Hare brained

Last week, I wrote about my experience of seeing a hare in suburban Finchley whilst on my Shabbos walk. Well, no-one's emailed me to explain they're a common phenomenon in this part of London. And I certainly haven't seen any popping into Tesco's.

But I can't help wondering about the significance of hares. Why do they seem such special and almost magical creatures, in a way that rabbits don't?

I first knew what a hare was through the Rupert Bear book which was one of the very few children's books in my childhood home. I loved the world of Rupert Bear, with benign looking children with animal heads who found their way through magical encounters. You could rely on dwarves, elves,  goblins, peacocks, mysterious woodlands turning up in every story. And I loved the way Rupert's mother, Mrs Bear was portrayed, with her long sprigged muslin dress, evoking a world I knew nothing of. The books were written in doggerel verse which described the adventures Rupert and his friends went through.

The Rupert book we had included an adventure in which Rupert, guided by a hare, had to choose between three chests he came across in the quest he was on. The hare was beautifully drawn, and presented as a modest, friendly figure, a sort of shaman guide. I remember the hare's advice about which of the three to choose: "Take the plain, spoke low the hare."

From this, I learnt that when confronted with two showy and jewelled choices and one plain one, you should always choose the plain. The casket choice scene in the Merchant of Venice therefore presented me with no difficulties, though quite a few of the other scenes did.

This didn't get me far enough thinking about my hare, so I decided to do a web search on the symbolic significance of hares.

So the first page that comes up is one that tells me that a hare is -ulp!-, ummm a symbol for... the Creator of All Things.  Pause. I need a bit of time to digest that. I mean, we surely didn't see....

I don't get anything other than the obvious from the other pages. Yes, well I guessed it might be some sort of fertility symbol. After all, that's rabbits, anyway. And it seems that the Easter Bunny was really a hare associated with the pagan goddesses Eostre and Astarte.

But then there was the much more academic page of anthropological interpretations by Professor Mary Douglas, who was around at my undergraduate college and still seemed to be going strong at feminist conferences I was at, over thirty years later. She was still an active researcher there at over 80 when interviewed in 2003. Mary Douglas has devoted quite a chunk of her life to an anthorpological analysis of the Book of Leviticus.

Douglas regards creatures like hares and camels as being classified by Leviticus as impure because they are hybrid animals, carrying one characteristic of prescribed holiness, such as chewing the cud (which hares appear to do, though it is actually a different form of regurgitation) but lacking another, such as a cloven hoof. They have no symbolic significance beyond their lack of holiness and purity.

But actually, hares were traditionally painted in the illuminated Passover haggadot of the mediaeval Ashkenazi world as part of hare hunt scenes, because of the similarity between the Hebrew acronym for the required order of blessings and the German for "hunt the hare."

Which somehow reminds me of Freud's saying, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." And sometimes a hare is just a hare.

But it didn't seem like it at the time.

Comments

[Horace Dunn]

As far as I can tell, there is little evidence to favour the theory that hares were sacred to Eostre (charming though the notion is). Of course, precious little is known about Eostre and the earliest reference to her, in the writings of Bede, makes no reference to the hare. In fact, it has sometimes been suggested that Oestre was an invention of Bede (hardly likely, but another charming notion).

That you used the word "magical" to describe the hare that you saw is hardly surprising. Throughout the British Isles they have always been associated with magic. It was believed that witches could change themselves into hares, for example, and one piece of folklore holds that if a hare runs through a house, then that house will burn down. Generally, from the Middle Ages onwards hares have been considered an ill omen. However, others have a more positive view of them. It used to be common for people to keep a hare's foot to ward off evil (as a boy I had a rabbit's foot "for luck", of course, by that time, alas, hares had become all too rare).

It also used to be believed that if a pregnant woman was startled by a hare, her child would be born with a hare lip unless she immediately tore up her petticoats.

Of course, all this shows that the perception of hares as somehow magical is quite common. But it does not explain why we DO perceive them in this way. Personally, I think that there is something curiously human about hares. They have none of the cuddly anonymity of rabbits (or most other wild mammals) and they seem to exhibit some sort of personality in the way they move and behave. Good old anthropomorphism is probably the answer.

[Judy]

Horace, you're clearly more much more knowledgeable about these legends and beliefs than I am. Thanks for your insight.

I agree that the hare, perhaps because it is usually seen as an individual, seems to have some quasi-human qualities. But then it also has the apparently magical ones of seeming to appear out of nowhere. And it sits more upright than a rabbit. It does also seem to me to have an objective beauty of the type that deer have, and rabbits do not, which may have to do with body language and movements as well as physical characteristics.

[Horace Dunn]

Judy, I could not have put it better myself. Thank you for that.

Actually, I'm by no means an expert on this stuff. I made a bit of a study of it when I was younger, but these days have to refresh my memory with books. If you're interested in this sort of thing you could do worse than getting hold of copies of Simpson & Roud's "Dictionary of English Folklore" and Iona Opie and Moira Tatem's "Dictionary of Superstitions". Both are Oxford dictionaries and, I think, readily available in paperback. These are good bluffer's guides (!) but also have detailed bibliographies should you want to approach the subject more seriously (and here comes the oft-heard plaintive cry "I wish I had more time"...)

I'm enjoying the blog, by the way, and the little excursion into the weird magical world of the hare, made it all the more attractive. Many thanks.