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  Agnes Sampson’s name quickly surfaced as ringleader. A renowned midwife and healer known as the Wise Wife of Nether-Keith, her work smacked of witchcraft. She made potions for healing and midwifery. She sold love charms and other talismans. After humiliations and tortures that included having her entire body shaved, being made to wear a witch’s bridle, sleep deprivation, and being probed in the genitals with a pin, Sampson confessed to conjuring the storms that had hindered the union of James and Anne.

  Eager to appear the deep-thinking skeptic, King James jumped up at that dramatic point in Sampson’s interrogation and called her a liar. Even more eager to stop her torture, Sampson asked to speak with James privately. She convinced him of her witch’s power by telling him the secrets he had whispered to his new wife on their wedding night in Oslo. Then she told James that the Devil hated him and wanted to see him drowned by storm. She explained that Satan considered the king his chief opponent in all the world.

  No words could have rung so true to the self-important and deeply religious king. James now saw himself as the avenging knight of the Christian faith. Sampson was only one of many who would pay the price. She was burned at the stake in winter 1591 at Edinburgh Castle.

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  Trudging up the half-crag, half-castle in a bitter winter wind, it is not hard to imagine Agnes Sampson’s January execution. The fortress is built into a jagged volcanic formation, 440 feet above the sea. The 1590s are believed to have been the coldest decade of the sixteenth century. Crowds would have climbed the hill in freezing winds to watch Sampson strangled in a garrote. The townspeople would have lingered late into the night to watch the fire for the hours it took to burn her body to ashes.

  The story, at least as the king and the courts saw it, was printed in a pamphlet widely distributed at the time, Newes from Scotland. Its woodcuts show a storm ravaging the king’s ship on the Firth of Forth, with women huddled around a boiling cauldron on shore. Sampson had provided her interrogators with a storm recipe that included joints or knucklebones from corpses, and a cat cast into the sea. She said the witches carried out the plot by sailing up the firth in magic sieves, then calling up the storms.

  Newes describes the torture of a maidservant, who endured graphic agonies before she finally blamed Sampson and others, including the schoolmaster James Fian, for the storms. Dr. Fian never confessed, even though his legs were totally crushed in bootes. King James and his council decided to burn him at the stake anyway, as an example, to remayne a terror to all others hereafter.

  King James remained so concerned about the threat of witchcraft to himself and Scotland that he wrote a treatise on it, Daemonologie. Published in 1597, the book was meant to “resolve the doubting of many,” so that people would believe in the “fearefull abounding at this time in this Countrey of these detestable slaves of the Devil, the Witches or enchaunters.”

  When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, he was crowned King James I of England and ruled both countries until his death in 1625. At the time he ascended the British throne, a witch could be hanged in England only if it were proven the witchcraft caused a death. One of James’s first acts was to strengthen England’s Witchcraft Act, requiring hanging for any witchcraft confessed or proven. Witch hunts and trials continued unabated during his reign. They started to trail off only in the early eighteenth century.

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  The drama that began with the North Sea storms of 1589 and ended with the witch burnings of winter 1591 may feel vaguely familiar. It brings to mind the “shipwrecking storms and direful thunders” of one of the most powerful plays in the English language. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth opens to “Thunder and lightning,” according to the bard’s directions. “Enter three Witches.” The opening lines:

  FIRST WITCH: When shall we three meet again

  In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

  Shakespeare wrote Macbeth shortly after James became king of England. The playwright and his troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, had enjoyed independence and quiet fame during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. That would change within weeks of James’s ascension. The new king made Shakespeare’s company his own and called it the King’s Men. For Shakespeare, it would mean unprecedented exposure and success, but also new worry about pleasing the crown. He began writing with James in mind, “burrowing deep into the dark fantasies that swirled about in the king’s brain,” writes the American literary critic Stephen Greenblatt. England had carefully watched James’s obsession with witchcraft. Satan’s stormy plot against James and Anna surely informed Macbeth’s seafaring witches traveling to Aleppo in a sieve, and some of the grim ingredients tossed in their cauldron.

