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 [pg 239] 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 [pg 240] 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.