What weaves its way like an underground warren beneath the borders of conquest and control, dancing through differences and softening divides, preserving our collective wild sisterhood with the earth across time, cultures and landscapes? The ancient folkloric association between hares, women and the moon originated in East Asia and spread through the Himalayas and Persia, through the Nile river valley and across the Roman empire, through the forests of Germania all the way to the North Atlantic Isles - not by conquerors, but by pilgrims, traders, storytellers, elders, midwives, weavers and wanderers. This hare, women and the moon trio endures to this day because it has stitched its subversive story by way of the Silk Road not from the forces of dominion and division, but from the threads spun from shared stories, bartered wisdom and lore. The humble nature in which folklore is transmitted and passed on by word of mouth requires that we acknowledge there may not be records or documents that trace every step of this journey with absolute certainty. After all, the scribes and chroniclers funded by those in power never documented the everyday private conversations of the masses. Folklore was shared and reshaped by word of mouth at hearths and temples, told over weaving looms, over kitchen stoves and birth fires, at bathhouses, wells, oases and marketplaces. The deeper purpose that fuels the telling of this transgressive underground tale of resistance is one of discovering and centering our ancient and enduring sisterhood of connection with the earth over divisiveness and patriarchal domination that has colonized historical record keeping for millenia. It is precisely the lack of detailed record keeping that proves the mystery and power of this enigmatic archetype that has endured the test of time which deserves our attention and honoring. Its wild profusion and variation and continued presence across landscapes and cultures is nothing less than the whisper of the unyielding regenerative aspect of the Earth Herself inviting us to celebrate Her ever-returning song of survival through its sacred retelling.

More than two thousand years ago, in ancient China, people told of the white hare on the moon, gently pounding the mineral jade with a mortar and pestle, alchemizing it into an elixir of immortality under the watchful eye of the moon goddess Chang’e. This ancient lore binds together a remarkable trinity: the Hare, Moon, and Sacred Feminine. Fittingly, the most prized stone of that time was nephrite jade, whose shifting shades — from translucent white, to light gray stone or plaque bone white — mirror the changing face of the moon. Jade was cherished not only for its beauty, but for its durability, its soft magical translucence seen as both a veil and a doorway to immortality. Ground into powder and ingested, it was believed to offer eternal life, allowing the soul to dwell between earth and heaven, between the physical and the spiritual. Like the shifting hues and durability of of jade, the moon is never only full and never only absent — it moves between phases, always betwixt and between, an enduring presence in the night sky. And there is deep synchronicity here: jade’s shifting colors reflect the moon’s changing face, while the moon’s cycles and the seasonal fertility of hares echo the menstrual rhythms of women. In this rhythm of regeneration and renewal, fertility becomes its own kind of immortality, carrying life forward where it might otherwise end. This is how the hare, the moon, and the goddess was birthed as a powerful and enduring trinity.

From there, like the hare, this tale leaps and burrows across Asia weaving new warrens in between the roots of old cultural borders and worlds, growing an underworld network where stories breathe and borders yield. In Korea and Japan, the hare begins to pound rice to make mochi, a ritual act tied to the cycles of the moon and symbols of renewal. In Vietnam, the hare appears during the Mid-Autumn Festival making mooncakes on the moon —a celebration associated with fertility and children. Further south, in India and Sri Lanka, the story of the hare weaves itself into the fabric of the Buddhist Jataka tales, where the hare embodies the Buddhist ideal of selflessness, compassion, and generosity. In this version the ultimate reward the hare receives for his noble sacrifice is a place of honor on the moon, beside the Goddess.

In the 7th century, the trio of Hares, Moon, and Sacred Feminine became expressed as an elegant motif of three hares, their shared ears creating a pattern that is circular like the moon. As this motif journeys over the Himalayas and Indus Valley and reaches Persia, it reshapes itself again. The paradox of three hares, separate yet interconnected into a unified whole, resonated with ancient Sufi and Islamic fascination with sacred geometry and hidden patterns, and themes of interconnectedness and divine mystery. The three hares motif was incorporated into Islamic and Sufi art and architecture including tiles, manuscripts, and the intricate designs of mosques.

