The meaning of the “fairy‐tale” told by the Chaldæan Qû‐tâmy is easily
understood. His _modus operandi_ with the “idol of the moon” was that of
all the Semites, before Terah, Abraham’s father, made images—the Teraphim,
called after him—or the “chosen people” of Israel ceased divining by them.
These teraphim were just as much “idols” as is any pagan image or
statue.(436) The injunction “Thou shalt not bow to a graven image,” or
teraphim, must have either come at a later date, or have been disregarded,
since the bowing‐down to and the divining by the teraphim seem to have
been so orthodox and general that the “Lord” actually threatens the
Israelites, through Hosea, to deprive them of their teraphim.
For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king,
... without a sacrifice, and without an image.
Matzebah, or statue, or pillar, is explained in the _Bible_ to mean
“without an ephod and without teraphim.”(437)
Father Kircher supports very strongly the idea that the statue of the
Egyptian Serapis was identical in every way with those of the seraphim, or
teraphim, in the temple of Solomon. Says Louis de Dieu:
They were, perhaps, images of angels, or statues dedicated to the
angels, the presence of one of these spirits being thus attracted
into a teraphim and answering the inquirers [consultans]; and even
in this hypothesis the word “teraphim” would become the equivalent
of “seraphim” by changing the “t” into “s” in the manner of
Syrians.(438)
What says the _Septuagint_? The teraphim are translated successively by
ἐίδωλα—forms in someone’s likeness; eidolon, an “astral body;” γλυπτὰ—the
sculptured; κενοτάφια—sculptures in the sense of containing something
hidden, or receptacles; θὴλους—manifestations; ἀλήθειας—truths or
realities; μορφώματα or φωτισμοὺς—luminous, shining likenesses. The latter
expression shows plainly what the teraphim were. The _Vulgate_ translates
the term by “annuntientes,” the “messengers who announce,” and it thus
becomes certain that the teraphim were the oracles. They were the animated
statues, the Gods who revealed themselves to the masses through the
Initiated Priests and Adepts in the Egyptian, Chaldæan, Greek, and other
temples.
As to the way of divining, or learning one’s fate, and of being instructed
by the teraphim,(439) it is explained quite plainly by Maimonides and
Seldenus. The former says:
The worshippers of the teraphim claimed that the light of the
principal stars [planets], penetrating into and filling the carved
statue through and through, the angelic virtue [of the regents, or
animating principle in the planets] conversed with them, teaching
them many most useful arts and sciences.(440)
In his turn Seldenus explains the same, adding that the teraphim(441) were
built and fashioned in accordance with the position of their respective
planets, each of the teraphim being consecrated to a special “star‐angel,”
those that the Greeks called stoichæ, as also according to figures located
in the sky and called the “tutelary Gods”:
Those who traced out the στοιχεῖα were called στοιχειωματικοὶ [or
the diviners by the planets] and the στοιχεῖα.(442)
Ammianus Marcellinus states that the ancient divinations were always
accomplished with the help of the “spirits” of the elements (spiritus
elementorum), or as they are called in Greek πνεύματα τῶν στοιχείων. Now
the latter are not the “spirits” of the stars (planets), nor are they
divine Beings; they are simply the creatures inhabiting their respective
elements, called by the Kabalists, elementary spirits, and by the
Theosophists elementals.(443) Father Kircher, the Jesuit, tells the
reader:
Every god had such instruments of divination to speak through.
Each had his speciality.
