the same generation, have grown
into persons, ceasing to be abstract ideas, or powers of nature. Five were
the children of Kronos, namely, Zeus, Poseidon, Here, Hestia, and Demeter;
six were children of Zeus, Apollo and Artemis, Hephaestos and Ares, Hermes
and Athene. The twelfth of the Olympian group, Aphrodite, belonged to the
second generation, being daughter of Uranos and of the Ocean. Beauty,
divine child of Sky and Sea, was conceived of as older than Power.

These are the three successive groups of deities; the second supplanting
the first, the third displacing the second. The earlier gods we must needs
consider, not as persons, but as powers of nature, not yet humanized.[219]
The last, seated on Olympus, are "fair humanities."

But now, it is remarkable that there must have been, in point of fact,
three stages of religious development, and three successive actual
theologies in Greece, corresponding very nearly to these three legendary
generations of gods.

When the ancestors of the Hellenic race came from Asia, they must have
brought with them a nature-worship, akin to that which subsequently
appeared in India in the earliest hymns of the Vedas. Comparative
Philology, as we have before seen, has established the rule, that whatever
words are common to all the seven Indo-European families must have been
used in Central Asia before their dispersion. From this rule Pictet[220]
has inferred that the original Aryan tribes all worshipped the Heaven, the
Earth, Sun, Fire, Water, and Wind. The ancestors of the Greeks must have
brought with them into Hellas the worship of some of these elementary
deities. And we find at least two of them, Heaven and Earth, represented
in Hesiod's first class of the oldest deities. Water is there in the form
of Pontus, the Sea, and the other Uranids have the same elementary
character.

The oldest hymns in the Vedas mark the second development of the Aryan
deities in India. The chief gods of this period are Indra, Varuna, Agni,
Savitri, Soma. Indra is the god of the air, directing the storm, the
lightning, the clouds, the rain; Varuna is the all-embracing circle of the
heavens, earth, and sea; Savitri or Surja is the Sun, King of Day, also
called Mitra; Agni is Fire; and Soma is the sacred fermented juice of the
moon-plant, often indeed the moon itself.

As in India, so in Greece, there was a second development of gods. They
correspond in this, that the powers of nature began, in both ca