e moon's phases was found by Mr. Meyer in 1846
among the natives of Encounter Bay. According to them the moon is a
woman, and a bad woman to boot. She lives a life of dissipation among
men, which makes her consumptive, and she wastes away till they drive
her from their company. While she is in retreat, she lives on nourishing
roots, becomes quite plump, resumes her gay career, and again wastes
away. The same tribe, strangely enough, think that the sun also is a
woman. Every night she descends among the dead, who stand in double
lines to greet her and let her pass. She has a lover among the dead, who
has presented her with a red kangaroo skin, and in this she appears at
her rising. Such is the view of rosy-fingered Dawn entertained by the
blacks of Encounter Bay. In South America, among the Muyscas of Bogota,
the moon, Huythaca, is the malevolent wife of the child of the sun; she
was a woman before her husband banished her to the fields of space.(2)
The moon is a man among the Khasias of the Himalaya, and he was guilty
of the unpardonable offence of admiring his mother-in-law. As a general
rule, the mother-in-law is not even to be spoken to by the savage
son-in-law. The lady threw ashes in his face to discourage his passion,
hence the moon's spots. The waning of the moon suggested the most
beautiful and best known of savage myths, that in which the moon sends
a beast to tell mortals that, though they die like her, like her they
shall be born again.(3) Because the spots in the moon were thought to
resemble a hare they were accounted for in Mexico by the hypothesis
that a god smote the moon in the face with a rabbit;(4) in Zululand and
Thibet by a fancied translation of a good or bad hare to the moon.

(1) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 432.

(2) Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 353.

(3) Bleek, Reynard in South Africa, pp. 69-74.

(4) Sahagun, viii. 2.

The Eskimos have a peculiar myth to account for the moon's spots. Sun
and moon were human brother and sister. In the darkness the moon once
attempted the virtue of the sun. She smeared his face over with ashes,
that she might detect him when a light was brought. She did discover who
her assailant had been, fled to the sky, and became the sun. The moon
still pursues her, and his face is still blackened with the marks of
ashes.(1) Gervaise(2) says that in Macassar the moon was held to be with
child by the sun, and that when he pursued her and wished to beat her