Whenever I hear of Met Éireann delivering an “orange weather warning”, as it did again yesterday, I always imagine conditions of that actual colour sweeping across Ireland. This is partly the result of reading too much Flann O’Brien.
In his comic masterpiece, The Third Policeman, O'Brien has the ghost of old Mathers expounding to his murderer on the theme of wind colours, belief in which, he adds, is "found in the literature of all ancient peoples".
There are four winds and eight sub-winds, each with its own colour, Mathers explains: “The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber.”
He continues, “People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, the magic of neighbouring winds when they are inter-weaved like ribbons at a wedding. It was a better occupation than gazing at newspapers.”
Mather was probably exaggerating about the wind-watchers (although there used to be a belief in Ireland that farm animals could see the wind, pigs being considered especially good at it). But he was right that the general idea was once common to many peoples.
I refer readers to that well-known historical document, Disney's 1995 film Pocahontas, which won an Oscar for a song called Colors of the Wind. This features the Native American princess explaining local weather theory to the know-nothing Europeans.
But she wouldn't have had to explain it to old Mathers, nor to the unnamed author of a 10th-century classic of Middle-Irish poetry, Saltair na Rann, which describes a 12-point wheel of wind colours: a cosmic-cum-meteorological map of Ireland.
The real-life version of Flann O’Brien probably studied that poem at university, before wildly embellishing the idea in his writings, like an early-Christian monk on LSD.
In his version, new-born babies everywhere are allocated the colours of the winds prevailing at time of birth, receiving them in the form of delicately woven gowns, one of which is added for each subsequent birthday, deepening the original hue until, in all cases, it becomes black eventually, announcing death.
Like everything else in O’Brien’s weird novel, the gowns scheme is overseen by policemen, who can thereby calculate everyone’s life span, but don’t divulge this information, “because the general ascertainment of death-days would be contrary to the public interest”.
(Somehow, this hints at a sinister Irish crime cliche, the one about deceased persons being “known to the gardaí”. I’m not sure when that appalling phrase was first used, but as with many things, Flann O’Brien seems to have anticipated it.)
A curious fact about the 10th-century wind-wheel, and indeed the Mathers version, is the alleged blackness of Ireland’s (and the world’s) north. This is not to be confused with the socio-political concept of a “Black North”, because as ancient as the sectarian conflict up there may seem, the supposed dark colour of northern parts is even older.
I’m sure some of my Northern readers are already quoting the Old Testament’s Book of Zechariah (Chapter 6), wherein that prophet has a vision of the heavenly winds in the form of chariots, led by black, white, red, and “grisled” horses, respectively:
Puzzled by the sight, he asks an angel what they are: “And the angel answered [. . .], These are the four spirits of the heavens, which go forth from standing before The Lord of all the earth.” Thereafter, to cut Zechariah’s long story short, the black horses depart “into the north country”, establishing a precedent, if it wasn’t established even before that.
So the idea of wind colours has a very long history. But as for those latter-day prophets, Met Éireann, any similarities between their warning system and the ancient wind-wheel are coincidental. In fact, most of the weather giving rise to yellow, orange, and red warnings recently has come from the west, whose winds, in the ancient scheme, were green, blue, or an unspecified “pale”.
The red and yellow winds, by contrast, came traditionally from Ireland’s south-east – the direction of Wales, to be exact. And I hereby prophesy that there will indeed be a scarlet-tinged invasion of Dublin from that quarter this coming weekend. But for everybody’s sake, I hope it will not be accompanied by a matching weather alert.
fmcnally@irishtimes.com