ABSTRACT
Weather and its consequences have a major impact on human lives and human culture, and it seems that there has always been a tendency to seek for meaning in the vicissitudes of weather. Finding it impossible to believe that catastrophes that affected them so severely could be personally or socially insignificant, early polytheistic civilizations attributed storms, thunder, and lightning, as well as droughts and other severe manifestations of weather, to the wrath of the gods. The weather proved so important, however, that various regular meteorological observations seem to have forced themselves into popular consciousness, becoming codified in the form of weather lore. Among the ancient Babylonians, for example, it was held that a dark halo around the moon signified a month of clouds, if not of rain. In both Egypt and Babylonia from the third millennium B.C., such empirically based weather lore included observations of the heavenly bodies, which were supposed to affect many things on the earth besides the weather. This tradition of what is known as astrometeorology proved to be extremely long-lived.
