Rabbit, Rabbit
How the Moon Rabbit came to live in the sky
Each post in this journal will be a trip down a different rabbit hole of research using the Moon as a common starting point. So it only makes sense to start by following a rabbit. A Moon Rabbit, to be specific. You know—the rabbit some people see on the face of the Moon. I never saw it myself until it was pointed out to me, and now I can’t unsee it, like the duck in the rabbit. (Or the rabbit in the duck.)
Frankly, whether it’s a rabbit, man, woman, frog, moose, or dragon, I think all the things people claim to see in the geography of the Moon are a stretch. But I guess when you spend roughly 188,000 years of human existence without television, there isn’t much else to do at night besides stare up at the Moon and identify shapes in its mountains and valleys.
Seeing creatures and faces in the Moon is a phenomenon known as pareidolia, or the human tendency to see specific and often meaningful images in random or ambiguous patterns. Pareidolia is the reason people see the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, the much-lamented gorilla Harambe in a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto, or Hitler in a teapot. Pareidolia isn’t just visual either. It can be auditory too. It’s the reason, for example, people think they hear John Lennon say “I buried Paul” when they play “Strawberry Fields Forever” backwards. Pareidolia is not, however, the reason Weird Al Yankovic’s “Nature Trail to Hell” says “Satan eats Cheez Whiz” when played backwards. He did that on purpose.
When ancient humans in Eastern Asia and the Americas looked up at the Moon, their pareidolic primate brains saw a rabbit. Throughout East Asia, the diamond-shaped blob below the rabbit became a mortar and pestle, but the people of different Asian communities thought the rabbit was grinding different things. In China and Vietnam, the rabbit is mixing the elixir of immortal life; in Japan and Korea, the rabbit is making mochi. Perhaps in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the rabbit is making Moon Pies.
In ancient Chinese mythology, the Moon Rabbit’s name is Yu Tu. He is the pet rabbit of the beautiful moon goddess Chang’e, and the two of them often hop up to the Moon to hang out in her Moon Palace. In some tales, Chang’e is the one who stole the elixir of immortality the rabbit is mixing in his mortar and pestle. In the 16th century Chinese epic Journey Into the West, the Moon Rabbit and the Monkey King fight, and Chang’e rescues her favorite pet before Sun Wukong can steal the secret of immortality. (Again.)
An Indian Jataka tale, or “Birth Story” about one of the previous incarnations of the Buddha, gives one explanation for how the image of a rabbit came to be etched on the Moon. A monkey, an otter, a jackal, and a rabbit were all hanging out one day and decided, in a sort of forest pride kind of way, to make an effort to be charitable once a month on the day of the full moon.
The talking-animal era apparently overlapped the era when gods disguised as old men were constantly wandering the earth just to mess with people, and sure enough, one of these old dudes came across our altruistic quartet the day of the next full moon. The old man said he was hungry, and begged the animals for food. Keeping to their promise, the monkey brought him fruit, the otter brought him fish, and the jackal brought the old man a lizard. (And, somewhat inexplicably, a pot of milk curd.) But all the rabbit had to offer was grass, and he knew the old man didn’t want to eat that.
So the rabbit jumped into a fire and offered himself to the old man to eat.
Much to the animals’ amazement (most of all the rabbit’s) the rabbit did not burn. Such sacrifice was the mark of a bodhisattva—a person on the path to enlightenment—and because the old man was not a real old man but instead Śakra, the ruler of heaven, he spared the kind-hearted coney. Śakra was so moved, in fact, that he tagged the face of the Moon with the rabbit’s likeness. I guess to inspire others to throw themselves into fires for hungry gods masquerading as old men? Regardless, Śakra’s vandalism remains visible to this day.
I like the story, but I’m even more fascinated by the fact that nearly 2,500 years later, the Aztecs—who most modern archaeologists agree had no pre-Columbian contact with the Old World—had a very similar story for the origins of the rabbit in the Moon. Freakishly similar. The Aztec story does away with the other animals, but still has an overly solicitous rabbit throwing himself on a fire to feed a god disguised as a starving old beggar. The beggar in this case isn’t the Buddhist ruler of heaven, but the Aztec creator god Quetzalcoatl.
