National Meteorological Day

It’s World Meteorological Day and I found this quote:

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it’s right too often for use to ignore it and wrong to often for us to rely on it

Patrick Young

I’ve been thinking of the myths and stories about gods recently and it’s led me to all sorts of snippets. For example, did you know that there is evidence for a thunder god in the reconstructed Indo European language of four thousand years ago? There is a whole section on weather gods from prehistory here in Wikipedia.

I don’t believe in weather gods and thunder gods, but I can see the appeal. When you’re counting on the harvest to keep you alive as the first farmers did, being able to appeal to a deity that might help must be a comfort, even if they are capricious. And, despite knowing the science, a thunderstorm feels supernatural. If you are in the middle of a loud one, when you can barely hear yourself for the thunder and the rain and hail is battering the windows, it doesn’t help to think about electrons and convection movements. It feels like something primeval. I’m not surprised that there is evidence of huge sacrifices of horses and cattle to appease the destructive force.

And I am fascinated that stories and myths can be traced back all those thousands of years to a people whose language we can’t fully know but which developed into so many different tongues as far apart as English and Bengali. That the stories that they told are still echoing around and finding their way out. Thor, who is definitely a thunder god, is still having his stories told in cinemas around the world.

In the flash fiction that I posted on Monday, here, I wrote about a retired thunder god. I can imagine that a retired weather deity wouldn’t be a comfortable neighbour, but I bet he wouldn’t be boring.