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The rain-making business, though very lucrative, is not without its disadvantages; for whenever Moselekatse, or Dingaan, or any other chief sets his rainmaker at work, and the rain was not forthcoming as per application, the indignant ruler caused an assegai or two to be stuck through the wizard, for the encouragement of the other wizards.
We are told that these desert-dwellers, whose very lives have always depended upon their little corn fields along the sandy washes that caught and held summer rains, always challenged new-coming clans to prove their value as additions to the community, especially as to their magic for rain-making, for life here was a hardy struggle for existence, with water as a scarce and precious essential.
"I'm no 'sharp' but it looks to me like some of that wheat would straighten up if it got a good wettin'." Wallie said grimly: "The only thing I forgot to buy when I was outfitting in Philadelphia was a rain-making apparatus." "On the level," Pinkey declared, earnestly, "I bleeve we're goin' to have a shower the clouds bankin' up over there in the northwest is what made me think of it."
The general effect of argument is to produce the impression that you are not anxious for rain at all; and it is very undesirable to allow the idea to spread that you do not take a generous interest in their welfare. An angry opponent of rain-making in a tribe would be looked upon as were some Greek merchants in England during the Russian war.
The foregoing pages record her observations, supplemented largely by the recordings of well-known authorities who have studied these people. To her own mind it is clear that the Hopi are living today by their age-old and amazingly primitive traditions, as shown by their planting, hunting, house building, textile and ceramic arts, and their ceremonies for birth, marriage, burial, rain-making, etc.
Thomas threatened to excommunicate them all, a menace which did not amount to much as they were already excommunicating themselves, and when they remained obstinate, told them that he would have nothing to do with this rain-making business, which was unholy and repugnant to him.
The stockades are crowded with huts, and the children have but small room to play in the narrow spaces between. 25th November, 1866. Sunday at Zeoré's. The villagers thought we prayed for rain, which was much needed. The cracks in the soil have not yet come together by the «welling of soil produced by moisture. I disabused their minds about rain-making prayers, and found the headman intelligent.
The modus operandi of rain-making appears in all cases to be based on the principle that like produces like; and to be in its nature a process which any one can carry out and which requires no mysterious art to effect and no mysterious personal power to produce.
No stranger or over-curious person was allowed to go near the place, under penalty of a beating from the custodians of these gods. They represented good and not malicious death-causing gods. The one made the yams, bread, fruit, and cocoa-nuts, and the other sent fish to the nets. Another stone was carefully housed in another village as the representative of a rain-making god.
And it will not surprise us if we find that the ceremonies which were used for the purpose of rain-making, before rain was recognised as the gift of the gods, continue for a time to be practised as the proper rites with which to approach the god of the community or the rain-god in particular.
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