Bear worship (also known as the bear cult or arctolatry) is the religious practice of the worshiping of bears found in many North American and North Eurasian ethnic circumpolar religions such as the Sami, Nivkh, Ainu, and pre-Christian Finns. There are also a number of deities from Celtic Gaul and Britain associated with the bear and the bear is featured on many totems throughout northern cultures that carve them. Bear worship may have been practiced as far back as the Middle paleolithic period amongst Neanderthal societies.
Read more about Bear Worship: Nivkh Bear Festival, Finns, Paleolithic Cult, The Ainu, Other Cultures
Famous quotes containing the words bear and/or worship:
“who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I have always been a friend to hero-worship; it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilized people—the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism—it is mere fetish.... There is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race.”
—George Borrow (1803–1881)