3. Ancient Theories of the Rainbow
In The Rainbow, Carl Boyer writes:
Anaxagoras, the friend and tutor of Pericles, found a popular atmosphere in Athens which was hostile to natural science; and, when he asserted that the sun, far from being a divinity, was nothing but a huge white-hot stone, he was jailed for impiety. Anaxagoras also courageously questioned the divinity of Iris, the Goddess of the Rainbow.
It seems that Iris has been a major UFO for many thousands of years, with a highly charged emotional effect upon those who witnessed the phenomenon. Some like the Hebrews, were delighted to see the rainbow, because they interpreted it as a sign of God’s forgiveness of the few survivors on Noah’s Ark after He had destroyed all other life on earth. But to the highly sophisticated Greeks and Romans, the rainbow was a terrifying sight because Iris was regarded as the harbinger of evil tidings. It was her special mission to come down to earth, after the storming thunder and lightning rages of Zeus, to inform men of their transgressions and to execute the penalties imposed by the Deity.
Iris was ominously present after the great deluge of Deucalion, when Zeus decided that mankind was unredeemable and must be totally eliminated. His “final solution” was to be an extreme coldness that would freeze all humans to death. It was Iris who was sent to inform Menelaus of the elopement of his daughter, Helen of Troy, an act that started the Trojan Wars. Iris announced the tempest that shipwrecked Aeneas. She severed the last slender thread that kept Queen Dido alive, and it was Iris who thereafter carried water from the River Styx and forced condemned sinners to drink. Shakespeare, steeped in Ovidian mythology, knew Iris well. In “All’s Well” he called her “the distempered messenger of wet” and in “Henry VI, Part II,” he had the Queen threaten the exiled Duke of Suffold: “For wheresoe’er thou art in this world’s globe, I’ll have an Iris that shall find thee out.” There was no escape from the rainbow messenger and executioner.
The trepidations of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Elizabethan English were shared by primitive ufologists the world over. Africa tribal lore regarded the rainbow as a giant snake who, seeking a meal after the rain will devour whomever he comes upon. In the Americas, the rainbow was also a hungry god, fond of indiscriminately ingesting water, cattle, and tribesmen, especially the youngest members. The Shoshoni Indian believed that the sky was made of ice against which the serpent rainbow rubbed its back, causing snow in the winter and rain in the summer.
It is not recorded whether the Shoshoni’s heavenly serpent thus relieved some dorsal itch, but other primitive descriptions of the rainbow reveal a very thirsty god indeed: Plutarch describes Iris as having a head of a bull that drinks the water of rivers and streams, while Ovid also depicts her as distinctly bibulous.
Other explanations of the rainbow include:
- the hem of God’s garments (Greenland);
- a hat (Blackfeet American Indians);
- a bowl for coloring birds (Germans);
- a camel carrying three persons, or a net (Mongol);
- and, in Finnish lore, a ”sickle of the Thunder-God.”
Homer may have been the champion literary projectionist of Greece. He too saw Iris either literally or figuratively as a serpent. The Great Visualizer of modern times, however, is beyond any doubt, Professor Hermann Rorschach. That compulsive spiller of ink is surely the twentieth century’s patron saint of visualization. The doctor of ink and blot has convinced psychologists that whenever we look at something that is disorderly, meaningless, amorphous, or vague, we immediately project upon something else. And that something else is an image withdrawn from our internal picture library and projected onto the shapeless blob placed before us. It seems that we cannot tolerate vagueness and insist on replacing it with what we wish to see or what we dread seeing.
Some experts insist, however, that we pretend to see something in order to be kind to the earnest psychologists who try to be helpful by showing inky messes to total strangers. During World War II, I was present as an observer when a brilliant young lieutenant was being tested. He did quite well until he was handed an enormous inkblot and asked to describe what he saw.
He gazed at it dutifully for quite a while, then handed it back, and said :
“It looks like an inkblot to me sir.” He was disqualified for his flagrant anti-social response, of course, and it served him right! I also looked at the configuration, and there plainly visible was a lovely picture of an old woman dressed all in black, riding her monocycle down a deserted country road.
And, speaking of tests, in 1875, after conducting a long series of experiments, the eminent physiologist Dr. Francis Galton published his discovery that a surprising number of “entirely normal and reliable” Englishmen he had tested habitually saw objects, colors, forms, and vivid kinaesthetic patterns involving mixed image and color not seen by others.
I offer these digressions with the suggestion that a great deal of work still remains to be done on the visualizing characteristics of the so-called “normal and reliable” people who have made “sightings” of all kinds. I do this not to challenge the validity of all UFO ‘sightings,’ but to call attention to the possibility that not very much is known about the nature of visualization. It has been generally assumed that if a man is a respected member of a respected profession (like a commercial jet-pilot) he is ipso facto free of any visualizing aberrations, and that he always sees the world and its phenomena as nakedly, as honestly as my young lieutenant saw it when he declined to play the inkblot game.
It is therefore hardly surprising that strange objects and phenomena of all kinds have been chronicled and reported for about 3,500 years, and for thousands of years previously as oral tradition in systems of religion, mythology, and folklore. The number of reports of “strange phenomena” have increased steadily with time, as increase caused by the great proliferation of journals and newspapers since their start in the seventeenth century. As the new media increased in number, they gathered and printed more and more reports of strange happenings that would otherwise have remained localized and been forgotten.
The current great interest in UFOs has resulted in a ransacking of religious literature, mythology, as well as the old newspapers and journals for UFO-like sightings and their inclusion in the current UFO literature. With the help of another researcher, I have gone through many old sources in search of new significant “UFO” material, but have found that the ufologists have covered the ground quite thoroughly not hesitating to graft new interpretations on the old reports.