Life beyond our own planet: alchemist rabbits
The Perseverance, a rover for the NASA Mars Exploration Program, landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. We have all marveled at the new color images already being sent back, and we await with excitement one of the results of the mission, to search for evidence of biosignatures indicating that there might have been life beyond our own planet at some point. But astronomers in East Asia could have answered this question more than two thousand years ago. There is indeed life beyond our own planet, and you can see it with your own eyes every time the moon grows full: rabbits.
Of course, these are no ordinary rabbits. They are alchemist rabbits. And they guard the secret of immortality, grinding the rare minerals of the moon into powder with their mortar and pestle to make ingredients for a magical elixir that grants everlasting life.
Shibata Zeshin (1807–1891), Rabbits Silhouetted Against the Moon, from the series Illustrated Book of Shibata Zeshin, Japan, c. 1880s. Woodblock print; ink and color on paper. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James E O’Brien, 1971 (17111)
Around the time this legend was first put into writing, there was a growing interest in physical immortality, which would reach its zenith about a century later, when the first emperor of China (259–210 B.C.), realizing even his immense power could not save him from death, became obsessed with finding a medicine that might keep him alive. The ingredients for such medicines were only to be found in faraway regions, and the emperor sought them throughout his empire and beyond. In a particularly tragic episode of history, he even sent a naval expedition manned by hundreds of youths—it was believed that immortals appeared younger the longer they lived, so only young people could approach them—into the eastern sea in search of a mythical island where the elixir of life might be found. They never returned.
In the medieval period, emperors and their alchemists continued to experiment with medicines to preserve life. among which cinnabar was especially popular. It is sometimes estimated that as many as a third of the emperors from the Tang dynasty (618–907) died of cinnabar poisoning. Eventually, though, the pursuit of physical alchemy was replaced by a more symbolically understood internal alchemy, which involved manipulating the body’s own energies to make an “elixir” rather than ingesting one with toxic side effects.
By the time Zeshin made this print, Japan had reopened to the outside world after a long period of isolation and was well on the road to modernization and internationalization. The artist himself played a role in this, and the government chose his remarkable accomplishments in lacquer to represent the best of Japanese craft in world fairs. Zeshin and his audience would have understood his rabbits as a charming folk tale. In fact, by that point, many Japanese saw the mortar and pestle not as alchemical tools but instead as a sticky rice, or mochi, pounder!
– Shawn Eichman, Curator of Asian Art