As the Hare, Moon, and Sacred Feminine trio makes its way through the Nile Valley, it whispers through worlds and weaves itself beyond borders and uses its shapeshifting trickster nature to burrow its way through the roots of Egyptian empire and power, emerging in the Book of the Dead, woven into hieroglyphs, and echoed in sacred artwork. During the waxing moon, it appears as the hare-headed god Osiris, the husband of the Goddess Isis whose role as mother, mourner, and magical healer revives him from the dead, echoing the qualities of immortality that flavored the original hare moon story. During the waning moon, it shifts into the hare-headed goddess Unut, a goddess of fertility and rebirth. Further south in the heart of the African continent, among the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Wolof of Senegal, the Moon Goddess is the center of authority who sends a mythical hare down to earth to give humankind the gift of immortality. However, hare defies her and bestows mortality instead, revealing hare here as a trickster, defiant of authority.

The feral, unyielding Hare, Moon, and Sacred Feminine archetype continues to journeysnorthwards and reshapes the Greco-Roman world where the hare becomes the sacred companion to Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and wild places, who is also depicted with a crescent moon on her head and is considered a lunar deity. In her care, the hare comes to represent fertility and the abundance of life — its rapid reproduction mirroring the goddess's protection of the wild. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and her son Eros also adopted the hare whose connection with this god and goddess sealed their collective spirit of fertility, love, and fecundity.

When the hare story reaches the wild woods and highlands of Northern Europe, it breathes new life into pre-existing folklore of goddesses and wild hunts. The Alpine goddess Holda, a symbol of winter and spring, seasonal changes and weaving, is associated with hares who are her torch bearing companions and she leads the "Wild Hunt," a folkloric procession that traverses the skies when seasons change. Participants of the Wild Hunt include supernatural dieties, fairies, witches, daemons, spirits and creatures, some of whom transform into hares to participate in the entourage. Further north, Freyja, the headstrong Norse goddess of love, sensuality, and women’s mysteries, is also served by hare attendants. She travels with a sacred hare and boar in a chariot drawn by cats. The Hare. Moon, Sacred Feminine trio spreads as far north and east as Siberia where you find Kaltes, the shape-shifting moon goddess, who roams the hills in the form of a hare, and is sometimes pictured in human shape wearing a headdress with hare’s ears.

When the Hare, Moon, Sacred Feminine trio finally reaches the British Isles, it takes hold and blooms in the form of the Celtic moon and war Goddess Andraste and her emissary the sacred hare. When Queen Boudica, defended her Celtic lands from the Romans it is said she harnessed the spirit of the Goddess Andraste and loosened a hare from her own cloak as a form of divination which helped her to defeat the Roman colonizers. In Anglo-Saxon myth, Eostre, the goddess of the moon, fertility, and spring is also depicted with a hare’s head or ears, and with a white hare standing in attendance. Finally cradled between the wild moors and the restless sea is the county of Devon where it can be said the Hare, Moon and Sacred Feminine journey reaches full circle. Beneath the shadowed arches of Devon’s old stone churches that pulse with old magic lies the ancient original symbol of the Three Hares, their ears interlaced in an endless knot, neither beginning nor end known as the Tinner Rabbits. How they came to rest here is a mystery lost to time, but what is most certain is their journey was the path of the Goddess and the Hare — winding through the hidden warrens of the underworld, moving only in the secret moonlit currents of the world unseen.

One might imagine that the sacred triad of Hare, Moon, and the Divine Feminine would have come to rest there. But the path of the goddess is ever a mystery — fluid, untamed, and unbound by borders. Not even the great Atlantic could hinder her migration, for across the waters, in the wide lands of the Americas, the hare rises once more, reborn in new forms and fresh tellings. In Mayan art and glyphs, hares often appear alongside the moon Goddess Ixchel, who is often depicted as a young maiden with a lunar crescent and a hare and the pair are associated with the moon, fertility, and the cycles of nature. In an Aztec legend, the god Quetzalcoatl, weary and starving from his journey, was saved by a female hare who offers herself as food. Moved by her selfless act, he elevates her to the moon.

