Rabbit symbolism

A hare crossing your path

In English folklore a hare in the road was a bad omen. John Brand collected many witnesses to it: Bishop Hall's superstitious man turns back home “if but a hare crosse him in the way”, and Melton's Astrologaster says it is “very ill lucke to have a hare cross one in the highway”. In 1668 Ramesey wrote that such people expected to be robbed or to meet some mishap. Sir Thomas Browne thought the omen came from the hare being a fearful animal. Brand also connected the belief to the ancient Britons, who “made use of hares for the purpose of divination.”

The witch as a hare

English and Scottish witch lore often turned witches into hares. Brand records that witches were said to “change themselves into hares, and elude the speed of the fleetest dogs”, to spite the squires and parsons who hunted them.

The harvest hare

In Galloway, James Frazer recorded, the last corn standing in the field was “the Hare”. The reapers plaited it, then threw their sickles at it in turn until one cut it down; in the parish of Minnigaff the unmarried reapers then raced home, and the first back would be the first to marry.

Where does the Easter bunny come from?

From a German custom first recorded in 1682. Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center traces the first clear reference to Georg Franck von Franckenau's essay on Easter eggs, which describes children in the Palatinate, Alsace and Westphalia hunting “hare's-eggs” that the Easter hare, der Oster-Hase, was said to have laid in the garden. The German-speaking Pennsylvania Dutch were the first Americans to welcome it. The earliest American evidence Winick found is a pair of drawings of a leaping hare with a basket of Easter eggs by the fraktur artist Johann Conrad Gilbert (1734–1812), who came to Pennsylvania from Germany in 1757, and the Pennsylvania Dutch called it the “Oschter Haws”.

The popular story that the hare was the sacred animal of a spring goddess, Ostara, is not ancient. Winick shows that Eostre is known from a single reference in the writings of Bede (672–735), that Jacob Grimm proposed Ostara in 1835 as a German form of her, and that nobody connected Ostara with a hare until 1874.

Rabbit the trickster

In Cherokee stories, as James Mooney collected them between 1887 and 1890, Rabbit “figures always as a trickster and deceiver”, often beaten at his own game. Mooney noted that the Great White Rabbit is the “hero-god, trickster, and wonder-worker” of the peoples east of the Mississippi, and that among the Algonquian peoples the word for rabbit, wabos, was confused with the word for dawn, waban. He heard the Cherokee storyteller Suyeta open a rabbit story with the same words Harris gave Uncle Remus for Brer Rabbit: “the Rabbit was the leader of them all in mischief.”

For the Ojibwe, waabooz, the snowshoe hare, was a staple food through the winter, and the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission reports elders' fears that its decline will cost the people their rabbit traditions and stories.

What does the white rabbit mean?

Most searches for the white rabbit are about Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), where “a White Rabbit with pink eyes” runs past Alice saying “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!”, and she follows it down a rabbit-hole into Wonderland.

Related animals

The Deer symbolism won its antlers from Rabbit in a Cherokee race. The Fox symbolism shares the hare's omens in English folklore. The jackalope has a page of its own.