A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

Indeed, the Indo-European people who worshiped Poseidon did not know the sea until they arrived in southern Greece. A number of Poseidon’s characteristics have nothing to do with the sea.

Thanks to Apollo, the symbolism of the bow and of archery reveals other spiritual situations: mastery over distance (and hence detachment from the “immediate,” from the viscosity of the concrete), the calm and serenity implied by every effort of intellectual concentration.

itself: Artemis governs the sacrality of wild life, which knows fertility and maternity but not love and marriage.