Hermetic History
Born in 6th century BC and probably visited Egypt and Mesopotamia. He moved to southern Italy and became famous for being a sage (occult practitioner), a kind of magical being and cult leader. His religion was that of a reformed cult of Orpheus (Orphic), which itself was a reformed cult of Dionysus. He believed in reincarnation and escape from this cycle. He talks about the nature of soul and fate after death, and ability to transform his own soul.
Famous for:
Expert on the transmigration of soul
Expert on religious ritual
Was a wonder worker with a golden thigh who could be in two places at once
Founder of a strict way of life: emphasizing a strict diet, performance of specific religious rituals, and rigorous self discipline
It is said that when he was a young man, he was initiated into the Grecian and barbarian sacred mysteries, then when he went to Egypt he learned the Egyptian language and associated himself with the orders of the Babylonian Chaldaens and with the Persian Magi there. After learning secret mysteries from the Egyptian temples and after heading to Crete and descending into the Idaean cave he returned back to Samos to find his country reduced under the absolute dominion of Polycrates. So he set sail for southern Italy, Crotona, once there it is said that he gained a very high reputation together with about three hundred other scholars which constituted very nearly an aristocracy.
Pythagoras tells a story of having memory of a previous life, in which his name was Aethalides, and was the son of Mercury - Mercury had asked him to select any gift he pleased except immorality so he chose to preserve the memory of what happens to him in each life. He is said to have been a man of the most dignified appearance, and his disciples adopted an opinion respecting him, that he was Apollo who had come from the Hyperboreans.
Pythagoras carried geometry to perfection, other Greeks before him had found out the principle elements of science and Pythagoras applied himself to the arithmetic of this science. He held a religious festival when finding out that the square of the hypotenuse equaled the square of the sides containing the right angle. He was a devout believer in Numerology and believed that numbers were everything, each number having a special meaning (one being a dot, two being a line, etc.).
Pythagoras developed music theory by ‘placing numbers in music’. He found the octave from walking and hearing an anvil being worked on. From this he studied musical harmony, which he said could be mathematically predicted. Music he claimed was a form of math. Therefore everything can be described in numbers. Arithmetic (number), music (number in time, harmony), geometry (number in space), cosmos (number in space and time, harmony). Harmonious circles can be calculated, the music of the spheres or celestial bodies. Life can be calculated, by applying the principle of harmony to medicine and the body with illness. Hot, cold, dry, wet being principal qualities.
The history we tell often reflects the myths we want to believe about ourselves in the present. This is true in the history of philosophy. Was the history of philosophy all rational?
Creation myth of the ‘Western World’ in the history of philosophy. The conquest of Mythos (myth) by Logos (science). Prior to 6th century, history was dominated by Myth until Hesiod defeated that with Logos. This too is a creation myth of the enlightenment, the ahistorical nature of the ‘Greek miracle’. Most philosophy disregards Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and other paradigms that don’t fit into the ‘rational’ paradigm.
Parmenides gives us gnosis or revelation by miracle. All comes from arche, what fundamentally is being and nonbeing can’t be. All that exists is being and therefore change can’t occur, existence persists without change, when we trust sensations we trust an experience of hallucinations. Trust Logos instead, and then you will see change is an illusion and being is restored - All is one. Parmenides has the way of truth and way of opinion, in the way of truth we have the Logos reign supreme and logic. Parmenides says that these are not his ideas but he is a vehicle for these ideas for the reader.
Pythagoras gives us Harmonic totality. Pythagoreans believe all knowledge comes from number, reality is number, music harmony can be occult found in number. Irrational numbers were esoteric and only revealed to higher priests in the cult. Some call Pythagoras the father of divine philosophy with his talk of the monad and other spiritual ideas.
