When it rains

[izard]

When I was a kid, I was spending every summer holiday in my grandmother’s village in Russia. The region sits on a cultural and religious border between Christian and Islam parts, with surviving traces of pre-Christian paganism. Some villages still had practicing shamans who preserved old rituals that were rarely talked about openly, but widely respected.

When I was 14 a drought had started in summer. Crops were at risk, and everyone was worried. A weather forecast finally offered some hope: light, scattered showers the following day. In response, several shamans from neighboring villages decided to “ask the gods” for rain.

I didn’t witness the ritual itself. But later that evening, I saw what they had left behind: stains of chicken blood at the base of a centuries-old oak tree, and bright cloths tied into its branches, swaying in the still, hot evening air.

The next day, it rained. Not much, maybe 20 minutes, but it was something. That’s when things got strange. I took my bicycle out and rode around the area.


There was not too much dirt on unpaved road, it was possible to ride the bike. In our village and two neighboring ones - places where the shamans had performed rituals - the ground was visibly wet. But as I traveled farther out, into fully Christian villages with no known shamans, the fields were dry and the road was covered with fine dry dust.

I asked my grandmother about it. She was a practical woman, not prone to superstition. Unlike most of her friends, she was not asking shamans for favours, and asked me not to. Her explanation stuck with me. She said: “No one can make rain. Just imagine the energy it takes. But once rain is already on the way, they can probably nudge it. Make it start a few seconds earlier. Divert it a little. There is no real energy cost - just changing probabilities of events by a tiny margin, they could use a small sacrifice.”

As a teenager, it gave me chills. As an adult, I’ve thought about that event many times. Was there anything to it? With the benefit of hindsight and some scientific perspective, there’s a straightforward explanation.

Rainfall, especially scattered showers in dry weather, is never uniform. A 20-minute drizzle can easily hit one village while skipping another just a few kilometers away.

In the heat of a drought, moisture doesn’t stick around. I reached some of those farther villages in about an hour after the rain, even a light drizzle would’ve evaporated quickly, leaving no obvious trace.

I didn’t visit every village, only headed to one direction where there was a better road for my bike. I heard second-hand accounts about dryness in other places. It’s easy to construct a pattern that fits the idea of shamanic influence when you’re primed to see it.

The rain was predicted. The shamans had TVs and radios, just like everyone else. They didn’t promise to create rain, they promised to try to direct it. They weren’t frauds or deluded mystics, but people with a deep cultural understanding of how to amplify coincidence into belief. The ritual was timed precisely because the forecast suggested rain was coming. When it did, and it landed in the right places, the ritual was seen as successful. It didn’t need to work, it just needed to look like it did.

In the end, there was no need for magic. The rain was real. The dryness of other villages was real. And the human tendency to find meaning in well-timed coincidences is as old as belief itself.

What I saw that day wasn’t supernatural power, it was narrative power. It made a brief drizzle into a story worth retelling. So in some ways, that’s a kind of magic too.

Comments

[izard]

Yes, this is the most plausible explanation - it dried until I got there on a bike. I. O longer recall if it was still wet when I returned, I think it was not.