with it, as an animal or a tree. Also things which
are visible to us accomplish the beauty of the world. The oblique
circle called the Zodiac in heaven is with different images painted and
distinguished:--

There's Cancer, Leo, Virgo, and the Claws;
Scorpio, Arcitenens, and Capricorn;
Amphora, Pisces, then the Ram, and Bull;
The lovely pair of Brothers next succeed.
(From Aratus.)

There are a thousand others that give us the suitable reflections of the
beauty of the world. Thus Euripides:--

The starry splendor of the skies,
The beautiful and varied work of that wise
Creator, Time.

From this the knowledge of a god is conveyed to man; that the sun, the
moon, and the rest of the stars, being carried under the earth, rise
again in their proper color, magnitude, place, and times. Therefore they
who by tradition delivered to us the knowledge and veneration of
the gods did it by these three manner of ways:--first, from Nature;
secondly, from fables; thirdly, from the testimony supplied by the
laws of commonwealths. Philosophers taught the natural way; poets, the
fabulous; and the political way is to be had from the constitutions of
each commonwealth. All sorts of this learning are distinguished into
these seven parts. The first is from things that are conspicuous, and
the observation of those bodies which are in places superior to us. To
men the heavenly bodies that are so visible did give the knowledge of
the deity; when they contemplated that they are the causes of so great
an harmony, that they regulate day and night, winter and summer, by
their rising and setting, and likewise considered those things which
by their influences in the earth do receive a being and do likewise
fructify. It was manifest to men that the Heaven was the father of those
things, and the Earth the mother; that the Heaven was the father is
clear, since from the heavens there is the pouring down of waters, which
have their spermatic faculty; the Earth the mother, because she receives
them and brings forth. Likewise men considering that the stars are
running (Greek omitted) in a perpetual motion, that the sun and moon
give us the stimulus to view and contemplate (Greek omitted), they call
them all gods (Greek omitted).

In the second and third place, they thus distinguished the deities into
those which are beneficial and those that are injurious to mankind.
Those which are beneficial they call Jupiter,