With Bear and Wolf in Dracula Country

Bucharest


On the main road from the airport to downtown Bucharest is a statue of Romulus and Remus with the she-wolf. This is the foundation story of Romania as well as Rome. Romania was once the Roman province of Dacia. Romanians claim Romulus and Remus were theirs before they were Rome's, since R&R were actually Thracians and the borders of Romania encompass ancient Thrace, renowned for its shamans - not to mention that fact that wolves still range the hill country here. Thracian or Dacian, the Wolf is big around here. Strabo reported that the original name of the Dacians was derived from daos, meaning "wolf". Warrior Dacians vaunted their wolf connection; their standard featured a wolf head on a dragon body.


Nonetheless, we'll be singing my Bear song when we open my first program in Bucharest tonight. This is actually a song I borrowed from the Mohawk Indians and turned into English. Traditionally, it is a lullaby to comfort children and call a protector to watch over them in the night. It is also a shaman song that calls in one of the great medicine animals of North America. I find that it travels well, and facilitates powerful connections will all the animal spirits.
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Don't cry little one
Don't cry little one
The Bear is coming to dance for you
The Bear is coming to dance for you
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In Romanian, the Bear song looks like this: -

Nu plange micutule
Nu plange micutule
Ursul danseze pentru tine
Ursul danseze pentru tine -

My host tells me there is a tribe of gypsies in Romania called the Ursari, or Bear People. They go from village to village dancing with trained bears at fairs. -

I learned just now that the Bear may also be at the heart of the ancient mystery religion of these parts. Herodotus and other ancient Greek writers mention a mysterious god of the Getae named Zalmoxis. Most likely (the etymology is disputed) this name means "Bear Skin" or "He Who Wears the Bear Skin", deriving from the tradition that the infant Zalmoxis was wrapped in a bear hide (zalmon, in Getic).
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On a deeper level, the Bear connection involves the Underworld journey. Zalmoxis is one of the god-men who dies and is reborn. He goes down into the Underworld as the bear goes down into its cave, to hibernate. Zalmoxis reappears after three years to impart the "knowledge of the skies" to humans. Central to his teachings was the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and the idea that we cannot heal the body without healing the soul. In some versions, he is the teacher of Pythagoras though in others, the relationship is the other way round and Zalmoxis is a slave who was manumitted by the sage Pythagoras and acquired great wealth and wisdom of his own. Mircea Eliade wrote a monograph about Zalmoxis, "the vanishing god", that I read years ago but found the least accessible of that great mythographer's works.
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To know Zalmoxis, perhaps, we have to dream him. Romania seems ripe for more adventures in dream archeology, in which we use the techniques of Active Dreaming to open direct channels to ancient knowledge, and then use the best of modern science and scholarship to confirm our leads. -


Road Notes: I have not yet spotted a vampire, though a U.S. girls' sports team at Prague airport were very excited that they were being matched against a team here called the Vampires.I struck up a conversation with the young woman who was my rowmate on the plane when I noticed she was reading Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. It turns out that she is a Romanian novelist, whose second novel was titled Men and who is now seeking a publisher for her third, Dava. I remarked that it seemed auspicious that we were flying in to Bucharest on the day it was announced that a Romanian-born author had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Bear report: We sang the Bear song in Romanian at the start of tonight's program, and it was wildly popular. Prior to this, socializing in the garden before the workshop began, I told everyone I met that I planned to learn Romanian in one day, and would each of them please give me an interesting word in their own language. Words volunteered (in chronological succession) included:
- iubire (love)
- vis (dream)
- daruire (giving yourself)
- suflet (soul)
- dor (longing)
- vasc (mistletoe)
- doina (folk song)
- pescarus (seagull)
- luna (moon, of course)
-frumesete (beauty)
- reveria (reverie, daydream)
- efervescenta (effervescence)

No lack of effervescence in the wonderfully high-energy opening session!