ad 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 scarlet twilight. [74] Thus we arrive at a true
werewolf myth. The storm-wind, or howling Rakshasa of Hindu folk-lore,
is "a great misshapen giant with red beard and red hair, with pointed
protruding teeth, ready to lacerate and devour human flesh; his body is
covered with coarse, bristling hair, his huge mouth is open, he looks
from side to side as he walks, lusting after the flesh and blood of men,
to satisfy his raging hunger and quench his consuming thirst. Towards
nightfall his strength increases manifold; he can change his shape at
will; he haunts the woods, and roams howling through the jungle." [75]

Now if the storm-wind is a host of Pitris, or one great Pitri who
appears as a fearful giant, and is also a pack of wolves or wish-hounds,
or a single savage dog or wolf, the inference is obvious to the
mythopoeic mind that men may become wolves, at least after death. And to
the uncivilized thinker this inference is strengthened, as Mr. Spencer
has shown, by evidence registered on his own tribal totem or heraldic
emblem. The bears and lions and leopards of heraldry are the degenerate
descendants of the totem of savagery which designated the tribe by a
beast-symbol. To the untutored mind there is everything in a name; and
the descendant of Brown Bear or Yellow Tiger or Silver Hyaena cannot be
pronounced unfaithful to his own style of philosophizing, if he regards
his ancestors, who career about his hut in the darkness of night,
as belonging to whatever order of beasts his totem associations may
suggest.

Thus we not only see a ray of light thrown on the subject of
metempsychosis, but we get a glimpse of the curious process by which
the intensely realistic mind of antiquity arrived at the notion that
men could be transformed into beasts. For the belief that the soul
can temporarily quit the body during lifetime has been universally
entertained; and from the conception of wolf-like ghosts it