Their situation is pretty confusing many sources identify the rabbit as a luck talisman in Celtic Europe as early as 600 BC, often attributing this status to the rabbit’s habit of nesting underground, and thus closer to benevolent spirits. (You might have notice I didn’t mention the Celts. Throughout Africa (and now North America, thanks to the influence of the slave trade), the rabbit has a trickster status: wily, evasive and clever. In China, thanks to its prodigious aptitude for breeding, it’s associate with fertility. In Japan and the Aztec Empire, people noticed that certain dark spots on the moon are shaped like a rabbit, causing members of those civilizations to begin associating the creature with the moon.
The rabbit, being easy to spot and found pretty much everywhere, has a special place in much of the world’s folklore. Why the foot? It was thought that to create a totem of good luck, you have to basically do everything according to existing norms of bad luck.