  Aside from appealing to his paranoid king, Shakespeare had come to understand the sweeping power of rain in the human drama. His comedies were often sunny. But he relied on storms as foreboding signs, symbols of chaos, and revelations of character in not only Macbeth, but King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus, and, of course, The Tempest.

  From Shakespeare to the Rig Veda, the rains of history influenced our stories of origin and those of end—a mythical river coursing through the Indus Valley’s Harappan civilization, storm gods buried under the dry sands of abandoned city-states.

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  In the drought of 4,000 years ago, the Harappan cultures did not die out entirely. Rather, the lamps of the largest cities in the ancient world dimmed as people moved out of the Indus Valley to the south and east in search of their lost rain. Archaeologists have found that the later Harappan settlements are rural, and more numerous in rainier regions at the foothills of the Himalayas and along the Ganges River in northern India.

  There, the religious traditions of Hinduism would evolve to turn rivers into goddesses and make a beloved god named Krishna blue—for the color of storm clouds.

  Rain would influence the evolving religions in deep but starkly different ways. It often depended on whether the faithful danced to the rhythms of the quenching monsoons—or marched to the beat of punishing aridity.

  * * *

  * She modeled the book’s victim, killed with a large blunt object to the head, on Woolley’s wife, Katharine, who was widely disliked but so capable that she led the final season’s dig at Ur. Katharine Woolley also may have been a matchmaker: Christie ended up marrying the young archaeologist-in-training Mrs. Woolley enlisted to show her around.

  THREE

  PRAYING FOR RAIN

  Mid-nineteenth century, when Texas was still a rowdy republic, a popular judge and lay preacher named Robert McAlpin Williamson was known by the nickname “Three-Legged Willie.” As a teenager, he’d been stricken by tubercular arthritis that confined him to bed for months and permanently paralyzed his right leg, which bent back at the knee. His custom pants had three holes: one for his left leg, one for the back-pointed one, and another for the wooden peg he wore below his right knee.

  Williamson read so voraciously during his illness that he emerged a prodigy and a crack lawyer—admitted to the bar around age nineteen. His disability stopped him from nothing, including becoming an expert horseman and marksman, a Supreme Court justice and congressman for the Republic, and one of the first majors in the Texas Rangers.

  As a brilliant orator and trusted leader, Williamson also had another honor to uphold. He was the go-to preacher when it came time to pray for rain.

  Texas in the 1840s was best known for storied battles among the Rangers, the Comanche, and the government of Mexico for the soul of the Lone Star State. But Texans were also fretting over the soul of the skies. Tree-ring researchers who read the history of rain in ancient bald cypress know that 1840 to 1849 marked one of the worst drought decades in Texas history. Settlers described conditions straight out of the Bible: invading grasshoppers, dust storms, wildfires, dead cattle. Creeks, springs, and rivers dried to mud. Bleached bones littered the land. Wheat failed. Corn grew to nubs.

  A typical Williamson prayer:

  O Lord, Thou Divine Father, the supreme ruler of
the Universe, who holdest the thunder and lightning in thy hands, and from the clouds givest rain to make crops for thy children, look down with pity upon thy children who now face ruin for the lack of rain upon their crops; and O Lord, send us a bounteous rain that cause the crops to fruit in all their glory and the earth to turn again to that beauteous green that comes with abundant showers. Lord, send us a bounteous one that will make corn ears shake hands across the row and not one of these little rizzly-drizzly rains that will make nubbins that all hell can’t shuck.

  For those who settled in Texas, the risk of drought would hang like red dust clouds over the plains. A century and a half after Three-Legged Willie’s time, in 2011, Texas burned with more than eight thousand wildfires brought on by a drought to rival the 1930s Dust Bowl. At Texas A&M University, atmospheric scientists said global warming was making the hellish conditions worse. The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, was skeptical of the professors. But he could sink his black-leather boots into prayer. Perry called upon his fellow Texans to join him in three days’ prayer for rain. Whereas, he wrote, Texas had received no rainfall for nearly three months; whereas fire had engulfed more than 1.8 million acres of the state and destroyed four hundred homes; whereas crops and businesses had failed…

  I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.

