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 [pg 236] 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