The lady threw ashes in his face to discourage his passion, hence the moon's spots. The waning of the moon suggested the most beautiful and best known of savage myths, that in which the moon sends a beast to tell mortals that, though they die like her, like her they shall be born again. Because the spots in the moon were thought to resemble a hare they were accounted for in Mexico by the hypothesis that a god smote the moon in the face with a rabbit; in Zululand and Thibet by a fancied translation of a good or bad hare to the moon.
Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 432.
Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 353.
Bleek, Reynard in South Africa, pp. 69-74.
Sahagun, viii. 2.
The Eskimos have a peculiar myth to account for the moon's spots.
Sun and moon were human brother and sister. In the darkness the moon once attempted the virtue of the sun. She smeared his face over with ashes, that she might detect him when a light was brought. She did discover who her assailant had been, fled to the sky, and became the sun. The moon still pursues her, and his face is still blackened with the marks of ashes. Gervaise says that in Macassar the moon was held to be with child by the sun, and that when he pursued her and wished to beat her, she was delivered of the earth. They are now reconciled. About the alternate appearance of sun and moon a beautifully complete and adequate tale is told by the Piute Indians of California. No more adequate and scientific explanation could possibly be offered, granting the hypothesis that sun and moon are human persons and savage persons.
The myth is printed as it was taken down by Mr. De Quille from the lips of Tooroop Eenah (Desert Father), a chief of the Piutes, and published in a San Francisco newspaper.
Crantz's History of Greenland, i. 212.
Royaume de Macacar, l688.
"The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his wife and the stars are their children. The sun eats his children whenever he can catch them. They flee before him, and are all the time afraid when he is passing through the heavens. When he (their father) appears in the morning, you see all the stars, his children, fly out of sight--go away back into the blue of the above--and they do not wake to be seen again until he, their father, is about going to his bed.
"Down deep under the ground--deep, deep, under all the ground--is a great hole. At night, when he has passed over the world, looked down on everything and finished his work, he, the sun, goes into his hole, and he crawls and creeps along it till he comes to his bed in the middle part of the earth. So then he, the sun, sleeps there in his bed all night.
"This hole is so little, and he, the sun, is so big, that he cannot turn round in it; and so he must, when he has had all his sleep, pass on through, and in the morning we see him come out in the east. When he, the sun, has so come out, he begins to hunt up through the sky to catch and eat any that he can of the stars, his children, for if he does not so catch and eat he cannot live. He, the sun, is not all seen. The shape of him is like a snake or a lizard. It is not his head that we can see, but his belly, filled up with the stars that times and times he has swallowed.
"The moon is the mother of the heavens and is the wife of the sun.
She, the moon, goes into the same hole as her husband to sleep her naps. But always she has great fear of the sun, her husband, and when he comes through the hole to the nobee (tent) deep in the ground to sleep, she gets out and comes away if he be cross.
"She, the moon, has great love for her children, the stars, and is happy to travel among them in the above; and they, her children, feel safe, and sing and dance as she passes along. But the mother, she cannot help that some of her children must be swallowed by the father every month. It is ordered that way by the Pah-ah (Great Spirit), who lives above the place of all.
"Every month that father, the sun, does swallow some of the stars, his children, and then that mother, the moon, feels sorrow. She must mourn; so she must put the black on her face for to mourn the dead. You see the Piute women put black on their faces when a child is gone. But the dark will wear away from the face of that mother, the moon, a little and a little every day, and after a time again we see all bright the face of her. But soon more of her children are gone, and again she must put on her face the pitch and the black."Here all the phenomena are accounted for, and the explanation is as advanced as the Egyptian doctrine of the hole under the earth where the sun goes when he passes from our view. And still the Great Spirit is over all: Religion comes athwart Myth.
Mr. Tylor quotes a nature myth about sun, moon and stars which remarkably corresponds to the speculation of the Piutes. The Mintira of the Malayan Peninsula say that both sun and moon are women. The stars are the moon's children; once the sun had as many. They each agreed (like the women of Jerusalem in the famine), to eat their own children; but the sun swallowed her whole family, while the moon concealed hers. When the sun saw this she was exceedingly angry, and pursued the moon to kill her.
Occasionally she gets a bite out of the moon, and that is an eclipse. The Hos of North-East India tell the same tale, but say that the sun cleft the moon in twain for her treachery, and that she continues to be cut in two and grow again every month. With these sun and moon legends sometimes coexists the RELIGIOUS belief in a Creator of these and of all things.
Primitive Culture, i. 356.