  At the time, Perry had his eye on the U.S. presidency. He showed off his boots, hand-stitched with the slogan of the Texas Revolution, “Come and take it.” He gave speeches in fluent Spanish to blue-leaning Mexican Americans. Ultimately, his brand of traditionalism did not win wide enough appeal. His rain refrain brought him criticism as a biblical bully, and for “trying to co-opt the most important three days of the Christian calendar”—Good Friday through Easter Sunday.

  But Perry’s prayer for rain bowed to tradition much older and broader than Texas, or even Christianity. In the arid American Southwest, the Indian Rain Dance remains an exaggerated cliché of the reality that rain prayer has been a part of daily life since ancient times, clear from the cloud designs on Ancient Puebloan water pitchers or the frog bracelets and pendants worn by the prehistoric Hohokam in what is now Arizona. Rain has been woven so deeply into the spiritual life of many natives that it became a name, a clan affiliation, or a personal symbol—like the rain cloud signature of potters and jewelers in the Hopi Water Clan.

  Whether Three-Legged Willie in the 1800s, Governor George W. Bush of Texas in 1999, or Governor Sonny Perdue of Georgia in 2007, Christians have long prayed for storms to relieve parched land in dry times. Jews and Muslims do as well. Jews around the world pray for rain each year on the eighth day of Sukkot, the pilgrimage festival that celebrates the harvest. The cantor dons a white robe and recites the special rain prayer, tefillat hageshem, to mark the beginning of rainy season in Israel. In Islam, Prophet Muhammad himself performed the rain prayers when he was alive. Raising his hands to the sky, with his back to the crowd, he would turn his cloak inside out. Today, Muslims communally perform the prayer, reciting the salatul istisqa, turning their outerwear inside out, and raising hands.

  In an unprecedented gesture of unity during a record-dry recent autumn in Israel, Christians, Muslims, and Jews gathered together in a valley between Jerusalem and Bethlehem to pray for an end to the drought. Rain can be a powerful unifying force. As it brings modern Abrahamic faiths together in joint prayer, rain also connects them to the birth of their religions in the searing ancient deserts of the Middle East.

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  More than four thousand years before Three-Legged Willie prayed for hand-shaking corn and Governor Perry asked God to douse wildfires, one of the earliest gods known to have been worshipped by humans was a deity of storms and rain. In Mesopotamia, the lightning-bolt-wielding rain god stood balanced on the back of a galloping bull, riding through a wild tempest in the sky. He was known as Iškur by the Sumerians, or Adad by the Akkadians, who referred to storm clouds as Adad’s “bull calves.” (The rain god Iškur/Adad was in some traditions son of Enlil, the drought-and-flood-making misanthrope blamed for desiccating Mesopotamia.)

  In pollen grains and deep-sea cores, we saw how geologists found evidence for a climate transition from moist to drought-prone around the time humans put down spears and picked up hoes. In that same period, archaeologists note a cerebral shift among worshippers in the earliest city-states. Where the hunter-gatherers had prayed feverishly for fertility, the agriculturalists upped the spiritual ante on rain. Mother-goddess artifacts are abundant in the earliest Mesopotamian cultures and others during Neolithic times—busty clues to a culture focused on procreation. Rain and storm gods were around then, too, but it wasn’t until the shift to agriculture and urban living that scholars find increasingly urgent references in images and texts to male storm gods such as the bull-riding Iškur/Adad.

  In regions such as Upper Mesopotamia where agriculture depended more on rain than on irrigation, storm gods ranked as the most prominent of all gods. Some were considered divine kings who ruled over the other gods and could even bestow kingship on humans. Still thought of as paeans to fertility, they came to conjure life along with rains when they felt appeased—drought and floods with infertility when angry. Bulls were a common rain-god motif not only because of their thundering run, but as symbols of masculinity and sexual power. Rain goddesses were around, too, but often as naked escorts of the storm gods.

