According to the ancient Norse and Germanic peoples, thunder and lightning were spectacular celestial effects produced by the great god Thor smiting enemies with his short-handled hammer, Mjolnir. The strength he needed to wield this instrument with enough force to produce the atmospheric pyrotechnics was generated by his special belt, called Megingjord, and his pair of iron gloves, Járngreipr.
Thor had a very long career making war and thunder, well over a thousand years, until finally the Vikings surrendered to the spread of Christianity, the last western Europeans to adopt the one new God who drove out the many old gods, about 1000 C.E. For a while the fireworks and sound effects that come with thunderstorms were still divinely ordained, but as rational and logical modes of thinking and science came to prevail, thunder and lightning were diminished to fairly pedestrian and scientifically legible occurrences -- electricity, and and air rushing into the vacuum produced by the sudden discharge of electricity into the air.
Except at my house. When my sisters and I were very young, we lived in Ohio, where there are lots of storms. My sisters when they were still small told each other, and firmly believed that thunder was caused by God moving furniture. My own infantile conception of those awesome events was more generic than theirs -- I thought the sky was angry, and in his anger produced the dangerous lightening flashes and the frightening thunder. It wasn't that far from believing in Thor.
Who's to say which explanation is the "right" one, or which is the most accurate? I do know that the angry sky is a more satisfying and emotionally healthy way to think of those things than analyzing them in terms of depersonalized electrons and emotionally sterile vacuums. Can anyone categorically deny that the sky is angry, or that the universe and all its parts are sentient?
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