The Bear. The Story of a Fallen King.
Points| N° d'inventaire | 22776 |
| Format | 10.5 x 18 |
| Détails | 432 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Paris, 2015 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782757854204 |
For a long time in Europe, the king of animals was not the lion but the bear, admired, venerated, thought of as a relative or ancestor of man. The cults to which it was subjected several dozen millennia before our era left traces in the imagination and mythologies right up to the heart of the Christian Middle Ages. The Church sought early to eradicate them. Prelates and theologians were frightened by the brutal strength of the wild beast, by the fascination it exerted on kings and hunters, and above all by a widespread belief that the male bear was sexually attracted to young women. He abducted and raped them. From these unions were born beings half-man, half-bear, all invincible warriors, founders of dynasties or totemic ancestors. Michel Pastoureau traces the various aspects of the Church's struggle against the bear over nearly a millennium: large-scale massacres, systematic demonization, the transformation of the fearsome wild beast into a circus beast, and the promotion of the lion to the animal throne. But the author does not stop at the end of the Middle Ages. By placing the cultural history of the bear over the long term, he attempts to identify what, up to the present day, has survived of its former royal dignity. The book thus ends with the astonishing story of the teddy bear, the last echo of a passionate relationship from the depths of time: just as Paleolithic man sometimes shared his fears and his caves with the bear, so the child of the 21st century still shares his fears and his bed with a teddy bear, his double, his guardian angel, perhaps his first god.
For a long time in Europe, the king of animals was not the lion but the bear, admired, venerated, thought of as a relative or ancestor of man. The cults to which it was subjected several dozen millennia before our era left traces in the imagination and mythologies right up to the heart of the Christian Middle Ages. The Church sought early to eradicate them. Prelates and theologians were frightened by the brutal strength of the wild beast, by the fascination it exerted on kings and hunters, and above all by a widespread belief that the male bear was sexually attracted to young women. He abducted and raped them. From these unions were born beings half-man, half-bear, all invincible warriors, founders of dynasties or totemic ancestors. Michel Pastoureau traces the various aspects of the Church's struggle against the bear over nearly a millennium: large-scale massacres, systematic demonization, the transformation of the fearsome wild beast into a circus beast, and the promotion of the lion to the animal throne. But the author does not stop at the end of the Middle Ages. By placing the cultural history of the bear over the long term, he attempts to identify what, up to the present day, has survived of its former royal dignity. The book thus ends with the astonishing story of the teddy bear, the last echo of a passionate relationship from the depths of time: just as Paleolithic man sometimes shared his fears and his caves with the bear, so the child of the 21st century still shares his fears and his bed with a teddy bear, his double, his guardian angel, perhaps his first god.