To a bear, man is a gorilla

I dreamed that I was in a cabin in a rural area, and a black bear cub wandered into the front room. I was a bit afraid of it but figured it could be mollified by feeding it. My wife said that was a bad idea, but I insisted. Looking around the cabin, I found a tray of tofu and congealed duck blood and fed it to the cub.

I stepped outside, and the bear cub followed me. Then, at the top of a nearby hill, I saw the mama bear. She saw us, too, and was absolutely enraged, making a horrible sound that sounded more like a mountain lion than a bear, and she began charging down the hill at top speed.

“Why is she so angry?” I said. “I didn’t hurt the cub.”

“Don’t you get it?” said someone (not sure who). “You’re Harambe. You’re Harambe to her.”

After a bit of running and hiding from the bear, I eventually woke up. For some reason I’m never scared in dreams anymore, not even in dreams like this one.

Harambe the gorilla was killed because his mere proximity to a human child made him a threat, even though he had shown no sign of wanting to harm the child. The mother bear felt the same way about a human being in proximity to her cub. We are to bears what gorillas are to us. In the dream, I also thought of Harambe as meaning haram, or “forbidden.”

The afternoon after the dream, I was reading The Tarot by Richard Cavendish. He was discussing the baboon as a symbol of Thoth, referring to this animal incorrectly as an “ape,” and he wrote that “the ape is to man as man is to God.”

This connection, together with the similarity of Harambe to haram and arktos to ark, made me think of the poor chaps who reached out to steady the Ark of the Covenant and were summarily struck dead.