Thus we see that Michabo, the hero-god of the Algonkins, was both the god
of light and day, of the winds and rains, and the creator, instructor and
teacher of mankind. The derivation of his name shows unmistakably that the
earliest form under which he was a mythological existence was as the
light-god. Later he became more familiar as god of the winds and storms,
the hero of the celestial warfare of the air-currents.

This is precisely the same change which we are enabled to trace in the
early transformations of Aryan religion. There, also, the older god of the
sky and light, Dyâus, once common to all members of the Indo-European
family, gave way to the more active deities, Indra, Zeus and Odin,
divinities of the storm and the wind, but which, after all, are merely
other aspects of the ancient deity, and occupied his place to the
religious sense.[1] It is essential, for the comprehension of early
mythology, to understand this twofold character, and to appreciate how
naturally the one merges into and springs out of the other.

[Footnote 1: This transformation is well set forth in Mr. Charles Francis
Keary's _Outlines of Primitive Belief Among the Indo-European Races_
(London, 1882), chaps, iv, vii. He observes: "The wind is a far more
physical and less abstract conception than the sky or heaven; it is also a
more variable phenomenon; and by reason of both these recommendations the
wind-god superseded the older Dyâus. * * * Just as the chief god of
Greece, having descended to be a divinity of storm, was not content to
remain only that, but grew again to some likeness of the older Dyâus, so
Odhinn came to absorb almost all the qualities which belong of right to a
higher god. Yet he did this without putting off his proper nature. He was
the heaven as well as the wind; he was the All-father, embracing all the
earth and looking down upon mankind."]