Moon History and Folklore

La Celestina, the story from which the first illusion is loosely based: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Celestina

Man in the Moon stories: 

• From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_in_the_Moon)

There are various explanations as to how there came to be a Man in the Moon.

A longstanding European tradition holds that the man was banished to the moon for some crime. Christian lore commonly held that he is the man caught gathering sticks on the sabbath and sentenced by God to death by stoning in the book of Numbers XV.32-36. Some Germanic cultures thought he was a man caught stealing from a neighbor's hedgerow to repair his own. There is a Roman legend that he is a sheep-thief.

One medieval Christian tradition claims him as Cain, the Wanderer, forever doomed to circle the Earth. Dante's Inferno alludes to this:

"For now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine

On either hemisphere, touching the wave

Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight

The moon was round."

This is mentioned again in his Paradise:

But tell, I pray thee, whence the gloomy spots

Upon this body, which below on earth

Give rise to talk of Cain in fabling quaint?”

There is also a Talmudic tradition that the image of Jacob is engraved on the moon, although no such mention appears in the Torah.

John Lyly says in the prologue to his Endymion (1591), "There liveth none under the sunne, that knows what to make of the man in the moone."

In Norse mythology, Máni is the man who pulls the Moon across the sky. He is continually pursued by the Great Wolf Hati who catches them both at Ragnarok. The name Máni simply means "Moon", but sounds very similar to the Old Norse for "human" mannligr.

in Haida mythology, the figure represents a boy gathering wood, who was taken up from the earth as a punishment for disrespect.

• From the introduction of a children's book titled "Man in the Moon Stories" (http://earlyradiohistory.us/1922mm.htm)

DEAR  CHILDREN:-- 
        You know the Man in the Moon--you have all seen his jolly face beaming down at you from the great yellow moon. Whenever you see him he is smiling and you know, just to look at him, that he is good-natured and happy and very fond of the little children at whom he smiles. 
        Although you have all seen the Man in the Moon, not all of you have heard him. It wasn't until recently that he could talk to little earth folk, not till the radiophone was perfected. There he lived on the Milky Way this Man the Moon, with the Star Children, but he couldn't speak to you because there was no way to make you hear him. The radiophone, which is the wireless, has made it possible for the Man in the Moon to talk to you. And as soon as he found the children could hear him, he began to tell stories. The Man in the Moon told the first story for children ever told by radiophone and the first stories he told are those in this book. 
        As he told these stories to children, the Man in the Moon named stars for them, bright, twinkling stars that stay shining as long as little people for whom they are named are good, but which turn dull and cloudy when the children are naughty. The Man in the Moon wants every child to have his own star; if you look inside the cover of this book you will find yours. As soon as your name is written on your star, you will be one of the Man in the Moon's Star Children. Please don't forget, the way to keep your star bright and shining is by singing as much as you can and never pouting at all--you'll really find it easy. 

• http://www.skyscript.co.uk/moon.html 

Many myths refer to the Moon as a feminine influence, some ancient civilizations considered the Moon a masculine deity, whose role was to structure society as a measurer and recorder of time. Folklore also continues to speak of the 'Man in the Moon', who is often described as carrying a bundle of twigs or a bucket and who is generally reported to be a thief or tramp, transported to the Moon in punishment for some criminal or immoral activity. One common folklore claims he was a beggar, whose crime was to gather firewood on Sunday, and whose punishment therefore was to live a perpetual 'Monday' on the Moon.