In
Mingrelia, when the crops are suffering from want of rain, they take
a particularly holy image and dip it in water every day till a
shower falls; and in the Far East the Shans drench the images of
Buddha with water when the rice is perishing of drought. In all such
cases the practice is probably at bottom a sympathetic charm,
however it may be disguised under the appearance of a punishment or
a threat.
Like other peoples, the Greeks and Romans sought to obtain rain by
magic, when prayers and processions had proved ineffectual. For
example, in Arcadia, when the corn and trees were parched with
drought, the priest of Zeus dipped an oak branch into a certain
spring on Mount Lycaeus. Thus troubled, the water sent up a misty
cloud, from which rain soon fell upon the land. A similar mode of
making rain is still practised, as we have seen, in Halmahera near
New Guinea. The people of Crannon in Thessaly had a bronze chariot
which they kept in a temple. When they desired a shower they shook
the chariot and the shower fell. Probably the rattling of the
chariot was meant to imitate thunder; we have already seen that mock
thunder and lightning form part of a rain-charm in Russia and Japan.
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