Published by New York Review of Books
June 2019
Sailing back from the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men land on the island of Aeolia, the domain of Aeolus, the Keeper of the Winds. Aeolus gives them an oxhide sack that contains the captive winds of the world – apart from a gentle westerly to waft them safely home – with strict instructions not to open it. Believing there is treasure inside, the greedy crew do just that. The opening of the sack unleashes a chaotic gale that hurls their ship upon the waves, out across the wine-dark sea, blowing Odysseus madly off course. His adventures last ten years.
The book in your hands is that oxhide sack. All the winds of the world are inside. If you open it, you will be blown to places you never expected.
Lyall Watson is a modern-day Keeper of the Winds. His natural history of the great, invisible forces that shape our planet – from the sand dunes of the Sahara to the serotonin inside our brains – twists and turns, uplifts and surprises like the subject it describes. “Wind is defined as air in motion,” he tells us early on, then explodes this apparently simple statement in every conceivable way. The reader is propelled back through recorded history into deep time, from the formation of the universe, through physics and mythology, biology and psychology, religion and sociology, in and out of an extraordinary diversity of cultures. We are blown from the macro to the micro, often in the space of a single page: from the planetary scale of the solar system to the infinitesimal particles that flow into us with each breath.
For wind, as Heaven’s Breath reveals, is much more than moving air. It is one of the great circulatory systems of our planet, connecting – like the book itself – far-flung climates and cultures. It ensures the spread of life, distributing pollen, seeds, and spores over vast distances, accompanied by a tidal soup of floating microorganisms. The atmosphere above our heads, far from being empty space, surges with windborne life, from thermal-surfing spiderlings (“arachnauts,” in Watson’s playful term) to the “living rain” of tens-of-millions-strong butterfly migrations.
Wind also shapes the Earth, sculpting the land beneath it. The sand dunes of the world’s great deserts are the most obvious example, pure creations of the air that mimic the ocean’s rolling waves, and abrasive airborne particles scrape and erode like sandpaper, creating fantastical rock formations millennia in the making. Godlike, wind gives with one hand and takes away with the other: the loess landscapes of China are composed of aeolian silt deep enough to carve entire towns from, while in the dust bowl of the 1930s, topsoil from the American Great Plains was whipped away in vast clouds, skinning “windhollows” in the land up to fifty meters deep.
The influence of wind, however, is not only physical. With a polymath’s panache, Watson plunges from natural history deep into the spiritual, for wind has always blown inside the human imagination. From the earliest times, this mysterious power – invisible yet tangible, existing nowhere yet everywhere – has been central to the origin myths of many cultures. In the Judeo-Christian story God breathes life, in the form of a gust of air, into lifeless clay, and numerous other religions place wind at the beginning – and sometimes at the end – of all things. Wind gods and spirits feature in belief systems from the Maori to the Mayan, often linked not only with creation but with procreation. Of the ancient Greek wind deities – collectively called the Anemoi, which derives from anima, “soul” – Zephyrus, the god of the warm west wind, was associated with fertilization, while Boreas, the god of the frozen north, was believed to be so lusty that mares grazing with northerly-facing hindquarters could be impregnated; an example of aeolian immaculate conception.
One of the greatest delights of Heaven’s Breath lies in the sinuous journey it takes through the world’s multivarious cultures, exploring the ways in which people have attempted not only to understand wind – and to translate its invisible language into portents and predictions – but to defend their communities from its more destructive urges. Watson relates how a New Guinea tribe fixed spears to the roofs of their houses “in order to pierce the wind’s belly,” and how, in South Africa, a Xhosa priest-diviner would climb a hill to spit potion into the eye of the wind. In other cultures, malevolent breezes were assailed with rocks, seaweed whips, gongs, lances, flaming torches, urine, and even (in Scotland) left shoes. These different tactics are all part of the same “ancient and common code” that Watson returns to time and again, drawing connections between scattered points that seem, at first glance, unrelated. Wind, unconstrained by borders, is the unifying thread between them.
All of this is a reflection of the breadth of Watson’s fascinations. A self-declared “scientific nomad,” he had degrees in botany, zoology, marine biology, chemistry, geology, ecology, and anthropology – plus a doctorate in ethology, the study of animal behavior – and wrote books on subjects as diverse as the unconscious, the supernatural, elephants, water, inanimate objects, and sumo wrestling. Interested in everything, he had a truly Gaian outlook, regarding the world not as a lump of insensible rock but as a living thing: “An organism in its own right, growing, wrapping itself in a moist and luminous membrane of air.” In following the paths of the wind, his restless curiosity had free reign.
