the name of Serapis; by the Persians, under that of Ormus or Oromaze;
and by the Romans, under that of Vesta and Vulcan.

Such was the origin of mythology: it may be said to be the daughter of
natural philosophy, embellished by poetry; only destined to describe
nature and its parts. If antiquity is consulted, it will be perceived
without much trouble, that these famous sages, those legislators, those
priests, those conquerors, who were the instructors of infant nations,
themselves adored active nature, or the great whole considered
relatively to its different operations or qualities; that this was what
they caused the ignorant savages whom they had gathered together to
adore. It was the great whole they deified; it was its various parts
which they made their inferior gods; it was from the necessity of her
laws they made fate. The Greeks called it Nature, a divinity who had a
thousand names. Varro says, "I believe that God is the soul of the
universe, and that the universe is God." Cicero says "that in the
mysteries of Samothracia, of Lemnos, of Eleusis, it was nature much more
than the gods, they explained to the initiated." Pliny says, "we must
believe that the world, or that which is contained under the vast extent
of the heavens, is the Divinity; even eternal, infinite, without
beginning or end." It was these different modes of considering nature
that gave birth to Polytheism, to idolatry. Allegory masqued its mode of
action: it was at length parts of this great whole, that idolatry
represented by statues and symbols.

To complete the proofs of what has been said; to shew distinctly that it
was the great whole, the universe, the nature of things, which was the
real object of the worship of Pagan antiquity, hardly any thing can be
more decisive than the beginning of the hymn of Orpheus addressed to the
god Pan.