The Monstrefact: Jade Rabbit

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the moon rabbit of East Asian and indigenous American folklore… 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Monster Fact, a short form theories from Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, focusing on unmithical creatures, ideas and monsters in time.
In celebration of the lunar New Year, I thought today
it would be a great time to consider the lunar rabbit. Now,
exactly what you see in the dark splotches of the

(00:32):
full moon will depend on your individual and or cultural priming.
You may see a face, a man with a cane
or a fork, a frog or toad, or some other
animal reel or imagined. But the rabbit has been a
popular choice since Time out of Mind, and why not.
Indigenous rabbit or hair species exist on every continent except

(00:56):
Australia and Antarctica. The rabbit also boath's a great deal
of character, inspiring numerous and varied tales that detail just
how that rabbit made it to the Moon, or from
the Moon to the Earth in the first place. Author
Randolph S. Albright recounts several of these in his twenty
twenty book House of the Three Rabbits. According to Albright,

(01:19):
the Yoruba people of Nigeria and the Woloff people of
Senegal recount legends of a rabbit sent down from the
moon with the secret of immortality, but the rabbit got
the message backwards or mangoled in one form or another,
and instead bestowed mortality upon human beings. Oops the moon

(01:39):
punished the rabbit by splitting its nose and forcing it
to accompany each dying mortal into the afterlife. The Siberian
moon goddess caltes Uku sometimes takes the form of a rabbit.
The Mayan moon goddess Excel often carries a rabbit. The
Cree people of North America telle of a rabbit who

(02:01):
traveled up to the moon with the help of a
passing crane, and the Celtic goddess Ostra took on the
form of a hare during the full moon. In Buddhist teachings,
Albright shares the rabbit's image appears on the moon because
the rabbit offered up its own body to feed a
starving beggar who was actually Sakra, lord of Davs in disguise.

(02:24):
The Aztecs told a similar tale concerning the god quetzalkotal.
As Victoria Dickinson explores, in her book Rabbit from the
excellent Rakotan Animals series. The Aztecs associated the rabbit with
drunkenness as well as the moon, and held that the
rabbit must first pass through fire on its way to
the lunar's surface. And of course, the lunar rabbit has

(02:46):
an important place in many East Asian traditions, often as
a lunar zodiac animal, and Chinese traditions invoke the creature
in the myth of Chenga. We discussed various versions of
this myth in great detail in our Stuffable your Mind
episode Chinese Mortality, which you can find in our archives.
But the simple version is as follows. The hero Ye

(03:08):
the archer, receives the elixir of immortality from the Queen
Mother of the West, and then, while her reasoning varies
depending on the telling. Sometimes it's to protect the potion
from theft by an enemy, Yi's wife shang A, drank
it instead and was instantly transported to the moon. In
some earlier tellings, she is then transformed into a toad
who pounds the elixir of immortality there, and it's of

(03:31):
course the very toad we might see when we gaze
up at the full moon other times, and certainly in
later tellings, she retains her human form and is accompanied
by the jade rabbit, who pounds the elixir of immortality instead.
Thus we see the rabbit on the moon. Dickinson writes
to Chinese alchemists the pale jade moon rabbit embodied the

(03:53):
yin or female principle that was associated with the moon,
not only in Asia, but in the West, where the
moon is often referred to as feminine. She also pointed
out that in Japanese traditions, the rabbit doesn't pound the
elixir of immortality, but instead pounds the rice that will
be used in lunar New Year mochi cakes. Tune in

(04:15):
for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or
Anamalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us
at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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