The rite varies as to detail in different places.  Among the Gilyaks the Bear is dressed after death in full Gilyak costume and seated on a bench of honour.  In one part the bones and skull are carried out by the oldest people to a place in the forest not far from the village.  There all the bones except the skull are buried.  After that a young tree is felled a few inches above the ground, its stump is cleft, and the skull wedged into the cleft.  When the grass grows over the spot the skull disappears and there is an end of the Bear.  Sometimes the Bear’s flesh is eaten in special vessels prepared for this festival and only used at it.  These vessels, which include bowls, platters, spoons, are elaborately carved with figures of bears and other devices.

Through all varieties in detail the main intent is the same, and it is identical with that of the rite of the holy Bull in Greece and the maypole of our forefathers.  Great is the sanctity of the Bear or the Bull or the Tree; the Bear for a hunting people; the Bull for nomads, later for agriculturists; the Tree for a forest folk.  On the Bear and the Bull and the Tree are focussed the desire of the whole people.  Bear and Bull and Tree are sacred, that is, set apart, because full of a special life and strength intensely desired.  They are led and carried about from house to house that their sanctity may touch all, and avail for all; the animal dies that he may be eaten; the Tree is torn to pieces that all may have a fragment; and, above all, Bear and Bull and Tree die only that they may live again.

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We have seen (p. 71) that, out of the puppet or the May Queen, actually perceived year after year there arose a remembrance, a mental image, an imagined Tree Spirit, or “Summer,” or Death, a thing never actually seen but conceived.  Just so with the Bull.  Year by year in the various villages of Greece was seen an actual holy Bull, and bit by bit from the remembrance of these various holy Bulls, who only died to live again each year, there arose the image of a Bull-Spirit, or Bull-Daimon, and finally, if we like to call him so, a Bull-God.  The growth of this idea, this conception, must have been much helped by the fact that in some places the dancers attendant on the holy Bull dressed up as bulls and cows.  The women worshippers of Dionysos, we are told, wore bulls’ horns in imitation of the god, for they represented him in pictures as having a bull’s head. We know that a man does not turn into a bull, or a bull into a man, the line of demarcation is clearly drawn; but the rustic has no such conviction even to-day.  That crone, his aged aunt, may any day come in at the window in the shape of a black cat; why should she not?  It is not, then, that a god ’takes upon him the form of a bull,’ or is ‘incarnate in a bull,’ but that the real Bull and the worshipper dressed as a bull are seen and remembered and give rise to an imagined Bull-God; but, it should be observed, only among gifted, imaginative, that is, image-making, peoples.  The Ainos have their actual holy Bear, as the Greeks had their holy Bull; but with them out of the succession of holy Bears there arises, alas! no Bear-God.