Image: “Leaping Hare” (detail), Pontifical, Italy, c.1435-1440 (MS.28 f.135v).
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- The Leveret
- Celebrating the male body, the gay soul, and the symbol and image of the hare in folklore and art.
"Like a hare, springing erect and bounding exuberantly across a dew-kissed field, the beauty and energy of the aroused male embodies the burgeoning life force often associated with spring. After all, the hare is symbolic of natural phenomena that connote actions of the aroused male: the rising sun, the coming spring. In folklore, art and dreams, hares herald great bursts of energy and creativity. They are often thought to be touched by divine madness, by a spirit of anarchy that overturns dogmatic tradition and restrictions. They are tricksters, offering us new ways of seeing and being in the world. They are emblems of the integration of body and soul."
– The Leveret
Body and Soul
"In many mythic traditions, [hares] were archetypal symbols of femininity, associated with the lunar cycle, fertility, longevity, and rebirth. But if we dig a little deeper into their stories we find that they are also contradictory, paradoxical creatures: symbols of both cleverness and foolishness, of femininity and androgyny, of cowardice and courage, of rampant sexuality and virginal purity. In some lands, Hare is the messenger of the Great Goddess, moving by moonlight between the human world and the realm of the gods; in other lands he is a god himself, wily deceiver and sacred world creator rolled into one."
– Terri Windling
The Symbolism of Rabbits and Hares
"The [medieval] bestiarists [those who named and attributed human characteristics to animals] deemed the hare’s sex to be ambiguous, and its mode of reproduction strange. They included the hare in a group of several beasts that they asserted had been declared unclean in the Mosaic law because of their alleged sexual deviance . . . Moses Azikri (1533-1600) wrote that one who is involved in homosexual relations is reincarnated as a hare."
– Marc Michael Epstein
Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature
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