Serapis gave instruction on agriculture; Anubis taught sciences; Horus
advised upon psychic and spiritual matters; Isis was consulted on the
rising of the Nile, and so on.(444)
This historical fact, furnished by one of the ablest and most erudite
among the Jesuits, is unfortunate for the prestige of the “Lord God of
Israel” with regard to his claims to priority and to his being the _one_
living God. Jehovah, on the admission of the _Old Testament_ itself,
conversed with his elect in no other way, and this places him on a par
with every other Pagan God, even of the inferior classes. In _Judges_,
xvii., we read of Micah having an ephod and a teraphim fabricated, and
consecrating them to Jehovah (see the _Septuagint_ and the _Vulgate_);
these objects were made by a founder from the two hundred shekels of
silver given to him by his mother. True, King James’ “Holy Bible” explains
this little bit of idolatry by saying:
In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that
which was right in his own eyes.
Yet the act must have been orthodox, since Micah, after hiring a priest, a
diviner, for his ephod and teraphim, declares: “Now know I that the Lord
will do me good.” And if Micah’s act—who
Had an house of Gods, and made an ephod and teraphim and
consecrated one of his sons
to their service, as also to that of the “graven image” dedicated “unto
the Lord” by his mother—now seems prejudicial, it was not so in those days
of one religion and one lip. How can the Latin Church blame the act, since
Kircher, one of her best writers, calls the teraphim “the holy instruments
of primitive revelations;” since _Genesis_ shows us Rebecca going “to
enquire of the Lord,”(445) and the Lord answering her (certainly through
his teraphim), and delivering to her several prophecies? And if this be
not sufficient, there is Saul, who deplores the silence of the ephod,(446)
and David who consults the thummim, and receives oral advice from the Lord
as to the best way of killing his enemies.
The thummim and urim, however—the object in our days of so much conjecture
and speculation—was not an invention of the Jews, nor had it originated
with them, despite the minute instruction given about it by Jehovah to
Moses. For the priest‐hierophant of the Egyptian temples wore a
breastplate of precious stones, in every way similar to that of the high
priest of the Israelites.
The high‐priests of Egypt wore suspended on their necks an image
of sapphire, called _Truth_, the manifestation of truth becoming
evident in it.
Seldenus is not the only Christian writer who assimilates the Jewish to
the Pagan teraphim, and expressed a conviction that the former had
borrowed them from the Egyptians. Moreover, we are told by Döllinger, a
preëminently Roman Catholic writer:
The teraphim were used and remained in many Jewish families to the
days of Josiah.(447)
As to the personal opinion of Döllinger, a Papist, and of Seldenus, a
Protestant—both of whom trace Jehovah in the teraphim of the Jews and
“evil spirits” in those of the Pagans—it is the usual one‐sided judgment
of _odium theologicum_ and sectarianism. Seldenus is right, however, in
arguing that in the days of old, all such modes of communication had been
primarily established for purposes of divine and angelic communications
only. But
The holy Spirit (spirits, rather) spake [not] to the children of
Israel [alone] by urim and thummim, while the tabernacle remained,
as Dr. A. Cruden would have people believe. Nor had the Jews alone need of
a “tabernacle” for such a kind of theophanic, or divine communication; for
no Bath‐Kol (or “Daughter of the divine Voice”), called thummim, could be
heard whether by Jew, Pagan, or Christian, were there not a fit tabernacle
for it. The “tabernacle” was simply the archaic telephone of those days of
Magic when Occult powers were acquired by Initiation, just as they are
now. The nineteenth century has replaced with an electric telephone the
“tabernacle” of specified metals, wood, and special arrangements, and has
natural mediums instead of high priests and hierophants. Why should people
wonder, then, that instead of reaching Planetary Spirits and Gods,
believers should now communicate with no greater beings than elementals
and animated shells—the demons of Porphyry? Who these were, he tells us
candidly in his work _On the Good and Bad Demons_:
They whose ambition is to be taken for Gods, and whose leader
demands to be recognized as the Supreme God.
