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#Fr6 onWitches Winds

Witches Winds | The Ion Balance | Ions in Nature | Ions in Our Cities | Ions in General
Perhaps because I now knew that I was not unique, that others were similarly troubled, I began to
voice my belief about the Geneva air being unhealthy. Astonishingly, friends agreed with me, and
some of them knew of the age old legends of the Foehn, the dry southerly wind that blows out of the
Alps in early spring and fall and is stigmatized as a Witches Wind. When the Foehn blows, the Swiss
and the people of southern Germany blame almost everything unusual on the wind itself. Fights at
home, suicides, murders, traffic accidents, even plane crashes - all are said to be part of the Foehn
sickness.
In Munich and many other parts of central Europe north of the Alps, surgeons even postpone
operations if a Foehn is forecast.
But no one could explain why the wind is evil; why it blows misfortune and unhappiness as it sweeps
across the plains dominated by the Alpine Mountains.There are scores of so called Witches Winds
around the world. They include the Santa Ana in California, the summer winds of the desert that
stretches from northern Arizona down into Mexico (they are known in Indian mythology as the Bitter
Winds); the Chinook in western Canada and the U.S.; the Sharav of the Middle East around Israel. All
are infamous, perhaps the Foehn most of all.
In Munich, a good friend learned to fear the Foehn because it made it impossible for her to sleep. For
years she had inexplicable but occasional bouts of sleeplessness and irritability. By the process of
deduction similar to mine, she realized she slept badly only when the wind blew from the south, and
that wind was the Foehn. Another friend in Munich, a British born artist, cycles around the city all year
- except when the Foehn blows. "For some reason the drivers all become either madmen or an
accident looking for a place to happen," he says. "To ride my bike would be asking for trouble.
"Along the Rocky Mountains in the western U.S. and Canada, the warm, dry Chinook flows eastward
out of the mountains for a few days at a time every year as winter is about to give way to spring.
Doctors say the Chinook coincides with outbreaks of the common cold and other respiratory ills and I
know one successful industrialist who after a decade or so found the Chinook made him feel so ill (he
too, suffered anxieties as well as colds) that he now carefully schedules his holidays so that he
escapes the area each spring.
In southern California, the hot, dry Santa Ana wind streams out of the coastal mountains across the
plain where cities sprawl into one another from north of Los Angeles and Hollywood down to San Diego
in the south. The belief that it causes murders and suicides and violence is so widespread that the
Santa Ana is even used as the explanation for crimes in the private eye stories of Raymond Chandler
and Ross MacDonald. In the Middle East some courts even permit the fact that the Sharav was blowing

at the time a crime was committed to be entered as a plea of mitigation, while in parts of Switzerland
and Italy judges are often known to be lenient if the local Witches Wind was blowing at the time
certain offenses were committed.
These and others mentioned here are probably among the quarter or more of the human race who are
"weather sensitive" human barometers whose minds and bodies are thrown violently out of balance in
response to changes in the weather.
It was not until now, however that this kind of folk wisdom had a scientific explanation. Even though I
later found that most of my problems in Geneva were similar to those of people known by their
doctors to be weather sensitive, it wasn't until 1971 that I finally made the connection between my
"Geneva condition" and air electricity. At the same time I found that not only weather sensitive people
are affected by electricity in the air. A large slice of humanity is influenced, most noticeably in the path
of the Sharav in Israel, the Foehn in Switzerland, southern Germany, and Austria, the Mistral in
France, the Sirocco in Italy, the Santa Ana in California.
The acutely weather sensitive may go to doctors with an encyclopedic collection of physical and mental
ills ranging from swollen feet to serious psychiatric problems. Others are equally affected, and without
a sane explanation for their feelings, are driven to extraordinary acts. In all these areas, both the
suicide rate and number of attempted suicides soar when the Witches Winds blow, and traffic
accidents become almost epidemic. Most people, of course, just feel low and out of sorts. Admittedly
they blame their feeling on the weather, on the fact that it may be cloudy, humid, or a day of dreary
drizzle. It's when there is no visual change in the weather, as is often the case with the Witches Winds
that these seemingly inexplicable feelings are most damaging.
In a similar way everyone may be equally a victim of the man-made twentieth century Witches Winds
that we create in cities, in modern buildings with central heating and air conditioning, and in cars and
other forms of transportation. It is not the weather itself to which people are sensitive so much as to
those electrically charged molecules of air called ions - that "something electrical about the air.