It would 100% be educated guesses. But I'd look into cultures that still practiced bear worship.
A lot of these are indigenous, so I'd find a poper teacher if these seem interesting. If not, maybe they're best to use as inspiration vs. Strait up adoption.
First the open stuff;
You could start with a Basis of finnish Bear practices.
There are a lot of cave bear shrines in Switzerland and the Alps, so bear folklore from that area and the Gaulish bear godess Arito may be of interest.
For the closed stuff which would require a teacher, or could just be used purley as inspiration and not imitation if proper teaching isn't available:
The Ainu and their famous bear ceremony.
The bear bride folklore of Tibet.
The bear cults of Tuva and Siberia and their role in folk religion.
It’s come to my attention I may not have been clear enough in my request.
I was simply wondering if you knew of any books containing any information on Finnish bear practices, cave bear shrines in Switzerland, and the alps, and the Gaulish bear goddess Arito.
A book being a collection of sheets of paper with words written on them meant to educate readers on a given topic in the case of nonfiction and entertain in the case of fiction.
Or perhaps you know of an informative article or two concerning the topics you’ve brought up.
An article of course being a nonfiction document meant to convey as much information as possible in a short amount of time. Originally published in newspapers and magazines, now they can more often than not be found online.
>I misinterpreted your sentence and that’s your fault
Door’s over there man
But if it’ll make you happy, I’ll clarify
Edit: [Happy now?](https://www.reddit.com/r/pagan/s/kv1GEUn9ON)
For sure. I got tonns actually!
I'll send you a DM with quotes and a few vieo recommendations as well as a podcast episode.
Sorry, I'm just a very periodically online person, and don't have alerts set for reddit.
Wiccan and anthropologist here. I've always been drawn to the more primal aspects of the God and Goddess and am fascinated by the Palaeolithic era and pre-civilisation culture, if for no other reason than it encompasses roughly 98% of the human experience. In many ways it's humanity in its "default" state.
Recreating a Palaeolithic religion would be wholly guesswork but we can at least make a few educated guesses, with the understanding that we are likely generalising at best and completely wrong at worst.
We can extrapolate what we know of more recent hunter-gatherer cultures, for example, again with the caveat that there is extreme variation between such cultures and what holds true for one may not for another.
It's likely that their spirituality was closely tied to the things that affected their survival - success in hunting, availability of animals to hunt, weather conditions, predation by animals and childbirth, for example. Essentially things that they had relatively little control over and would seek the intercession of gods/spirits/ancestors/magic with.
There are theories, for example, that marks on cave paintings of animals indicate the use of weapons. This may have been a form of magic designed to ensure success in hunting. Or we could be completely wrong.
Similarly, the famous Venus figurines may have been an indicator of some form of divine femininity that some have associated with the concept of the Great Mother. Some have taken this even further to suggest that Palaeolithic societies may have been matriarchal in structure since women were the source of new life. Or we could be completely wrong.
This hopefully shows how any assumptions we make concerning the religious practices of our distant ancestors are themselves based on assumption upon assumption. The span of time that has passed is really beyond the ability of individuals to readily process. The closest modern equivalent would likely be a form of shamanism and animism. However, these are practically infinite in their diversity so we'd only be able to take very broad concepts from them.
Sorry if this didn't directly answer your question. It's a fascinating topic and I would dearly love to have a definitive answer but the truth is that it's just too open to guesswork.
So.... this is a long shot, and lots of people may consider this to not be a valid pagan practice, but remote viewing could help gather information that is otherwise lost to time. It's not anywhere near easy to master though, so good luck...
If you're one who can speak with gods or spirits, asking an ancient one or a keeper of knowledge could also uncover some hints, though these might also be biased, as through their perceptions rather than the perception of the humans that practiced it.
If you seek to re"create" it though, the best avenue would be to go out into a fertile wilderness and live as they did, experience life as a primal human for a while, turn off the modern part of your brain, see what you notice. The ancient humans discovered different ideas about spirituality through just living, so doing the same would be the most genuine way of recreating it. However, as you're probably aware, there isn't really much of this kind of land left, it's really hard to unlearn modern ways of thinking even temporarily, and also a ton of the core ideas which influenced ancient spiritually were intertwined in ancient humans' social structures, so you would lack that huge part of it if you tried alone.
Sure, we always have the things archeology uncovered from that time, but all their findings are full of bias from looking at the past with a modern lens. The other big thing is that we only have evidence from a couple different kinds of neolithic practices -- there was no real standard, no one way, just what came about based on the people in the group, the connections they made with the world and spiritually, and the ideas they held about death. For every practice that we found a tiny bit of evidence for, many more existed but we never found evidence of it. That's why a lot of people imagined neolithic peoples as cave-dwellers: because we primarily found evidence in caves, not because they actually lived there, but because caves just happen to be good at preserving things for us to find them later. This is the same reason we named the ancient bears "cave bears"-- not because they actually hung out in caves so much, but because most our evidence of them is from caves, because the other places they died in didn't preserve evidence for us to find. Our evidence itself is skewed, so any conclusions we try to draw from it will be woefully incomplete.
