With the advent of the concept of Nature, which emerged more or less simultaneously in China, India and Greece some 2,700 years ago, naturalism replaced what we now call "supernaturalism". Along with it, a new world-view emerged. The earliest Greek scientists "invented" the concept of Nature as "the productive power" of the World. Accordingly, to help us understand their Natural World-View, we use the paradigm of "Nature" itself. This world-view rejects religious personification in favor of material Reification ("thing-making"), transforming personal gods who "are" the World into mere physical things produced by Nature that are "in" the world. To paraphrase an early Greek philosopher, the Sun is not Apollo, a God, but rather simply a big ball of fire in the sky. Nor is the World itself the great god Pan, for instance, but rather just "to pan", as the Greeks would say, which we translate quite literally as "the totality" of natural things.
Reification betrays the intentionally literal grammar of the Natural World-View, the grammar of Logos. Unlike the symbolically rich grammar of Mythos, Logos is rich in natural significance; and Reification, unlike Personification, is not figurative but merely literal. Admittedly, Reification does have affinities with Metonymy, for natural things are taken to be parts of the whole, and this form (which underlies synecdoche, for instance) can account for the metonymic capacity of rational language. But in the Sciences metonymic devices are not presumed to represent actual physical relations (as was the case in Contagious Magic), but rather merely to illustrate physical processes. For instance, to say that "during the Big-Bang, a slight cosmic asymmetry gave birth to all galactic nebulae" (in which the phrase 'Big-Bang' is an instance of synecdoche, a type of metonymic figure) does not imply that the universe was born in a simple explosion. Rather, the figurative language is used merely to illustrate Causality on a grand scale.
Similarly, as the metaphoric phrase "gave birth" illustrates, Logos also uses a form of Analogy. But now Analogy is not presumed to represent a physical relation (as was the case in Imitative Magic); it is only a means of comparing different aspects of Nature. This is the scientific, as opposed the magical, approach to Analogy. For instance, in the early 20th century a model of atomic structure was proposed in which an atom was described as being like a tiny solar system. This is admittedly merely an analogy, but used figuratively rather than literally (as in Magic), it served well enough to advance of our understanding of atoms; and it illustrates the use of scientific Analogy, as opposed to magical Analogy.