The Rabbit in the Moon

The figure of a rabbit or hare on the face of the moon is genuinely widespread across East Asia: Chinese tradition sees a rabbit pounding the elixir of immortality with a mortar and pestle, Japanese tradition sees it pounding rice for cakes, and a comparable moon-hare appears in Mesoamerican sources by an entirely separate route. A Buddhist birth-story, the Sasa Jataka, has a hare offer its own body as food to a starving traveller by leaping into a fire, and is set in the moon by a god in recognition of the sacrifice. The frequently repeated claim that the Easter hare descends from a goddess named Eostre rests on a single sentence in Bede and little else; the Easter hare is first clearly attested in seventeenth-century German sources.

A separate rabbit-trickster tradition took shape in the American South: Br'er Rabbit, published by Joel Chandler Harris from 1880 onward as tales he attributed to formerly enslaved storytellers, descends from West and Central African trickster tales, particularly hare stories, carried across the Atlantic and adapted to a new setting; the rabbit repeatedly out-thinks larger, stronger animals through wit rather than force, the same pattern found in the Anansi spider tales of the same African diaspora.