So… I’ve been thinking about bears again.
Maybe it’s because my grandmother, over the years, gave me an enormous collection of bears (teddy bears, for the most part, but also the odd tiny stone or ceramic bear statue/figurine), but they’re hanging around my head. I keep thinking about wearing bearskin, about body language, about growling and fishing and – rather more tangentially – about wildcraft.
I’m thinking of The Bear Queen – this fictional chicky of mine who is a shapeshifter and a deity and the embodiment of Earth. I’m thinking of how my Earth Mama – she who resides in my kitchen – has associations with bears.
And all this thinking, these half-awake not-really-dreams of bear-attacks and, sometimes, bear conversations, has led me to start Looking Things Up (on the internet, no less. No good can come of this).
I have found Artio – who is allegedly a Gaulish bear goddess from in around Switzerland.
I’ve found a bunch of stuff from OBOD and another bunch of stuff from a site called “alltotem”[1]. There’s some Finnish Stuff on Wikipedia. There are also a few bits and pieces floating around the web.
So, yeah. Lotsa stuff. Not necessarily useful. Not even necessarily aplicable to me. But I figured I’d look it up.
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
[1] Okay, this is basically disclaimer time: I have no fucking clue. Also anything talking about “totems” that isn’t written by someone from Haida Gwaii or similar… gets kind of a big salt-shaker thrown at it.
Urban Meliad 