Whenever couples plan to get married, there are always deliberations on what period of the year to have their weddings in order not to get disappointed due to rainfall.
Do you know there are some tribes who can control rainfall and re-direct the position of rain to another location? Where did rainmakers originate, in Africa or where exactly? We know rainmakers to cause literal rainfalls. Sometimes, they are expected to postpone rains or, if possible, move where the showers may come down.
Rain is a central concern of African societies which depend on it for their sustenance and that of their animals. We usually attribute the power to make rain to African kings. In several African societies, kings who failed to produce the expected rain risked being blamed as scapegoats and killed by their people.
A famous rain making monarch is the Rain Queen of Balobedu, South Africa. Tribal rain dances are done to ensure rain comes. Notable peoples known to have done rain dances are tribes on the Sahara Desert and Ethiopia. The term mysticism typically denotes a complex of beliefs and practices related to the personal experience of the divine.
Much mystical thought and practice derives from or draws upon formal religious doctrines, emphasizing reflective, introspective, and meditative practices as the keys to cultivating perception and awareness that will ultimately lead to knowledge of and communion with the divine.
If we understand how a traditional African believer connects with the environment, we may sympathize with why there is a huge belief in rainmakers from western to southern Africa. Among the Zulu, for instance, there is a saying: “He who brings rain, brings life”. For the Zulu and even other African peoples, the guarantor (and bringer) of life is ultimately a supreme deity, you may call it God.
But the people accept the place water has in their physical environment. It is what they drink, what they cook with, heal with, and grow their crops with. For them, water is life, and that is more than symbolism. It is literal.
What we learn from many anthropologists who have diligently studied African peoples is that traditional African believers do not make a conscious differentiation between what is physical and what is spiritual.
For these traditional believers, what happens in the physical is necessarily connected to the spiritual. According to some interpretations, the spiritual controls the physical.
