rainmaking rites

The tradition & historical record

Rainmaking is a weather modification ritual that attempts to invoke rain. It is based on the belief that humans can influence nature, spirits, or their ancestors who withhold or bring rain. Among the best known examples of weather modification rituals are North American rain dances, historically performed by many Native American tribes, particularly in the Southwestern United States. Some of these weather modification rituals are still implemented today. ¹

Julia M. Buttree (the wife of Ernest Thompson Seton) describes the rain dance of the Zuni, along with other Native American dances, in her book The Rhythm of the Redman. Feathers and turquoise, or other blue items, are worn during the ceremony to symbolize wind and rain respectively. Guidance on how to properly perform the Rain Dance has been preserved through oral tradition. In the Ozarks, multiple methods of attempting to call rain have been documented: ¹

Other hillmen try to produce rain by burning brush along the creeks, or hanging dead snakes belly-up on fences, or killing frogs and leaving them in the dry road, or putting salt on gravel bars, or suspending live turtles above the water. [..] In some localities people imagine that they can cause a rain by submerging a cat in sulphur water—they don't drown the animal, but make sure that it is completely under water for a moment at least. I once saw this tried at Noel, Missouri, but without any success. ¹

Rain is a central concern of low-rainfall African societies outside Equatorial Africa, which depend on it for their sustenance and that of their animals. The power to make rain is usually attributed to African kings. In a number of African societies, kings who failed to produce the expected rain ran the risk of being blamed as scapegoats and killed by their people. ¹

Omek Tannou is an ancient Tunisian rainmaking ritual traditionally performed by rural communities during periods of drought. Children parade a wooden doll representing the goddess Tanit, singing supplications for rain. which was inherited from Punic and Berber traditions involving invocations of the goddess Tanit. It is now all but extinct though traces of the ritual survive in some folk songs and oral traditions in northern Tunisia. ¹

Among the San, shamans enter a trance-often induced by rhythmic dancing and hyperventilation-to access the spirit world and spiritually capture mythical "rain animals", notably the eland antelope. ¹

A famous rain making monarch is the Rain Queen of Balobedu, South Africa. Queen Modjadji, or the Rain Queen, is the hereditary queen of Balobedu, a people of the Limpopo Province of South Africa. The Rain Queen is believed to have special powers, including the ability to control the clouds and rainfall. She is known as a mystical and historic figure who brought rain to her allies and drought to her enemies. Queen Modjadji is believed to have ancestral ties to the Shona people of present-day Zimbabwe, a culture renowned historically for their rain shrines and ceremonies involving ancestral spirits. The Shona have some of the most powerful rainmaking abilities of the Southern Bantu as it was mainly practiced there until the late 1500s. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Rainmaking (ritual)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

rainmaking rites is weather modification ritual, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 15 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²