KING OF BEASTS | BEAR ARCHAEOLOGY [t-shirt]

The mighty brown bear once reigned as the supreme totemic animal of the pre-historic and ancient cultures of Europe. This archaeology inspired design is based on the work of medieval French historian, Michel Pastoureau and his book: The Bear; History of a Fallen King.

Pastoureau’s treatise explores the idea that the native & once abundant Eurasian brown bear was a god to pre-historic Europeans, where 30,000+-years-ago in Chauvet cave, they painted bears on the cave walls & created an altar of skulls upon & around a prominent stone in what is today called, The Skull Chamber. Thousands of years later the Greeks & Celts placed this devotional essence upon their hunting goddess Artemis & bear goddess Artio. From god to king of beasts, the pre-Christian Scandinavians & Germanic tribes considered the bear’s bravery & strength the very aspirational qualities of warriors & kings with many buried & cremated in bear skins. Without a doubt a manhood ritual was to hunt & kill a bear with spears, an initiation of the berserkers, the infamous & highly feared bear-shirt clad Viking warriors who would become possessed by the bloodthirsty spirit of bears & wolves. Nordic kings even traced their ancestry back to bears. This fanciful interspecies mating between bears & women was a theme paralleled in the Greek myths & later in the paranoid delusions of medieval priests. But the sacred bear lost its symbolic mojo in the medieval period when the Church appropriated the many bear holidays of the still half wild country folk & transformed them into saints days with their accompanying legends of bear-taming saints. By the late medieval period the bear was no longer an ancient god nor a mighty king of beasts but little more than a chained & muzzled mockery of itself, one for the menageries of princes & the entertainment of the town square led by the carnies of their time. O’ how the mighty fall!

◊ Oversized graphic

◊ Mens sizes/regular fit

◊ Printed on high quality AsColour Classic T; Heavy weight, 100% combed cotton

◊ Preshrunk to minimise shrinkage

◊ Khaki