In the Chinese heaven, thunder is not a single god but a bureau. The served witness opens on "The Ministry of Thunder and Storms", a celestial office staffed and titled like an earthly one, its roster led by "Lei Tsu, the Ancestor of Thunder, Lei Kung, the Duke of Thunder" and their colleagues of lightning, wind, and rain. Command of the storm is parcelled out and filed; the thunder-god arrives wearing the robes of a civil servant of the sky.

The record's most vivid face is Lei Kung, the Duke of Thunder, drawn as "an ugly, black, bat-winged demon, with clawed feet," fitted with a monkey's head and an eagle's beak, who swings "a spiritual hammer" against "numerous drums strung about him". Here the reasoning turns oddly exact: it is that drum-noise, "not the lightning, which causes death." A second tale brings the god down to earth almost comically. A woodcutter sheltering under a tree in a storm finds a winged being pinned in a split trunk, crying "I am Lei Kung. In splitting this tree I got caught in it"; freed by stones driven in as wedges, the thunderer hands him a book that can "bring thunder or rain" and cure the sick, on the sole warning that he be summoned "only in case of pressing necessity".

All of this reaches us through the 1922 compilation Myths & Legends of China. Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this shelf its number, files a thunder-god across a dozen traditions — Icelandic Thor, Greek Zeus, Hindu Parjanya, and Lithuanian, Estonian, and Siberian witnesses besides — yet only the Chinese office is wired to served text today; the rest wait unread. When a sky-god is sorted into a ministry, with colleagues and a title and a fixed birthday, what has become of the terror that first named him?