Sacred

I find it fascinating that just as the hare, throughout history and across cultures, has been considered sacred by some yet “unclean” by others, so too have expressions of human sexuality that depart from traditional gender roles and/or the norms of heterosexuality.

In many Native American cultures, for instance, the “two-spirited” ones were held in high regard, and their unique role in community life honored, even revered. They crossed boundaries, blending, for instance, the genders. Accordingly, they were often the shamans – the ones who communed with and traveled to the spirit realm, the ultimate boundary crossing.

Within the ancient Jewish culture, the hare’s ambiguity stemmed from the strange and erroneous belief that every hare was both male and female. Such perceived blending of the genders made the hare ritualistically impure and unfit to eat. Writing in the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne observed that the ancient Jews believed that all manner of vices resulted from eating the flesh of the hare, with its “mixture of sexes.” Two such “vices” were “unnatural venery” and “degenerous effemination.”

Expanding on such ideas, Christianity (though not Christ himself) later declared that sexual activity between members of the same gender was “sinful,” that it separated those who engaged in it from the sacred.


Especially symbolic

Of course, all creation is sacred – infused with the divine spark of life. Yet, without doubt, certain creatures, including the hare, have been considered especially symbolic to humans throughout history. In pre-urban cultures, for instance, many animals and other naturalistic figures were seen to spiritually represent a group of related people such as a clan. Such an animal was considered the clan’s totem.

In various trickster tales found from Asia and Africa to North America, rabbits and hares are both good and bad. The Algonquin tribes of North America had as their chief deity a great hare to whom they went at death. According to one account this mighty hare lived in the east, according to another, in the north. In his anthropomorphized form he was known as Menabosho or Michabo.

Terri Windling notes that in Egyptian myth, “hares were . . . closely associated with the cycles of the moon, which was viewed as masculine when waxing and feminine when waning. Hares were thus believed to be androgynous, shifting back and forth between the genders—not only in ancient Egypt and, as has been noted, Native American culture, but also in European folklore right up to the 18th century. A hare-headed god and goddess can be seen on the Egyptian temple walls of Dendera, where the female is believed to be the goddess Unut (or Wenet), while the male is most likely a representation of Osiris (also called Wepuat or Un-nefer), who was sacrificed to the Nile annually in the form of a hare.”



Greco-Roman, Teutonic, Norse, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese, and Buddhist myths all feature the hare. The ancient Germanic and Scandinavian peoples used the hare as a sacred symbol in association with the nature goddess Freyja. In a similar way, the Anglo-Saxons associated the hare with Ostara or Eostre, the goddess of spring. Later, Christianity appropriated many of these symbols in its celebrating of Easter, the commemoration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.


The Easter Hare

There are unique associations in English folklore between hares and Easter. In 17th century Southeastern England, for example, there is evidence of a custom of hunting a hare on Good Friday, and in 18th century Coleshill there was a manorial custom in which young men tried to catch a hare on Easter Monday.

According to Stuart Buchanan, the English traditionally eat young spring lamb at Easter. Yet he suggests that “it was the early Christian monks who thought up the ‘paschal lamb’ as an alternative to the hare, totem of Oestre, pagan goddess of dawn, fertility and rebirth, whose annual festival took place, naturally enough, at the spring equinox.”

“The Easter Bunny,” says Buchanan, “is in fact the hare, one of England’s five noble beasts of venery under the ancient forest laws of William the Conqueror and his successors.”



Image 1: “I’m for the Hare that Runs by Night” (digital paint, 2003), part of Martin Herbert’s Totem Animal Series.
Image 2: Egyptian hare.
Image 3: “Hare” by Catherine Eaton Skinner.