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ONCE more, the savage thinks he can make the wind to blow
or to be still. When the day is hot and a Yakut has a long way to go, he
takes a stone which he has chanced to find in an animal or fish, winds a
horse-hair several times round it, and ties it to a stick. He then waves
the stick about, uttering a spell. Soon a cool breeze begins to blow. In
order to procure a cool wind for nine days the stone should first be
dipped in the blood of a bird or beast and then presented to the sun,
while the sorcerer makes three turns contrary to the course of the
luminary. If a Hottentot desires the wind to drop, he takes one of his
fattest skins and hangs it on the end of a pole, in the belief that by
blowing the skin down the wind will lose all its force and must itself
fall. Fuegian wizards throw shells against the wind to make it drop. The
natives of the island of Bibili, off New Guinea, are reputed to make wind
by blowing with their mouths. In stormy weather the Bogadjim people say,
“The Bibili folk are at it again, blowing away.” Another way of making
wind which is practised in New Guinea is to strike a “wind-stone” lightly
with a stick; to strike it hard would bring on a hurricane. So in Scotland
witches used to raise the wind by dipping a rag in water and beating it
thrice on a stone, saying:
“I knok this
rag upone this stane
To raise the wind in the divellis name,
It sall not lye till I please againe.”
1
In
Greenland a woman in child-bed and for some time after delivery is
supposed to possess the power of laying a storm. She has only to go out of
doors, fill her mouth with air, and coming back into the house blow it out
again. In antiquity there was a family at Corinth which enjoyed the
reputation of being able to still the raging wind; but we do not know in
what manner its members exercised a useful function, which probably earned
for them a more solid recompense than mere repute among the seafaring
population of the isthmus. Even in Christian times, under the reign of
Constantine, a certain Sopater suffered death at Constantinople on a
charge of binding the winds by magic, because it happened that the
corn-ships of Egypt and Syria were detained afar off by calms or
head-winds, to the rage and disappointment of the hungry Byzantine rabble.
Finnish wizards used to sell wind to storm-stayed mariners. The wind was
enclosed in three knots; if they undid the first knot, a moderate wind
sprang up; if the second, it blew half a gale; if the third, a hurricane.
Indeed the Esthonians, whose country is divided from Finland only by an
arm of the sea, still believe in the magical powers of their northern
neighbours. The bitter winds that blow in spring from the north and
north-east, bringing ague and rheumatic inflammations in their train, are
set down by the simple Esthonian peasantry to the machinations of the
Finnish wizards and witches. In particular they regard with special dread
three days in spring to which they give the name of Days of the Cross; one
of them falls on the Eve of Ascension Day. The people in the neighbourhood
of Fellin fear to go out on these days lest the cruel winds from Lappland
should smite them dead. A popular Esthonian song runs:
Wind of the
Cross! rushing and mighty!
Heavy the blow of thy wings sweeping
past!
Wild wailing wind of misfortune and sorrow,
Wizards
of Finland ride by on the blast.
2
It is said, too, that
sailors, beating up against the wind in the Gulf of Finland, sometimes see
a strange sail heave in sight astern and overhaul them hand over hand. On
she comes with a cloud of canvas—all her studding-sails out—right in the
teeth of the wind, forging her way through the foaming billows, dashing
back the spray in sheets from her cutwater, every sail swollen to
bursting, every rope strained to cracking. Then the sailors know that she
hails from Finland. 3
The art of tying up the wind in three knots, so
that the more knots are loosed the stronger will blow the wind, has been
attributed to wizards in Lappland and to witches in Shetland, Lewis, and
the Isle of Man. Shetland seamen still buy winds in the shape of knotted
handkerchiefs or threads from old women who claim to rule the storms.
There are said to be ancient crones in Lerwick now who live by selling
wind. Ulysses received the winds in a leathern bag from Aeolus, King of
the Winds. The Motumotu in New Guinea think that storms are sent by an
Oiabu sorcerer; for each wind he has a bamboo which he opens at pleasure.
On the top of Mount Agu in Togo, a district of West Africa, resides a
fetish called Bagba, who is supposed to control the wind and the rain. His
priest is said to keep the winds shut up in great pots. 4
Often the
stormy wind is regarded as an evil being who may be intimidated, driven
away, or killed. When storms and bad weather have lasted long and food is
scarce with the Central Esquimaux, they endeavour to conjure the tempest
by making a long whip of seaweed, armed with which they go down to the
beach and strike out in the direction of the wind, crying “Taba (it is
enough)!” Once when north-westerly winds had kept the ice long on the
coast and food was becoming scarce, the Esquimaux performed a ceremony to
make a calm. A fire was kindled on the shore, and the men gathered round
it and chanted. An old man then stepped up to the fire and in a coaxing
voice invited the demon of the wind to come under the fire and warm
himself. When he was supposed to have arrived, a vessel of water, to which
each man present had contributed, was thrown on the flames by an old man,
and immediately a flight of arrows sped towards the spot where the fire
had been. They thought that the demon would not stay where he had been so
badly treated. To complete the effect, guns were discharged in various
directions, and the captain of a European vessel was invited to fire on
the wind with cannon. On the twenty-first of February 1883 a similar
ceremony was performed by the Esquimaux of Point Barrow, Alaska, with the
intention of killing the spirit of the wind. Women drove the demon from
their houses with clubs and knives, with which they made passes in the
air; and the men, gathering round a fire, shot him with their rifles and
crushed him under a heavy stone the moment that steam rose in a cloud from
the smouldering embers, on which a tub of water had just been thrown. 5
The Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco ascribe the rush of a whirl-wind
to the passage of a spirit and they fling sticks at it to frighten it
away. When the wind blows down their huts, the Payaguas of South America
snatch up firebrands and run against the wind, menacing it with the
blazing brands, while others beat the air with their fists to frighten the
storm. When the Guaycurus are threatened by a severe storm, the men go out
armed, and the women and children scream their loudest to intimidate the
demon. During a tempest the inhabitants of a Batak village in Sumatra have
been seen to rush from their houses armed with sword and lance. The rajah
placed himself at their head, and with shouts and yells they hewed and
hacked at the invisible foe. An old woman was observed to be specially
active in the defence of her house, slashing the air right and left with a
long sabre. In a violent thunderstorm, the peals sounding very near, the
Kayans of Borneo have been seen to draw their swords threateningly half
out of their scabbards, as if to frighten away the demons of the storm. In
Australia the huge columns of red sand that move rapidly across a desert
tract are thought by the natives to be spirits passing along. Once an
athletic young black ran after one of these moving columns to kill it with
boomerangs. He was away two or three hours, and came back very weary,
saying he had killed Koochee (the demon), but that Koochee had growled at
him and he must die. Of the Bedouins of Eastern Africa it is said that “no
whirl-wind ever sweeps across the path without being pursued by a dozen
savages with drawn creeses, who stab into the centre of the dusty column
in order to drive away the evil spirit that is believed to be riding on
the blast.” 6
In the light of these examples a story told by
Herodotus, which his modern critics have treated as a fable, is perfectly
credible. He says, without however vouching for the truth of the tale,
that once in the land of the Psylli, the modern Tripoli, the wind blowing
from the Sahara had dried up all the water-tanks. So the people took
counsel and marched in a body to make war on the south wind. But when they
entered the desert the simoon swept down on them and buried them to a man.
The story may well have been told by one who watched them disappearing, in
battle array, with drums and cymbals beating, into the red cloud of
whirling sand.
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