Sunday, January 4, 2009

Symbol of Enlightenment


The following is excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson.

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The hare is a symbol of enlightenment, not only of the spirit but of the dawn, the dawn of the day and the dawn of the year which we call spring.

The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph – a picture of a hare – stood for the auxiliary verb “to be,” but auxiliary verbs come late in the development of language and all are derived from words of independent sense. The Egyptian “to be” was associated with creation and had the senses of being, existing, and persisting, which are in mythology often represented by the hare.


Image: Mark Bakker.

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