to create. The mission of Pythagoras was to record them as concepts before they disappeared entirely.
Pythagoras’s philosophy, therefore, begins the process of translating the primordial vision, the picture consciousness of ancient humanity, into abstract, conceptual terms.
In about 532 Pythagoras fell foul of Polycrates, the despotic ruler of Samos. Forced into exile, he set up a small community — the first of several — in Crotona in southern Italy. Candidates for initiation into his community had to undergo years of training, including a strange diet that included poppy, sesame and cucumber seeds, wild honey, daffodil flowers and the skin of sea onion from which the juice had been completely extracted. There was great emphasis on gymnastics as a way of bringing the three human bodies — material, vegetable and animal — into harmony, and candidates were required to remain silent for years on end.
Pythagoras was able to grant his pupils a great vision of the spirit worlds, which he would then interpret for them. Out of this, the first discursive teaching, would emerge mathematics, geometry, astronomy and music.
In his day Pythagoras was said to be the only human being able to hear the Music of the Spheres, conceived as a scale of different notes each made by the seven planets as they moved through space. This is easy to dismiss as mystical hogwash, but the story of how he measured the first musical scale has an authentic sounding ring to it.
One day Pythagoras was walking through town when he heard metal being pounded on an anvil. He noticed that different sized hammers made different sounds. Returning home, he fixed a plank of wood across a room and hung a series of weights according to the weights of the different hammers in an ascending scale. By a process of trial and error he determined that the musical notes that sound beautiful to the human ear correspond to different weights. He then calculated that they were proportionate to one another in a mathematically precise way. It is from these calculations by Pythagoras that we derive the musical octave we understand and enjoy today.
As Pythagoras and his followers began to describe the rational element in life, they started to formulate a parallel concept. It was a concept which had perhaps never been articulated before, because up till that point it had been a part of everyone’s everyday experience. The concept went like this: life can be explained in rational terms only up to a point.
The teachings of the Mystery schools relating to the rational side would help build cities, develop science and technology, structure and regulate the Outworld. The irrational teaching in its explicit form would be confined to the schools. To talk about it outside was dangerous and might well attract hostility. As Plutarch would put it, ‘One who knows the higher truths, finds the “serious” values of society difficult to take seriously. Eternity is a child at play.’
Here, at the birth of rational thought, the Mystery schools nurtured its opposite. It is no accident that individuals like Pythagoras, Newton and Leibniz, those who have done most to help humanity get to grips with the reality of the physical universe, have also been deeply immersed in esoteric thought. This is because it is undoubtedly true, as these great minds have seen, that if you look at life as subjectively as possible, rather than objectively, as you must do in science, some very different patterns emerge. Life viewed objectively may be rational and subject to natural law, but experienced subjectively it is irrational.
By consciously splitting experience in this way, Pythagoras made it possible to think more clearly about both dimensions.
The pupils of Pythagoras were taught to live apart from society, alternating between mystical ecstasy and intellectual analysis. Pythagoras was the first to call himself a lover of wisdom, that is to say ‘a philosopher’, but like Socrates and Plato who followed him, he was closer to a magus than a modern-day university professor. His pupils were in awe of him. They believed he had the power to make them dream what he willed, and that he could reorient their waking consciousness in an instant, too.
Pythagoras attracted murderous rage from those excluded from his inner circle. He refused to admit a man called Cyron into his Mystery school because of his reckless, imperious behaviour. Cyron stirred up a mob against Pythagoras. They broke into the building where Pythagoras and his followers were meeting and set fire to it. Everyone inside died.
IN THE ERA OF PYTHAGORAS TWO OTHER philosophers on different sides of the world, Heraclitus in Greece and Lao-Tzu in China, briefly come to the surface of history, trying to define rationally, the irrational dimension of life.
We cannot step in the same stream twice, said Heraclitus.
There is a story that Confucius went to see Lao-Tzu and asked to be initiated. Lao-Tzu turned him away, mocking him for his mixture of ingratiating manners and vaulting ambition. It is probably apocryphal, but it points to an important truth which is that Confucianism and Taoism represent exoteric and esoteric thought in China.
Confucius spent years collecting traditional Chinese wisdom and these collections would be adopted as manuals for government by later Chinese leaders.
The sayings of Confucius are eminently reasonable. A thousand mile journey begins with a single step. Value the task more than the prize. If you can’t meet your goals, adjust your goals. And so on.
We can compare Confucius with Rudyard Kipling. They were both servants of empire. If scientific materialism described everything there is in life, Kipling’s poem ‘If’ would be the last word on the conduct of life and esoteric philosophy would have nothing to teach us.
The problem is that, though there may be times when the best thing to do is to try with all our might and not give up, there are other times, as Orpheus had found to his cost, when it is prudent to give up and go with the flow. Sometimes when you grab at what you want, you just push it further away. Sometimes the only way to keep something is by letting it go. As Lao Tzu says:
THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF PYTHAGORAS, an enormous Persian army under Xerxes swept over Greece. Then, in the early years of the fifth century BC, Persian forces were defeated and driven back by the Athenians at Marathon and then by an Athenian-Spartan alliance at Mycale.
Pythagoras had institutionalized the open discussion of options and the making of collective decisions on matters which concerned the whole community — what we today call politics. From this — and in the space created by the Athenian-Spartan alliance — would emerge the unique character of the Greek city-state of Athens.
14. THE MYSTERIES OF GREECE AND ROME
