Chang'e: The Chinese Moon Goddess From Myth to Lunar Rovers

Just before Apollo 11 landed, Houston told the crew to watch for a beautiful woman and a giant rabbit under a cinnamon tree, and Michael Collins agreed to look out for the bunny girl. This deep dive builds a biography of Chang'e, the Chinese moon goddess Mission Control was referencing, beginning with the ecological catastrophe of ten suns rising at once, the archer Hou Yi shooting down nine of them, and the two portions of the elixir of immortality granted as his reward.The episode contrasts the popular version, in which Chang'e drinks both doses to keep the elixir from the violent apprentice Feng Meng and floats to the moon, with the older second-century BCE account in the Huainanzi, where she steals it and flees her husband. It traces Hou Yi's mourning ritual as the origin of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Han dynasty naming taboo that forcibly changed her name from Heng'e, the Tang poet Li Shangyin who recast her as a symbol of cosmic loneliness, her reinvention in Journey to the West as a goddess who reports a drunken marshal to the Jade Emperor and retrieves her runaway Jade Rabbit, and the modern Chang'e lunar probes, including the Yutu rovers and the 2019 first soft landing on the far side of the moon.Why the suns were imagined as three-legged crows in a mulberry treeThe yin-yang logic behind a double dose of pure celestial energy causing weightlessnessHow Confucian values may have required inventing a home invaderNaming taboos as ancient state censorship rewriting a deitySailor Moon, Over the Moon, and the question of who the home invaders are now