15.5.20 Rainbow's End

Good morning everybody as another week in the School of Daddy draws to a close. In today's lesson we have been learning how to "unweave the rainbow as it erewhile made" to quote the great Romantic poet Keats, in his poem Lamia. The subject of rainbows has been suggested by the children's Nanna and thanks go to Sue for the inspiration - I'm sure she'll be overjoyed with the results! Not only have we now logged the rainbow "in the dull catalogue of common things" (to quote the great poet Keats once more) by applying the cold and clinical gaze of science, but in the interests of balance, we have also been looking at some of the more fanciful interpretations of this chromatic aberration. The children have been fascinated by stories of rainbows as magical bridges such as Bifrost of Viking legend, connecting Midgard and Asgard - good to know if the current situation does turn out to be the beginning of Ragnarock. Rainbows appear as terrible weapons like the magical rainbow used by Indra, Hindu God of War and Thunder, to rain down lightning bolts on his foes and as a divine sanction of war in the story of Ishtar and Izdubar from the epic of Gilgamesh. The Indigenous Peoples of Australia have an interesting take on rainbows, often depicting them as gigantic and sometimes malevolent serpents that are connected with creation myths - they spread fertility with the rain but sometimes blindness and disease too, whilst the Karen people of Burma considered rainbows to be painted demons that ate children. Some Amazonian cultures blamed rainbows for skin diseases and in the Incan Empire there was a tradition of closing one's mouth to prevent disease if a rainbow was seen - not a bad habit for folk to get in to in these troubled times. And let us not forget the Christian deity who used the rainbow as a bit of an apology for exterminating most of the living things on the planet with the Great Flood. Out of all these extraordinary tales the children's favourite was the old Irish legend of the Leprechaun and his treasure. So much so that they have devised an experiment to see if they can lure one of the Little People in to our humble abode with the rainbow we have created to see if indeed there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow...