iomante
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, sometimes written as is an Ainu ceremony of Hokkaido and Sakhalin in which a hand-raised brown bear cub is ceremonially killed, under the notion that the soul merely returns to its god-world (). The physical body of the bear god is considered merely to be his "disguise" (), and the pelt and meat harvested are accepted as gifts that the god has left in gratitude for the ceremonious hospitality it received.
~21 min read
Encyclopedic overview
24 sectionsContents
- Nomenclature
- Practice
- Capture, caging, raising
- Festival grounds
- Ceremonial arrow-shooting and slaying
- Offering-place
- Walnut-tossing
- Overall flow after slaughter
- Un-memke
- Interpretations
- Progress of the rite
- Non-bear sending
- Early history and origins
- Okhotsk derivation theory
- Jōmon culture derivation theory
- Reconstruction of the past
- Legality
- Museum displays
- Audiovisual resources
- See also
- Explanatory notes
- References
- Citations
- Bibliography
, sometimes written as is an Ainu ceremony of Hokkaido and Sakhalin in which a hand-raised brown bear cub is ceremonially killed, under the notion that the soul merely returns to its god-world (). The physical body of the bear god is considered merely to be his "disguise" (), and the pelt and meat harvested are accepted as gifts that the god has left in gratitude for the ceremonious hospitality it received.
The term in some circles is used in the narrow sense of this elaborate ceremony of "sending" fostered animals (hand-raised bear cubs), as opposed to more general , and the simpler rite performed for the bear or other game animals taken in the wild may be referred to as or .
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “iomante” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.