Pythagoras (fl. 530 BCE)

Pythagoras was born sometime around 570 BCE in the eastern Aegean, and after travels in Egypt and Babylonia—those ancient lands of mystery and mystic lore—reportedly settled in the Greek city of Croton in Southern Italy. There he lived as the head of a religious and philosophical community rumored to be nearly 300 in number. The group eventually gained wide political influence in Croton, which after some twenty years of virtual rule became the object of an uprising that killed many of its members and drove the others into exile. Pythagoras sought refuge in a temple in the neighboring city of Metapontum, and there starved to death. Some of these details are probably more or less accurate; most of his biography has been lost in a blur of legends invented by his disciples.

Upon his death, the cult split into two groups: the Akousmatikoi (or "Listeners"), who cultivated his religious, mystical, and ethical teachings; and the Mathêmatikoi (or "Learners"), who continued his work in mathematics, astronomy, and music. The former were all sworn to observe strict rules of purity and abstinence, along with rigid dietary prohibitions that seem to have included vegetarianism, based on a belief in the reincarnation of the soul after death—the meat you eat might once have been a man! According to a roughly contemporary anecdote, Pythagoras once stopped someone from beating a small dog because he recognized in its barking the voice of a dead friend, who had obviously been reborn as that puppy.

Some of the rules of the cult reportedly included the following:

When you go to a temple, do your worshipping first, and when you are on your way there, neither say nor do anything that has any connection to secular life.
Never stir a fire with something made of iron.
Always put your right shoe on first; but always wash your left foot before you wash the right one.
Don’t wear rings.
Never cut your fingernails at a sacrifice.
When you get up from bed, roll your bedding together and smooth out the impression left in the place where you were lying.
Never eat beans.
When you cut your hair, spit on the trimmings; the same with fingernails. From the Mathematikoi comes the following list—in its way perhaps no less mysterious than the mystical rules—of what are said to be the fundamental principles of the universe, arranged in ten contrary pairs:

Limit and Unlimited
Odd and Even
One and Many
Right and Left
Male and Female
Rest and Motion
Straight and Curved
Light and Dark
Good and Bad
Square and Oblong


 

Aetius (2nd century CE), records the following about the Oath of the Pythagoreans:

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Ten is the very essence of number, according to Pythagoreans. Greeks and barbarians alike all count up to 10 and then, after reaching it, go back to 1 again. Moreover, Pythagoras insists that the power of 10 resides in the tetrad, or number 4. This is why: if you begin at 1 and keep adding each successive number up to four, you make the number 10... That is, if you take 1, then add 2, then 3 and then 4, the sum is 10. In terms of single units, then, that number resides in the number 10, but in terms of potentiality, it is in the number 4. And so the Pythagoreans used to invoke the tetrad as their most sacred oath:

‘By him who gave the tetrad to our generation,
which holds the source and root of eternal reality.’

 

Other fragments:

(1) ...the Pythagoreans, as they are called, devoted themselves to mathematics. They were the first to advance this study, and having been brought up on it they thought that its principles were the principles of all things. Now, since numbers are naturally the first of these principles, and since in numbers they thought they saw many resemblances to things that exist—such and such a modification of numbers being "justice," another being "soul," another "reason"—and since, again, they saw that the attributes and ratios of the musical scale could be expressed in numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first things in nature—they supposed that the elements of numbers were the elements of all things, and that the whole heaven was a musical scale and a number. [Aristotle]

(2) Most say that the earth lies at the center of the universe,...but the Pythagoreans take the contrary view. At the center, they say, is fire, and the earth is one of the stars, creating night and day by its circular motion around the center. They further construct another earth in opposition to ours to which they give the name "counter-earth."...For since the number 10 is thought to be perfect and to comprise the whole nature of numbers, they say that there are ten bodies which move through the heavens. But since there are only nine visible bodies, they invent a tenth—"counter-earth." ...But in this they are not seeking theories and causes to account for observed facts, but instead forcing their observations and trying to accommodate them to certain theories...of their own. [Aristotle]

(3) [Pythagoreans say] that the movement of the stars produces a harmony, i.e. that the sounds they make are concordant.... They suppose that the motion of bodies of that size must produce a noise, since on our earth the motion of bodies far inferior in size and speed of movement has that effect.... Starting from this argument and from the observation that their speeds as measured by their distances are in the same ratios as musical concordances, they claim that the sound produced by the circular movement of the stars is a harmony. But since it seems unaccountable that we should not hear this music, they explain this by saying that the sound is in our ears from the very moment of birth and so is indistinguishable from silence. [ibid.]