Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer, declared Voltaire ("If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him"). And in the absence of other explanations for familiar meteorological phenomena, our ancestors used to do precisely that. By far the most popular divine portfolio was responsibility for thunder storms.
The Greeks and Romans shared a god of thunder, albeit by a different name. To the Greeks he was Zeus, depicted seated on a throne with threatening thunderbolt in hand. But on a more domestic note he was the protector and ruler of the family - "Father of gods and men".
The Romans knew him by the name of Jupiter, who would punish offending mortals with death or damage to their property, using lightning as the means of displaying his displeasure.
In Norse mythology, Wotan was in charge of thunder. And further south, in what we now call Germany, the Teutonic god of thunder was Thor, who wielded a mighty hammer with which he split the clouds.
Those dark Teutonic thunder clouds comprised a mixture of water and an inflammable vapour called a vafermist; when the cloud was split the two were separated - one falling as rain, and the other catching fire and descending earthwards as a bolt of lightning.
In ancient India, Indra was the god of thunder. He, too, had a thunderbolt which he brandished as he raced across the skies, drawn noisily in a golden carriage by 2,000 horses. The epic poem Mahabhrata describes the onset of the summer monsoon:
"And then Indra covered the entire firmament with masses of blue clouds. And those clouds, luminous with lightning and incessantly roaring against each other in the welkin, poured abundant water.
"And in consequence of the myriads of waves caused in the falling torrents, the flashes of lightning, and the violence of the winds, the sky looked as if it danced in madness."
Of course, one could always ward off the worst excesses of an angry deity by sacrifice. But even this had limits. Our own Judeo-Christian God, interrupted one day from some other more important heavenly pursuit, allegedly informed Isaiah:
"To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me? I am full of burnt offerings of rams and of the fat of fed beasts, and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs. Your new moons, and your appointed feasts, My soul hateth; they are a trouble unto Me, and I am weary to bear them."
Which only goes to show, as Voltaire was hinting at, that gods are human too.