Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [5]
At least partly because of this conflation and confusion, wind plays a role in the creation myths of almost all human cultures, and in dozens the winds also govern commerce, procreation, communication, and more. For example, in the complicated cosmology of the Dogon people of Mali, in West Africa, there were four founding couples, thereby avoiding, in their view, the Christian sin of original incest; the women's mouths opened and the winds came out, and so did breath and therefore all subsequent life. The Mi'kmaq people of the American Atlantic coast have as their hero Glooscap, who once imprisoned the eagle whose wings create all the winds, and thereby made the world uninhabitable, albeit briefly. The San of the Kalahari believe the winds carry stories—not just legends, but also whole histories up to and including the very latest news and gossip. Old Japanese legends say the winds banished the fogs that shrouded the world in the Elder Days. The Bozo people, who live on the southern fringes of the Sahara, believe Wind wrestled with Water, and Water lost, which is the origin of the Great Desert. The Niger River is all the water that is left from the dawn of time, and the Bozo people became its stewards, taking up boatbuilding as a tribal preoccupation and sacred calling. In Hindu mythology, primordial winds swept bare the earth, preparing it for life. Even a casual pass through a biblical concordance yields a dozen or more references to wind—winds bring plagues to Egypt, winds collapse Job's house and kill his sons, God keeps winds in his heavenly warehouses, and a God-sent wind parts the Red Sea and lets the Jews escape from Egypt.
In many cultures winds are male and can impregnate unwary or unruly females. In African legends the fleetest antelopes are often wind-born as well as wind-borne. Hiawatha's mother conceived from the West Wind. In aboriginal legends winds originate in volcanoes, in caves in the mountains, from vents in the sea, from the breath of gods. Odysseus carried the four winds in a leather sack on his back and tied them to his mast (and his crew loosed the wrong ones, bringing ruin to his journey and giving Homer a great narrative line). The old Chinese god of winds also carried the winds in a bag slung over his back.
Sir James George Frazer's repository of old legends, The Golden Bough, recounts dozens of rites for mitigating, or at least controlling, the unruly winds. The Payuge Indians of South America used to light brands and run at the wind to frighten it; others pushed the winds into caves and rolled stones against the openings to seal them in. Frazer reports that Finnish wizards sold knotted ropes to mariners—the first knot for a breeze, the second for a stiff wind, the third for a gale, and the fourth for . . . well, you generally didn't want to untie the fourth knot, unless you were in port and your enemy was still at sea.1
As late as the nineteenth century Sir Walter Scott reported meeting an old woman in the Orkneys "who subsisted by selling winds. Each captain of a merchantman, between jest and earnest, gives the old woman six pence, and she boils her kettle to procure a favorable gale."2 And stories are still extant in the memory of New Englanders, just yarns now, but colorful enough. Some were recounted by Richard M. Dorson in his collection of American tales called Buying the Wind. One told of the sea captain Paris Kaler, a notorious blasphemer. "Well, he got out one day and was becalmed, he was going to west'ard and there wasn't no