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Water was poured over the skeleton
to run down on the leaves. They believed that the soul of the
deceased took up the water, converted it into rain, and showered it
down again. In Russia, if common report may be believed, it is not
long since the peasants of any district that chanced to be afflicted
with drought used to dig up the corpse of some one who had drunk
himself to death and sink it in the nearest swamp or lake, fully
persuaded that this would ensure the fall of the needed rain. In
1868 the prospect of a bad harvest, caused by a prolonged drought,
induced the inhabitants of a village in the Tarashchansk district to
dig up the body of a Raskolnik, or Dissenter, who had died in the
preceding December. Some of the party beat the corpse, or what was
left of it, about the head, exclaiming, "Give us rain!" while others
poured water on it through a sieve. Here the pouring of water
through a sieve seems plainly an imitation of a shower, and reminds
us of the manner in which Strepsiades in Aristophanes imagined that
rain was made by Zeus.


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