(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
We learn from Francis Legge in Forerunners
And Rivals Of Christianity (1964) that in the year 391 A.D., the chief
seat of origin for the Alexandrian religion was laid to waste, and the
religion itself perished after a successful reign of seven centuries.
Legge writes, “The ecclesiastical writers say that this was followed
by the conversion of several of the ‘Hellenists,’ adherents
to the worship of Serapis and Isis, to Christianity… Is this the
reason we find so many of the external usages of Isis-worship preserved,
in or revived by, the Catholic Church? When one religion finally replaces
another, it generally takes over from its predecessor much of its usages
that seem harmless or praiseworthy.” Another example of this immersion
of belief systems is seen with the worship of the Virgin as the Theotokos
or Mother of God, which is introduced into the Catholic Church about the
same time as the destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria. It enabled
the devotees of Isis to continue unchecked their worship of the mother
goddess by merely changing the object of their adoration” (Legge).
The concept of the Supreme Being as a triune
(three-fold) god was a very old one in Egypt. “Thus from one god
I became three gods,” says Osiris in his description of his self-creation
in a papyrus dated twelve years after the death of Alexander. The Trinitarian
formulas set out in the Creeds of Nicaea and of St. Athanasius was familiar
to those in the Alexandrian religion, but not to those brought up in the
uncompromising monotheism of the Jews. The ideas in Christianity are much
older doctrines in the most ancient of religions than most people realize.