Again, when he discovers the influence of the heaven upon the growth
of his labour--when, taught by experience, he acknowledges its power
to blast or to mellow--then, by the same process of ideas, the HEAVEN
also assumes the character of divinity, and becomes a new agent, whose
wrath is to be propitiated, whose favour is to be won. What common
sense thus suggests to us, our researches confirm, and we find
accordingly that the Earth and the Heaven are the earliest deities of
the agricultural Pelasgi. As the Nile to the fields of the Egyptian--
earth and heaven to the culture of the Greek. The effects of the SUN
upon human labour and human enjoyment are so sensible to the simplest
understanding, that we cannot wonder to find that glorious luminary
among the most popular deities of ancient nations. Why search through
the East to account for its worship in Greece? More easy to suppose
that the inhabitants of a land, whom the sun so especially favoured--
saw and blessed it, for it was good, than, amid innumerable
contradictions and extravagant assumptions, to decide upon that
remoter shore, whence was transplanted a deity, whose effects were so
benignant, whose worship was so natural, to the Greeks. And in the
more plain belief we are also borne out by the more sound inductions
of learning. For it is noticeable that neither the moon nor the
stars--favourite divinities with those who enjoyed the serene nights,
or inhabited the broad plains of the East--were (though probably
admitted among the Pelasgic deities) honoured with that intense and
reverent worship which attended them in Asia and in Egypt. To the
Pelasgi, not yet arrived at the intellectual stage of philosophical
contemplation, the most sensible objects of influence would be the
most earnestly adored. What the stars were to the East, their own
beautiful Aurora, awaking them to the delight of their genial and
temperate climate, was to the early Greeks.

Of deities, thus created from external objects, some will rise out (if
I may use the expression) of natural accident and local circumstance.
An earthquake will connect a deity with the earth--an inundation with
the river or the sea. The Grecian soil bears the marks of maritime
revolution; many of the tribes were settled along the coast, and
perhaps had already adventured their rafts upon the main. A deity of
the sea (without any necessary revelation from Africa) is, therefore,
among the earliest of the Gre