In this myth Michabo, the Light-God, was represented to the native mind as still fighting with the powers of Darkness, not now the darkness of night, but that of the heavy and gloomy clouds which roll up the sky and blind the eye of day.  His weapons are the lightning and the thunderbolt, and the victory he achieves is turned to the good of the world he has created.

This is still more clearly set forth in an Ojibway myth.  It relates that in early days there was a mighty serpent, king of all serpents, whose home was in the Great Lakes.  Increasing the waters by his magic powers, he began to flood the land, and threatened its total submergence.  Then Michabo rose from his couch at the sun-rising, attacked the huge reptile and slew it by a cast of his dart.  He stripped it of its skin, and clothing himself in this trophy of conquest, drove all the other serpents to the south.[1] As it is in the south that, in the country of the Ojibways, the lightning is last seen in the autumn, and as the Algonkins, both in their language and pictography, were accustomed to assimilate the lightning in its zigzag course to the sinuous motion of the serpent,[2] the meteorological character of this myth is very manifest.

[Footnote 1:  H.R.  Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, Vol. i, p. 179, Vol. ii, p. 117.  The word animikig in Ojibway means “it thunders and lightnings;” in their myths this tribe says that the West Wind is created by Animiki, the Thunder. (Ibid. Indian Tribes, Vol. v, p. 420.)]

[Footnote 2:  When Father Buteux was among the Algonkins, in 1637, they explained to him the lightning as “a great serpent which the Manito vomits up.” (Relation de la Nouvelle France, An. 1637, p. 53.) According to John Tanner, the symbol for the lightning in Ojibway pictography was a rattlesnake. (Narrative, p. 351.)]

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, Dyaus, 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.