Witches and Weather

Second to flight, the witches’ chief power was the power to control weather. Witches were constantly accused of manufacturing hailstorms to destroy crops, or of creating tempests that sank ships, or of conjuring sudden hurricanes to spread fires or otherwise wreak havoc on their neighbors. Sailors feared women who whistled because of the sympathetic magic implied in “whistling up the wind.” And the association between chaos in the macrocosm and chaos in the microcosm that we find in King Lear’s howling tempest (and other Shakespearean storms) was in fact an association between devilish doings and huge storms that dated back to the Middle Ages.

The witchy blighting of crops with hailstones may in fact be a remnant of the attributes of the Mother Goddess, condensed (if we may pun so) into the figure of the witch. For the power to make nourishing rain or blighting hailstones is again a form of the power to increase (or blast) fertility. The witch is a rainmaker, a snowmaker. Is there an official Witch of Aspen?