Neolithic Shamanism: Spirit Work in the Norse Tradition - Raven Kaldera 2012

Water
Appendix

Isaac’s Storm, by Erik Larson

The deadliest natural disaster in United States history was presaged, as so many are, by the assurance that the disaster was impossible. Less than ten years prior to the destruction of Galveston, Texas, the city’s weather service representative explained in the local paper that due to atmospheric conditions, a storm of any size could not hit the coastal city. The designers of the Titanic should have taken the lesson to heart.

This book is truly about two phenomena—the first being the monstrous storm that completely submerged Galveston during the fall of 1900, killing more than six thousand people, and the second, the immense hubris of individuals who believed that their science had solved the mysteries of climate and weather, to the point where the U.S. Weather Service stopped accepting reports from Caribbean weather stations, in part out of bureaucratic infighting, and in part because firsthand observations disputed their prediction of how the weather should be behaving. Larson, who has since become quite well-known, writes eloquently about the often futile struggle against the advancing water that swept across the city, built on a barrier island. Perhaps the book’s most powerful lesson for students of magic is that water has immense and unstoppable mass. Wind too plays a role in this story, as it does in all of these books, but water is the engine driving the horrors of Galveston’s destruction, arriving without drama as the storm surge pushes its way up into the city before the storm is even a glimmer on the horizon.