The man in the Moon: Cain, the bundle of thorns and the lunar face
Lunar markings read as a face or a man: Plutarch, Cain and the thorns in Dante, the biblical stick-gatherer and the Moon in Shakespeare's comedies.
Looking at the full moon with the naked eye, one can make out dark patches and bright areas. Today we know that the former are the maria, vast plains of solidified lava, and the latter the older highlands. For centuries, however, those patches suggested various figures: a face, a man with a bundle of sticks, a woman, a hare. In Europe the most widespread figure was the man in the Moon, the protagonist of religious legends, literary verses and nursery rhymes.
The face of the Moon for the philosophers
The ancients already wondered what the lunar markings were. Plutarch, between the first and second centuries AD, devoted a dialogue to the question, On the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon, in which the characters discuss various hypotheses: that the Moon is a mirror reflecting the earthly seas, that she is a body like the Earth with hollows and heights, or that she is the dwelling of souls after death. The dialogue blends physical observation and myth.
In the Middle Ages the problem returned in the second canto of Dante's Paradiso, where Beatrice refutes the explanation of the markings based on the varying density of matter, which the poet himself had proposed in the Convivio. Before the demonstration Dante asks what are those «dark marks» which on Earth make people «tell fables of Cain». The reference is to the legend, widespread in the Middle Ages, according to which Cain had been confined to the Moon with a bundle of thorns.
Cain and the man with the bundle
Dante had already alluded to the legend in the twentieth canto of the Inferno, indicating the Moon with the periphrasis «Cain and the thorns». According to medieval tradition, Cain, condemned to wander for eternity, had been placed in the Moon with a bundle of brambles on his shoulders, and the lunar markings drew his outline. The explanation joined the biblical story of the first murderer with the observation of a recurring shape on the lunar disc.
In northern Europe a variant circulated that was tied to another biblical passage. The Book of Numbers tells of a man caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath and punished with death; popular legend moved him to the Moon, condemned to carry his bundle for ever. In some German and English versions the man is accompanied by a dog and carries a lantern, details that also found their way into literature.
Shakespeare and Galileo
The most famous literary reference is in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, written around 1595. The Athenian craftsmen preparing a play for the duke's wedding decide to have Moonshine played by an actor with a lantern, a thornbush and a dog, precisely the attributes of the man in the Moon in English folk tradition. The comic scene shows how familiar the legend was to the audience of the time.
In The Tempest, written around 1611, Stephano, to impress Caliban, declares that he was once the man in the Moon, and Caliban replies that he has already seen him up there with his dog and his bush. A year earlier, in 1610, Galileo had published the Sidereus nuncius, showing with the telescope that the lunar surface was full of mountains and hollows, and thus opening a new era in the understanding of those markings.
The man in the Moon is a fascinating example of how cultures have made sense of the shapes in the sky. From Plutarch's discussions to Dante's tercets, from biblical legends to Elizabethan comedies, those dark patches have housed culprits, wanderers and comic characters, before the telescope revealed a landscape of stone.