In
our first paper we saw how the moon-spots have been variously
explained by Indo-Europeans, as a man with a thorn-bush or as
two children bearing a bucket of water on a pole. In Ceylon it
is said that as Sakyamuni was one day wandering half starved
in the forest, a pious hare met him, and offered itself to him
to be slain and cooked for dinner; whereupon the holy Buddha
set it on high in the moon, that future generations of men
might see it and marvel at its piety. In the Samoan Islands
these dark patches are supposed to be portions of a woman's
figure. A certain woman was once hammering something with a
mallet, when the moon arose, looking so much like a
bread-fruit that the woman asked it to come down and let her
child eat off a piece of it; but the moon, enraged at the
insult, gobbled up woman, mallet, and child, and there, in the
moon's belly, you may still behold them. According to the
Hottentots, the Moon once sent the Hare to inform men that as
she died away and rose again, so should men die and again come
to life. But the stupid Hare forgot the purport of the
message, and, coming down to the earth, proclaimed it far and
wide that though the Moon was invariably resuscitated whenever
she died, mankind, on the other hand, should die and go to the
Devil.
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