Archetype in Focus: A Monthly ARAS Feature
Rabbit
TheChineseZodiac.org image for 2023, Year of the Rabbit.

We are excited to ring in 2023, the Chinese zodiac’s year of the Rabbit! The rabbit brings with it new beginnings, fertility and good luck. As a symbol of renewal, the rabbit is reflected in the Japanese tradition of preparing pounded rice cakes called mochi (full moon) for the celebration of the New Year. All over the world, moon and rabbit are linked. A Mayan ceramic piece displays a plump blue rabbit upon the disk of the moon. Both the moon and the rabbit reflect the cyclical nature of life, the ever-recurring conjunction of darkness and light, death and rebirth.

7Lp.003 – Rabbit on the moon stirring the elixir of immortality. Embroidery, 18th century, China.

In the diffuse light of dusk and dawn, the rabbit exhibits its ability to easily vanish from sight. Its lively antics have made it an embodiment of alchemy’s Mercurius, the elusive, informing spirit of psyche that can bring together the mortal and immortal aspects of self. The rabbit is thus depicted as the initiate’s guide in obtaining the elixir of immortality, which is also in the rabbit’s possession. Often humorously, the figure of the rabbit can be a trickster. The young heroine of Alice in Wonderland, seeing a white rabbit running rapidly ahead of her, follows him down a rabbit hole into an uncanny, underground world. In the play Harvey, Elmer Dowd and his six-foot-tall white rabbit companion are the foil for a proper, moneyed family lacking soulful imagination (Chase, 571-607). Small often overcomes large in the escapades of the English Peter Rabbit.

“The Hare, the Lion, and the Well”, Folio from a Kalila wa Dimna. Middle East, second quarter 16th century.

Rabbits are also known to dance and leap in meadows in the moonlight and to cavort in sexual play. It is only natural, then, that rabbits should join the throng around the love-goddess Aphrodite. Or even that Playboy magazine’s centerfolds should be dressed in bunny outfits. The great mother goddess in her maternal aspect is sometimes depicted with giant rabbits standing beside her, emblems of fertility and rebirth, later interwoven even into Christian mysteries as the Easter Bunny with his basket of brightly colored, magical eggs. Chase, Mary. Harvey. In Best American Plays: Supplementary Volume, 1918–1958. Ed. John Gassner. NY, 1961

8Bb.058 – Blue rabbit and a human figure on the moon. Ceramic, Mayan, 550–800, Mexico.

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