In North America, too, the Great Hare appears as trickster, teacher, healer and rebel. Among Algonquin-speaking peoples the hare is known as Nanabozho, and is associated with the moon through his grandmother, Nokomis, who is described as the "Daughter of the Moon". In some stories, Nanabozho plays a vital role in creation myths, and naming all the plants and animals. He is depicted as comparing the thirteen sections on the back of a turtle to the thirteen moons of the year, further linking him to lunar calendar and lunar cycles. In the Eastern Woodlands of New England where I live, Mohawk (Kanienkahageh) folklore tells of hunters who stumble upon a giant hare thumping its foot, summoning others to dance. Astonished, they turn to the wise Clan Mother for an explanation. She listens in silence, then speaks: the dance is a gift, a living prayer, a remembrance to honor the hares — those generous ones who offer their bodies, surrendering their flesh so that humans might be fed. From her wisdom, a sacred dance was born — weaving respect, reciprocity, and kinship between humans and hares. The moon, referred to as "Grandmother Moon" in some Mohawk traditions, is highly revered and connected to the cycles of life.

Even in the last few hundred years, we see new hare folklore emerging retaining elements of the Hare, Moon, and Sacred Feminine trio. In the African American folktales of Br’er Rabbit, we meet a sacred trickster who outwits the powerful — a folk hero spirit thought to have crossed the ocean in the hearts and voices of enslaved women and men in the New World. Slavery was an instrument of empire and conquest seeking to dominate and control both people and nature and the tales of Bre’er rabbit offered a subversive commentary on the power dynamics of slavery and the broader societal inequalities. And even across the Atlantic, in the pages of Watership Down and Peter Rabbit, the hare endures: trickster, survivor, hero — always the one who topples the mighty.

Through every shapeshift and every retelling, the Hare, Moon, Sacred Feminine trio continues its eternal, dance of becoming. The mythical hare began as an alchemist and companion to the goddess, and shapeshifted into a mochi and mooncake maker, then transformed into a torch bearer, a model for moral behavior, a sacred messenger between human and divine worlds, a trickster and hero defiant of authority. Hares become linked by the ears to form a triangular triad which enters into the heart of riddles and puzzles and paradoxes where mysteries are unraveled and rewoven. Wherever the hare runs, the Sacred Wild Feminine runs alongside, both are infused with the spirit of spring’s fecundity and its timeless, shape-shifting and transgressive current of resilience defying homogeneity.

Perhaps most importantly, the Hare, Moon, Sacred feminine archetype shows us that folklore belongs to the people — it breathes through us, and we shape it in return. It is not a fixed tale carved in stone, but a living, multiplying truth, where each new telling makes space for more voices and deeper collective belonging. David Attenborough, in the documentary Our Planet II says “migration is the most vital survival strategy” and goes on to explain that the health and resilience of the planet depends on species’ ability to migrate, adapt and change. Like nature herself, the Hare, Moon and Sacred Feminine trio thrives through variation, through small divergences, mutations, wild shapeshifting, and cross-pollinations — this is the essence of vitality, this is life renewing itself. To suppress that force is to estrange ourselves from the Great Mother, but to let it flow in its infinite iterations is to loosen the bindings of power, to join the eternal spring that sprouts from the ground up, where the hare and the Wild Feminine dance at the threshold of change, under the light of the moon.

Some cool references:

Bruchac, Joseph (1991). “The Rabbit Dance” Keepers of the Animals: Native American Stories and Wildlife Activities for Children. Golden: Fulcrum Publishing. p. 41.

Greeves, Tom., Andrew, Sue., and Chapman, Chris. (2016) The Three Hares - A Curiosity Worth Regarding.

Windling, Terri. (April 10, 2020). “Myth and Moor: The Folklore of Rabbits and Hares”. (www.terriwindling.com).

https://chinesepuzzles.org/three-hares/