Brief History of Ancient Greek Religions
Ancient Greece was divided into a large number of small independent states, each consisting of a city with some agricultural territory surrounding it. The level of civilization was very different in different parts of the Greek world, and only a minority of cities contributed to the total of Hellenic achievement. There were purely agricultural rural communities, such as the proverbial Arcadia, which townsmen imagined to be idyllic, but which was really full of ancient barbaric horrors.
Inhabitants worshiped Pan, and had a multitude of fertility cults, in some merely a square pillar would be used instead of a statue of the god. The goat was the symbol of fertility because the peasants were too poor to possess bulls. When food was scarce, the statue of Pan (square pillar) was beaten. There were clans of supposed werewolves that committed cannibalism and human sacrifice allegedly - whoever tasted the flesh of a sacrificed human became a werewolf, Cave sacred to Zeus Lykaios (werewolf is always from the lower class).
The idea that all Ancient Greeks worshiped the traditional ‘Pantheon’ is a misnomer. The lower class had various cults. The Cult of Pan, meaning the feeder or shepherd, interpreted as All-God, his worship was adopted in Athens around the fifth century BC after the Persian war. Another was the Cult of Dionysus, or Bacchus, which out of his worship arose a profound mysticism which greatly influenced many of the philosophers, and even had a part in shaping Christian theology.
Dionysus was originally a Thracian God - the Thracians were ‘very less civilized’ than the Greeks, who regarded them as barbarians. The Thracian fertility cults were centered on Bacchus instead of Pan. It was never quite clear if Bacchus had the shape of a man or a bull. When they discovered beer they thought intoxication divine and gave honor to Bacchus. When they learned of the vine and made wine they thought even better of Bacchus. His function of fertility became somewhat subordinate to his functions in relation to the grape and the divine madness produced by wine. It is not known when his worship migrated from Thrace to Greece, but it seems to be just before historical times. This is said because initially the cult of Bacchus was met with hostility from the Orthodox but nevertheless established itself. It contained many barbaric elements, some rituals involved women dancing in the hills - husbands found the practice annoying but did not dare to oppose the religion. Both the beauty and savagery of the cult are set forth in the Bacchae of Euripides.
In the sphere of thought, sober civilization is roughly synonymous with science. But science, unadulterated, is not satisfying; humans need passion, art, and religion. Science may set limits to knowledge but should not set limits to imagination. Among Greek Philosophers, some were primarily scientific, but some primarily religious – those that were primarily religious owed much to the religion of Bacchus. This applies especially to Plato, and through him to those later developments which ultimately become embodied in Christian theology.
Orpheus is a dim but interesting figure. Some say he was an actual man, some say an imaginary hero, others say he was a god. He came from Thrace like Bacchus, but it seems more possible that he came from Crete. This is partly due to Orphic doctrines containing much that seem to have its source in Egypt, and its chiefly through Crete that Egypt influenced Greece. Orpheus is said to have a reformer that was torn to pieces by frenzied Maenads actuated by Bacchic orthodoxy. Orpheus’ addiction to music was not so prominent in the older forms of the legend as it became later, primarily in the older legends he was a priest and philosopher. Orphic doctrine and teachings believed in the transmigration of souls; they taught that the soul can achieve eternal bliss or suffer eternal or temporary torment according to its way of life on earth. Orphics aimed at becoming pure, partly by ceremonies, partly by avoiding earthly contamination. The most orthodox of them abstain from animal food, except on ritual occasions. Orphics believed that humans were partly of earth and partly of heaven; by a pure life the heavenly part could be increased and the earthly part diminished. In the end, someone could become one with Bacchus and become ‘a Bacchus’.
There was an elaborate theology in which Bacchus was twice born, once to his mother Semele, and once from the thigh of his father Zeus. There are many forms of the Bacchus myth, in one Bacchus is the son of Zeus and Persephone; while still a boy he is torn to pieces by Titans and they eat everything but his heart. Semele then gives Zeus his heart who gives a second birth to Bacchus. The Titans were earth-born, but after eating the god (Bacchus) they had a spark of divinity. So humans are partly of earth, partly divine, and Bacchic rites sought to make the practitioner more nearly completely divine.
