Thief, woodcutter or rabbit: every culture sees someone different on the Moon
The dark patches on the full moon are old lava plains, but people everywhere have read figures into them. Europeans saw a banished criminal, Vietnamese see a woodcutter clinging to a flying banyan tree, and in East Asia a rabbit pounds rice cakes. Tidal locking means we always see the same face.
The markings are lunar maria, Latin for seas, named when astronomers believed they held water. In fact they formed when lava flooded ancient craters and cooled into smooth basalt, contrasting with the paler highlands. The Moon turns exactly once per orbit, a synchronous rotation thought to stem partly from gravity acting on its slightly oblong shape, so its near side and its familiar pattern always face Earth. In a common Western reading, Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis are the eyes and Mare Nubium the open mouth. That face appears less often, and eventually not at all, as you travel toward the South Pole.
Many European tales cast the figure as a wrongdoer. One says he is the man caught collecting sticks on the Sabbath in the Book of Numbers; Germanic versions made him a Sabbath-breaking woodcutter, a Roman legend a sheep thief, and a medieval Christian tradition Cain doomed to wander. In Brittany, a gorse thief named Yann swore the moon could swallow him if he had stolen his load, and it did. A Latvian story has a woman stuck up there with her carrying pole after showing the Moon her backside.
Elsewhere the figures differ. Norse myth has Máni driving the Moon across the sky pursued by the wolf Hati. Chinese stories place the goddess Chang'e there after she drank a double dose of an immortality elixir, sometimes with the rabbit Yu Tu, and Wu Gang forever chops at a tree that regrows. In Haida tradition a boy who mocked the Moon while gathering sticks was taken up as punishment. Vietnam's Cuội joins the Moon Lady and Jade Rabbit to hand out lanterns and mooncakes at the Mid-Autumn festival.
English folklore added a thirst for claret, and in the Middle Ages and Renaissance the Moon was considered a god of drunkards; at least three London taverns bore the name The Man in the Moone. Francis Godwin's 1638 book of that title is counted among the earliest works with the hallmarks of science fiction.
Source: Man in the Moon
