The Hunt For Man
Back to the Bears in The Catalan Pyrenees
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A brief excerpt from a piece about la Fête de l’Ours, published a year ago on Riffs, follows. It sets the stage for the next piece which will be up in a few days time. I’m on the road and as soon I get the grease paint off – the bears had an easy time with me – I’ll get to work on it.
Each February three villages in the French Pyrénées are hostage to an all-day ritual that dates to the Stone Age. It’s terrifying, a million miles away from Paris and the Enlightenment. No fancy dress, let it all hang out carnival you may have witnessed or heard about. Something entirely more wicked, an irruption of the natural world impinging on man, a revolt against mediocrity, life-as-business. A rite of passage between savage and civilised, although as we can see from reading the old texts, the road leads both ways, with plenty of room for manimals both devious and kind. Special attention is given to young men at this carnival, suggesting that this old tradition, indelibly linked to the end of winter, also has something to say to those on the threshhold of adult life.
Arles sur Tech, Prats de Mollo and Saint Laurent de Cerdans kiss the modern world goodbye for a few hours, while men dressed as bears invade the towns that sit under the watchful gaze of Canigou, the region’s sacred mountain, its Mount Fuji. The event is called the Chasse d’Ours – The Bear Hunt – although it might more properly be called a hunt for humans, nature’s invasion of picturesque hill towns.
The essay posted a year ago about Prats de Mollo is here. It includes a longish epilogue, with a translated version of the one of the early Pyrennees legends about man and bear.