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 [pg 237] 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 [pg 238] 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.