Herla: that of the “Herla King” is one of the numberless variants of a legend rooted in the Nordic saga of the “wild hunt”; the figure, leading an “infernal gang” of souls, is condemned wildly to follow howling beasts in certain stormy nights. The origins of the name “Arlecchino” (“Harlequin”) seems to derive from such tradition, and evidence of this would be the bump on the black mask of the origins, a remnant of infernal horns.

The demonic "hure" with fiends coming and going	How, more or less, the French ended up imagining the "wild hunt" (from Callot's Oeuvres )