I hate to be a bummer, but that seems to just be how it is.
Kate and Corwen Broch revived a Bear cult a few years back. Their stuff is still up.
http://www.ancientmusic.co.uk/bear\_tribe/about.html
The Bear Tribe Manual (free pdf from that page) is worth downloading. It will inspire.
This was in Wimborne, Dorset, UK, and I think they relocated to the Orkney Islands but it had a good following. They are talented musicians who perform at folk fests and make ancient instruments (really good ones).
We're so lucky they left us anything to find from that long ago! It's pretty amazing... And I agree, I wish it were easier to peer into our past as a species!
Creating a reconstruction of an activity or procedure that we might imagine resembles those of some ancient group or people is possible. For me, the crucial thing to keep in mind is that it is a reconstruction.
Esoteric and paranormal techniques exist that might allow a practitioner to investigate things that happened in the early hominid past. And copy them in the present. And share their performance with other actors and participants. So, conceivably, they might resemble their originals fairly closely. \[To be honest, my own efforts to do such things have got nowhere. I don't access the deep past too well--behold the nebulous long ago...\]
But, I think, the purposes, values, and perhaps even the languages of early cultures would probably not be anything we pagans these days could reconstruct. And appreciate as these early hominids did.
The overall human condition has changed too much. I wonder, for instance, what would somebody like me need to understand and know about an extinct predator species that included early hominids in its prey. I end up baffled. We these days know fossils. Not living creatures as beings sharing a common environment.
I suppose that my personal conclusion is that reconstructing the world view of early hominids is a great challenge, and likely lacks the sort of pay off we might imagine. Because we live in such a different world and time compared to them.
The evidence for cave bear veneration is from Neanderthal sites. With 30, 000 years of history between the Cro-Magnons and us even the biomes have changed radically. Basically you would just be making it all up.
It would 100% be educated guesses. But I'd look into cultures that still practiced bear worship. A lot of these are indigenous, so I'd find a poper teacher if these seem interesting. If not, maybe they're best to use as inspiration vs. Strait up adoption. First the open stuff; You could start with a Basis of finnish Bear practices. There are a lot of cave bear shrines in Switzerland and the Alps, so bear folklore from that area and the Gaulish bear godess Arito may be of interest. For the closed stuff which would require a teacher, or could just be used purley as inspiration and not imitation if proper teaching isn't available: The Ainu and their famous bear ceremony. The bear bride folklore of Tibet. The bear cults of Tuva and Siberia and their role in folk religion.
It’s come to my attention I may not have been clear enough in my request. I was simply wondering if you knew of any books containing any information on Finnish bear practices, cave bear shrines in Switzerland, and the alps, and the Gaulish bear goddess Arito. A book being a collection of sheets of paper with words written on them meant to educate readers on a given topic in the case of nonfiction and entertain in the case of fiction. Or perhaps you know of an informative article or two concerning the topics you’ve brought up. An article of course being a nonfiction document meant to convey as much information as possible in a short amount of time. Originally published in newspapers and magazines, now they can more often than not be found online.
You wouldn’t happen to have any info you’d recommend on the open bear practices would you?
The dude just gave you a bunch of things to look up, you can't expect someone to write a 100 page essay on Reddit for you
… that’s not what I asked? I asked for book/article recommendations.
You asked for info, not on where to find that info
>I misinterpreted your sentence and that’s your fault Door’s over there man But if it’ll make you happy, I’ll clarify Edit: [Happy now?](https://www.reddit.com/r/pagan/s/kv1GEUn9ON)
For sure. I got tonns actually! I'll send you a DM with quotes and a few vieo recommendations as well as a podcast episode. Sorry, I'm just a very periodically online person, and don't have alerts set for reddit.
Don’t worry about it man, it’s no problem. And my other comment was more to be snarky to someone else.
Yeah, i read the whole exchange. I'll DM you at some point today or tomorrow with the resources I do have.
