over again. And he notes significantly that those who revert to these elements "observe days, and months, and seasons, and years." Throughout this passage Paul has in view the deeply rooted astrological belief in the twelve zodiacal signs and their thirty-six decani which governed human life and conduct. These were the powers, according to Celsus (Origen, c. Celsum, viii. 58), which really had authority, exousia (the Pauline word), over man. "You are trying," replies Origen, "to bring back our souls under the sway of the demons, which you pretend have our bodies as their lot." "See," he exclaims in the next section (59), "how Celsus turns us away from belief through Jesus Christ in the universal God, and summons us to believe, because of the healing of our bodies, in six and thirty barbaric demons[1], for whom the magi of the Egyptians, and none else, find I know not what names, and promise us prosperity. It is time for us, according to Celsus, to take to magic and to swindling[2] rather than to being Christians." The observance of days and months, of seasons and years, which Paul laments in this connexion among his Galatian converts, is still further explained by Julius Firmicus, whom Salmasius[3] thus summarizes:—
Climacterici vero dies sunt, in quibus pericula ex morbis aut ex casibus qui extrinsecus eveniunt vitae nostrae intentantur, quibusque in discrimen et metum interitus adducitur ac pene subvertitur. Et climacteres illos sive pericula, quae annis vel diebus climactericis vel etiam horis inde appellatis accidunt, a Decanis fieri crediderunt, ut dictum est, et per ipsos Decanos omnia vitia valetudinesque colligebant antiquissimi Aegyptii, ut ex Firmico supra docuimus.
Paul himself believed in the reality of these unseen powers, which made days and hours, and even years, unlucky by their malign influence. In Jesus Christ, the prophet of the one God, he found a superior power that sheltered him and his converts against them. Faith in the