It's wild to me that the two myths share so many specific details. Is it proof, as some believe, that ancient Asian sailors visited the Americas before the Europeans did, and brought their stories with them? It’s hard to imagine people didn’t find their way back and forth between the eastern and western hemispheres—even if by accident—from when humans crossed the land bridge that is now the Bering Strait 16,500 years ago until Leif Eriksson stepped off his longboat at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland 1,000 years ago. There’s no archaeological evidence, sure. But it’s fun to think that the similarities in the Moon Rabbit stories in East Asia and the Americas are an example of a kind of narrative archeological record, the same way so many different cultures have flood myths, or stories about dragons.
Or maybe Joseph Campbell was right, and there’s some kind of shared Jungian psychic well from which all humans draw our stories. That’s a little woo-woo for me, but I do like Campbell’s idea of the “monomyth”—the theory that all mythic narratives are variations on a single great story. He believed that common narrative elements created a “hero’s journey” that existed simultaneously in the great myths of the world, regardless of where or when they were created.
Academic folklorists point out that Campbell’s highly influential book The Hero With a Thousand Faces suffers mightily from source selection bias, and it’s true that many myths and tales from around the world do not fit his monomyth archetype—notably the kishōtenketsu story structure common in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese narratives. But the Hero’s Journey sure does make for good storytelling. (Just ask George Lucas, and practically every other writer of successful Hollywood blockbusters ever since.)
Not every Moon Rabbit story is about self-sacrificing rabbits and gods masquerading as old men, of course. A Cree legend, for example, tells of a young rabbit who dreamed of riding the Moon. The only bird willing to take him was the crane, whose legs stretched out long from carrying the rabbit’s weight. The two astronauts made it to the Moon, and as a tip for his lunar Uber driver, the rabbit touched the crane’s head with his bleeding paw, leaving the red mark the crane still bears today.
During the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that first landed men on the Moon, Mission Control in Houston asked the astronauts one morning to be on the lookout for “a large Chinese rabbit,” and his companion, “a beautiful Chinese girl called Chang’e,” perhaps emphasizing just how much the lunar landing felt like an accomplishment for all of humanity, not just one nation. Much later, the Chinese National Space Administration’s first lunar rover was named Yutu, in honor of the Moon Rabbit. Perhaps if China had been the first country to send people to the Moon, the first words from the lunar surface would have been, “Beijing, Tranquility Base here. The Rabbit has landed.”
As to the superstitions surrounding saying “Rabbit, Rabbit” as your first words of a new month for luck, nobody is quite sure where or when that started. It’s a uniquely British and North American tradition first recorded in a 1909 issue of Oxford University’s still-running scholarly journal Notes and Queries, which investigates the origins of words and phrases in the English language. Sometimes people said “rabbit, rabbit,” sometimes just “rabbits,” and rarely “white rabbits.” Some people believed the words had to be said up the chimney. Others thought it would bring presents from a loved one, not just the more vague “good luck.” Trixie Beldon was still saying “rabbit, rabbit” in The Mystery of the Emeralds in 1962, and in the 1990s the cable channel Nickelodeon reminded kids on the last day of each month to say it first thing when they woke up the next morning. Social media is the place I see the superstition live on the most, with some people posting “rabbit rabbit” before they post anything else in a new month. Here’s hoping “rabbit rabbit” brings this Moon Journal, and you, good luck in the new month, and the new year.
Moon Rabbit Trivia
What famous anime character’s human name is Usagi Tsukino, a pun on Tsuki no Usagi, which means “Moon Rabbit” in Japanese?
Leave your answer in the comments if you didn’t have to look it up!
I teach 4th Grade, you are talking to a bunch of my students in March. They love to read Sailor Moon books.