The Spirits of the North Wind

Aerial Daemons in Mythology and Folklore

The North Wind brings snow to the Author’s homestead in this photo from several years ago. Pictured is our good old dog Jake, who is no longer with us.

The onset of serious cold weather on a homestead is always a time fraught with a certain level of anxiety for the smallholder. One wonders if the stocks of accumulated biomass, the summer sunlight stored in the form of hay, firewood, and stored grain, will last through the dark and cold months until the sun returns on its northward course again in the spring. The arrival of the frigid weather systems which bring the snow and howling winds from the northern regions has been shrouded in myth and mystery and associated with the coming of spiritual forces that are indifferent to human and animal life, if not downright malevolent. The Earth centered cultures of the temperate and subpolar regions of the world have developed a number of technologies of spiritual defense against these powers of cold, darkness, and death that lurk just outside t…