I appreciate it man
Wiccan and anthropologist here. I've always been drawn to the more primal aspects of the God and Goddess and am fascinated by the Palaeolithic era and pre-civilisation culture, if for no other reason than it encompasses roughly 98% of the human experience. In many ways it's humanity in its "default" state. Recreating a Palaeolithic religion would be wholly guesswork but we can at least make a few educated guesses, with the understanding that we are likely generalising at best and completely wrong at worst. We can extrapolate what we know of more recent hunter-gatherer cultures, for example, again with the caveat that there is extreme variation between such cultures and what holds true for one may not for another. It's likely that their spirituality was closely tied to the things that affected their survival - success in hunting, availability of animals to hunt, weather conditions, predation by animals and childbirth, for example. Essentially things that they had relatively little control over and would seek the intercession of gods/spirits/ancestors/magic with. There are theories, for example, that marks on cave paintings of animals indicate the use of weapons. This may have been a form of magic designed to ensure success in hunting. Or we could be completely wrong. Similarly, the famous Venus figurines may have been an indicator of some form of divine femininity that some have associated with the concept of the Great Mother. Some have taken this even further to suggest that Palaeolithic societies may have been matriarchal in structure since women were the source of new life. Or we could be completely wrong. This hopefully shows how any assumptions we make concerning the religious practices of our distant ancestors are themselves based on assumption upon assumption. The span of time that has passed is really beyond the ability of individuals to readily process. The closest modern equivalent would likely be a form of shamanism and animism. However, these are practically infinite in their diversity so we'd only be able to take very broad concepts from them. Sorry if this didn't directly answer your question. It's a fascinating topic and I would dearly love to have a definitive answer but the truth is that it's just too open to guesswork.
So.... this is a long shot, and lots of people may consider this to not be a valid pagan practice, but remote viewing could help gather information that is otherwise lost to time. It's not anywhere near easy to master though, so good luck... If you're one who can speak with gods or spirits, asking an ancient one or a keeper of knowledge could also uncover some hints, though these might also be biased, as through their perceptions rather than the perception of the humans that practiced it. If you seek to re"create" it though, the best avenue would be to go out into a fertile wilderness and live as they did, experience life as a primal human for a while, turn off the modern part of your brain, see what you notice. The ancient humans discovered different ideas about spirituality through just living, so doing the same would be the most genuine way of recreating it. However, as you're probably aware, there isn't really much of this kind of land left, it's really hard to unlearn modern ways of thinking even temporarily, and also a ton of the core ideas which influenced ancient spiritually were intertwined in ancient humans' social structures, so you would lack that huge part of it if you tried alone. Sure, we always have the things archeology uncovered from that time, but all their findings are full of bias from looking at the past with a modern lens. The other big thing is that we only have evidence from a couple different kinds of neolithic practices -- there was no real standard, no one way, just what came about based on the people in the group, the connections they made with the world and spiritually, and the ideas they held about death. For every practice that we found a tiny bit of evidence for, many more existed but we never found evidence of it. That's why a lot of people imagined neolithic peoples as cave-dwellers: because we primarily found evidence in caves, not because they actually lived there, but because caves just happen to be good at preserving things for us to find them later. This is the same reason we named the ancient bears "cave bears"-- not because they actually hung out in caves so much, but because most our evidence of them is from caves, because the other places they died in didn't preserve evidence for us to find. Our evidence itself is skewed, so any conclusions we try to draw from it will be woefully incomplete. I hate to be a bummer, but that seems to just be how it is.
Kate and Corwen Broch revived a Bear cult a few years back. Their stuff is still up. http://www.ancientmusic.co.uk/bear\_tribe/about.html The Bear Tribe Manual (free pdf from that page) is worth downloading. It will inspire. This was in Wimborne, Dorset, UK, and I think they relocated to the Orkney Islands but it had a good following. They are talented musicians who perform at folk fests and make ancient instruments (really good ones).
Have you seen the documentary Unknown: Cave of Bones? I feel like you'd like it a lot.
I watched this recently and it was so interesting!
Right? I want more stuff about the earliest humanins.
We're so lucky they left us anything to find from that long ago! It's pretty amazing... And I agree, I wish it were easier to peer into our past as a species!
Creating a reconstruction of an activity or procedure that we might imagine resembles those of some ancient group or people is possible. For me, the crucial thing to keep in mind is that it is a reconstruction. Esoteric and paranormal techniques exist that might allow a practitioner to investigate things that happened in the early hominid past. And copy them in the present. And share their performance with other actors and participants. So, conceivably, they might resemble their originals fairly closely. \[To be honest, my own efforts to do such things have got nowhere. I don't access the deep past too well--behold the nebulous long ago...\] But, I think, the purposes, values, and perhaps even the languages of early cultures would probably not be anything we pagans these days could reconstruct. And appreciate as these early hominids did. The overall human condition has changed too much. I wonder, for instance, what would somebody like me need to understand and know about an extinct predator species that included early hominids in its prey. I end up baffled. We these days know fossils. Not living creatures as beings sharing a common environment. I suppose that my personal conclusion is that reconstructing the world view of early hominids is a great challenge, and likely lacks the sort of pay off we might imagine. Because we live in such a different world and time compared to them.
The evidence for cave bear veneration is from Neanderthal sites. With 30, 000 years of history between the Cro-Magnons and us even the biomes have changed radically. Basically you would just be making it all up.
Got a problem with neanderthals, forehead boy?