power over the weather in general and over rain and wind in particular.[587] That tempests are caused by the spirits of the dead is a belief of the Araucanians of Chili. Not a storm bursts upon the Andes or the ocean which these Indians do not ascribe to a battle between the souls of their fellow-countrymen and the dead Spaniards. In the roaring of the wind they hear the trampling of the ghostly horses, in the peal of the thunder the roll of the drums, and in the flashes of lightning the fire of the artillery.[588] [Sidenote: Every Latin town probably had its local Jupiter.] Thus, if the kings of Alba and Rome imitated Jupiter as god of the oak by wearing a crown of oak leaves, they seem also to have copied him in his character of a weather-god by pretending to make thunder and lightning. And if they did so, it is probable that, like Jupiter in heaven and many kings on earth, they also acted as public rain-makers, wringing showers from the dark sky by their enchantments whenever the parched earth cried out for the refreshing moisture. At Rome the sluices of heaven were opened by means of a sacred stone, and the ceremony appears to have formed part of the ritual of Jupiter Elicius, the god who elicits from the clouds the flashing lightning and the dripping rain.[589] And who so well fitted to perform the ceremony as the king, the living representative of the sky-god? [Sidenote: Many local Jupiters in Latium.] The conclusion which we have reached as to the kings of Rome and Alba probably holds good of all the kings of ancient Latium: each of them, we may suppose, represented or embodied the local Jupiter. For we can hardly doubt that of old every Latin town or settlement had its own Jupiter, as every town and almost every church in modern Italy has its own Madonna; and like the Baal of the Semites the local Jupiter was commonly worshipped on high places. Wooded heights, round which the rain-clouds gather, were indeed the natural sanctuaries for a god of the sky, the rain, and the oak. At Rome he occupied one summit of the Capitoline hill, while the other summit was assigned to his wife Juno, whose temple, with the long flight [Sidenote: Capitoline Jupiter and Juno.] of stairs leading up to it, has for ages been appropriately replaced by the church of St. Mary “in the altar of the sky” (_in Araceli_).[590] That both heights were originally wooded seems certain, for down to imperial times the saddle which joins them was known as the place “between the two groves.”[591] Virgil tells us that the hilltop where gilded temples glittered in his day had been covered of old by shaggy thickets, the haunt of woodland elves and savage men, “born of the tree-trunks and the heart of oak.”[592] These thickets were probably composed of oaks, for the oak crown [Sidenote: The hills of Rome once wooded with oaks.] was sacred to Capitoline Juno as well as to Jupiter;[593] it was to a sacred oak on the Capitol that