Orphic tablets have been found in tombs, giving instructions to the soul of the dead person as to how to find his way into the next world, and what to say in order to prove himself worthy of salvation.
“Hail, Thou who has suffered the suffering… Thou art become God from Man.” Orphic Tablet
“Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.” Orphic Tablet
The Orphics were an ascetic sect; wine, to them, was only a symbol like later in the Christian sacrament. The intoxication they sought was that of ‘enthusiasm’, of union with the god. They believed themselves, in this way, to acquire mystic knowledge not obtainable by ordinary means. This mystical element entered into Greek philosophy with Pythagoras, who was a reformer of Orphism, as Orpheus was a reformer of the religion of Bacchus. From Pythagoras Orphic elements entered into the philosophy of Plato, and from Plato into most later philosophy that was in any degree religious.
Certain definitely Bacchic elements survived wherever Orphism had influence. One of these was feminism, of which there was much in Pythagoras. Another Bacchic element was respect for violent emotion - Greek tragedy grew out of the rites of Dionysus. Euripides honored the two chief gods of Orphism: Bacchus and Eros. He has no respect for the coldly self-righteous well-behaved Man, who in his tragedies, is apt to be driven mad or otherwise brought to grief by the gods in resentment of his blasphemy.
The conventional tradition concerning the Greeks is that they exhibited admirable serenity which enabled them to contemplate passion from without, perceiving whatever beauty it exhibited, but themselves calm. This would be true of Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle, but not of those Greeks influenced by Bacchic or Orphic traditions. At Eleusis, the Eleusinian mysteries formed the most sacred part of Athenian State religion.
The Orphic is no more “serene” than the unreformed worshiper of Bacchus. To the Orphic, life in this world is pain and suffering. We are bound to a wheel which turns through endless cycles of birth and death; our true life is of the stars, but we are tired to earth. Only by purification and renunciation can we achieve at last an ecstasy with God through union.
“I’m going to tell God of all my troubles,
When I get home.”
A large portion of Greeks were passionate, unhappy, at war with themselves, driven along one road by the intellect and along another by the passions, with the imagination to conceive heaven and the willful self-assertion that creates hell. Their maxim, “nothing too much”, was a farce in the face of everything they did - pure thought, poetry, religion, and sin. It was their combination of passion and intellect that made them great, while they were great. Neither alone would have transformed the world for all future time as they transformed it. Their prototype in mythology was not Zeus but Prometheus, who brought fire from heaven and was rewarded with eternal torment. There were two tendencies in ancient Greece:
Passionate: religious, mystical, other-worldly. Orphics, Baccheans.
Rational: cheerful, empirical, interesting in acquiring knowledge of a diversity of facts. Herodotus, Aristotle, early Ionian philosophers.
Eleusinian mysteries were filled with Orphism and its rituals. Those who were of a religious temperament turned to Orphism, while rationalists despised it. There were striking similarities between Orphic beliefs and those prevalent in India at about the same time. Orphics used ‘sacrament’ to purify the believer’s soul and enable it to escape from the wheel of birth. The Orphics, unlike the priests of Olympian cults, founded what we may call “churches”, i.e. religious communities to which anybody, without distinction of race or sex, could be admitted by initiation and from their influence arose the conception of philosophy as a way of life.
The School of Pythagoras represents the main current of mystical tradition which we have set in contrast with the scientific tendency. Parmenides, the founder of Logic and father of Metaphysics, is an offshoot of Pythagoreanism. Plato himself found in Italian Philosophy the chief source of his inspiration. Pythagoreanism was a movement of reform in Orphism, and Orphism as a movement in reform in the worship of Dionysus. The opposition of the rational and the mystical, which runs all through history, first appears, among the Greeks, as an opposition between the Olympic gods and those other less civilized gods who had more affinity with the primitive beliefs dealt with by anthropologists. In this division, Pythagoras was on the side of mysticism - though his mysticism was of a peculiar intellectual sort. The systems of Pythagoras tend to be otherworldly, putting all value in the unseen unity of God, and condemning the visible world as false and illusive, a turbulent medium in which the rays of heavenly light are broken and obscured in the mist and darkness.
