Did the Legend of the Rain God’s Bride and the Wolf’s Wedding Originate in North Africa?
In various parts of the world, rain falling while the sun shines inspires a curious saying: that animals are getting married. In North Africa, people call it “the wolf’s wedding.” In Korea and Japan, it’s known as the fox’s wedding. This peculiar image of animal weddings during strange weather isn’t the only folkloric echo that seems to connect distant cultures. A similar pattern emerges with stories about the marriage between rain deity's and mortal women.
As someone deeply familiar with North African culture, especially Amazigh traditions, I’ve noticed a story told among the Imazighen (Berbers): the myth of Anzar, the god of rain. In times of drought, villagers would dress a young girl and perform rituals to symbolically marry her to Anzar, asking him to send rain. In some oral versions, Anzar truly loves a mortal woman and only after she consents to marry him does he grant the people rainfall.
Strangely enough, a nearly identical story appears in Korean mythology. The god of the Yalu River, Habaek, is associated with a divine-human union in a foundational myth: his daughter, Yuhwa, is taken by a celestial figure, and their child becomes the founder of the Goguryeo kingdom.
These similarities raise the question: could these shared myths have originated from a common source? Could ancient North African civilizations have influenced such stories beyond their borders?
Considering the reach of Amazigh peoples, it’s not impossible that elements of their spiritual and mythological worldview spread far and wide. The Moors, who carried Berber culture into Spain and Portugal, also indirectly influenced Latin American folklore during the colonial period. This might explain why the motif of the sunshower-animal wedding also appears in parts of Brazil and Mexico.
While mainstream scholarship tends to see these parallels as coincidental or products of universal human psychology, I believe there’s room to explore the possibility of forgotten migration patterns, shared ritual structures, and cross-cultural storytelling that began in North Africa and rippled outward over centuries.
Perhaps it is not coincidence that so many distant cultures describe nature’s strangeness with the same mythical solutions. Maybe, just maybe, a long time ago, these stories all had a single root — in the sun-drenched of North Africa, where gods once fell in love with humans, and wolves were wed beneath a golden rain.
