23 September 2014
The Short Answer (TSA)
Traditional Face of “The Man in the Moon”
Traditionally, there is said to be a human face visible on the face of the Full Moon seen in the night sky. After many ages of meteor strikes, the moon’s surface is irregular creating many light and dark areas. If looked at, in just the right way, it is said that you will see the face of “The Man in the Moon.”
“Looked at in just the right way”?
Yes. Since the beginning of time people and, especially, visual artists have noticed that if you look at a series of naturally occurring random shapes and images, your mind will often produce or “recognize” the image of something in the shapes. The renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci explains in his journal how it was possible to, sometimes, see figures and scenes just by relaxing and looking at random water stains on a wall.
This natural human tendency was used by a Swiss psychologist, Hermann Rorschach, to develop a famous test using inkblots. Using a set randomly shaped ink blots, the patient is asked what each shape reminds them of. Often, the images “seen” by individual patients are believed to reveal the patient’s mood or mental state.
The technical term for this is a pareidolic image. That’s just an image that you or I might “recognize” in a billowy white cloud in the sky . . . or . . . getting back to our subject, on the face of the moon.
The Woman in the Moon?
But “The Man in the Moon” wasn’t always a face. In old traditions, “The Man in the Moon” was seen as a figure walking across the moon. Sometimes, the “Man” crossing the moon wasn’t a man, but a woman. Sometimes, the figure on the moon was seen as a rabbit.
The Rabbit in the Moon?
In Norse mythology, Máni, a male moon god is said to cross the sky in a carriage. In Chinese mythology, he goddess Chang’e is stranded on the moon with a few rabbits. (Rabbits?) Anyway, a Talmudic tradition says that an image of Jacob is engraved on the moon.
Naturally, legends grew up about how “The Man in the Moon” (either a face or figure) got there. In Christian Europe, the story was told of a man banished to the moon for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. In Germany, the man was banished to the moon for stealing bushes from a neighbor’s border hedge to repair gaps in his own.
By the European Middle Ages, “The Man in the Moon” was Cain of the Biblical Cain and Abel . Cain, it was supposed, was doomed to circle the Earth forever for his crime against his brother.
In later Europe, the importance of the crime and criminal, faded a bit. “The Man in the Moon” was thought to suffer from . . . a tendency to drink a bit too much. “The Man in the Moon” was, now, called the god of drunkards. Capitalizing on “The Man in the Moon’s” new image as a heavy drinker, numerous English taverns adopted the name and variations of the name “The Man in the Moon.”
“The Man in the Moon” has been a popular name in the arts and has been given to no less than three films and a number of popular songs.
Lots of Moons & Music 