Devout readers of Weather Eye - who comprise, I believe, the vast majority - will know that today, August 6th, is the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord. The story is told succinctly in Matthew, Chapter 12: "After six days Jesus took Peter and James and John his brother and led them on to a high mountain. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone as the sun, and his garments became white as the light".
Now meteorologists are as willing as the next to admit the possibility of miracles, and subscribe fully to the notion
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.
But while never ruling out the possibility of direct intervention from above, they are always pleased when natural rather than supernatural ways can be identified in which the Almighty might have gone about achieving His divine objectives. So it is with the Transfiguration.
One theory is that the Transfiguration occurred on Mount Hermon, and probably at a time when it was snow-capped and thickly enveloped in a mist. If, in these circumstances, a gap developed in the fog to let the sunlight in, Jesus, dressed in white, would be brilliantly illuminated by the sudden burst of sunlight reflected from the snow. The event would be all the more spectacular in contrast to the misty gloom beforehand.
But then Matthew goes on: "And behold there appeared to them Moses and Elias, conversing with him" - and meteorologists have found an answer for this, too. The Brocken spectre is an eerie phenomenon sometimes seen on foggy mountain tops, but which is, in fact, merely the shadow of the observer cast by a low sun on to a bank of cloud or mist. It has a strange triangular shape, because the rays of light just grazing the observer and forming the edge of the shadow are subject to the same perspective effect as railway-lines which seem to converge as they disappear into the distance. Moreover the shadow, because of an optical phenomenon called diffraction, appears with a number of brilliantly coloured halos around its head.
Could it be that what appeared to be Moses and Elias where simply the Brocken spectres of two of the disciples? The hypothesis is strengthened by the next verse from Matthew's Gospel: "Behold, a short time later, a bright cloud overshadowed them," strongly suggestive of a patchy fog being, quite literally, behind the whole affair.
The real mystery, of course, is to be found in the Lord's final words on that occasion: "Tell not anyone about this vision," he said to Peter, James and John - so who told Matthew all about it?