Hares and moons: where the pairing comes from, and what is a Victorian guess

The hare and the crescent moon turn up together in so much decoration that the pairing feels ancient and vague. It is actually specific and traceable, and it has three separate sources on three continents, one of which is a Buddhist story and one of which is a nineteenth century German scholar's guess that got repeated until it became a fact. The animal is also not the animal most people think it is, because almost everything that makes the hare interesting in folklore comes from the ways it differs from a rabbit. Here is what is documented, what is reconstruction, and where each piece came from.

A hare is not a rabbit, and the difference built the folklore

Hares are the genus Lepus. They do not dig burrows. A hare lives entirely above ground, resting in a form, which is a shallow scrape in grass, and relies on stillness and then on speed. Rabbits are a different genus, they live socially in warrens, and they go underground when threatened.

The reproductive difference is the one that matters here. A leveret is born fully furred with its eyes open and is left alone in a form within hours, visited briefly by the doe to feed. A rabbit kitten is born naked, blind and helpless in a lined nest underground. So a hare appears in the open, alone, fully formed, in a field where there was nothing the day before.

Add the size and the ears and you have an animal that is easy to notice and hard to approach: longer limbs, black tipped ears, solitary habits, and a top speed that outruns most things that chase it. Folklore about hares is consistently about something that appears from nowhere, behaves oddly, and cannot be caught.

Mad as a March hare, and what the boxing actually is

The phrase is old. It is in English by the early sixteenth century, and Erasmus records a Latin version, so it was already proverbial across Europe. What people were describing is real: in late winter and spring hares stand upright in open fields and strike at each other with their forepaws, in full daylight, for minutes at a time.

The usual explanation given for centuries was that the males were fighting. They are mostly not. In most observed bouts it is a female fending off a male she is not ready to mate with, which is a different story and a better one, because the behaviour is a test rather than a brawl.

That the display happens in daylight, in the open, in a species otherwise built around not being seen, is the whole reason it entered the language. A hare behaving conspicuously is a hare behaving wrongly, and folklore reaches for madness, or for a person inside an animal, to explain it.

The hare in the moon, which predates the man in the moon

Look at the full moon and the dark lunar plains do resolve into a shape with two long ears, if that is what you have been taught to see. Several traditions were taught exactly that. In the Buddhist Sasa Jataka, a hare offers its own body to a starving traveller who turns out to be a god, and the god draws the hare's likeness on the face of the moon so the act will not be forgotten.

Chinese tradition has the jade rabbit on the moon, pounding with a pestle beside Chang'e, the woman who went there. The motif appears in Han dynasty art and is still on Mid Autumn Festival decorations now. In Mesoamerica, a story recorded after the conquest has the gods throw a rabbit at the newly bright moon to dim it, which is why the rabbit is visible on its face.

Three unconnected cultures, the same markings, the same animal. Europe looked at the same moon and saw a man carrying sticks, which is a useful reminder that the shape on the moon does not determine anything by itself.

The three hares, from Dunhuang to a Devon church roof

There is a specific motif worth knowing about: three hares running in a circle, sharing three ears between them, so that each animal appears to have two. It is an optical device as much as an image, and it only works at one scale and one arrangement.

The oldest known examples are not European. They are painted on cave ceilings at Dunhuang in western China, on the Silk Road, from around the sixth century. The motif then appears across Asia and the Middle East, in medieval Europe on church roof bosses, particularly in Devon where around thirty survive, and in at least one medieval synagogue ceiling in Germany.

Nobody has established what it meant to the people who carved it, and the Devon examples picked up the local nickname of tinners' rabbits because of the mining districts they cluster in, which is a modern guess at a connection rather than a documented one. It is a rare case of a decorative idea travelling four thousand miles with its geometry intact and its meaning lost.

Easter, and a guess from 1835

The common claim is that the Easter hare descends from a pagan goddess, Eostre, whose sacred animal was the hare. The source for the goddess is one passage in Bede, writing in the eighth century, who says an English month was named after her. Bede says nothing about a hare.

The hare was added by Jacob Grimm in 1835, in Deutsche Mythologie, as a reconstruction. He was an extraordinary scholar working with almost no evidence at that point, and he proposed the connection rather than reporting it. Everyone since has quoted him as though he had found a source.

What is documented is the Osterhase, the Easter hare that brings eggs, described in a German text of 1682 as a folk custom of the Alsace region, and spread much later by German migration. That is a seventeenth century custom with a clear paper trail, which makes it more interesting than an invented ancient one. Separately, Roman writers record hares used in British divination and Caesar reports that the Britons would not eat them, so the animal did carry weight here. Just not the weight usually claimed for it.

The hare and the crescent as a decorative pair

The moon gazing hare, sitting upright with its head turned up, is largely a modern decorative genre rather than an old one, assembled out of the lunar stories above. That does not make it weaker. It makes it a motif with a short history and a deep set of sources, which is true of most things people assume are ancient.

The pairing works visually for a simple reason. A hare in profile is all diagonals: long ears one way, long hind legs the other, a tapering body. A crescent is a single clean arc. Putting an irregular angular silhouette against a geometric one is a standard way of making both read, and it is the same reason a moth against a crescent works on a print like The Longest Night.

Cast small, the hare has one weak point. The ears are the identifying feature and they are also the thinnest section, so they are the first thing a mould fails to fill and the first thing to bend. Sitting poses solve it, which is why a pair like the brass hares is sitting rather than running, and why a crescent used as an object, as in the crescent burner, is almost always a solid closed arc rather than a thin horned one.

Questions people actually ask

What is the difference between a hare and a rabbit?

Hares are a separate genus, they do not dig burrows, and they live above ground in a shallow scrape called a form. Their young are born fully furred with open eyes, where rabbit kittens are born naked and blind underground. Hares are also larger, longer limbed and solitary.

Why do hares box in March?

It is mostly a female fending off a male she is not ready to mate with, rather than two males fighting. It happens in daylight in open fields, which is unusual behaviour for an animal that otherwise relies on not being noticed, and that is why it entered the language as madness.

Why is there a hare or rabbit in the moon?

Several traditions read the dark lunar plains as a hare. A Buddhist story has a god draw a self sacrificing hare on the moon's face, Chinese tradition places a jade rabbit there pounding with a pestle, and a Mesoamerican account has the gods throw a rabbit at the moon to dim it.

Was the Easter bunny originally a pagan symbol?

There is no evidence for it. Bede mentions a goddess called Eostre but says nothing about a hare; the hare was added by Jacob Grimm as a conjecture in 1835. The documented custom is the German Osterhase, first described in 1682.