The Private Life of the Hare by John Lewis-Stempel

Author:John Lewis-Stempel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473542501
Publisher: Transworld

If the hare is a symbol of spring, of dawn, of fertility, the creature truly belongs to the moon. The ambivalent, inexplicable hare is the lunar animal sans pareil. Like the moon, which is always inconstant, the hare is illogical and mysterious. In Ancient Egypt the hare was used as a hieroglyph for the word denoting existence, and all its metaphysical ramifications.

Stare at the full moon and you will see, as tribes the globe over do, shadow-patterns in the shape of a hare. (No, I did not believe it until I tried it one romantic October night, when the wind was wild music in the hedges of a stubble field.) The folklorist Timothy Harley noted in Moon Lore (1885):

When the moon is waxing, from about the eighth day to the full, it requires no very vivid imagination to descry on the westward side of the lunar disk a large patch very strikingly resembling a rabbit or hare. The oriental noticing this figure, his poetical fancy developed the myth-making faculty, which in process of time elaborated the legend of the hare in the moon, which has left its marks in every quarter of the globe. In Asia it is indigenous, and is an article of religious belief. ‘To the common people in India the spots look like a hare, i.e. Chandras, the god of the moon, carries a hare (sasa), hence the moon is called Sasin or Sasanka, hare mark or spot.’ Max Müller also writes, ‘As a curious coincidence it may be mentioned that in Sanskrit the moon is called Sasānka, i.e. “having the marks of a hare,” the black marks in the moon being taken for the likeness of the hare.’

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