Skip to content

The legends

The rabbit in the moon

Illustration for The rabbit in the moon

What it covers

Why the Mexica saw a rabbit in the moon, in the account the sources give.

The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why

What you have read above is this project's own summary of the rabbit in the moon. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.

In Spanish the entry carries:

Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.

How to cite this page

Alma Mexica, «The rabbit in the moon», The legends. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/legend/el-conejo-en-la-luna/