Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. II (the Corpus Hermeticum) — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

septs or classes of priests. Here we see that the Greek tradition itself was not pure Aryan even in its socalled archaic period. Chaldaea had given of her wisdom to post-diluvian Greece, even as she had perchance been in relation with Greece before the " flood." Here, then, we have another element in the Hermes-idea. In fact, nowhere do we find a pure line of tradition ; in every religion there are blendings and have been blendings. 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.

In connection with the "Good Shepherd" glyph, it will be useful to quote from Granger's instructive exposition on the subject,1 where he writes:

" Since the identification of Jesus with Hermes took place in circles which formed part of the Christian community,2 we shall not be surprised to find that one of the leading types of Christian art, the Good Shepherd, was immediately adopted from a current representation of the Greek Hermes.3 As we see from Hippolytus (Refut., v. 7), the Gnostics were especially interested in Hermes as Hermes Logius, a type which was increasingly frequent in later Greek art. And this epithet was connected by them with the conception of Jesus as the Logos. Now another type of Hermes, the Kriophoros, seemed to bring together Jesus as the Logos and Jesus as the Good Shepherd. These representations of Jesus begin in the second century; and so they correspond in order of time with the appearance of the Gospel according to the Egyptians, and of those Gnostic compositions which largely depend upon it.*

" Another fact leads us to think that the figure of

1 Op. dt., pp. 408 ff.

3 G. seems here to be referring to the Naassene Document, but without any suspicion apparently of its composite character.

3 See Sittl, Klassische Kunstarchaologie, 777, 809, 819.