Rainmakers

Just read the following article. It says: 

When rainmakers recite incantations, sacrifice goats and chickens, throw cowries into the air, go into frenzied dances and blow white powder into the atmosphere, they are communicating with “unseen” reality.

So I wonder if it might possibly work and is due to those actions?

Before you think this is weird African thinking, you must know that this belief is not drastically different than the Western metaphysical philosophy of occasionalism, popularized by Nicolas Malebranche and George Berkeley.

Which held that there is no material causality, God does everything. Not a notion that is popular in the modern west, but that's not an argument against it. I wrote a blog post on Berkeley's metaphysic.

John Grisham’s 1995 book, The Rainmaker, contributes in large part to our current understanding of the term – a person who comes in when hope is out of the door and causes a windfall.

Never come across this definition! My understanding is that it is someone who causes it to rain through anomalous means.