THE DOCTRINE OF LUNAR SYMPATHY 649 



conviction that the sun moves round the earth. If the fall of a meteorite 

 were directly identified with a missile from Zeus it was so directly identified 

 because of the preconception that Zeus reigned in the sky, that he would 

 punish presuraptuousness, and that he could hurl flaming projectiles from 

 Olympus. Spontaneous estimates may be sensible appearances directed or 

 fashioned by preconceptions, and on such a spontaneous estimate the notion 

 of sympathetic lunar contagion probably depended. The suggestion that 

 because " the moon is one of the most striking of natural objects seen by 

 primitive man, and one which varies most in aspect," then " by association 

 of ideas the moon's increase and decrease is supposed to influence the increase 

 and decrease of any changing process," ' does not seem to be complete. 

 The prominence of the moon, which, as the Irishman said, is more useful 

 than the sun because it comes out in the dark when there is so little light, 

 was part, it seems certain, of the convincing experience. But why should a 

 cabbage grow because the moon is growing or Tiberius become bald as it 

 wanes ? The association of increase or decrease with growing or changing 

 things by an analogical transfer from the moon's phases must depend on 

 some connection that prompts the transfer. An indirect prompting of 

 growth by the moon was apparently supposed by some to have moisture as 

 its intermediary. Plutarch, for example, says that dew falls most freely at 

 full moon. Fox suggests that the moon was supposed to be a source of 

 moisture because, since dew deposits most on cloudless nights, the moon and 

 dew appear together.^ This first effort to substitute science for magical 

 belief is, however, later than the ascription of magical potency to the moon 

 and is much less universal. The belief in a sympathetic connection between 

 the moon and growth arose independently of the later " moisture hypothesis," 

 nor does Fox suggest that it did not. 



In one group of primitive myths or stories messages pass from the moon 

 to men. The messengers in these stories are instructed to tell human beings 

 that they will rise again as the moon rises after her death. The death and 

 resurrection of the moon obviously represent her waxing and waning phases, 

 or her newness and fullness, and her promise of human resurrection is the 

 same belief, in essence, as the belief that her phases control the crops. If 

 the moon dies and rises again she has, in her turn, been compared to human 

 beings who are observed to die. or to plants which seem to die and bloom 

 again. The stress of the comparison usually falls on the resemblance of 

 growing things to the changing moon. The messengers in these moon stories 

 are usually animals, and the choice of messenger is catholic enough to include 

 the hare, the dog, the insect, and the tortoise. The messenger varies among 

 these animals with the locale of the myth — some Hottentot stories, for 

 example, enrol the hare, and a Bushman story enrols the hare and the tortoise. 

 Sir James Frazer^ includes these stories under " The Story of the Perverted 

 Message." The " perversion " is obviously an attempt to conform the fact 

 that men die without rising with the conviction that they should, through 

 sympathetic response to the behaviour of the moon, rise again after death. 

 The method of perversion varies : a dog angrily told its hosts that they 

 would die and not rise, because it was not pleased with their hospitality ; a 

 hare was simply careless and forgot that the moon had promised resurrection 

 to men ; an insect, instructed to tell men that they would rise again, passed 

 on the message to a hare, who perverted it into a sentence of doom, and, in 

 another version, a tortoise who kept repeating the message to himself as he 

 movei slowly along was outpaced by a hare who ran so fast that he muddled 

 the message when he arrived. These stories are significant for the under- 



1 Fox, loc. cit., p. 273. 



- Ibid., p. 274. 



* Sir James Frazer, Folk-lore in the Old Testament, voi. i ch . ii. 



