The Bear Cult among the Evenki and the Ainu
THE BEAR CULT
Among the Evenki and the Ainu — When the Animal Was Ancestor
The Relative Who Walks on Four Legs
There was a time — and for some peoples that time has not yet ended — when the bear was not an animal. It was a relative. An ancestor. A grandfather. A being that walked on four legs but that, if it wished, could stand up and walk on two, like people. That had hands resembling human hands. That protected its young with a mother’s ferocity. That knew where to find roots, fruits, and honey — and that, when it died, deserved a funeral as dignified as that of any person in the village.
For the Evenki of Siberia and the Ainu of northern Japan — two peoples separated by thousands of kilometers but united by an identical reverence — the bear was the point where the human and the sacred met. Not a symbol of the sacred: the sacred itself, dressed in fur, claws, and strength. Killing it was necessary to survive. But killing it without respect was unthinkable — because killing a bear without honoring it was killing a member of one’s own family.
This article is about that relationship. About the bear cult — one of humanity’s oldest spiritual practices, with archaeological evidence dating back at least one hundred thousand years. About how two peoples at opposite ends of the world developed extraordinarily similar rituals to honor the same animal. And about what that reverence says regarding a way of being in the world that modern civilization has forgotten, but that perhaps desperately needs to remember.
The Evenki: The People of the Taiga
The Evenki — formerly called Tungus — are one of the largest indigenous peoples of Siberia, spread across a vast territory stretching from Lake Baikal to the Pacific Ocean. They are the people who gave the world the word “shaman.” And they are, possibly, the oldest guardians of the bear cult in continental Asia.
For the Evenki, the bear — amikān in their language — is a direct ancestor. Origin myths tell that in the beginning, there was no difference between humans and bears: they were the same people, the same family, and it was by accident or by divine choice that some remained in human form and others in bear form. This narrative is not allegory: it is genealogy. The bear is the older brother. The human is the younger brother. And when the younger brother needs to kill the older brother to eat, the very least that is expected is that he do so with absolute respect.
This belief did not arise from nothing. Anyone who has observed a bear up close — and the Evenki observed them every day — understands why the resemblance to humans is so disturbing. The bear stands up on two legs and walks upright. Its front paws have five fingers with mobility that resembles that of the human hand. When skinned, the bear’s body looks frighteningly like the body of a muscular human. Its eyes, unlike those of other predators, have an expression that seems — and perhaps is — intelligent, evaluative, conscious. Calling the bear “people” was not metaphor: it was the logical conclusion of those who lived intimately with it.
The Sacred Hunt: The Evenki Ritual
Among the Evenki, bear hunting was surrounded by rules so rigorous that the term “ritual” is more appropriate than “hunt.” Each stage — from preparation to conclusion — was laden with spiritual significance and obligations that could not be ignored without risk of consequences that went far beyond mere bad luck: offending the bear’s spirit was offending the entire order of the world.
Before the hunt, the hunter did not say he was going to hunt a bear. The word “bear” was avoided — euphemisms, respectful names, titles of kinship were used instead. “Grandfather.” “The old one.” “The lord of the forest.” Naming the bear directly was calling it before the time was right — and whoever calls the bear before being ready risks being found instead of finding. This linguistic taboo exists in dozens of cultures that practice the bear cult, from the Evenki to the Finns, from the Khanty to the Sami — and is, in itself, evidence of the antiquity and diffusion of this reverence.
During the hunt, the hunter apologized to the bear. Not after killing it — before. And during. He explained that the need was real, that the family needed to eat, that it was not out of cruelty or sport. There are ethnographic accounts of Evenki hunters who conversed with the bear throughout the entire hunt, like someone asking permission from a relative to borrow something. “Forgive me, grandfather. My children are hungry. I do not offend you — I honor you.”
After death, the bear was treated with the dignity of an illustrious guest. The body was positioned carefully. The head was turned toward the east — the direction of the rising sun, the direction of renewal. The eyes were covered — not out of revulsion, but out of respect: so that the bear’s spirit would not see the dismemberment of the body it had just inhabited. The skin was removed with ceremonial care. And the meat was divided following specific rules that ensured that each part of the bear fulfilled its ritual destiny.
