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			by Van Bryan 
			September 19, 2025 
			from
			
			ClasicalWisdom Website 
			  
			  
			  
			  
			
			 
			Bust of 
			Pythagoras of SamosUnknown author
 Roman copy of a Greek original
 
			from the 
			2nd-1st century BC 
			  
			  
				
					
						
						It's 
						really not what you think…
 Despite being something of a household name, the life 
						Pythagoras remains something of a mystery.
 
 Yet his followers we can see more clearly:
 
							
							
							the cult of Pythagoras was a truly unusual blend of 
							philosophy, religion, and mathematics.  
						
						Their beliefs included, 
							
								
								
								
								the transmigrations of souls
								
								
								a strict commitment to vegetarianism
								
								
								the supreme importance on numbers 
						Now, 
						the idea that the secrets of how the world and the 
						universe function could be understood by mathematics is 
						perhaps not so strange.    
						
						What makes the 
						Pythagoreans so striking is the mix of the rational 
						and the mystical, both the materialism and 
						the metaphysics of it all.
 We have a tendency to think of ancient philosophy as 
						broadly falling into either the more scientific model of
						Aristotle, or the more abstract world of Plato 
						and the forms.
 
 Sean Kelly
 Managing Editor
 Classical Wisdom
 
			
 Not much is really know about the Pythagoreans or their rather 
			mysterious founder, 
			
			Pythagoras.
 
			  
			Several different accounts of the Pythagoreans 
			have come down to us from antiquity. Plato and Aristotle 
			both reference the Pythagoreans throughout their philosophical 
			writings.  
			  
			Even still, the true nature of the "cult of 
			Pythagoras" is often shrouded in mystery.
 The questions abound:
 
				
				Who were they?    
				Where did they come from?    
				What did they believe?    
				And most importantly, were they a cult? 
			That sort of question is not only interesting, it 
			is terribly complicated.  
			  
			In the context of our modern world, we might 
			consider a group of individuals who worship mathematical harmonies 
			as not only being a cult, but also prime candidates for a 
			straitjacket.
 However, in the context of ancient Greece it was not uncommon to 
			attribute great importance, even divine importance, to profound 
			philosophical formulations.
 
			  
			
			
			Thales of Miletus, for example, 
			attributed great importance to water: 
				
				he claimed that it was the foundation for all 
				of the universe.  
			Socrates, during the course of his 
			philosophical investigations, eventually came to believe that there 
			was a heavenly voice in his head (a
			
			daimon) that compelled him to 
			pursue true knowledge no matter the cost.
 These examples, however, do not grant the Pythagoreans a free pass.
 
				
				While Socrates, Thales, and others did 
				attribute great importance to their discoveries, the 
				Pythagoreans outright worshipped their philosophical beliefs, 
				going so far as to sacrifice an ox after discovering the
				
				47 Proposition of Euclid. 
			It was said that Pythagoras and his followers 
			settled in Crotona in South Italy around 530 BCE and went about 
			making a society for themselves that reflected their, let's just 
			call it, unique ideals for life.
 A central tenet of the Pythagorean belief system was,
 
				
				the transmigration of the soul.  
			This included the transmigration of human souls 
			into the bodies of animals.  
				
				It is perhaps for this reason that Pythagoras 
				strictly forbid the consumption of meat, resulting in his 
				followers becoming some of the earliest known vegetarians. 
			A strange side note of the Pythagorean diet is 
			that they were forbidden to eat beans.  
				
				The reason behind this is not entirely known. 
				A funny anecdote tells us that Pythagoras believed that a human 
				being lost a part of his or her soul whenever passing gas. 
			They wore a specific garb that was common only 
			amongst their followers.  
				
				Abstinence of the flesh was insisted upon.
				   
				However, this seems to have been a later 
				addition.    
				We do know that Pythagoras himself did not 
				die a virgin. 
			When it came to their philosophical beliefs, the 
			Pythagoreans were extremely superstitious and mystical.  
			  
			They believed that the human soul was trapped in 
			a continuous cycle of death and reincarnation. It was taught 
			that the only way to free ourselves from this cycle was to obtain a 
			higher understanding of the universe through introspective thought 
			and philosophical study. 
			  
			  
			
			 Pythagoreans 
			Celebrate the Sunrise
 
			(1869) by Fyodor 
			Bronnikov 
			
 And so when examining the nature of the universe, a rather difficult 
			brand of philosophy known as metaphysics, the Pythagoreans 
			concluded the objects
			
			within 'reality' 
			could be differentiated by the qualities that they have.
 
				
				Certain things are different shapes,
				colors, or sizes. 
			These qualities range dramatically and they are 
			by no means universal.  
			  
			A leaf, for instance 
				
				The same can be said for smell, size, or 
				shape. 
			The Pythagoreans concluded that the one universal 
			quality of all things in 
			the Universe, the one thing that 
			everything had in common, was that it was numerable and could be 
			counted.  
				
				We could perhaps imagine a Universe without
				smell or taste... 
			However, the idea of creating a hypothetical 
			universe without numbers is very much impossible.
 And here we see the basis of the Pythagorean philosophy.
 
				
				They believed that numbers were the 
				underlying substance of reality much in the way that Thales 
				believe water to be origin of being in the universe. 
			However, not all numbers were treated equally.
			 
				
				Some were considered more holy than others.
				 
			For instance,  
				
				the Pythagoreans attributed great importance 
				to the number one. 
			This is probably due to their ideas on the 
			formation of the universe.  
				
				It was proposed that there once existed chaos 
				and disorder within an unstructured, infinite universe. 
				 
			Then, limitations were set upon the universe and 
			the world as we know it fell into order: 
				
				objects became numerable, the cosmos became 
				perceivable... 
			In this way the universe came from a sort of 
			chaos and took on a oneness that was 
			previously unknown.  
			  
			This idea of a harmonious, single universe would 
			be echoed by the likes of Parmenides and Zeno of Elea. 
			  
			  
			 
			
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