What better day than Halloween to contemplate the eerie side of weather? After all, as Hamlet remarked:
There are more things in
Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
At Halloween the rule of nature's laws is interrupted. It is a time of the most bizarre occurrences, such as Macbeth imagined when he contemplated his foul deed on Duncan:
Now o'er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
With pale Hecate's offerings.
Hecate was the Greek goddess of the night, the queen of ghosts and magic and protector of enchantresses and witches, and even in meteorological terms, her constituency was a very powerful one.
Witches had developed the science of weather modification to a fine art, and could raise hailstorms, conjure up tempests, and command thunder and lightning to appear with the merest twitch of a magic broomstick. Their meteorological talents are documented in authoritative detail in Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of the Witches"), a magnum opus published in 1486 by two Dominican friars called Sprenger and Kramer, and which contains all you ever wanted to know about witches.
But, of course, you cannot really blame the witches for any storms that may occur tonight, since the last known practitioner in these islands was hanged in 1722. Witchcraft ceased to be a crime when the Act Against Conjuration, Witchcraft and Dealing with Evil Spirits, enacted during the reign of James I, was repealed in 1736.
Parts of the emancipating legislation, however, have left some awkward loopholes that sometimes worry meteorologists, in that it continued to forbid the prediction of the future, or indeed "any pretences to such arts and powers, whereby ignorant persons are frequently deluded and defrauded".
But at least under this new lenient enactment, rather than being condemned to death practitioners of such arts, it was decreed, "shall for every such offence suffer imprisonment for the space of one whole year without bail, and once every quarter of the said year shall stand openly in the pillory for the space of one hour".
A strict construction of this law, therefore, would seem to be a danger to weather forecasters, who may risk prosecution as they ply their trade of predicting things to come. The lot of our British colleagues has been alleviated somewhat by the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951, which excuses such activities "done solely for the purposes of entertainment". Here in Ireland, however, the 1736 enactment must be still presumed to stand, and meteorologists, forecasting even just for fun, live in constant danger of imminent arrest.