devised” (57) and that “the Bear Mother may also be the first great mythopoetic mother of all life” (60). To them, all goddesses are degenerated Bear Mothers, and all heroes from Odysseus to Beowulf are corrupted versions of her Bear Sons. They even claim that “as the mythology of the bear entered Neolithic Europe, its multiple qualities were divided and the single image broken,” arguing that the many gods, goddesses, and religious concepts we are familiar with today are just shards of the one original bear religion (112). They provide no real evidence to support these claims, which is unsurprising, because what evidence could prove that the Bear Mother was the first or most widespread myth in ancient world, or that bears were the original European religion?

The authors seem to have taken two universalizing systems of mythology that they mention in the text—James Frazer’s theory of dying-and-rising vegetation gods and Marija Gimbutas’s theory of the Great Goddess who dominated religion in “Old Europe” before the influx of patriarchal Indo-Europeans—and decided that both of these theories, despite being outdated and/or heavily criticized, are accurate in that they actually describe the original dominance of bears in European, north Asian, and North American religion. All dying-and-rising gods are corruptions of the original sacred bear, because bears go underground to hibernate and remerge in spring, and the Great Goddess is a corruption of the original Bear Mother, because…actually, I don’t think there was any explanation provided for this leap.

And then there is their linguistic argument—they argue that nearly all important concepts in Indo-European languages are linguistically related to the words for “bear,” and this somehow reveals a fundamental symbolic connection in the human mind between bears and nearly everything. They claim that “etymologically, there can be no way of knowing” the nature of these connections, but I have to disagree. Someone with actual etymological knowledge could no doubt show that many of these connections are coincidental or reflective of natural linguistic processes, rather than being indicative of a profound and unique relationship between bears and human language. I admit that I was skimming by the time I reached the chapter on bears in literature; while some of the discussion of bears in ancient and medieval literature was interesting, the authors also quote at length from 20th century poetry, which caused my little remaining patience to evaporate.

In summary, I am frustrated with The Sacred Paw for attempting to argue that bears are the ur-religion of humanity rather than simply exploring the genuinely interesting aspects of bears in mythology and folklore. The authors don’t even mention until the final chapter my favorite factoid about bears in religion, the presence of carefully arranged bear bones in human and even Neanderthal archaeological sites that are tens of thousands of years old. Bears are plenty fascinating without the authors’ painfully strained argument about their supremacy in human religion.  

To be honest, I read The Sacred Paw because I couldn’t find a hard copy of Irving Hallowell’s Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere (1926). If you’re mostly interested in details about bear rituals and folklore, especially those related to the hunting of the bear, Hallowell’s work is probably a better choice. However, you will have to work around the outdated 1920s language and perspective on indigenous peoples, which includes the repeated use of the word “primitive” to describe Native Americans and others. Bear Ceremonialism is recently out of copyright and available online for free, if don’t mind reading a 175 page PDF.

The accompanying image is © The Trustees of the British Museum, released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This pottery lamp depicting a bear is from Roman Tunisia 175-225 CE.

This pottery lamp depicting a bear is from Roman Tunisia 175-225 CE.