atlin's North American Indians, Letter 19.

(2) Themis, p. 61.

Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but of the inner
causes of rain he knew next to nothing; he was more ignorant even than
we are! His main idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that
the sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder and
cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder (in Hebrew
Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was everywhere regarded as
the manifestation of a spirit. (1) To make sounds like thunder would
therefore naturally call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the
rain-maker, might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles (known
in ever so many parts of the world) in which he rattled dried seeds
or small pebbles with a most beguiling and rain-like insistence; or
sometimes, like the priests of Baal in the Bible, (2) he would cut
himself with knives till the blood fell upon the ground in great drops
suggestive of an oncoming thunder-shower. "In Mexico the rain god was
propitiated with sacrifices of children. If the children wept and shed
abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced, being convinced that
rain would also be abundant." (3) Sometimes he, the rain-maker, would
WHISTLE for the wind, or, like the Omaha Indians, flap his blankets for
the same purpose.

(1) See A. Lang, op. cit.: "The muttering of the thunder is said
to be his voice calling to the rain to fall and make the grass grow up
green." Such are the very words of Umbara, the minstrel of the Tribe
(Australian).

(2) I Kings xviii.

(3) Quoted from Sahagun II, 2, 3 by A. Lang in Myth, Ritual and
Religion, vol. ii, p. 102.

In the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone--which has been adopted by
so many peoples under so many forms--Demeter the Earth-mother loses her
daughter Persephone (who represents of course the Vegetation), carried
down into the underworld by the evil powers of Darkness and Winter.
And in Greece there was a yearly ceremonial and ritual of magic for the
purpose of restoring the lost one and bringing her back to the world
again. Women carried certain charms, "fir-cones and snakes and unnamable
objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there was a sacrifice of
pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth, and their remains
afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the fields."
(1) Fir-cones and snakes from their very forms were emblems of male
fertility; sn