Most decidedly—and it is not the Theosophists who will ever deny the
fact—there are good as well as bad spirits, beneficent and malevolent
“Gods” in all ages. The whole trouble was, and still is, to know which is
which. And this, we maintain, the Christian Church knows no more than her
profane flock. If anything proves this, it is, most decidedly, the
numberless theological blunders made in this direction. It is idle to call
the Gods of the heathen “devils,” and then to copy their symbols in such a
servile manner, enforcing the distinction between the good and the bad
with no weightier proof than that they are respectively Christian and
Pagan. The planets—the elements of the Zodiac—have not figured only at
Heliopolis as the twelve stones called the “mysteries of the elements”
(elementorum arcana). On the authority of many an orthodox Christian
writer they were found also in Solomon’s temple, and may be seen to this
day in several old Italian churches, and even in Notre Dame of Paris.
One would really say that the warning in Clement’s _Stromateis_ has been
given in vain, though he is supposed to quote words pronounced by St.
Peter. He says:
Do not adore God as the Jews do, who think they are the only ones
to know Deity and fail to perceive that, instead of God, they are
worshipping angels, the lunar months, and the moon.(448)
Who after reading the above can fail to feel surprise that,
notwithstanding such understanding of the Jewish mistake, the Christians
are still worshipping the Jewish Jehovah, the Spirit who spoke through his
teraphim! That this is so, and that Jehovah was simply the “tutelary
genius,” or spirit, of the people of Israel—only one of the pneumata tōn
stoicheiōn (or “great spirits of the elements”), not even a high
“Planetary”—is demonstrated on the authority of St. Paul and of Clemens
Alexandrinus, if the words they use have any meaning. With the latter, the
word στοιχεῖα signifies not only elements, but also
Generative cosmological principles, and notably the signs [or
constellations] of the Zodiac, of the months, days, the sun and
the moon.(449)
The expression is used by Aristotle in the same sense. He says, τῶν ἀστρῶν
στοιχεῖα,(450) while Diogenes Laertius calls δώδεκα στοιχεία, the twelve
signs of the Zodiac.(451) Now having the positive evidence of Ammianus
Marcellinus to the effect that
Ancient divination was always accomplished with the help of the
spirits of the elements,
or the same πνεάματα τῶν στοιχείων, and seeing in the _Bible_ numerous
passages that (_a_) the Israelites, including Saul and David, resorted to
the same divination, and used the same means; and (_b_) that it was their
“Lord”—namely, Jehovah—who answered them, what else can we believe Jehovah
to be than a “spiritus elementorum”?
Hence one sees no great difference between the “idol of the moon”—the
Chaldæan teraphim through which spoke Saturn—and the idol of urim and
thummim, the organ of Jehovah. Occult rites, scientific at the
beginning—and forming the most solemn and sacred of sciences—have fallen
through the degeneration of mankind into Sorcery, now called
“superstition.” As Diogenes explains in his _History_:
The Kaldhi, having made long observations on the planets and
knowing better than anyone else the meaning of their motions and
their influences, predict to people their futurity. They regard
their doctrine of the _five_ great orbs—which they call
interpreters, and we, planets—as the most important. And though
they allege that it is the _sun_ that furnishes them with most of
the predictions for great forthcoming events, yet they worship
more particularly Saturn. Such predictions made to a number of
kings, especially to Alexander, Antigonus, Seleucus, Nicanor,
etc., ... have been so marvellously realised that people were
struck with admiration.(452)
It follows from the above that the declaration made by Qû‐tâmy, the
Chaldæan Adept—to the effect that all that he means to impart in his work
to the profane had been told by Saturn to the moon, by the latter to her
idol, and by that idol, or teraphim, to himself, the scribe—no more
implied idolatry than did the practice of the same method by King David.
One fails to perceive in it, therefore, either an apocrypha or a “fairy‐
tale.” The above‐named Chaldæan Initiate lived at a period far anterior to
that ascribed to Moses, in whose day the Sacred Science of the sanctuary
was still in a flourishing condition. It began to decline only when such
scoffers as Lucian had been admitted, and the pearls of the Occult Science
had been too often thrown to the hungry dogs of criticism and ignorance.