  The male rain god would endure in the driest cultures. As late as the sixteenth century, Spanish chroniclers described the Aztecs sacrificing children to their rain god, Tlaloc. Scant archaeological evidence substantiated the stories until recently, when researchers found the skeletons of thirty-seven children and six adults carefully laid out in what appears to have been a single ceremony at a temple in Tlatelolco, in what is now Mexico City. The remains, which include tiny infant bones folded into urns, date to a time of drought-induced famine in the mid-1400s.

  The Aztecs believed many smaller gods lived in the hills and mountains and acted as helpers to Tlaloc, and that these little assistants had hands-on responsibility for rain. The temple at Tlatelolco was devoted to one of the wee rainmakers, Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl. When molecular anthropologists analyzed the victims’ DNA, they found that most of them were younger than three. All whose gender could be determined were male—Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl personified. The Aztecs had tried to please the elfin rain god with the closest likenesses they could find.

  Many religions and cultures came to view the rain, itself, as male—though Native Americans consider driving rain male and soft rain female; both equally vital to sate life and landscape. When the Hebrew God was creating Earth, he divided the waters in the heavens above from those on land below. Jewish tradition identifies the upper waters—the rainfall—as male, and the lower—lakes, rivers, and springs—as female, citing the line in Isaiah, “Let the Earth open to receive, that it may bear the fruit of salvation…” In Sanskrit, the word for rain, varsha, is derived from the older vrish, which means not only “to rain,” but also “to have manly power” and “generative vigor.” Hindus consider rivers female, and sometimes describe those swollen with monsoon rains as pregnant.

  Some cultures made a more literal link between rain and semen; farming couples took to making love in the fields to induce rain. Others sent nude women into the crops to sing ribald songs to the rain. Australian Aborigines bled tribesmen they considered rainmakers, sprinkled their blood over other men in the tribe, then made all the participants avoid contact with their wives until the rains arrived. The Australians also attributed rain-giving powers to foreskins removed during circumcisions. They would put the skins away for safekeeping, out of sight of any women, to break out in case of drought.

  The Sumerian Iškur and his Akkadian counterpart Adad were ambivalent rain gods, foreshadowing the alternat
ely benevolent and punishing God of monotheism. They could intervene to help humankind by bestowing rain for crops, or unleash their wrath in a drought or monster flood, usually for some moral reason. (Other storm gods became known for arbitrary destruction, such as the Yoruba Shango, the Polynesian Tawhiri, and the Japanese Susanoo, so unruly he’s banished from heaven.)

  One cuneiform tablet describes Iškur as “clothed in a frightful radiance, who by means of his thunder gathers the thick clouds, who opens the teat of heaven, who makes produce and abundance plentiful everywhere.” The ancient stories of Iškur and Adad also offer a desolate glimpse of long-term drought; the stripped soil is evident in the Mesopotamian epic Atrahasis: “Above, Adad made scarce his rain. Below, the fountain of the deep was stopped, that the flood rose not at the source. The field withheld its fertility. A change came over the bosom of Nisaba; the fields by night became white.”

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  In the Old Testament, Abraham makes a pact with God to give up all this sort of idolatry and be loyal only to Him. Abraham promises to leave northern Mesopotamia and its polytheism. In return for Abraham’s faith, God will take care of him and his descendants in the pastoral, rain-fed land of Canaan.

  Several hundred years later, starving in an unrelenting drought, many of these descendants lose their faith and flee for prosperous Egypt. At first, they thrive. But in time, they’re enslaved and forced to build cities along the Nile Delta. Eventually Moses releases them from bondage and leads them back toward Canaan and freedom.

  In the exodus that follows, here’s the climax and its climatic twist: God wanted his people back where he could control them by means of rain and drought. As Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, explained nearly three hundred years ago in his still-popular Notes on the Bible, God was careful to settle his people in Canaan rather than Egypt, “not in a land where there were such rivers as the Nile, to water it and make it fruitful, but in a land which depended wholly upon the rain of heaven, the key whereof God kept in his own hand, so that he might the more effectually oblige them to obedience.”