The Woman Who Married A Bear

Old Arrangements with the Wild

Oh, give me back my bended bow

William Walker Jr.

Thoreau says:

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another word for tameness.

In Thoreau’s exaggeration we glimpse the truth of something. Mythic intelligence tends to blow on an ember rather than dampen it down. It clarifies by amplification. Few of us curl up with a nice, dull book. We yearn for the Song of the Sirens, the Sword in the Stone, White Buffalo Woman. Something resolutely undomestic. Love it though we may, we can’t stay in the Shire forever. A roving we must go. The price is too high if we don’t.

The Diné poet Jake Skeets has a joke to tell us that says it all.

The joke takes place in Chinle, Arizona, a small town located near the heart of the Navajo Nation. Its place name in Diné is Chʼínílį́. The joke is as follows: Two men are arguing over a meal about the correct pronunciation of Chinle. One says they are in Chinle, using the English pronunciation. The other says they are in Chʼínílį́, using the Diné pronunciation. To settle the dispute, one stops a restaurant worker and asks her, “Are we in Chinle or Chʼínílį́?” The worker replies, “Sir, you are in Burger King.”

(Skeets, 2020 Emergence Magazine article)

We are all mostly in Burger King now. And you’re right to think it not funny, not funny at all.

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repetition – there’s rumours from old world ideas that a woman’s original wedding is to the wild. If that’s not established we have that Selkie scenario – a draining tension between the concerns of the hearth and the sea. Not dynamic counterweight but a wearying tug. And we can mistake a lack of boundaries in a partner for exhilarating spontaneity, then have years to untangle the situation. We mistake the feral for the wild. These days I value words like stability, even-handedness, slow-fuse, fidelity far more than I used to. Not necessarily sexy, but there’s chaos without them in our tool box. It’s that boat-building aptitude we touched on with Brendan a few letters back. Spending time in the bush, I delight to witness the repetition of wild animals, the plod as well as the flurry.

I’m well aware the wild can feel a rather exhausted topic at the moment, a little too prodded and poked, a little too franchised. But some kind of sustained curiosity towards it can ward off the lintel of a Burger King logo queasily atop our imagination. That curiosity would seem a civic duty of a sort. So this is a little series of prompts really, to keep us peckish, maybe restless.

In The Marriage of Gawain to Lady Ragnel, Gawain willingly marries a woman with tusks, paws and fiery eyes. In twelfth and thirteenth century literature we find women that are very close to both God and the land reside in a startling, semi-animal state. Cundrie the Grail Defender is a good example.

Lady Ragnel is a powerful remnant of the Arthurian idea that the king and queen must wed the land. That to locate personal sovereignty we need grounding – root and branch – to a bubbling, confounding, exultant earth. It may not always be pretty but that’s hardly the point. And that kind of love affair does something to our conscience. It tenderises it. It’s a connected field of awareness out there, with consequence and relatedness at every turn. It’s rhizomic in its textures. We have to start clearing up our mess.

The Wider Astonishment Of Being

The wild’s not just antelopes and three-spined sticklebacks, though that’s a fabulous start. Over decades as a wilderness vigil guide I’ve seen many arrive at the forest to resubmit to the old arrangement with the wild. And at first it is a submission, sometimes a disorientation, as much falls away. Suddenly the wild is not a florid backdrop to our process, but front and centre the instructor and crafter of ceremonies.

Mercifully, the good news – extraordinary news – is that even in times like these it is quite possible to re-enter this kind of conversation. It’s not a Stone Age nostalgia but an ever-present shimmering cauldron of receptive and formidable energies. We go slow, baby steps, humility essential.

This conversation can lead to not just an original participation (as the writer and Inkling Owen Barfield put it), but possibly a final participation. This is a dynamic evolvement. To slightly oversimplify, final participation is the awe of childhood now curated consciously in the adult imagination, as a connective and meaning-making principle. You help create within this wider astonishment of being. And this circles around the terrain of the heart, which invokes the conscience I just mentioned, and that then provokes deliberate and loving ecological savvy. That’s the general idea at least, I’ve seen it more than once.

More contracts with the wild: Yeshua as long anticipated messiah turns up in Jerusalem not on a chariot with burning wheels but on a donkey. That’s a kind of anti-Zeus move. That turns the grandiosity of the myth world on its head. Yeshua’s not married to the things of Caesar, he’s working to a different plan. It’s devotion to a wildness that is not showily exuberant, but wild nonetheless in its radical agency. Wild because it’s so out of step with the transactional, pleasure-and-reward scheme that we are all so hooked into. Wild because its directive comes from The Hidden Country. Wild because it replaces material comfort with spiritual shelter, and trouble always arrives with something like that.

We recall Greek stories of young women entering the temple of Artemis before the stress and strains of marriage. They would learn intricate dances to attract the protection of the great She-Bear, become totemized to the regal, animal feminine before the complexity of marital relations. All these cases (in the words of John Moriarty) are examples of standing firm on ‘divine ground’. Don’t go easy, don’t get bought.

The Evenk (Siberian) tell a story of a young woman stolen away one day by a bear:

It’s autumn and winter is coming. The bear takes her to a cave, seals up the entrance and goes to sleep, her next to him. When she’s hungry he places his paw to her mouth, and delicious fat pours out. In the dark they find themselves making love.