Pythagoras was the first to teach that the soul is an immortal thing, transformed into other kinds of living things; and whatever comes into existence is born again in the cyclic revolutions, nothing being absolutely new; and that all things born with life in them ought to be treated as kindred. In the society Pythagoras founded, men and women were admitted on equal terms; property was held in common, and there was a common way of life. Scientific and mathematical discoveries were deemed collective, and in a mystical sense due to Pythagoras even after his death. It is said that Hippasos of Metapontion violated this rule and was shipwrecked as a result of divine wrath at his impiety.
To Pythagoras there were three types of humans who come to the Olympic games: the lowest class being made up of those who come to buy and sell, the next above them are those who compete, the third and best of all is those who come to simply look on. The greatest purification of all is the disinterested science and the person who devotes himself to that, is the pursuit of a true philosophy, and this will effectively release the individual from the ‘wheel of birth’.
‘Theory’ originally was an Orphic word that was interpreted as ‘passionate sympathetic contemplation’ was intellectual and issued in mathematical knowledge. In this way, through Pythagoreanism, ‘theory’ gradually acquired its modern meaning; but for those who were inspired by Pythagoras it retained an element of ecstatic revelation. To those who have reluctantly learnt a little mathematics this may seem strange; but to those who have experienced the intoxicatingly dorky delight of ‘sudden understanding’ (satori) that mathematics gives from time to time, to those who love it, the Pythagorean view will seem completely natural even if untrue. It might seem that the empirical philosopher is the slave of his material, but that the pure mathematcian, like the musician, is a free creator of the world of ordered beauty.
This is to refer to a Mathematician type of Pythagorean ethic. In connection with a football game, modern-minded people think that the players are the most important part of the game - much more important than the spectators. Similarly with the State: we admire the politicians who are contestants in the game more than those who are the onlookers (and hold the political power). This change of values is connected with a change in the social system – the warrior, the gentleman, the plutocrat, and the dictator, each has his own standard of the good and the true. The gentleman has had a long life in philosophical theory, because he is associated with the Greek genius, due to the virtue of contemplation acquiring theological endorsement, and due to the ideal of disinterested truth dignifying the academic life. This Gentleman includes the saint and sage, insofar as their lives are contemplative rather than active.
Modern definitions of truth, such as those of pragmatism and instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialism as opposed to aristocracy. To the Gentlemen we owe pure mathematics, in their contemplative ideal, since it led to the creation of it and was the source of its useful activity; this increased its prestige, and gave it a success in theology, in ethics, and in philosophy, which it might not have otherwise enjoyed. So much by way of explanation of the two aspects of Pythagoras: as religious prophet (akousmatikoi), and as pure mathematician (mathematikoi). In both respects he was immeasurably influential, and the two were not so separate as they appear to the modern mind.
Most sciences at their beginning have been connected with some form of false belief, which gave them a fictitious value. Astronomy with astrology, chemistry with alchemy, even Mathematics. Mathematics was associated with a more refined type of error though. Mathematical knowledge appeared to be certain, exact, and applicable to the real world; being obtainable by mere thinking, it didn’t have the need for observation. Consequently, it was thought to supply the ideal, from which every-day empirical knowledge fell short. It was supposed, on the basis of mathematics, that thought is superior to sense, intuition to observation. If the world of sense does not fit mathematics, so much the worse for the world of sense. In various ways, methods of approaching the mathematician’s ideal were sought, and the resulting suggestions were the source of many metaphysics and theories of knowledge. This form of philosophy begins with Pythagoras. Pythagoras might have thought of the world as atomic but derived from the number of bodies built up of molecules composed of atoms arranged in various shapes - this he hoped to make arithmetic the fundamental study of physics as in aesthetics.
