by Van Bryan

September 19, 2025

from ClasicalWisdom Website

Bust of Pythagoras of Samos
Unknown 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.