Pythagoras

Seven essays on the spiritual and mystical teachings of Pythagoras of Samos: the man and the legend, the Pythagorean way of life, the wandering soul, number, harmony, the purification of the soul and its ascent, and the long afterlife of his school. Pythagoras wrote nothing, and nearly all we know of him comes from later admirers and critics, so each essay sets what the earliest witnesses say beside what later centuries made of him.

Part 1 of 7
The Man and the Legend
What can be known of Pythagoras, who wrote nothing: the earliest witnesses, the later lives that turned him into a demigod, and how to read between them.
Forthcoming
Part 2 of 7
The Pythagorean Life
The community at Croton: silence, the oral maxims and their riddling symbols, friendship and common goods, diet, and philosophy as a way of life rather than a doctrine.
Forthcoming
Part 3 of 7
The Wandering Soul
Transmigration and the kinship of all living things, the remembered past lives, the refusal of meat, and what the teaching asked of those who held it.
Forthcoming
Part 4 of 7
All Things Are Number
The tetractys, the limit and the unlimited, and number as the hidden order of things: how mathematics became, for the Pythagoreans, a path to the divine.
Forthcoming
Part 5 of 7
The Harmony of the Spheres
The discovery of the musical ratios, music as a medicine for the soul, the cosmos as an ordered beauty, and the music of the spheres.
Forthcoming
Part 6 of 7
Purification and the Ascent of the Soul
The Golden Verses and the daily examination of conscience, purification by music, mathematics and discipline, and the goal of becoming like God.
Forthcoming
Part 7 of 7
The Pythagorean Inheritance
From Plato and the Neopythagoreans to Boethius, Kepler and the modern esotericists: what passed from Pythagoras into later contemplative life, and what remains of value.
Forthcoming

Written by the Editors. Each essay quotes the traditions’ own texts and links to them in the Library, where the terms they use have pages of their own.