My day began with my little dog pushing his bushy face against mine as I lay back on the pillow. I petted him and sang to him. Without considering the content, I found I was singing the Romanian version of a song to call the spirit Bear that is a favorite in my workshops.
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Romanian friends helped me make the translation when I taught in Bucharest a couple of years ago.
Nu plânge micutule
Nu plânge micutule
Ursul danseze pentru tine
Ursul danseze pentru tine
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
Don't cry little one
The Bear is coming to dance for you
The Bear is coming to dance for you
After walking the dogs, I went online and found a Romanian Facebook friend had just commented on the article I posted here about the Vapor Drinker I met while traveling to Santa Fe for the board meeting of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners last weekend
When I told him I am returning to Romania in October 2012, to lead an adventure in shamanic dreaming and dream archaeology in the Bucegi mountains, he replied:
Ursii te asteapta! "The bears are waiting for you."
I shared today's Bear story with the physician who is the current president of the Society for Shamanic Practitioners, who told me he loves bears after I led the group in singing the Bear song. He told me that his grandfather was Romanian.
Right after this, I received an email from my coordinator in Romania telling me that she is considering a workshop site called....The Cabin of the Bears.
Good stories can have many installments, or sequels. I suspect that this one is going to go far.
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. -
The Bear may also be at the heart of the ancient mystery religion of the Dacians (in what is now Romania). 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. Mircea Eliade wrote a monograph about Zalmoxis subtitled "The Vanishing God".
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To know Zalmoxis, perhaps, we have to dream him. Romania seems ripe for fresh adventures in dream archaeology, 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. -
