The sacred bear: Artemis of Brauron, Callisto and the goddess Artio

Large, solitary, able to rise on its hind legs like a man and to disappear for the whole winter in hibernation, the bear has struck the imagination of almost every people that has known it. In Greece it was linked to Artemis, in Roman Gaul to a goddess with a telling name, among the peoples of the North to complex ceremonies. On the existence of a true prehistoric bear cult, on the other hand, archaeologists are divided.

The little bears of Brauron

In the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron, on the eastern coast of Attica, Athenian girls spent a period of ritual service called the arkteia: they were called arktoi, «bears», and probably wore a saffron-coloured robe. Aristophanes alludes to it in the Lysistrata, where the chorus of women recalls having been a bear at Brauron. Fragmentary vases found in the sanctuary show girls running or dancing near the altar.

A myth explained the origin of the rite: a tame she-bear living in the sanctuary was killed by some youths after scratching a little girl, and Artemis, angered, sent a plague. To appease her, the Athenians decreed that their daughters should serve the goddess as bears before marriage. The rite thus marked the passage from childhood to adulthood under the protection of a goddess of the wild.

Callisto and the Great Bear

The myth of Callisto, a nymph of Artemis's retinue vowed to virginity, is also linked to the goddess. Seduced by Zeus, she was turned into a bear, according to the various versions by Artemis herself, by the jealous Hera or by Zeus to hide her. Ovid, in the second book of the Metamorphoses, tells that her son Arcas, grown into a hunter, was about to kill her without recognising her, when Jupiter raised them both to the sky as constellations.

Hence the Great Bear and, depending on the version, Boötes or the Little Bear. The ancients noted that these stars, seen from the Mediterranean, never set below the horizon, and the myth explained this by Hera's resentment, since she was said to have asked Oceanus never to receive Callisto into his waters. The very name of Arcadia was linked to Arcas, the son of the bear.

Artio, Bern and the ceremonies of the North

In 1832 at Muri, near Bern, a Roman-period bronze group was discovered showing a seated goddess facing a bear, with the inscription «Deae Artioni», to the goddess Artio. The name is connected with the Celtic word for bear, the same that may perhaps be found in the name of Arthur. The statuette, now in the Bern Historical Museum, has become a civic symbol, since the city's name too is traditionally linked to the bear.

Among the peoples of northern Eurasia the bear was the object of elaborate ceremonies, described by ethnographers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the Ainu of Hokkaido, for example, the festival called iyomante was intended to send the bear's spirit back to the world of the gods with honours and gifts. More uncertain is the hypothesis of a Palaeolithic cult: bear skulls found in caves such as the Drachenloch, in Switzerland, or the Chauvet cave, in France, may also have natural explanations.

The historian Michel Pastoureau has shown how in the Christian Middle Ages the bear, long regarded as the king of animals in many regions of Europe, was gradually replaced by the lion. Traces of its ancient prestige remain, however, in names, in coats of arms, in the constellations and in a sanctuary in Attica where, more than two thousand years ago, little girls became for a time little bears.