In a recent journey circle at the Way of the Buzzard Mystery School we journeyed to Bear to ask for advice on overwintering. I was expecting to receive my usual guidance on slowing down and making time for rest. What happened was surprising. 

When I got to the cave Bear was in a torpor. I pulled back his skin, like velcro, and found to my shock that he was mechanical inside. I searched inside his insides, which were like circuit boards and pulled out a box of cornflakes! I then found myself in a cottage with the three bears shouting at them: “You should be eating porridge not cheap cornflakes!” This made me realise they were not real bears. In the basement of the cottage I found three bear pawprints leading into a woodland. There I found the three bears inside each other like Russian Dolls playing a drum. I was told I must play ‘the Bear Drumbeat.’ As they drummed images came from the drum and were made manifest. I was told, this way, I must ‘repopulate the forest.’ 

This got me wondering if the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story has roots in an older myth about the Old Three Bears from the time between when the Romans imported oats to Britain to feed their horses and potentially to make porridge and bears became extinct 1,500 years ago. Could the Three Bears within each other be a triple form of the Celtic Bear God or Goddess, Artaios or Artio? 

Their advice is suggestive of how images of the Otherworld are evoked by a shamanic drumbeat and of the power of durmming and imagination to create more ecologically viable futures to which extinct animals like Bear might return.