The Golden Bough - The Original Classic Edition. Frazer Sir

The people of Egghiou, a district of Abyssinia,

       used to engage in sanguinary conflicts with each other, village against village, for a week together every January for the purpose of

       procuring rain. Some years ago the emperor Menelik forbade the custom. However, the following year the rain was deficient, and the

       popular outcry so great that the emperor yielded to it, and allowed the murderous fights to be resumed, but for two days a year only.

       The writer who mentions the custom regards the blood shed on these occasions as a propitiatory sacrifice offered to spirits who

       control the showers; but perhaps, as in the Australian and Javanese ceremonies, it is an imitation of rain. The prophets of Baal, who

       sought to procure rain by cutting themselves with knives till the blood gushed out, may have acted on the same principle.

       There is a widespread belief that twin children possess magical powers over nature, especially over rain and the weather. This curious

       superstition prevails among some of the Indian tribes of British Columbia, and has led them often to impose certain singular restric-

       tions or taboos on the parents of twins, though the exact meaning of these restrictions is generally obscure. Thus the Tsimshian

       Indians of British Columbia believe that twins control the weather; therefore they pray to wind and rain, "Calm down, breath of the

       twins." Further, they think that the wishes of twins are always fulfilled; hence twins are feared, because they can harm the man they

       hate. They can also call the salmon and the olachen or candle-fish, and so they are known by a name which means "making plenti-

       ful." In the opinion of the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia twins are transformed salmon; hence they may not go near water,

       lest they should be changed back again into the fish. In their childhood they can summon any wind by motions of their hands, and

       they can make fair or foul weather, and also cure diseases by swinging a large wooden rattle. The Nootka Indians of British Colum-

       bia also believe that twins are somehow related to salmon. Hence among them twins may not catch salmon, and they may not eat or

       even handle the fresh fish. They can make fair or foul weather, and can cause rain to fall by painting their faces black and then wash-

       ing them, which may represent the rain dripping from the dark clouds. The Shuswap Indians, like the Thompson Indians, associate

       twins with the grizzly bear, for they call them "young grizzly bears." According to them, twins remain throughout life endowed with

       supernatural powers. In particular they can make good or bad weather. They produce rain by spilling water from a basket in the air;

       they make fine weather by shaking a small flat piece of wood attached to a stick by a string; they raise storms by strewing down on

       the ends of spruce branches.

       The same power of influencing the weather is attributed to twins by the Baronga, a tribe of Bantu negroes who, inhabit the shores

       of Delagoa Bay in South-eastern Africa. They bestow the name of Tilo--that is, the sky--on a woman who has given birth to twins,

       and the infants themselves are called the children of the sky. Now when the storms which generally burst in the months of Septem-

       ber and October have been looked for in vain, when a drought with its prospect of famine is threatening, and all nature, scorched

       and burnt up by a sun that has shone for six months from a cloudless sky, is panting for the beneficent showers of the South African

       spring, the women perform ceremonies to bring down the longed-for rain on the parched earth. Stripping themselves of all their

       garments, they assume in their stead girdles and head-dresses of grass, or short petticoats made of the leaves of a particular sort of

       creeper. Thus attired, uttering peculiar cries and singing ribald songs, they go about from well to well, cleansing them of the mud and

       impurities which have accumulated in them. The wells, it may be said, are merely holes in the sand where a little turbid unwholesome

       water stagnates. Further, the women must repair to the house of one of their gossips who has given birth to twins, and must drench

       her with water, which they carry in little pitchers. Having done so they go on their way, shrieking out their loose songs and dancing

       immodest dances. No man may see these leaf-clad women going their rounds. If they meet a man, they maul him and thrust him

       aside. When they have cleansed the wells, they must go and pour water on the graves of their ancestors in the sacred grove. It often

       happens, too, that at the bidding of the wizard they go and pour water on the graves of twins. For they think that the grave of a twin

       ought always to be moist, for which reason twins are regularly buried near a lake. If all their efforts to procure rain prove abortive,

       they will remember that such and such a twin was buried in a dry place on the side of a hill. "No wonder," says the wizard in such a

       case, "that the sky is fiery. Take up his body and dig him a grave on the shore of the lake." His orders are at once obeyed, for this is

       supposed to be the only means of bringing down the rain.

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       Some of the foregoing facts strongly support an interpretation which Professor Oldenberg has given of the rules to be observed by a Brahman who would learn a particular hymn of the ancient Indian collection known as the Samaveda. The hymn, which bears the name of the Sakvari song, was believed to embody the might of Indra's weapon, the thunderbolt; and hence, on account of the dreadful and dangerous potency with which it was thus charged, the bold student who essayed to master it had to be isolated from his fellow-men, and to retire from the village into the forest. Here for a space of time, which might vary, according to different doctors of the law, from one to twelve years, he had to observe certain rules of life, among which were the following. Thrice a day he

       had to touch water; he must wear black garments and eat black food; when it rained, he might not seek the shelter of a roof, but had to sit in the rain and say, "Water is the Sakvari song"; when the lightning flashed, he said, "That is like the Sakvari song"; when the thunder pealed, he said, "The Great One is making a great noise." He might never cross a running stream without touching water; he might never set foot on a ship unless his life were in danger, and even then he must be sure to touch water when he went on board; "for in water," so ran the saying, "lies the virtue of the Sakvari song." When at last he was allowed to learn the song itself, he had

       to dip his hands in a vessel of water in which plants of all sorts had been placed. If a man walked in the way of all these precepts, the rain-god Parjanya, it was said, would send rain at the wish of that man. It is clear, as Professor Oldenberg well points out, that

       "all these rules are intended to bring the Brahman into union with water, to make him, as it were, an ally of the water powers, and to guard him against their hostility. The black garments and the black food have the same significance; no one will doubt that they refer to the rain-clouds when he remembers that a black victim is sacrificed to procure rain; 'it is black, for such is the nature of rain.' In respect of another raincharm it is said plainly, 'He puts on a black garment edged with black, for such is the nature of rain.' We may

       therefore assume that here in the circle of ideas and ordinances of the Vedic schools there have been preserved magical practices of

       the most remote antiquity, which were intended to prepare the rain-maker for his office and dedicate him to it."

       It is interesting to observe that where an opposite result is desired, primitive logic enjoins the weather-doctor to observe precisely opposite rules of conduct. In the tropical island of Java, where the rich vegetation attests the abundance of the rainfall, ceremonies