live in the sky along with Yama, the great original Pitri of
mankind. This first man came down from heaven in the
lightning, and back to heaven both himself and all his
offspring must have gone. There they distribute light unto men
below, and they shine themselves as stars; and hence the
Christianized German peasant, fifty centuries later, tells his
children that the stars are angels' eyes, and the English
cottager impresses it on the youthful mind that it is wicked
to point at the stars, though why he cannot tell. But the
Pitris are not stars only, nor do they content themselves with
idly looking down on the affairs of men, after the fashion of
the laissez-faire divinities of Lucretius. They are, on the
contrary, very busy with the weather; they send rain, thunder,
and lightning; and they especially delight in rushing over the
housetops in a great gale of wind, led on by their chief, the
mysterious huntsman, Hermes or Odin.

It has been elsewhere shown that the howling dog, or
wish-hound of Hermes, whose appearance under the windows of a
sick person is such an alarming portent, is merely the tempest
personified. Throughout all Aryan mythology the souls of the
dead are supposed to ride on the night-wind, with their
howling dogs, gathering into their throng the souls of those
just dying as they pass by their houses.[73] Sometimes the
whole complex conception is wrapped up in the notion of a
single dog, the messenger of the god of shades, who comes to
summon the departing soul. Sometimes, instead of a dog, we
have a great ravening wolf who comes to devour its victim and
extinguish the sunlight of life, as that old wolf of the tribe
of Fenrir devoured little Red Riding-Hood with her robe of