Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [6]
In many cultures, too, gods came to represent the four cardinal directions of the wind. Most North American tribes believed the winds to be four gods. So did the Greeks, before they complicated things. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in Primitive Culture suggested a commonplace explanation. "Man naturally divides his horizon into four quarters, before and behind, left and right, and thus comes to fancy the world a square, and to refer the winds to its four corners."4 The flat earth, in support of this view, was seldom a circle, almost always a square. It was obvious, then, why on Judgment Day, according to Revelation 7:1, four angels stand at the four corners, holding back the Four Winds "so that no wind would blow on the earth, or on the sea, or on any tree." In a nice admixture, "modern" flatearthers incorporated into their design the devices of witchcraft, so that the earth had five corners, not four, being a pentagon. These five corners were to be found at the northernmost extent of Lake Mikhail in Tunguska, Siberia; on Brimstone Head, on Fogo Island, Newfoundland; on Easter Island in the Pacific; at Hokkaido in Japan; and somewhere near the south of Tasmania.5 I've been to Fogo Island, where the local council has hospitably erected a rather vertiginous boardwalk to the top of Brimstone Head for those flat-earthists who want to see where one of the pillars is to be found.
In early Greek mythology the empire of the winds was shared between the four sons of Eos, the goddess of dawn, and Astraeus, the god of starry sky. They were called Boreas, the north wind; Zephyrus, the west wind; Eurus, the east wind; and Notus, the south wind.
Boreas, who dwelled in the mountains of Thrace, assumed the form of a stallion to mate with the mares of Erichthonius, and from this union were born twelve young mares so light of step that they ran across fields of standing corn without bruising an ear of grain and over the crests of the sea without wetting their feet. The Greeks liked Boreas because he had dispersed the fleet of the invader, Xerxes. Zephyrus in later years became a soft and beneficial wind at whose breath the spring flowers opened, but in the early myths he was savage and baleful and took pleasure in brewing storms and tossing the waves of the sea. From his tumultuous mating with the Harpy Podarge were born the two horses Xanthus and Balius, who drew the chariot of Achilles. When he calmed down in old age, he was given the gracious Chloris for a wife, by whom he had a son, Carpus, meaning fruit.
Eurus and Notus had little personality of their own, a reflection of the place of those winds in the Aegean.
According to Homer, the winds all lived in the Aeolian Islands, where they were kept under guard by Aeolus himself. The son of Poseidon, Aeolus was said to have invented the sailing ship, and Zeus appointed him guardian of the winds. It was Aeolus who gave Odysseus the wineskin containing the contrary winds that would hinder his voyage. Of course, Odysseus's greedy crewmen untied the bag to see what it contained, and let the deadly winds out.
Aeolus later became the Roman god of wind. 6
It's a name that has persisted. Aeolian sound is the sound wind makes. We live all our lives in the Aeolian zone.
Virtually every part of the world has named winds—regular winds that the locals have personified over the centuries. Although no one knew where they came from or what caused them, winds were given names because, invisible and mysterious though they were, they were as real a presence as any mountain, river, or sea;7 they were either benign—good for the crops, good for sailors—or, more likely, malevolent, the action of some malicious deity, sent to try the wretched people affected. Englishman