Rain Gods - Introduction

With the recent spells of rains announcing the arrival of monsoon the country is celebrating the much awaited and the most celebrated season of rains. The rainy season is a season of love and romance and poets have made the most of this season by singing paeans on this season. Romance blooms and love is in the air. But monsoon is not all about romance and getting wet in the rains. From time immemorial it is all about livelihood more so in an agrarian society which was probably the first occupation of mankind.

For people all around the world, rains was a much needed season and also the most dreaded one. Not receiving rains would ‘burn’ their livelihood just as too much of it would ‘drown’ the same. This led to the ‘birth’ of the often-dreaded Rain gods. Let us know more of the Rain gods from across the world.

Pictoral representation of the separation of Rangi & Papa

But even before there were gods and goddesses, the primeval man had his own interpretation of nature. A very interesting myth of the Maoris (the early inhabitants of New Zealand) explains this natural phenomenon in this manner. At the beginning, the primeval set of parents were Ranginui, the Sky God, and Papatuanuku, the Earth Mother (Rangi and Papa in short), but both were in close embrace. Gods were born out of this confluence, but they did not have enough space to move around! One of the gods, Tane who was the forest-god, decided to stand up erect and pushed his head high in the chest of the sky father pushing the sky up above and thus separating the two from the eternal embrace. Tane till today stands erect as a tall tree of the forest and till date the two, i.e. the sky and earth cannot meet. Occasionally the father sheds tears of longing for his mate, the earth and these tears come in the form of rain on earth.

The Rig Veda has a similar myth which goes a step further to imply that the parents are brought together in a sexual embrace which results in rain, which is symbolically compared to the reproductive fluid of the sky-father. Some hymns even mention of this embrace as dev-vivaha or marriage of gods which results in rain.

Be it tears or reproductive fluids, these beautiful imagery tries to explain the phenomenon of rains so well at the times when there wasn’t any other way to explain this natural phenomenon. Water is a sign of life and the above imageries lend credence to the importance of rains for the primeval mankind.

Rains have been explained here from a very primeval form of thinking. In due course of time, specific deities came into existence as different cultures developed and people found the need to explain such phenomenon in greater details and needed more clarity. 

Next time we will discuss some of the rain gods from different cultures.

Keep reading…


The above picture is courtesy Tara Lemana
http://www.redbubble.com/people/taralemana/works/2763989-rangi-and-papa