“The Thunder Dance exemplifies the strange harmony that exists between the primitive customs of these people and the forces of nature. This harmony is inaccessible to logic and incomprehensible to the representatives of the civilized world, but it is simply and quite naturally perceived by the consciousness of the natives”. (Harry Wright. "Witness of Witchcraft.")
Prince Aho
Harry Wright has spent a lot of time and effort researching various witchcraft treatments. At the same time, he got acquainted with the rites and customs of the native tribes. In his travels, he traveled almost the entire globe. The dance of thunder was demonstrated to him in Dahomey. And here he managed to meet Prince Aho.
Prince Aho once decided to demonstrate the dance of thunder to the distinguished guest. This is how it started.
“A slender man ran into the dance floor, waving a sosiabi, a long dance rod with a sharp and shiny bronze hatchet at the end. With sharp movements of the wand, he drew zigzags of lightning in the air. The beating of the drums gave the impression of distant thunder. The dancer began to spin in place at an accelerating pace. Others gradually joined him. The dancer, like a man possessed, ran along the wall of the people surrounding the platform, waving his baton and almost touching the audience with it."
In general, it would seem, nothing special. They dance frenziedly, beat drums, don't light a fire (this is important!), But in Dahomey, apparently, they dance just as frenziedly on other occasions. Nevertheless…
“At the beginning of the dance, there was not a single cloud in the sky. Looking up by chance, I noticed that the sky began to be covered with thunderclouds. The dance continued, and thunderclaps were heard, which further encouraged the dancers. I felt that I was also captured by the madness that possessed them, but it did not prevent me from experiencing anxiety at the thought that heavy clouds that had gathered above us would prevent me from taking pictures.
It won't rain
What happened from the point of view of a modern meteorologist?
Any thunderclouds are created by the so-called vertical convection. This convection moves warm and humid air from bottom to top. It's cold upstairs and the air is cooling. In this case, droplets arise from water vapor. The droplets do not fall down, but are supported in the air by this very convection. All this creates that very cloud.
In order to get a cloud where lightning will flash and from where rain will pour out, it is necessary that this very convection raise the entire mass of air and water to a height of 9-10 kilometers.
Of course, the process is not as simple as described here. If it were so elementary, then every hot summer day there would be thunderstorms everywhere. But that doesn't happen. Nevertheless, even such a simple description shows what a difficult task sorcerers face.
But back to dancing. "Prince Aho bent down to me and said in my ear:" It will not rain, we do not allow him to go without a rain dance. " It's as simple as that: we don't allow it, so it won't.
And further. “Thunderclaps approached, merging with the rumble of drums. I waited for lightning to flash and rain downpour. But there was another thunderclap, and the dance suddenly stopped.
The prince turned to me and raised his eyes to the sky. The sun was shining brightly again in the deep blue sky. The threat of rain is over.
"This time we put on this spectacle for fun," he said, laughing, "but in the woods such entertainment sometimes ends badly for the priests
- they are killed if the thunder is accompanied by rain."
A bit of physics
How can such powerful processes be initiated?.. The idea of a "trigger" is now widely considered in many fields of science. Indeed, lightly pressing the trigger with a finger causes a burst of bullets flying at a breakneck speed. The main condition in the idea of a "trigger" is the presence of accumulated energy in a certain system. And, of course, the knowledge of what exactly to press.
In forecasters, there is a term "thunderstorm". That is, the sky is still cloudless, but powerful clouds can begin to develop at any moment
- there is enough energy in the atmosphere for this. Apparently, the Dahomey sorcerers guess a similar situation for their dances.
And what is the trigger? There is a story about how one smart man in the United States took money from farmers for making it rain. And he called. The territory where he "worked" was closed from prying eyes, and what he was doing there was unknown for a long time. Then it turned out that the "magician" was simply making a big fire. Hot air rose up and initiated the development of the very convective processes that form rain clouds.
Nature protects
The ideas of the influence of hot air on the weather did not appear out of nowhere. On July 27, 1943, several thousand tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on the German city of Hamburg. The city caught fire, the heat generated was estimated to be the equivalent of burning about a million tons of fuel. Everything happened in dry, stable weather. Nothing in the atmosphere could contribute to the development of convection, especially because the raid was at night. It would seem that Hamburg will be completely destroyed. However, due to the heat, a giant air column appeared over the city. The whirlwind uprooted trees and tossed them high. Just a few minutes later, a huge rain cloud formed in size exceeding Hamburg itself. And a heavy downpour began.
Something similar happened on August 6, 1945 in Japan, when an American plane dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The resulting fire in a large city, in turn, caused a storm. But in this case, she did not improve the situation in any way, but only completed the destruction of the city.
Thus, it turns out that in case of gigantic fires caused by man or natural causes, a kind of "fuse" is triggered - nature is protected from death.
Another Trigger Idea
However, in the description of the dance of thunder, Harry Wright lacks a fire. There are only drums and a strange dance. Let's try again to look for analogies. Indeed, there is something close to Lobsang Rampa's famous book "The Third Eye": "At this time people tried not to scream in the mountains, because screaming contributed to the rapid concentration of cumulus clouds coming from India - the land of ill-fated tropical showers."
This is much more interesting. That is, under appropriate conditions, sound can, like fire, initiate convection.
What happens? Need to scream correctly, and after a while it will rain? Some kind of magic. So all and sundry would call for rain instead of carrying buckets of water and watering their beds.
Of course, all this is not at all easy. But the idea of a sound trigger, taking into account the peculiarities of propagation under the appropriate conditions, looks quite reasonable. Sound is the movement of air. The further upward the sound vibrations propagate, the greater their amplitude. The growth of the amplitude depends on the frequency - a very low frequency is needed, up to infrasound, in order for the amplitude to rise to tens and hundreds of meters.
Then it turns out that the most important thing in thunder or rain dancing is the drums. Everything else is for the audience.
How can a thunder dance differ from a rain dance? It is known that dry thunderstorms sometimes occur in natural conditions. Droplets in a cloud, for various reasons, cannot merge into large rainstorm droplets that reach the ground. At the same time, the power of the cloud is very high, and therefore lightning flashes. Under normal conditions, the large droplets formed do not stay in the cloud and fall out as rain. But how do sorcerers know how to shape both?
Most likely, they know very well what the conditions will be during the planned dance by a number of meteorological signs. It is impossible without this. After all, Prince Aho said: "They are killed if thunder is accompanied by rain."
Maxim KLIMOV
Secrets of the 20th century