The Feast: Eating as Prayer
The bear feast among the Evenki was not a meal: it was a ceremony. The meat was cooked in a specific way — never burned, never wasted, never treated carelessly. Each part of the bear’s body had meaning: the heart was reserved for the principal hunter; the head was prepared separately and treated as a sacred relic; the bones were kept with anatomical precision.
The bones, in fact, were the most important element of the entire ritual. Because for the Evenki — and for the Ainu, as we shall see — the bear could be reborn. But it would only be reborn if its bones were preserved intact. It was from them that the soul would restructure itself in the spiritual world to return in the form of a new bear, in a new season, in a new cycle. Breaking a bone was preventing rebirth. Losing a bone was mutilating the soul. And so the bones were collected, organized in the correct order, and deposited in a sacred place — on an elevated platform in the forest, or hung in a tree, far from other animals and beyond the reach of forgetting.
This belief — that the preservation of bones allows rebirth — is one of the oldest and most widespread in humanity. It appears among the Sami of Scandinavia with the reindeer. It appears among the Inuit of the Arctic with the seal. It appears in Norse mythology, where Thor can resurrect his goats by eating the meat and returning the bones to the skin. It is a universal principle among hunting peoples: life is not destroyed by death — it is recycled by it. As long as the bones return to the earth, the soul returns to the body. And the cycle continues.
The Ainu: The People of Northern Japan
At the other end of the world — on the islands of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurils — lives a people that most people have never heard of, but whose culture is one of the most fascinating and ancient in the North Pacific. The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan, ethnically and culturally distinct from the Japanese, with their own language, their own spirituality, and a relationship with nature that resembles much more that of Siberian peoples than that of any sedentary Asian civilization.
For the Ainu, everything in the world is inhabited by spirits called kamuy — a word that, not by coincidence, sounds similar to kami, the Japanese term for Shinto deities, suggesting a cultural influence that runs deeper than recorded history can trace. But among all the kamuy, one stands out above the others: Kim-un Kamuy — the god of the mountains. The brown bear.
In Ainu cosmology, the bear is not merely a sacred animal: it is a god in disguise. The Ainu believe that the kamuy live in their own world — a spiritual world parallel to the human one — and that, when they decide to visit the world of humans, they assume physical forms. The mountain kamuy wears the “clothes” of a bear to walk among humans. And when humans kill the bear, they are not killing a god: they are freeing the god from its earthly garment, allowing it to return to its spiritual world. The death of the bear is, therefore, an act of liberation. And it must be treated as such.
Iyomante: The Ritual of Sending the God Back
The Iyomante is the most elaborate and most well-known Ainu ritual — and it is, without exaggeration, one of the most extraordinary rituals in the entire animist world. The name means “send away” — and refers to the act of sending the bear’s spirit back to the world of the kamuy, laden with gifts and gratitude.
The ritual began months before the final moment. A bear cub was captured in spring — usually after its mother was hunted — and brought to the village, where it was treated not as a prisoner, but as a divine guest. The cub was nursed by Ainu women, literally: women from the village offered their own breast to the bear cub, feeding it as they would a human baby. It slept inside the house. It was caressed, fed the finest foods, played with the children. For months, it was treated with the love and care reserved for a beloved family member.
And then, when the cub reached about two years of age, came the Iyomante. The entire village gathered for the ceremony. There were songs, dances, prayers. The bear was adorned with ritual ornaments — necklaces, carvings, sacred cloths. One spoke to it directly, explaining what was about to happen: that it was not abandonment, not betrayal, not cruelty — it was honor. That it was being sent back to its true world, to the world of the kamuy, carrying with it the gifts and love of the community. That when it arrived in the spiritual world, it would tell the other kamuy how well it had been treated — and that, because of this, the kamuy would continue to send bears to the human world, perpetuating the cycle of reciprocity between the two worlds.
The bear was killed ritually — with ceremonial arrows, following a specific protocol that minimized suffering. Afterward, the body was prepared with the same ceremonial care as the Evenki: the meat divided among the community, the head preserved as a sacred relic, the bones organized and returned to nature to allow rebirth.
