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As parts of India are currently facing one of the worst droughts in eighty years, there have been more of these frog marriages performed all over the country wherever rain is needed. However, in the eastern state of Bihar more drastic measures appear to be required.
Farmers in the eastern Indian state of Bihar have asked their unmarried daughters to plough parched fields naked, in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain.
Witnesses said the naked girls in Bihar state ploughed the fields and chanted ancient hymns after sunset to invoke the gods.
Nudity is very strong taboo in Indian society, and many magical schools make use of the breaking of taboos in order to increase the power of magical operations. My guess is that this practice likely has a similar origins, or at least exploits similar processes of human psychology to help impose the will of the community upon the natural world. The practice may not have even been designed with this mechanism in mind, but rather something that was found to work over time and adopted as a magical method.
'They believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains,' Upendra Kumar, a village council official, said from Bihar's remote Banke Bazaar town.
'This is the most trusted social custom in the area and the villagers have vowed to continue this practice until it rains very heavily.'
According to this explanation the success of the method depends upon how easily embarrassed rain gods happen to be. I could see the practice working regardless if the rain gods were simply pleased to see young naked women plowing fields, but under those circumstances I would also be concerned that if the rain gods think they can get a free show by withholding rain they might just do it year after year.
5 comments:
Cloudbusting.
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3861501945/ref=nosim/addall
Das Oranur-Experiment. Zweiter Bericht (1951-1956). Contact With Space / OROP Wüste Ea (1954-1955) (Gebundene Ausgabe)
von Wilhelm Reich
"Etheric Rain Engineering."
Trevor Constable's work is based Reich, only from the standpoint of Rudolf Steiner, as I understand it.
http://www.rainengineering.com/
The only real concern I have about this is who inherits the blame if it doesn't work within their timeframe?
This sounds to me like it could easily turn into a pogrom targeting insufficiently X (beautiful, virginal, ???) plough girls.
Admittedly, we not talking about a culture that hunts its albinos in this case, but blame inheritance for failed magick seems more or less universal- and 'official' priests and shaman's are generally immune to prosecution for failure - the fault can't lie iwth them, either it was against the will of the gods, or something worked against them to degrade the working.
It took me about five years of work as a magician before I could step back and analyze my own failures rationally for myself. I'm still not entirely certain that faced with a mob of angry villagers I wouldn't to do some finger pointing of my own.
Nerd: It definitely sounds like it might be worth seeing if a cloudbuster would have much of an effect on the situation in India. Reich apparently had some success down in the American Southwest and it's almost always pretty dry there.
Ismft: This practice apparently has been used for a long time and I've never heard of any persecutions related to it, though granted it can sometimes be difficult to track down stories from overseas. One of the advantages of framing magick as trying to influence the gods to do something is that it shifts most of the blame onto the deity in question rather than the magicians.
"...rain gods think they can get a free show by withholding rain they might just do it year after year."
LOL!
Seriously, there's a whole culture in what I can only (and no offence intended) term "folk Hinduism" (ie as practiced by people who are mainly looking for direct interventions, aka magick, from their deities) of ascribing phenomenal powers to the female, especially young females.
This female shakti force was invested into a female Deity, Durga, when ALL the male Gods (who are no lightweights themselves) failed to defeat an extremely powerful demon.
It's possible that had some connection here, even if the roots of it (and its possible occult authenticity) is no longer consciously known? Just a thought anyway.
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