Jupiter (god)

132:0.2While at Rome, Ga­nid had reg­u­lar hours for study and for vis­it­ing places of in­ter­est about the city. His fa­ther had much busi­ness to trans­act, and de­sir­ing that his son grow up to be­come a wor­thy suc­ces­sor in the man­age­ment of his vast com­mer­cial in­ter­ests, he thought the time had come to in­tro­duce the boy to the busi­ness world. There were many cit­i­zens of In­dia in Rome, and of­ten one of Gonod’s own em­ploy­ees would ac­com­pany him as in­ter­preter so that Je­sus would have whole days to him­self; this gave him time in which to be­come thor­oughly ac­quainted with this city of two mil­lion in­hab­i­tants. He was fre­quently to be found in the fo­rum, the cen­ter of po­lit­i­cal, le­gal, and busi­ness life. He of­ten went up to the Capi­tolium and pon­dered the bond­age of ig­no­rance in which these Ro­mans were held as he be­held this mag­nif­i­cent tem­ple ded­i­cated to Jupiter, Juno, and Min­erva. He also spent much time on Pala­tine hill, where were lo­cated the em­peror’s res­i­dence, the tem­ple of Apollo, and the Greek and Latin li­braries.

69:2.5La­bor, the ef­forts of de­sign, dis­tin­guishes man from the beast, whose ex­er­tions are largely in­stinc­tive. The ne­ces­sity for la­bor is man’s paramount bless­ing. The Prince’s staff all worked; they did much to en­no­ble phys­i­cal la­bor on Uran­tia. Adam was a gar­dener; the God of the He­brews la­bored—he was the cre­ator and up­holder of all things. The He­brews were the first tribe to put a su­preme pre­mium on in­dus­try; they were the first peo­ple to de­cree that “he who does not work shall not eat.” But many of the re­li­gions of the world re­verted to the early ideal of idle­ness. Jupiter was a rev­eler, and Bud­dha be­came a re­flec­tive devo­tee of leisure.

85:1.3All an­cient clans and tribes had their sa­cred stones, and most mod­ern peo­ples man­i­fest a de­gree of ven­er­a­tion for cer­tain types of stones—their jew­els. A group of five stones was rev­er­enced in In­dia; in Greece it was a clus­ter of thirty; among the red men it was usu­ally a cir­cle of stones. The Ro­mans al­ways threw a stone into the air when in­vok­ing Jupiter. In In­dia even to this day a stone can be used as a wit­ness. In some re­gions a stone may be em­ployed as a tal­is­man of the law, and by its pres­tige an of­fender can be haled into court. But sim­ple mor­tals do not al­ways iden­tify De­ity with an ob­ject of rev­er­ent cer­e­mony. Such fe­tishes are many times mere sym­bols of the real ob­ject of wor­ship.

98:3.3Ro­man re­li­gion was greatly in­flu­enced by ex­ten­sive cul­tural im­por­ta­tions from Greece. Even­tu­ally most of the Olympian gods were trans­planted and in­cor­po­rated into the Latin pan­theon. The Greeks long wor­shiped the fire of the fam­ily hearth—Hes­tia was the vir­gin god­dess of the hearth; Vesta was the Ro­man god­dess of the home. Zeus be­came Jupiter; Aphrodite, Venus; and so on down through the many Olympian de­i­ties.