Note 1 — XI.—SUPERSTITIONS REGARDING THE POWERS OF NATURE.

The Chinese “Old Man in the Moon” is known as Yue-lao and is reputed to hold in his hands the power of predestining the marriages of mortals—so that marriages if not, according to the native idea, exactly made in heaven, are made somewhere beyond the bounds of earth. He is supposed to tie together the future husband and wife with an invisible silken cord which never parts so long as life exists. Readers of Mr. Baring-Gould’s “Curious Myths” will remember the various legends attaching to the Man in the Moon, none of which however endow him with any power over sublunary affairs. The parallel between an English and Chinese superstition regarding the Queen or Goddess of the Moon is closer. This still exists in parts of Lancashire and is the basis of numerous legends in China. Regarding these latter I cannot do better than quote the remarks made by Mr. W. F. Mayers,1 though, as will be observed, he does not notice the Lancashire superstition. He says:—“No one can compare the Chinese legend with the popular European belief in the ‘Man in the Moon,’ as sketched, for instance, in Mr. Baring-Gould’s ‘Curious Myths of the Middle Ages’ (First Series, p. 179), without feeling convinced of the certainty that the Chinese superstition and the English nursery tale are both derived from kindred parentage, and are linked in this relationship by numerous subsidiary ties. The idea, says Mr. Gould, of placing ‘animals in the two great luminaries of heaven is very ancient and … a relic of a primeval superstition of the Aryan race.’ A tree, an old man, and a hare, are, as Mr. Gould shews in various passages, the inhabitants assigned to the moon in Indian fable; whilst the curious notion that the human recluse condemned to an abode in the lunar regions owes his transportation thither to an act of theft or of sacrilege is a well-known concomitant of the story in all lands. In all the range of Chinese mythology there is, perhaps, no stranger instance of identity with the traditions that have taken root in Europe than in the case of the legends relating the moon; and, luckily, it is not difficult to trace the origin of the Chinese belief in this particular instance. The celebrated Lin Ngan, author (in part at least) of the writings known as Hwai Nan Tsze, is well known to have been the patron of travelled philosophers, under whose guidance he studied and pursued the cabalistic practices which eventually betrayed him to his death; and the famous astronomer Chang Hêng was avowedly a disciple of Indian teachers. That the writings derived from two such hands are found giving currency to an Indian fable is, therefore, not surprising; and there seems to be ground for suspicion that the name Chang Ngo, (or, as the dictionaries assert more properly Heng-ngo) appearing in their treatises may be the corrupt representation of some Hindoo sound, rather than connected, as the writer quoted above suggests, with the doubtful title of an office obscurely mentioned in times long anterior to the dates at which they wrote. The statement given by Chang Hêng is to the effect that ‘How I 后羿, the fabled inventor of arrows in the days of Yao and Shun, obtained the drug of immortality from Si Wang Mu (the fairy “Royal Mother” of the West); and Chang-Ngo (his wife) having stolen it, fled to the moon, and became the frog—Chan-chu—which is seen there.’ The later fabulists have adhered to this story and amplified its details, as for instance, in the Kwang-ki a pleasing story of a subsequent reunion between How I and his wife is told; but in general the myth has been handed down unaltered, and the lady Chang-ngo is still pointed out among the shadows in the surface of the moon. In its etymological bearings, the legend is well worthy of further investigation.” With this conclusion all readers will agree. As regards the legend concerning the hare, it is purely of Indian origin, having been introduced into China with Buddhism. Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, is related to have been a hare in one of the earliest stages of his existence, living in friendship with a fox and an ape. Indra having sought their hospitality the fox and ape procured him food, but the hare could find nothing. Sooner than be inhospitable the hare cast itself into a fire in order to become food for his guest, in reward for which Indra transported him to the moon.2 The lunar hare, as Mr. Mayers notes in his “Manual,” is said to squat at the foot of “the cassia tree of the moon” (月中桂) pounding drugs for the Genii (Art. Kwei 桂 § 300). A vulgar superstition asserts that the hare conceives by looking at the moon, bringing forth her young from the mouth.