Lightning

All manner of stories are told about us shamans. For a start they say we can fly, a skill allegedly passed on from the people of a far distant land many years ago.

Once, so the story goes, there was a tribe of magicians or sages or healers who lived in the days when the medicinal properties of plants were first being discovered. For centuries they sought a herb which would give them the gift of flight, wandering about the young world and experimenting with every new plant they found. This was a dangerous process in which many of them died of bizarre forms of poisoning but during which they also discovered many important remedies, culinary herbs and pigments.

They traded knowledge of plants with the other tribes they met, until one day they heard of a herb which had a strange and unbelievably hot taste and was reputed to make the body lighter, and of one foolish youth who had eaten so much of it that he had drifted up into the air. He narrowly escaped being blown away by the wind when his head burst into flames due to the heat released by chewing the herb, after which he apparently fell back to earth. His hair never grew back.

They were greatly excited by this news and set out to look for the miraculous plant.

After much searching – the subject of numerous legends in its own right – they found it. When they first ascended into the sky they found it so clean and peaceful by comparison with the chaos of the surface that they settled there permanently. They made their dwellings in the interior of hollowed-out cumulus clouds and only returned to earth when they needed to gather fresh supplies of the flying herb – they had to chew this incessantly to stay aloft – and other materials for the magic which they had learnt during their search.

There was one unfortunate side effect, however – the story of the reckless boy's head catching fire had not been entirely untrue, though perhaps exaggerated. Chewing the herb caused their mouths to fill up with a fiery, electrically charged fluid which they occasionally had to spit out, causing what we know as lightning.

It's all rubbish, of course. But let them have their fairy tales – how are you going to explain to a non-shaman what "electrical discharge" means?