There can be few more exotic jobs than cloud herding in the Tibetan Himalayas. Shamans in the Amdo region keep watch from the mountain peaks and warn villagers when storms are coming.
Their predictions are based on a combination of weather experience and trusted formulae such as “when the clouds over Ami Kodtse are like sheep’s hair, it will hail in the village”.
Nor do the shamans just passively observe conditions; a “weather worker” or “cloud herder” claims to be able to ward off bad weather.
According to their beliefs, the weather is caused by the interaction between humans, spirits and nature. The shaman intercedes with the spirits, who in turn influence the weather.
As well as prayers and chants, a slingshot, like those used to herd sheep and yaks in Tibet, may be used to herd the clouds, or they may be driven off by firing arrows.
In his book Mindscaping the Landscape of Tibet, anthropologist and film maker Dan Smyer Yu describes a dawn excursion with a weather worker in 2010. The mountains were invisible under a murky white blanket and there seemed to be no chance of filming, but the shaman assured Yu that he could break the fog.
The shaman chanted praises to the mountain spirits for a full 15 minutes, at which point the fog lifted and the Himalayan peaks emerged like islands from a sea of cloud. Perhaps the result was coincidence, but the shamans do seem better at winning the confidence of their audience than most meteorologists.
