Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/283

Rh Æolus with the winds imprisoned in his cave has the office of the Red Indian Spirit of the Winds, and of the Polynesian Maui. With quaint adaptation to nature-myth and even to moral parable, the Harpies, the Storm-gusts that whirl and snatch and dash and smirch with eddying dust-clouds, become the loathsome bird-monsters sent to hover over the table of Phineus to claw and defile his dainty viands. If we are to choose an Aryan Storm-god for ideal grandeur, we must seek him in

'... the hall where Runic Odin Howls his war-song to the gale.'

Jakob Grimm has denned Odin or Woden as 'the all-penetrating creative and formative power.' But such abstract conceptions can hardly be ascribed to his barbaric worshippers. As little may his real nature be discovered among the legends which degrade him to a historical king of Northern men, an 'Othinus rex.' See the All-father sitting cloud-mantled on his heaven-seat, overlooking the deeds of men, and we may discern in him the attributes of the Heaven-god. Hear the peasant say of the raging tempest, that it is 'Odin faring by;' trace the mythological transition from Woden's tempest to the 'Wütende Heer,' the 'Wild Huntsman' of our own grand storm-myth, and we shall recognize the old Teutonic deity in his function of cloud-compeller, of Tempest-god. The 'rude Carinthian boor' can show a relic from a yet more primitive stage of mental history, when he sets up a wooden bowl of various meats on a tree before his house, to fodder the wind that it may do no harm. In Swabia, Tyrol, and the Upper Palatinate, when the storm rages, they will fling a spoonful or a handful of meal in the face of the gale, with this formula in the last-named district, 'Da Wind, hast du Mehl für dein Kind, aber aufhören musst du!'