fooles, I will tell you a tale which I heard my
mother once relate unto a brother of mine. The time was (quoth she)
that the moone praied her mother to make her a peticoate fit and
proportionate for her body. Why, how is it possible (quoth her
mother) that I should knit or weave one to fit well about thee
considering that I see thee one while full, another while croissant or
in the wane and pointed with tips of horns, and sometime again
halfe rounde?" [65] Old John Lilly, one of our sixteenth-century
dramatists, likewise supports this ungallant theory. In the
_Prologus_ to one of his very rare dramas he writes:

"Our poet slumb'ring in the muses laps,
Hath seen a woman seated in the moone." [66]

This woman is Pandora, the mischief-maker among the Utopian
shepherds. In Act v. she receives her commission to conform the
moon to her own mutability:

"Now rule _Pandora_ in fayre _Cynthia's_ steede,
And make the moone inconstant like thyselfe,
Raigne thou at women's nuptials, and their birth,
Let them be mutable in all their loves.
Fantasticall, childish, and folish, in their desires
Demanding toyes; and stark madde
When they cannot have their will."

In North America the woman in the moon is a cosmological myth.
Take, for example, the tale told by the Esquimaux, which word is
the French form of the Algonquin Indian _Eskimantsic_, "raw-flesh
eaters." "Their tradition of the formation of the sun and moon is,
that not long after the world was formed, a great conjuror or angikak
became so powerful that he could ascend into the heavens when he
pleased, and on one occasion took with him a beautiful sister whom
he loved very much, and also some fire, to which he added great
quantities of fuel, and thus formed the sun. For a time the conjuror
treated his sister with great kindness, and they lived happily
together; but at last he became cruel, ill-used her in many ways, and,
as a climax, burnt one side of her face with fire. After this last
indignity she ran away from him and became the moon. Her brother
in the sun has been in chase of her ever since; but although he
sometimes gets near, will never overtake her. When new moon, the
burnt side of her face is towards the earth; when full moon, the
reverse is the case." [67] The likeness between this tradition and the
Greenlanders' myth of Malina and Anninga is very close, the
difference consisting chiefly in the change of sex; here th