Thus the early mythology of Greece is to be properly considered in its simple and outward interpretations.

The Greeks, as yet in their social infancy, regarded the legends of their faith as a child reads a fairy tale, credulous of all that is supernatural in the agency--unconscious of all that may be philosophical in the moral.
It is true, indeed, that dim associations of a religion, sabaean and elementary, such as that of the Pelasgi (but not therefore foreign and philosophical), with a religion physical and popular, are, here and there, to be faintly traced among the eldest of the Grecian authors.
We may see that in Jupiter they represented the ether, and in Apollo, and sometimes even in Hercules, the sun.

But these authors, while, perhaps unconsciously, they hinted at the symbolical, fixed, by the vitality and nature of their descriptions, the actual images of the gods and, reversing the order of things, Homer created Jupiter! [35] But most of the subtle and typical interpretations of the Grecian mythology known to us at present were derived from the philosophy of a later age.

The explanations of religious fables--such, for instance, as the chaining of Saturn by Jupiter, and the rape of Proserpine by Pluto, in which Saturn is made to signify the revolution of the seasons, chained to the courses of the stars, to prevent too immoderate a speed, and the rape of Proserpine is refined into an allegory that denotes the seeds of corn that the sovereign principle of the earth receives and sepulchres [36];--the moral or physical explanation of legends like these was, I say, the work of the few, reduced to system either from foreign communication or acute invention.

For a symbolical religion, created by the priests of one age, is reinstated or remodelled after its corruption by the philosophers of another.
XII.