Note 138 — Chapter I · THE EVIL EYE AND THE SCARING OF GHOSTS.
Reading edition
The hare is always a bad omen. He is a god among the Kalmucs, who call him Sakya Muni, or the Buddha, and say that on earth he allowed himself to be eaten by a starving man, for which gracious act he was raised to domineer over the moon, where they profess to see him. There are traces of the same idea in Upper India.138 The sites of many cities are said to have been founded where a hare crossed the path of the first settler. The hare is detested by the agricultural and fishing population of the Hebrides, and it is one of the ordinary disguises of the witch in European folk-lore.139