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The methods
by which they attempt to discharge the duties of their office are
commonly, though not always, based on the principle of homoeopathic
or imitative magic. If they wish to make rain they simulate it by
sprinkling water or mimicking clouds: if their object is to stop
rain and cause drought, they avoid water and resort to warmth and
fire for the sake of drying up the too abundant moisture. Such
attempts are by no means confined, as the cultivated reader might
imagine, to the naked inhabitants of those sultry lands like Central
Australia and some parts of Eastern and Southern Africa, where often
for months together the pitiless sun beats down out of a blue and
cloudless sky on the parched and gaping earth. They are, or used to
be, common enough among outwardly civilised folk in the moister
climate of Europe. I will now illustrate them by instances drawn
from the practice both of public and private magic.
Thus, for example, in a village near Dorpat, in Russia, when rain
was much wanted, three men used to climb up the fir-trees of an old
sacred grove.


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