Tag: Goldilocks and the Three Bears

The Wise Lad and the Old Three Bears

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Many years ago the Wise Lad was wandering through Ribblesdale. In the limestones crags he espied a cave and was immediately drawn into its darkness.

What drew him was not so much the dark, for there would soon be much of that with winter on its way, but the smell of a delicious stew cooking. Inside he found a skin cauldron boiling over a fire and around it three wooden bowls. 

In each bowl was a mixture of berries, nuts and meat that made his mouth water. He tried the first bowl, “Agh!” He dropped the wooden spoon. “Too hot!” He tried the second bowl. “Ugh!” He spat it out. Too cold!” He tried the third bowl. “Just right.” He grinned, wolfed it down, only slightly disconcerted when he found a golden hair at the bottom.

Full up, rubbing his belly, he collapsed into one of the three wooden chairs. “Too small.” It barely fit his arse. He tried the second. “Too big – enough room for two of me and my dogs on here.” When he sat on the third chair it wobbled because it was already missing a leg then collapsed beneath him. “Someone else has been here before me and broken the chair that is just right!”

Moving into the next cave he was relieved to see three beds lined with mosses and twigs. He tried the first. “Too hard.” The sticks dug in his ribs. Then the second. “Too soft.” He sunk into the moss. Finally he lay down in third. “Just right.” As he curled up he realised he was lying in the sleeping shape of someone else who had slept there before and caught a girl scent.

“Hmm…” Something told him it would be unwise to fall asleep in that bed. 

The Wise Lad got up and made his way into the next cave where he found the skeleton of the girl who the bears had stripped of flesh and put in their stew. By the remnants of her skull and golden hair she had been pretty.

“No wonder the stew was so tasty,” he picked a piece of meat from his teeth. 

“You ate me,” her golden-haired ghost appeared and spoke accusingly. 

“You ate the third bowl too,” shrugged the Wise Lad.

The ghost-girl glanced at the other skeletons piled up in the cave. 

“Once again,” he heard the voices of the Old Three Bears, “someone’s eaten my stew,” “someone’s broken my chair,” “someone’s been sleeping in my bed.”

“It’s time to go,” said the Wise Lad to the golden-haired ghost, “take my hand and we’ll go and share your story with the people who need to know the risks of having their stew, their chairs, their beds, everything in their world just right.”

The Old Three Bears

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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.