The Pooka

My girlfriend has seen the the 'Pooka'.

It was the mid 1980's in a wee Scottish village and she was around 10 years old at the time. It was the Easter school holiday (of course), so it could be said her otherworldly sensitivity was primed and the veils between worlds had worn a bit thin.

She was absently gazing out of the lounge window, her head full of impatience at the anticipation of rushing outside to play after she'd had her Weetabix, when she noticed a figure on the pavement of the main road across the end of her street.

"There it stood, bold as brass!"

'It' apparently was a rather large rabbit, pale in colour, and definitely NOT some party animal or charity fundraiser donning a suit. She says the creature was human-like, standing on its hind legs, and sort of "looking around". After so many years she can't remember if the giant Easter Bunny had a basket of eggs or not, although, in retrospect, she believes it probably did.

On further investigation, and being informed of the somewhat austere financial predicament of her large family at that time, she believes the Bunny may have been an hallucination, or rather a 'mirage' brought on by chocolate egg deprivation.

But when all is said and done, rather than seeing my girlfriends vision as an appearance of the Easter Bunny I prefer to interpret her experience as a physical manifestation of the mythical 'Pooka'.

This shape-shifting pagan deity of Celtic folklore has various spellings and legends that surround it according to region and dialect. It is often seen as a large rabbit, but often manifests itself as a horse, a dog or a goat. It is generally thought to be a relatively benign creature, more cuddly and laid back than the Nordic 'trickster' Loki, and without the ability to re-shape mountains like the Native American 'Coyote' character. The Pooka is more like Bugs Bunny after a couple of Guinness'. Hmmm, another naughty anthropomorphized rabbit.

Our particular mischievous creature is associated with the Irish harvest festival and the pagan knees-up called Samhain that is known more popularly as 'Halloween'. His/her/its annual day of celebration is the 1st of November - officially Pooka Day. So remember to put that in your calendar - lack of respect for the creature may cause it to spit and shat on your tom's and tators, never mind the wild fruit!
Diss the Pooka at your peril.

Some farmers and growers still leave a bit of the harvest aside as an appeasement or gift for the Pooka, others believe that the residue of the harvest in the fields has become 'Faery blasted' or otherwise made inedible by contamination by the Pooka. (Thank you Wikipedia.)

The most famous manifestation of the Pooka in popular culture has been through the medium of film. The 1950 Hollywood movie called 'Harvey' starring James Stewart portrays a man, Elwood Dowd (Stewart) becoming increasingly desperate as friends and family refuse to see or believe in the reality of his friend 'Harvey' - a six foot three and a half inch white rabbit. Reference to the Pooka of folklore is actually made in one of the early scenes of the movie.

After the plot thickens and thins a few times and Elwood wades through ridicule and a few dark nights of the soul, and a couple of other characters have actually seen the rabbit, he finally manages to walk out of the sanatorium in which he has been held. We as viewers (and over thinkers) are then left with an interesting deconstruction of the psychology of myth and belief (am I reading too much into this?).
The film has the inevitable up-beat Stewartesque happy ending, with the audience realising that Harvey is in fact 'real' and Elwood is just a harmless everyman who hasn't entirely lost his childhood sense of wonder - is not yet gripped by that adult compulsion to disbelief.

The other much darker and more recent cinematic appropriation of the Pooka myth was writer/director Richard Kelly's 2001 movie 'Donnie Darko'.
Here we have the mischievous anthropomorphic rabbit from hell, macabre and eerie, a time travelling messenger who is literally a man in a suit...but somehow inhuman and all the more terrifying than a genuine six foot rabbit.
In this movie the 'veil between worlds' is a quantum cloud of probabilities, where the wormholes have let the supernatural light seep through between primary and tangent universes. Science and myth slowly coming together maybe.

Its nice to see that the Pooka was given a more contemporary, psychedelic/Sci-fi makeover for the new Millennium, who knows when and in what form he'll pop up next.
I know which bunny I prefer.