@JamestheJust
Thank you very much for your link, the edge between symbolic and literal is one of the most complex to disentangle.
I went trough your interesting link with the Herodotus quotations.
The dispute about how sacred texts have to be read is still present today. For instance as I chosed to be part of a rosicrucian fringe order, I agree to partake to a current of thought that would like to see the bible with symbolic meanings that overweight the literal ones, but still today you are going to find a lot of students (more o less catholic) that will defend the literal aspect.
For instance I start to independently give credit that Isis could be more o less identified with the Holy Ghost in the Christian trinity. But would open another post for that.
Most of the ancient rites were literal and using drugs and sex. But still the archeoastronomy showed some wisdom that suggested a much more articulated symbolic system. The thoughtfulness of thinkers as Plato when mentions the pythagorean methaphors (for instance a perforated cup to contain the passions), put forward for consideration the ability from the ancients to use the symbols. Much-debated have been in the modernity the structuralist french studies of Vernant and Levi Strauss about the importance of the symbols for the ancient Greeks, how the polymorphic meanings of the deities, namely a no unilateral interpretation makes these symbols so important to us, because open to several interpretations, this is also a masonic principle as far as I spoke in some lodges, where there is not a dogmatic meaning for a particular symbol.
Said that, all the roots of the religions are in really literal rituals, where the female fecundity, as in Artemis, Potnia Theron, Diana, Cybele is all a recall with enrichments of the more simple Paleolithic and Mesolithic themes of big breasted females. So still you could see in some documentary, modern men from "civilizations without the writing techniques" that were inserting their erected penis into the ground as way to have prosperous harvests, as to sustain the fact that initially the literal part, the sun and the nature were playing a role much more practical than esoteric.
But the point that even some masonic authors miss at my advice is that outside the external manifestation of astronomic phenomena the role of corrispondence between micro and macro cosmos play an important role in the mystery, I read Know thyself on the entrance of some Lodges I visited after all.
@BullDozer Harrell
the famous 1717 Goose and Giridon story comes from Anderson second edition of the constitutions. The problem is that the sources he quotes are not always reliable, and also he was putting is point of view. With these premises I would not be surprised that Anderson wrote/elaborate them together with other enlightened minds. These are the years where the landmarks are taking a substantial form, far before the categorizations will see a century after from Albert Mackey. But mines are only speculations, as I would like to shed light on who wrote the rituals as written in the title of this thread.