The project where is it all began, a recreation of a Finnish bear funeral. It was a surprisingly long lasting tradition lastingfrom pre-Christians times all the way up to the 1800s. This ritual was meant to appease the angry spirit of a bear that had been hunted. Bears were a sacred animal to the Finnish, a link between the gods and man. According to myth they were lowered to earth on silver chains from Ursa Major. When one needed to be hunted for food, its angry spirit could rampage through a village causing an illness and death.

To appease the spirit of the bear a funeral and feast was prepared. Often the celebration would take the form of a wedding. The bear would be celebrated as a guest of honor and sung to with a number of ritual songs. Some examples show trying to trick the bear spirit, singing to it that its death was an accident, it fell out a tree. Another example blames the Russians for hunting it.

After bear meat was processed, a funeral procession would take the skull and bones to the tallest pine tree where a leader of the village would question the procession to ensure they had cared properly for the bear. The bones would be buried at the base of the tree, and the skull would be hung at the top, which would allow the bear to be reincarnated and return from the stars.