The Rainbow Taboo

People who have grown up in the West with cheerful depictions of rainbows, are often astonished when they learn they’re considered unlucky and downright ominous across huge swathes of cultures. We certainly were. 

But for a large part of the world rainbows represent a malevolent force. The late, hyper-thorough linguist Robert A. Blust was equally taken aback when he learned of this phenomena. So on and off for the next 40 years, he went to great scientific pains to determine the reasons why. 

This article does a really fine job reporting the whole story, but here are your CliffsNotes:

He first became aware of the ‘taboo’ in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1980 after pointing at one himself, and being corrected by a local. Intrigued, he began poring through ethnographies for traditional beliefs about rainbows.

He collected evidence and eventually documented the belief in 124 cultures around the world. From Indonesia to India, Brazil, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, Thailand, Laos, even the Lakota in North America had a version of the taboo. It existed globally. Specifically it was pointing at a rainbow with the index finger that was the big no-no.

“There was also more to the taboo than the vague idea that pointing to rainbows is bad. Blust found it often came bundled with specific ideas about what would happen if you violated the taboo, ideas that varied from culture to culture. Most commonly, your finger would suffer the consequences: it might become bent or paralyzed, fall off, wither, rot, or swell, or develop warts, ulcers, or maggots. Less commonly—such as in parts of New Guinea and Australia—the ill effects would befall your mother.”

But why?

“Blust proposes two key factors. The first is that, traditionally, rainbows were considered sacred, a manifestation of another realm. He writes that, accordingly, they were “greeted with that mixture of fear, awe and reverence generally accorded to spiritual things.” The second factor is that pointing is widely viewed as aggressive; combine these two ingredients and you get the idea that one should not act aggressively toward a sacred being.

And that’s the end of the rainbow (taboo).

Additional reading for the extra-curious: Blust, an illustrated expert on comparative Austronesian linguistics, wrote a book called ‘The Dragon and the Rainbow’, an anthropological-based take connecting dragons and rainbows across cultures, it goes into great detail on the ethnology of the rainbow. You can read that here.