This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Syncretic Movements gathers five groups that fused unrelated religious traditions into something new, chosen because between them they span four centuries and every scale of consequence, from a controversial fraud conviction to a following that survived its founder's own failed prophecy for generations.
The Donmeh are the oldest and longest lived: descendants of the minority of Sabbatai Zevi's followers who followed him into outward conversion to Islam in 1666 rather than abandon his messianic claim when it failed to deliver, they practiced Islam publicly while maintaining secret Sabbatean religious life for centuries in Salonica and later Ottoman lands, eventually splitting into further subgroups over Zevi's own nature, a rare direct example of a following transformed rather than dissolved by a failed deadline.
The Source Family, centered on Jim Baker in Los Angeles, blended Eastern and Western spiritual teaching with meditation and psychedelic rock, funded by a health food restaurant, until it dispersed after Baker's death in a hang gliding accident in 1975. The Family, also called the Santiniketan Park Association, was an Australian group blending Christian and Hindu ideas whose leader raised children acquired through irregular adoptions in isolation as her own, later the subject of a long police investigation.
Ho No Hana and the Nuwaubian Nation both ended in criminal conviction. Ho No Hana's founder claimed to diagnose spiritual condition by examining the soles of feet and was convicted of fraud in Japan; the Nuwaubian Nation blended Black nationalism with esoteric and extraterrestrial themes around a compound built in the style of ancient Egypt before its founder was convicted of child molestation and financial charges in 2004.