Hare Worship

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages assembled from two entries in Blavatsky's Theosophical Glossary — Sakshi, and Hare-Worship — with a quotation from the French assyriologist François Lenormant.

It opens with the legend behind the name Sakshi: the hare who threw himself into the fire to feed some starving pilgrims who would not kill him, and whom Indra is said to have transferred to the centre of the moon for that sacrifice. The rest explains why the animal was held sacred so widely, and particularly among Egyptians and Jews — the latter reckoning it unclean and unfit to eat, yet holding it sacred in some tribes. The reason given is a piece of natural history: in a certain species the male was believed to suckle the young, so the hare was taken to be androgynous or hermaphrodite, and on that account fit to typify an attribute of the Demiurge or creative Logos. From there the associations multiply. The hare is a symbol of the moon, in which the Jews say the face of Moses can still be seen; the moon is connected with the worship of Jehovah, described here as pre-eminently a god of generation; Eros, the god of sexual love, is represented carrying a hare; and the animal was sacred to Osiris as well. Lenormant is quoted for the conclusion the whole file is arranged around — that the hare must be considered a symbol of the Logos, since the Logos ought to be hermaphrodite and the hare is an androgynous type.

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