The Egyptians had known that a triangle whose sides are 3, 4, 5 has a right angle, but apparently the Greeks were the first to observe the squaring of these values and acting on this suggestion to discover a proof of the general proposition. Unfortunately for Pythagoras, his theorem led immediately to the discovery of incommensurables, which appeared to disprove his whole philosophy. This convinced the Greek mathematicians that geometry must be established independently of arithmetic. There are passages in Plato’s dialogues which prove that the independent treatment of geometry was well under way in its day; it was perfect in Euclid. Euclid proves geometrically many things which we should naturally prove by algebra. It was because of the difficulty of incommensurables that he considered this course necessary.
The influence of geometry on philosophy and scientific method has been profound. Geometry, as established by the Greeks, starts with axioms which are (or are deemed to be) self-evident, and proceeds, by deductive reasoning, to arrive at theorems that are very far from self-evident. The axioms and theorems are held to be true of actual space, which is something given in experience. It thus appeared to be possible to discover things about the actual world by first noticing what is self-evident and then using deduction. This view influenced Plato and Kant, and most of the intermediate philosophers. When the Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” it is modeling itself on Pythagoras or Euclid. The eighteenth-century doctrine of natural rights is a search for Euclidean axioms in politics. The form of Newton’s Principia, in spite of its admittedly empirical material, is entirely dominated by Euclid and Pythagoras. Theology, in its exact scholastic forms, takes its style from the same source. Personal religion is derived from ecstasy, theology from mathematics; and both are to be found in Pythagoras.
Mathematics is the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as in a super-sensible intelligible world. Geometry deals with exact circles, but no sensible object is exactly circular; however carefully we measure it will always be imperfect with some irregularity. This suggests a view that all exact reasoning applies to ideal as opposed to sensible objects; it is natural to go further and to argue that thought is nobler than sense, and the objects of thought more real than those of sense-perception. Mystical doctrines as to the relation of time to eternity are also reinforced by pure mathematics, for mathematical objects such as numbers, if real at all, are eternal and not in time. Such eternal objects can be conceived as “God’s thoughts”. Hence Plato’s doctrine that God is a geometer, and Sir James Jeans’ belief that He is addicted to arithmetic.
The combination of mathematics and theology, which began with Pythagoras, characterized religious philosophy in Greece, in the Middle Ages, and in modern times down to Kant. Orphism before Pythagoras was analogous to Asiatic mystery religions. But in Plato, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant there is an intimate blending of religion and reasoning, or moral aspiration with logical admiration of what is timeless which comes from Pythagoras. The whole conception of the eternal world, revealed to the intellect but not to the senses, is derived from him. But for him, Christians would not have thought of Christ as the Word; but for him, theologians would not have sought logical proofs of God and immortality.
Nomadic Notes
Akousmatikoi, or ‘listeners’ (Spiritual Metaphysics, or Process Theology)
These were the spiritual followers of Pythagoras who followed the following dogma:
The monad was the beginning of everything. From the monad proceeds an indefinite duad, which is subordinate to the monad as to its cause. That from the monad and the indefinite duad proceed numbers. And from numbers signs. And from these last, lines of which plane figures consist. And from plane figures are derived solid bodies. And from solid bodies comes sensible bodies, of which there are four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. The world which is endured with life and intellect, is of spherical shape, like the earth, results from a combination of these elements and derives its motion from them.
The sun provides the principle of heat through its rays which penetrate both cold aether (air/dryness) and dense aether (sea/moisture), and these rays penetrate into the depths vivifying (elan vital) everything. Everything which partakes of the principle of heat are animated beings, including plants and animals. The eyes are the gates of the sun, allowing the soul to see through air and water due to their cold temperature, the eyes and sun being hot.
