Animals & Totems
Rabbit
Mammals
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Origin 1980 to 2000
Rabbits and hares are lagomorphs, not rodents, and they breed at a rate that has made them a fertility emblem almost everywhere they occur. The moon rabbit is genuinely widespread in East Asia: Chinese tradition places a rabbit on the moon pounding the elixir of immortality, Japanese tradition has it pounding rice cakes, and a comparable figure appears in Mesoamerican sources. A Buddhist jataka has a hare offer its own body as food to a beggar and be set in the moon in recognition. The Easter hare is attested in German sources from the seventeenth century; the frequently repeated claim that it descends from a goddess named Eostre rests on one sentence in Bede and nothing else.
Facts
Disputed
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThe words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice. 4 Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties. Correspondences
Element Correspondence Meaning
Symbolic MeaningChinese tradition places a rabbit on the moon pounding the elixir of immortality, and the rabbit is the fourth sign of the Chinese zodiac. 2 Identity
Creature Type Origins
Origin Period1980 to 2000 1Tradition: Modern Western esotericism Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceA Buddhist jataka tale has a hare offer its own body as food to a beggar and be set in the moon in recognition of the sacrifice. 3 Learn More
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.
Fourth of the Twelve, the Gentle Sign
The rabbit is the fourth sign of the Chinese zodiac, replaced by the cat in the Vietnamese version, probably through a pun or a mistranslation of the sign's name. As a birth-sign the rabbit is read for gentleness, tact, refinement and caution, the temperament of a prey animal that survives by prudence rather than force, and it is among the most benign and least aggressive of the twelve. Its association with the moon carries into the calendar, and it is linked with the pre-noon hours and, in the elemental scheme, with wood and the season of spring. Its universal fertility symbolism, from its famous rate of breeding, sits alongside the calendrical meaning rather than in it.
A point of natural history worth noting against the calendar image: the animal in the Chinese zodiac's fourth sign, tu, covers both rabbits and hares, and the two are biologically distinct, hares (Lepus) being born furred and mobile while rabbits (Oryctolagus and relatives) are born blind and naked in a burrow; European and Chinese art has moved fairly freely between the two without much concern for the distinction, so a given zodiac image labelled rabbit may show either animal. East Asian tradition gives the animal a separate lunar story, distinct from the sign's own calendrical use: the Moon Rabbit, seen in the dark markings of the full moon, is said in Chinese and neighbouring traditions to pound the elixir of immortality with a mortar and pestle, most often as companion to the moon goddess Chang'e.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Named as the emblem animal of the lunar mansion Fang (Room) in the twenty-eight xiu list.
Attested in Region
China, Regions The hare in the moon, pounding the elixir of immortality.
The rabbit in the moon, put there by a god, and the four hundred rabbits of pulque.
The Great Hare of the Eastern Woodlands, a creator and a trickster at once.
Disciplines That Use This
One of the animal spirits gathered under this discipline. Where a tradition restricts this material, the restriction is recorded on the tradition itself rather than repeated for each animal.
Sources
1. Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking
Alice Beck Kehoe, Waveland Press, 2000ch. on core shamanism and its commercial forms
2. A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought
Wolfram Eberhard, Routledge, 1986s.v. hare/rabbit; the moon rabbit and fourth branchView the Source 3. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. hare; lunar symbolismView the Source 4. The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality
Suzanne Owen, Continuum, 2008ch. on the marketing of Native spirituality
A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways through Mountains and Seas
Richard E. Strassberg, University of California Press, 2002
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