Excerpt from Original Sanskrit Texts, Vol. 5: On the Origin and History the People of India, Their Religion and Institutions
[In opposition to those who represented Dionysos, the wine-god, as meaning merely wine, Hephaistos fire, Demeter com, etc., Plutarch urges]: -
"For the god is not a lifeless thing, subject to human handling and control. But from the fact that they dispose of, and bestow upon us, these objects, and preserve them to us perpetual and constant, we have considered them to be gods. And these gods are not different among different peoples, they are not Barbarian, or Hellenic, not southern or northern; hut just as the sun, and the moon, and the heaven, and the earth, and the sea are common to all - though they receive different names from different races - so too, while there is but one reason that orders, and one providence that superintends, this universe, and administrative powers are set over all, different honours and appellations have been assigned to these divine beings by the laws of different nations. And symbols too are employed, some of an obscure character, by initiated persons, and others of a plainer description by others, with the view of guiding men's conceptions of divine things. But this practice is not free from danger; for some persons, deviating from the truth, have slipped into superstition, while others, seeking to avoid the marsh of superstition, have fallen into atheism as over a precipice."
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