Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but of the inner causes of rain he knew next to nothing; he was more ignorant even than we are! His main idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that the sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder and cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder (in Hebrew Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was everywhere regarded as the manifestation of a spirit. (1) To make sounds like thunder would therefore naturally call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the rain-maker, might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles (known in ever so many parts of the world) in which he rattled dried seeds or small pebbles with a most beguiling and rain-like insistence; or sometimes, like the priests of Baal in the Bible, (2) he would cut himself with knives till the blood fell upon the ground in great drops suggestive of an oncoming thunder-shower. "In Mexico the rain god was propitiated with sacrifices of children. If the children wept and shed abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced, being convinced that rain would also be abundant." (3) Sometimes he, the rain-maker, would WHISTLE for the wind, or, like the Omaha Indians, flap his blankets for the same purpose. (1) See A. Lang, op. cit.: "The muttering of the thunder is said to be his voice calling to the rain to fall and make the grass grow up green." Such are the very words of Umbara, the minstrel of the Tribe (Australian). (2) I Kings xviii. (3) Quoted from Sahagun II, 2, 3 by A. Lang in Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, p. 102.