One day her brother-in-law, a shaman, tracks her down and fights her bear-husband as she escapes. He also becomes a bear, with a bell hanging from his left ear. He tells her to escape, but says:

If my bell grows loud and bright then I am winning, but if it fades, then he’s ripped me apart.

When she finds the tiny settlement of tents her parents and sister live in, she falls into a dangerous fever. Over time the returning shaman tends her back to health, but not before realising that she’s pregnant. She gives birth to a powerful boy, human in all ways but one:

He had the ears of a bear.
Over time, Bear-Ears became a powerful hunter.

***

Walking Home With Your Bear Husband

Lully, lully, lully, lulley!

The falcon hath born my love away.

The Corpus Christi Carol

This other world is strange, strange –

I wish for home again.

Peter Perkins Pitchlynn

Stories as old as The Woman Who Married A Bear I shouldn’t say much about, but I will sketch in a few light touches.

There will always be a yearning in us, a strangeness in us that calls animals to our tent. It was always this way. The communion of the bear fat in the dark chapel of the den, adrift in deep time hibernation. Spirits bob and weave between them in this mid-winter’s dream. We remember the love of fairy Titania for a human in Shakespeare’s Mid-summer Night’s Dream:

So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle

Gently entwist––the female ivy so

Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.

O, how I love thee! How I dote on thee!

There will always be a wrestle between the bear and the shaman, forest and village. Mystical encounters are often understood as communally necessary but uneasy in reality. But we must not forget that something gets born, the lad with the ears of a bear. All Evenk women make love with a bear, suck fat from his paw, have a furry being grow in their womb. This is how it was meant to be. By evening the bear husband is alive again and the story repeats itself.

The Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen recommended bear fat mixed with the ash of wheat as a cure for baldness, amongst many tribal groups it was used to make hair shiny and sleek. Amongst the First Nations bear fat was mixed with clay to paint with. I’ve even been gifted it as a soap. I find myself beautifully haunted by the bear that offers his fat, the sheer animal Christness of it. Any bear that hibernates is starving, so the move is especially generous.

So when our thinking gets a little bald, a little denuded, we need to rub bear fat and ash into our skull. Stuff’ll happen.

There has been a huge societal move since this story’s birth.

In our time I would suggest she should be walking home with her bear husband. Not to domesticate their love, but to speak from it.

The danger is no longer the elopement of the bear but the return to a society that has no memory the bear ever existed. It is savagery not love-making we find in the woods now and no bear-eared-baby incubates in our foresty belly. Modernity makes us barren to this conception. It’s a great contraceptive of the soulful.

Frankly I think we should all get whisked away by the bear. We should be so lucky. Enter the warm dark chapel of the cave, bring the paw of the bear to your mouth and drink the fat. Reconsecrate yourself to the turbulent magnificence of the earth. Protect it, cherish it, get mad callouses on your hands working on it, listen to it till it tells you stories.

Walk back into the settlement with your bear wife or bear husband. Dance with an animal not a pelt.

Spend every winter curled up in the warming dark, feeling the dreams of a beast all around you. When you walk back down the mountain in the spring tell those who will listen of what you have learned. To them it may seem your cave was a library or a shipyard or a wintering field, but you’ll know better.

I know how heady this may read. I can’t apologise for that. You either respond to this kind of thing or you don’t. But in my own life I have to testify to the benefits of rehydrating personal circumstance in such a way. If you’ve read this far you’ve almost certainly found a similar orientation. When I talk about old arrangements with the wild it’s not something that gets catered for on a weekend workshop. I’m sure you understand this. It’s to do with limit, wit, curiosity, pragmatism and absolute wonder. It’s do to with being a woman or man or however you perceive yourself having an integrity of spirit that can withstand the shrapnel of the most grievous elements of modern life. It’s to do with the choices you make marking your face with their consequence.

We wish for more than what’s around. The wires and lights. We do long for the love the falcon has born away, we do sense our home is deeper than what’s being sold to us. We push away the shiny beads and useless trinkets and say enough.

In my next letter I’ll wonder more on what could be underneath this condition. The Woman Who Married A Bear: Old Arrangements with the Wild is going out to all this week, to get a deeper glimpse into what a paid subscription offers. That also gets you fortnightly audio with Sunday Stories and a very rich dialogue opening up in the community comments. All for the price of a London pint.

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If you would be interested in studying such stories and ideas, please consider joining me from April on Stalking the Rebel Soul, my five-weekend programme in Devon, England. Details at: Westcountry School of Myth.

A tithe from this essay goes to the Artic Children Foundation, getting leadership courses and funds into the hands of the indigenous youth of the Artic Circle. To know more go to: Arctic Children and Youth Foundation.

Please consider buying Jake Skeets’ fantastic book Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers.

Peter Perkins Pitchlynn (Choctaw) and William Walker Jr (Wyandot) were poets you can read more about in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through edited by Joy Harjo.

Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry by Owen Barfield is the one to read for more on original and final participation. He’s hard work but rewarding, and I suspect a revival of his work in the next few years. C. S. Lewis called him ‘the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers’.