The Iyomante was, at the same time, funeral and celebration. Mourning and gratitude. Death and liberation. And at the center of it all was an idea that the modern mind has enormous difficulty processing: that it is possible to love deeply what one kills. That death, when clothed in respect and necessity, is not violence — it is sacred.
The Question That Won’t Go Away
The modern gaze — especially the Western one, especially the urban one — looks at the Iyomante and sees cruelty. Raise an animal with love only to kill it later? Nurse a cub at your breast only to sacrifice it? The instinctive reaction is horror. And that reaction deserves to be taken seriously — but it also deserves to be examined.
Because the uncomfortable question that the Iyomante raises is not “how could they?” — it is “and us, how can we?” Modern civilization kills billions of animals per year for consumption. Billions. Animals that are born in confinement, live in confinement, and die in confinement, never seeing the sun, never setting foot on earth, never being called by name, never receiving a gesture of respect or acknowledgment that they are living beings who died so that others might live.
The Ainu who nursed the bear and then killed it with ceremonial arrows and tears in his eyes did something that the modern food industry does not do: he recognized the life he was taking. He looked into the animal’s eyes. He apologized. He gave thanks. And he carried the weight of that death for the rest of his life, knowing that the meat on the plate was not a product — it was someone’s sacrifice.
This is not a defense of the Iyomante as a contemporary practice — the Ainu themselves abandoned it over the course of the twentieth century, partly due to Japanese pressure, partly due to internal changes. But it is an invitation to examine what was lost when humanity moved from “killing with respect” to “producing without conscience.” The problem is not that the Ainu killed bears. The problem is that we kill everything — and feel nothing.
Two Peoples, One Bear: What Connects Evenki and Ainu
The similarity between Evenki and Ainu rituals is too striking to be coincidence — and too fascinating to be ignored. Both treat the bear as ancestor or divinity. Both use euphemisms to avoid naming the bear directly. Both perform ceremonial feasts with the meat. Both preserve the skull as a sacred relic. Both organize the bones to allow rebirth. Both apologize before and during death.
The most likely explanation is shared ancestry. The Ainu, although they live in Japan, are not genetically Japanese — their origins are debated, but there is evidence of connection with ancient populations of Siberia and northeastern Asia. The bear cult may be a cultural inheritance that both peoples carry from a common ancestor — a hunting people who inhabited the forests of northern Asia thousands of years ago and who, as they dispersed, carried with them the reverence for the bear as a sacred being.
But there is another possible explanation — and it is deeper. Perhaps the similarity does not require a common ancestor. Perhaps any people who live intimately with bears, who depend on them for survival, who observe them closely enough to perceive the disturbing resemblance to humans — perhaps any people in that situation inevitably arrive at the same conclusion: this animal is not merely an animal. It is something more. It is a mirror. It is a relative. It is sacred.
The bear cult appears — with variations but with recognizable structure — among the Sami of Scandinavia, the Khanty and Mansi of Western Siberia, the Nivkh of Sakhalin, the Ket of the Yenisei, the Ob-Ugric peoples, and even among Native American communities. The distribution covers practically the entire northern hemisphere where bears exist. This suggests that the bear cult may be one of humanity’s oldest spiritual traditions — possibly predating the very migration of modern humans out of Africa.
One Hundred Thousand Years of Reverence
The antiquity of the bear cult is vertiginous. At the archaeological site of Drachenloch, in Switzerland — a cave in the Alps at 2,445 meters altitude — skulls of cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) were found organized in stone niches, dated to approximately 75,000 years ago. Skulls positioned intentionally, oriented in the same direction, accompanied by long bones — an arrangement that suggests ritual, not chance.
At the site of Regourdou, in France, a Neanderthal skeleton was found buried together with bear bones arranged in a way that suggests offering or funerary accompaniment. The dating: approximately 70,000 years. This means that the bear cult may be older than modern Homo sapiens in Europe — it may be an inheritance from the Neanderthals.
