“For the Scrutiny of Science and the Light of Revelation”: American Blood Falls

Abstract

For millennia, showers of blood, known variously blood falls, rains of blood, and blood rain, have been reported in sources both historical and literary. earliest record comes from Homer's Iliad, in which Zeus makes it rain blood as a portent of slaughter: Then, touch'd with grief, weeping Heavens distill'd/A shower of blood o'er all fatal field. Pliny, Livy, and Plutarch mention actual rains of blood and flesh. Cicero recorded these events well, but doubted their veracity. Cicero, an early proponent of view that these rains had a natural explanation, was succeeded in twelfth century by the great grammarian and natural philosopher William of Conches, who sought to explain blood falls result of power of wind and properties of condensed and heated rain? phenomenon continued to be reported throughout Medieval and Renaissance England, France, Germany, Ireland, and Iceland. Contemporary chroniclers seldom recorded detailed descriptions, and consensus was that they were omens of suffering or terrible transition. When claims of blood falls came to New World with European settlers, they were disseminated through a powerful new medium, newspaper. first known report of an American blood fall was in 1708: By Letters from Dorchester in South-Carolina of April 7th last we are acquainted, that some of their Indian Traders met with some Indians who informed them that they were being Hunting about 6 or 700 Miles from Dorchester towards French Settlement at Mobile ... there fell a Shower of Blood, in which they walk'd up to Ankles? While it not possible either to prove or disprove these ancient and early era claims, real benefit of examining them lies elsewhere. In his essay Observations on Early Medieval Weather in General, Bloody Rain in Particular, historian Paul Edward Dutton differentiates between climate and weather. Climate, he argues, exists without us. Weather, however, is atmosphere in contact with us, and exists when we engage it physically and think about it... To study weather to study human. (3) Blood falls, oddly enough, are wonderfully revealing of societal norms. Blood and meat showers were seen through competing lenses of superstition and rationality. former gradually receded latter advanced in nineteenth century, culminating in best-documented case, which occurred in Chatham County, North Carolina, in 1884. Let us first go back some eight decades previously, when science was scarcely involved. BLOOD FALLS AS PROPHECY At dawn of nineteenth century, a newly formed religious group exhibited strange behavior. Known Schismatics, because of their separation from Presbyterian Church in 1803, they soon acquired another nickname: The Jerks. (Today they are known Shakers.) During enormous camp meetings in Kentucky and Ohio, thousands would drop down, if dead. Others clapped, leaped around, screamed, and engaged in exercises which were believed to have been of an involuntary kind. In rolling exercise, it was called, they appeared to be forcibly thrown down, and to roll over and over like a log, or in a kind of double posture to turn like a wheel. Sometimes they went in this manner through mud and dirt, which was considered very degrading. In jirking exercise head appeared to be violently moved towards one shoulder, then other, and backwards and forwards. Here it may be observed, that during time they were under these operations, though they were often exposed to imminent danger, yet few received any hurt ... jirking exercise was sometimes accompanied, and often succeeded barking. In this exercise both men and women personated and took position of a dog, moved about in a horizontal posture upon their hands and feet, growled, snapped their teeth, and barked if they were affected with hydrophobia. …