The Hare at Orion's feet and the hares that live on the Moon

Beneath the feet of the great hunter Orion, on winter nights, a small and unremarkable constellation crouches. It is Lepus, the Hare, which the ancients imagined as the prey of Orion and his hounds, forever fleeing before Canis Major as it follows close behind. Alongside this starry hare, many cultures of the world imagined another celestial hare, far more famous, living on the surface of the Moon.

The hunter's prey

Lepus is one of the forty-eight classical constellations listed by Ptolemy in the Almagest, in the second century AD, and Aratus already describes it in the Phaenomena as an animal pursued relentlessly by the Dog, which presses upon it as it rises and sets. The scene completes the great hunting picture of winter: Orion with his club raised, his two dogs, and the small prey seeking escape towards the west.

Hyginus, in his treatise on astronomy, reports a curious legend. On the island of Leros, in the Aegean, there were once no hares; a young man brought a pregnant female from abroad, and soon all the inhabitants wanted to raise them. The hares multiplied so quickly that they devoured the crops, and the islanders struggled to get rid of them. In memory of this episode, according to some, the hare was placed in the sky as a warning.

The hare that offered itself

In India the hare is linked to the Moon by a famous Buddhist tale, the Śaśa Jātaka, one of the stories of the Buddha's previous lives. The future Buddha, born as a hare, lived in the forest with some animal friends. When the god Śakra appeared disguised as a hungry traveller, the hare, having nothing to offer, threw itself into the fire to give its own flesh.

The fire, however, did not burn it. To commemorate that act of generosity forever, Śakra drew the image of the hare on the face of the Moon. Even today in India the lunar disc is called by names containing the word “hare”, such as śaśin, “the one who bears the hare”. The dark patches on the lunar surface, seen with a little imagination, do indeed recall a crouching animal with its ears raised.

The jade rabbit and the hare of Mexico

In China the same figure is the Jade Rabbit, companion of the goddess Chang'e, who fled to the Moon after drinking the elixir of immortality. According to legend the rabbit pounds herbs in a mortar to prepare that elixir. In Japan and Korea popular tradition sees instead a rabbit pounding rice to make cakes, and the scene is still celebrated during the mid-autumn festival.

In Mesoamerica, too, the Moon had its rabbit. According to the Aztec account collected in the sixteenth century by Bernardino de Sahagún, when at Teotihuacan two gods sacrificed themselves to become the Sun and the Moon, the two bodies shone with equal strength. Then one of the gods threw a rabbit at the face of the Moon to dim its light, and that is why its outline can still be seen there.

The celestial hare thus joins two different skies: the Greek sky of the hunt, where the animal is prey forever in flight, and that of many Asian and American cultures, where it becomes a symbol of sacrifice, of immortality or of balance between the heavenly bodies. In both cases a small and fragile animal finds a place up there, beside gods and heroes, thanks to the attention with which humans have watched the sky.