Two facts are to be noticed in connection with this primitive religion.  One is the local distribution of the different deities and modes of worship through Greece.  Every tribe had its own god and its own worship.  In one place it was Zeus and Gaia; in another, Zeus and Cybele; in a third, Apollo and Artemis.  At Samothrace prevailed the worship of the Heaven and the Earth.[224] Dione was worshipped with Zeus at Dodona.[225] The Ionians were devoted to Poseidon, god of the sea.  In Arcadia, Athene was worshipped as Tritonia.  Hermes was adored on Mount Cyllene; Eros, in Boeotia; Pan, in Arcadia.  These local deities long remained as secondary gods, after the Pan-Hellenic worship of Olympus had overthrown their supremacy.  But one peculiarity of the Pre-Homeric religion was, that it consisted in the adoration of different gods in different places.  The religion of Hellas, after Homer, was the worship of the twelve great deities united on Mount Olympus.

The second fact to be observed in this early mythology is the change of name and of character through which each deity proceeds.  Zeus alone retains the same name from the first.[226]

Among all Indo-European nations, the Heaven and the Earth were the two primordial divinities.  The Rig-Veda calls them “the two great parents of the world.”  At Dodona, Samothrace, and Sparta they were worshipped together.  But while in India, Varuna, the Heavens, continued to be an object of adoration in the Vedic or second period, in Greece it faded early from the popular thought.  This already shows the opposite genius of the two nations.  To the Hindoos the infinite was all important, to the Greeks the finite.  The former, therefore, retain the adoration of the Heavens, the latter that of the Earth.

The Earth, Gaia, became more and more important to the Hellenic mind.  Passing through various stages of development, she became, successively, Gaia in the first generation, Rhea in the second, and Demeter ([Greek:  De meter]), Mother Earth, in the third.  In like manner the Sun is successively Hyperion, son of Heaven and Earth; Helios, son of Hyperion and Theia; and Phoebus-Apollo, son of Zeus and Latona.  The Moon is first Phoebe, sister of Hyperion; then Selene, sister of Helios; and lastly Artemis, sister of Apollo.  Pallas, probably meaning at first “the virgin,” became afterward identified with Athene, daughter of Zeus, as Pallas-Athene.  The Urania Pontus, the salt sea, became the Titan Oceanos, or Ocean, and in another generation Poseidon, or Neptune.

The early gods are symbolical, the later are personal.  The turning-point is reached when Kronos, Time, arrives.  The children of Time and Earth are no longer vast shadowy abstractions, but become historical characters, with biographies and personal qualities.  Neither Time nor History existed before Homer; when Time came, History began.

The three male children of Time were Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades; representing the three dimensions of space.  Height, Breadth, and Depth; Heaven, Ocean, and Hell.  They also represented the threefold progress of the human soul:  its aspiration and ascent to what is noble and good, its descent to what is profound, and its sympathy with all that is various:  in other words, its religion, its intelligence, and its affection.