The Pythagoreans (1)

From 494 BC (the date of the destruction of Miletus), with the Milesian school, all traces of Ionian physics temporarily disappeared. Intellectual life had already shifted to the flourishing colonies of Magna Graecia and Sicily. Several of the men who became known there, however, came from Ionia. Pythagoras was born in Samos, Xenophanes in Colophon. And it was they who each gave impetus, in the Italian colonies, to an important intellectual movement: the philosophy of numbers on the one hand, and Apeleaticism on the other, both of which would dominate all subsequent development of ideas.

Pythagoreanism was not only an intellectual movement, but a religious, moral, and political one, culminating in the formation of a brotherhood that sought to spread propaganda and seize power in the cities of Magna Graecia. It is difficult to form an accurate picture of this very complex movement: firstly, the life of Pythagoras himself is known only through legends that arose from the earliest generations[1]; secondly, the history of Pythagoreanism is composed of two very distinct periods, the first lasting from the founding of the school in Croton (around 530) until around the death of Plato (350), and the second, that of Neo-Pythagoreanism, beginning around the 1st century AD. However, even granting that it is possible to distinguish between the doctrines of the first age and those of the second (which is difficult, since one often has to use texts dating from the new Pythagoreanism to understand the old), the doctrines attributed wholesale to the Pythagoreans of the first age contain such blatant contradictions that it is quite impossible to attribute them solely to Pythagoras, and one must be content with classifying them, without being able to determine either their connections or their authors.

Pythagoras, born in 570, founded a religious association in Croton around 530. There is nothing remarkable about this; associations of this kind, like those of the Orphics, existed in Greece; their mission was to teach methods of purification that they kept secret for initiates. This was also true of the Pythagorean association; she had secrets that she forbade the impure to reveal[2]. Some rather ancient traditions link Pythagoras’ teachings to promises of a happy afterlife for initiates. The society, open to women and foreigners, went beyond the limits of a city-state religion. The famous prohibitions contained in the Pythagorean catechism (not eating beans, not speaking in the dark, not wearing the effigy of a god on a ring, not sacrificing a white rooster, etc.)[3] are taboos of the most vulgar kind[4] in which one should not look for any moral symbolism, as was done later, but signs that should suffice to distinguish the members of the sect from other men.

The doctrine of the transmigration of souls through the bodies of men and animals, a doctrine that a very ancient document[5] attributes to Pythagoras, cannot be considered the product of philosophical reflection either: a common belief among primitive peoples who see birth as nothing more than reincarnation[6], it is linked to those tales, so frequent in folklore, which show the soul leaving the body and going to reside in an animal or an inanimate object[7]; it cannot in any way be linked to a precise historical origin. Finally, the precept of abstinence from meat, if it was indeed part of the early school catechism, undoubtedly stems from the same faith in the uniqueness of all living beings that gave rise to the doctrine of transmigration.

Notes

[1] Isidore LÉVY, Recherches sur les sources de la légende de Pythagore,, 1926.

[2] Cf. in Jamblïque, Vif de Pythagore, 75-78, letter from Lysis to Hipparchus on the Pythagorean secret.

[3] Jamblïque’, ibid.} 83-84. Cf. Larguier de Bancels, « Sur les origines de la notion de Pâme, à propos d’une interdiction de Pythagore », in Archives de Psychol, XVII, 1918.

[4] Frazer, Le Rameau d’Or; tr. fr., t. I, p. 528.

[5] Xenophane, fragment 7.

[6] Lévy-Bruhl, Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, p. 398.

[7] Frazer, Le Rameau d’Or, trader., t. I.