All the great religions had their roots in one mother soil

By Hermes – There was unconscious syncretism (and conscious also) long before the days of Alexandria, for unconscious syncretism is as old as race-blendings. Even as all men are kin, so are popular cults related; and even as the religion of nobler souls is of one paternity, so are the theosophies of all religions from one source.

One of the greatest secrets of the innermost initiated circles was the grand fact that all the great religions had their roots in one mother soil.

And it was the spreading of the consciousness of this stupendous truth which subsequently—after the initial period of scepticism of the Alexandrian schools—gave rise to the many conscious attempts to synthesise the various phases of religion, and make ” symphonies ” of apparently contradictory philosophical tenets.

Modern research, which is essentially critical and analytical, and rarely synthetical, classifies all these attempts under the term ” syncretism,” a word which it invariably uses in a depreciatory sense, as characterising the blending of absolutely incompatible elements in the most uncritical fashion.

But when the pendulum swings once more towards the side of synthesis, as it must do in the coming years—for we are but repeating to-day in greater detail what happened in the early centuries— then scholarship will once more recognise the unity of religion under the diversity of creeds and return to the old doctrine of the mysteries.

By Hermes (Trismegistus.) Thrice Greatest Hermes: Sermons