Heaven’s Breath is not a book to read if you want facts in a hurry. It does not take the reader in a straight line from one point to the next. Although its chapters are divided into five broad themes, or breaths – dealing with wind’s relationship to Earth, time, life, body, and mind – the narratives constantly interweave and overlap. Watson delights in the meander, which makes wind his perfect subject. The thing that keeps this informative flood from spilling into breathlessness is the controlled pace of the prose and the precision of the language. This is especially evident in the sections dealing with the science of wind: meteorology is a complex subject, and describing something that cannot be seen – as many artists have discovered – is a particularly daunting task. But Watson has a gift for fixing the invisible in concrete images. Warm air lifts “in great buoyant bubbles, exactly like the vapour that rises from the bottom of a kettle of gently-boiling water.” A cold front “edges forward beneath the warmer air in its path, prying it up and rolling it back like a toe tucked under carpet.” And the sun, as it formed and heated, “spread radiation like a firehose.” Such images have an anchoring effect, keeping the reader’s feet on the ground and preventing us from being blown off course.
Myth and science are drawn together in the field of biometeorology, the study of how atmospheric conditions affect living organisms. Farmers have long observed that animals can grow skittish in wind, and teachers know that windy days create anarchy in the playground. Stories of “ill winds” exist in every part of the world, documented through generations of folk wisdom and weather lore, blamed for everything from minor misfortune to national calamity. Easterly winds are often associated with bad luck. The mistral in the south of France is known as “the wind of madness.” In parts of Europe, the blowing of certain winds was historically considered a mitigating factor in crime cases; if you could prove that the wind made you do it, you might receive leniency in court. Goethe, Voltaire, Ruskin, Schiller, and Nietzsche – to name but a few weather-sensitive souls – have all drawn links between ill winds and violent changes in mood.
I have a particular reason to believe in such accounts. In 2016, I walked the routes of several European winds to explore the effects they have on landscapes, peoples, and cultures. I was frozen by the helm wind in northern England, knocked off my feet by the bora (named after Boreas, the horse-ravishing god of the north), enervated by the sirocco, and battered by the mistral. But it wasn’t until I reached Switzerland that I truly understood wind’s power. In valley after valley, I had heard claims that the föhn – the warm, desiccating wind that melts the snow from the mountain peaks – causes headaches, insomnia, irritability, anxiety, and a host of other ailments. It is even rumored to cause a spike in the suicide rate. These stories sounded like old wives’ tales and I took them with a pinch of salt, until, in the Haslital valley, the föhn began to blow. After a day and a night of its relentless blast – like the slipstream of an invisible train thundering constantly around me – I found myself so exhausted and depressed that I could hardly move. Despairing, almost paranoid, I fled to another valley, where, out of range of the wind, I felt completely normal again. I had fallen victim to Föhnkrankheit, the notorious “föhn sickness.”
Heaven’s Breath helped me understand what I had experienced. Studies have linked föhn-type winds – characterised by a downslope flow of warm, dry air – to an increase in positively charged ions in the atmosphere. Evidence suggests that positive ions play havoc with serotonin levels, causing dramatic mood swings; pressure fluctuations and alarm reactions might also play their parts. The baleful effects of such winds are known from Israel (in the form of the sharav) to Los Angeles, where the notorious Santa Ana is alleged to drive up homicides. Not for nothing is it also called the Devil Wind.
On the subject of named winds – which blow from specific directions at specific times of year – one of the final delights of the book is the aeolian dictionary that leads us from the aajej (a Moroccan whirlwind) to the zonda (a westerly in the Andes). On the way we meet the xlokk, the southerly burster, and the bad-i-sad-o-bist-roz, the “Wind of One Hundred and Twenty Days” that rages in Iran and Afghanistan. It is hard not to be carried away by fairy-tale names such as these. Whether baleful or beneficial, avatars of creation or destruction, these great forces are introduced as a cast of characters, all with distinctive moods and personalities.
It is a fitting tribute to the spirits in whose midst we dwell. As Watson reminds us, the words for wind, spirit, and breath are the same in many languages, from the Hebrew and the Arabic to the Sioux and the Dakota. In the anima of the ancient Greeks we even catch a glimpse of ourselves: we are breathing animals, brought to life by the air flowing through us.
The oxhide sack in your hands, then, is not just full of wind. It is full of life.