Pythagoras divides the soul into three parts:
Intuition, or nous - deliberative part of the mind
Reason, or phren - rational part of the intellect
Mind, or thymos - heart or that which passions are concerned
He would say that intuition and mind is found in animals, but that reason is only found in humans. The chief abode of the soul is in the parts of the body which are between the heart and the brain: the brain being Intuition (nous), and Reason; the heart being Mind (thymos).
Mercury is the steward of the souls, he is who conducts the souls from their bodies, and from earth, and sea; and he conducts the pure souls to the highest region, and that he does not allow the impure ones to approach the pure ones, nor come near other impure souls but become devoured by Furies.
Pythagoreans also assert that air (cold aether) is full of souls, daemones (eternal forms or guardians in Cratylus), and heroes. It is among these souls (daemones and heroes) that dreams are sent to humans, but also disease and health; these last two being sent to animals but not dreams (sheep do not dream, but do androids?).
The most privileged of humans are able to persuade their souls to either good or bad: humans are happy when they have a good soul, but can never remain quiet or maintain the same state of mind (being) for long. Virtue is harmony, oath is justice, friendship is harmonious equality.
Some students of Pythagoras are Empedocles, Philolaus, Parmenides, Plato, ‘Timaeus’, Philolaus and many others. The followers of Pythagoras come in two great waves, pythagoreans (Mathematikoi being more early Platonism, and Akousmatikoi more 4th century Cynicism) and neo-pythagoreans (2nd century BC - 2nd century AD). Theory of emanation usually is attributed to the Pythagorean tradition which is a theory of the outflowing of being and a hierarchy of beings (great chain of being).
Due to various politically existential threats, many Greek cities of Ionia had already caused a type of ‘wanderer’ lifestyle - where philosophers would hold a refugee status and wandered from city to city in unenslaved parts of the Hellenic world, spreading civilization that until then had been mainly confined to Ionia. Most of the time they were kindly treated in their wanderings. In the Akousmatikoi group of Pythagoreans, there was a closer association with wandering ascetics.
Mathematikoi, or ‘learners’ (Natural Metaphysics)
These were the followers who extended and developed the more mathematical and scientific work of Pythagoras. This would be contrasted with the followers of the ‘Akousmatikoi’ or those who focused on the more religious or ritualistic aspects of Pythagoras’ teachings.
For example, Philolaus was a prominent Mathematikoi Pythagorean in 470 BC - 385 BC. But the Mathematikoi group became more closely associated with Plato and Platonism, whereas the Akousmatikoi group became more associated with the Cynicism movement of the 4th century BC.
Pythagoras was one of the first western philosophers to believe in metempsychosis (transmigration of soul and reincarnation after death), but also subscribed his views to Anaximander - that the ultimate substance of things is ‘apeiron’ (‘the boundless’ or ‘undefined infinite’). Pythagoras believed that apeiron had ‘inhaled’ the void from outside, filling the cosmos with vacuous bubbles that split the universe into many interconnected parts according to a natural harmony – numbers and mathematics constituting the true nature of things underlying these theories.
Pythagoras and his influence in ancient and modern times can be argued to be intellectually of the highest importance. Mathematics, in the sense of demonstrative deductive argument, begins with him, and in him is intimately connected with a peculiar form of mysticism. The influence of mathematics on philosophy owing to him has been profound.
Some more Pythagorean Metaphysics
Pythagoras Ten opposites
Unlimited vs limited - reality created when god put a limit on the unlimited
Even odd
Plurality one
Left right
Male female
Motion rest
Bent straight
dark light
evil good
oblong square
Each column (opposite) is related to one another.
Sources:
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius
A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
The Metaphysics, Aristotle
Thank you mr. Jack F. I’m overwhelmed by the brilliance of your historization of the Western Philosophical Tradition, may all who read your words know the truth of your wisdom.