These discoveries are debated among archaeologists — as is everything involving ritual interpretation of prehistoric remains. But even the most skeptical recognize that the recurrence of bear skulls in unnatural positions, at multiple sites, over tens of thousands of years, is difficult to explain as accident. Something was happening. Someone was honoring the bear before even inventing agriculture, writing, or the wheel.
If this is true, the bear cult is the oldest documented spiritual practice of the human species. Older than any organized religion. Older than any temple. Older than any sacred text. And the Evenki and Ainu, with their rituals that survived into the twentieth century, would be the last living links in a spiritual chain that extends for one hundred thousand years.
The Skull: The Throne of the Soul
In practically all traditions that practice the bear cult, the skull occupies a central position. It is the part of the body that is not eaten, that is not discarded, that is not forgotten. It is kept, elevated, positioned with care — because it is there that the bear’s soul resides, even after the body is gone.
Among the Evenki, the skull was placed on an elevated platform in the forest, facing east. Among the Ainu, it was positioned in the nusa — an outdoor altar dedicated to the kamuy — and decorated with inau (ritual wooden sticks with curled shavings). Among the Khanty and Mansi, the skull was wrapped in cloth and kept in the house, treated as a living presence. Among the Sami, it was returned to the cave from which the bear had emerged in spring, so that the spirit could find its way back.
The logic behind all these practices is the same: the skull is a throne. The bear’s soul — the spirit, the kamuy, the essence — does not abandon the skull. It remains there, watching, waiting, and eventually returning to the cycle of life when conditions are right. The skull is not a dead relic: it is a seed. And like every seed, it needs to be planted in the right place to germinate.
What Was Lost: From Reverence to Product
The bear cult survived glaciations, migrations, empires, and millennia. It did not survive the twentieth century. Japanese colonization suppressed Ainu culture with systematic brutality — it prohibited the language, the rituals, the Iyomante. The Soviet Union did the same to the Evenki — it classified their rituals as superstition, forced sedentarization, destroyed the way of life that sustained the practice. And the globalized world completed the job: it transformed the bear into a zoo attraction, into a cartoon character, into a decorative rug.
What was lost was not merely a ritual. A way of relating to the world was lost — a way that recognized that killing to live is necessary, but that killing without conscience is obscene. A way that saw in the animal not a resource, not a product, not a property — but a being with a soul, with dignity, with the right to be honored even in death. Especially in death.
The Evenki who spoke to the bear before killing it were not naive. They did not think the bear understood Portuguese, Russian, or Evenki. They knew they were speaking to something that transcended the individual animal — to the spirit of the species, to the soul of the forest, to the very consciousness of life that feeds on life. This conversation was not superstition: it was ethics. The oldest ethics that exists: the ethics of one who looks into the eyes of what he eats and says “thank you.”
The Bear Still Waits
Today, the Ainu are experiencing a cultural renaissance. Since 2019, the Japanese government officially recognizes the Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan. The language is being recovered. The rituals are being relearned. The Iyomante, although not practiced in its complete form, is studied, discussed, and celebrated as spiritual heritage. Young Ainu discover the history that their grandparents were forced to hide — and in it they find identity, purpose, and a vision of the world that makes far more sense than what modernity offers.
The Evenki face a similar path. The tradition did not die — it retreated. And now, gradually, it returns. Not as a copy of the past, but as a living adaptation — the same spirit in new clothes. Because true traditions are not fossils: they are seeds. And seeds, like the bear’s skull positioned toward the east, need only the right conditions to germinate.
The bear cult teaches us something that transcends any specific tradition: that the relationship between the human and the animal he hunts, eats, and uses can be — and for most of human history was — a relationship of mutual respect, of sacred reciprocity, of awareness that life feeds on life and that the very least owed to one who dies so that others may live is recognition.
The bear is still in the forest. The skull still points toward the east. And the question that the Evenki and Ainu left us still awaits an answer: when you eat, do you know what died so that you could eat? And if you know — did you give thanks?
The hunter apologizes.
The bear listens.
The meat nourishes.
The bones hold the promise that no one dies forever.
And the skull, facing east,
waits for the sun that brings everything back.
— Burrow of the Badger
