Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California.

Now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Tonight we are going to talk a little bit about skin walkers.

And one good way to talk about skin walkers, whatever they are,

is to think about the ancient mystical creature called the wear bear.

Sometimes it works like this.

You fight and kill the bear.

You eat the bear meat and then you put on the bear skin. The power of the bear

shirt, berserker, an old Norse, gives you the strength and fury of the great animal.

This is what berserk means, bear shirt.

Do you actually turn into a bear human hybrid?

Maybe nobody liked to go to war against the berserkers.

That much is known from the stories of the Roman Empire's long northern border conflict with the barbarians, the foreigners,

the champion Norse warriors, the ones who did not need chain mail, they fought without armor,

they fought in a trance. They pile off most sinister

Viking boats and slaughter everything in their path. The human bear combination exists in North

American and Siberian tribal religions too.

These stories go back to the bear sons, born to an animal godfather and human mother.

When the mother dies, the bear sons leave the human tribe and return to the bear people.

The Navajo Skinwalker is said to be something of this sort, at least sometimes.

At least in some of the stories, it's a witch, a dark wizard, and through this dark magic,

the witch takes the form of a four-legged beast,

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