Complex Numbers

Over the Rainbow

Last day of being away from home... until next week.

Even Rainbows Have a Dark Side  
Humans were once united by the belief that you should never, ever point at one.

I find that extremely difficult to believe. Not because it's a silly superstition, but the idea that "humans were once united by" anything.

Both had learned as children that if you broke the taboo, your finger would become bent like a rainbow.

Right, and if you keep making faces, your face will freeze like that; if you crack your knuckles you'll get arthritis (to be fair, you might, but not from cracking); and if you watch too much porn, you'll go blind.

*looks at medical bill for cataract surgery*

...okay, so that last one might be true.

The first hint that he was on to something bigger, something truly boggling, came from a report of a prohibition on pointing to rainbows in India. “It did not take long for the shock to set in,” he wrote. The report suggested “the rainbow taboo”—as he would come to call the phenomenon—was not confined to Southeast Asia.

Oh, it's in Southeast Asia and India? Wow, it must be all over the world.

He would soon amass evidence for the rainbow taboo—in some form or another—in 124 cultures. The prohibition turned up in North America, among the Atsugewi of northern California and the Lakota of the northern plains; in remote parts of Australia and isolated islands in Melanesia; among the Nyabwa of Ivory Coast and the Kaiwá of Brazil.

Okay, okay, jeez, I get the point. You make one joke...

The belief was not found in every culture, according to Blust’s search, but it was present globally, across all inhabited regions.

See? I told you we weren't united.

Less commonly—such as in parts of New Guinea and Australia—the ill effects would befall your mother.

When I was a kid and my mother made me do something I didn't like, or scolded me for doing something I did like, I'd deliberately stomp on the cracks in the sidewalk.

I was an asshole kid.

This, by the way, took significant effort and patience on my part, because where I spent my childhood there were no sidewalks for miles, so I had to wait until someone let me ride with them into town. If it was my mom, I'd leap onto a crack, look back at her, jump to another one, look back, stomp, look... getting more and more disappointed each time (never mind that if I'd been successful, no one would have been able to drive me back home).

As her back never broke, I lost all faith in kid lore. But later, when I learned about how concrete (such as that in sidewalks) works, I discovered that as concrete cures, it develops microfractures throughout its matrix. You can't see them (hence, "micro") but if you're walking on a sidewalk you cannot avoid stepping on dozens of cracks with each and every pace.

The relative lack of mother's back breakage in the world should be enough to put people off such taboos, but apparently not.

A final recurring idea was that, should you accidentally point to a rainbow, there were remedies. You could wet the offending digit; or put it into a bodily cavity like your mouth, anus, or belly button; or, according to the Javanese version of the taboo, plunge it into a pile of buffalo dung.

Or any of the above, in random order?

Anyway. No, the article isn't about fact-checking the taboo; it's about the very interesting widespread nature of the belief and speculation about the reasons for it. And while even that didn't unite humanity as one shining, glorious people singing under the rainbow, it's a fascinating glimpse into peoples' beliefs.