FOREWORD

IF WESTERN CIVILIZATION has taken, as it seems, not one but several wrong turnings between the time of Pythagoras (sixth century B.C.E.) and the present, it is because it has been unfaithful to him who should by rights have been its tutelary genius. Pythagoras is the very midwife of our epoch, ushering it to birth from the dusky, mythic past, sowing the seeds of a new consciousness, a new possibility for growth after the plan laid up in Heaven. His own story, accordingly, is part myth, part ascertainable history. Such divine figures as he inhabit both realms. His achievement is a prophetic one, for in his life and work he set forth the perfect framework for the unfoldment not only of Classical Greek culture but of the whole coming age up to our own time. The Pythagorean synthesis of religion with spiritual and natural philosophy would have been the ideal guide for a civilization whose destiny was to come to terms with the material world.

Pythagoras set the stage for this development with a careful system of checks and balances. In his emphasis on Number -- the keystone of his doctrine -- he revealed the secret without which modern technology would have been impossible. It is applied mathematics, after all, that has led to the so- called conquest of Nature. But at the same time, and much more importantly, Pythagoras taught the  metaphysical and sacred aspect of Number as reflecting the One and its emanations. In this respect the Numbers, especially those from 1 to 10, are archetypal beings. To approach them as quantity alone is a denial of their nature verging on blasphemy. It is not the fault of Christianity that the idea of sacred number and geometry has vanished, along with any viable science based thereon: nowhere are these things more evident than in the scriptures and rituals of the Churches. It is the error of those who have forgotten the Pythagorean (and Christian) precept, to "honor first the Immortal Gods"  -- themselves Numbers -- before embarking on any enterprise. Consequently number today carries not meaning and wisdom, but only information and power of a very dubious character.

The Pythagorean world view is a graduated, hierarchical one, with every stage filled by appropriate beings: Divinities, lesser Gods, daimons, heroes, geniuses. etc. It is in no way contrary to the Jewish, early Christian, and Islamic vision of rank upon rank of angels standing between God and the earth. Angels are unfashionable nowadays, and while in some respects it has been an advantage to bring the Absolute closer to man, it has lost most of its absoluteness in becoming a personal God. Far better to worship the One within, but to recognize and cooperate with those beings who have to maintain the world against mankind's best efforts to spoil it. Given this orderly hierarchical universe, Pythagoreanism has no need to blandly oppose spirit to matter: things are more subtle than that. Neither does it need to invent a Fall of angels or of man that violates the divine order. The Golden Verses say: "Men are children of the Gods, and sacred Nature all things hid reveals. " Everything proceeds according to a law that renders perfect justice to each, as surely as every physical action provokes an equal and opposite reaction. The One has no personality to make its favor or anger our concern. Since there is no Fall except the periodic one of soul into body, there is no vicarious salvation. Only one's own efforts and acquired wisdom can free one from this migration around the states of being. Nevertheless, there is every reason for piety towards the Gods, and for gratitude to Pythagoras and those others who have taught the means to attain freedom through rational conduct and the philosophic life.

Pythagoras' metaphysics enables the Intellect to approach and know the ultimate TRUTH. His moral precepts ensure conformity with the perfect GOODNESS. To complete the trinity, he also adored the supreme BEAUTY which inspires the Muses as they do our Arts. In the first place he seems to have used Music, both for the intellectual benefits of its speculative side and for the effects of practical music on psycho-physical health. Music is the art in which the Numbers penetrate directly to the heart; in Mathematics they occupy the brain. But it is not music alone that incarnates the transcendent virtues of Number. As it does so in time, so the visual arts do in space, depending no less for their beauty on harmony and correct proportion. It was this knowledge that enabled Classical Greek architecture and sculpture to attain such heights in the century after Pythagoras. Ever since then the high-points of Western and Islamic architecture have followed on the reapplication of harmonic principles, as one can prove by measurement of Gothic cathedrals, early Renaissance churches, and the masterpieces of Islamic architecture. Disobedience to harmonic laws leads to ugliness, which is a sin against the Muses and a denial of the divinely beautiful order of the cosmos. Obedience to them, on the other hand, presupposes a state of soul open also to Intelligible Beauty; music and architecture open our souls in the same way.

When he came to teach, Pythagoras recognized that people, too, are arranged in a hierarchy, and that they vary enormously in their receptivity to philosophy. Some are little more than animals, and require the same loving attentions, while others are little short of Gods. Consequently he reserved different degrees of teaching for the different levels. Much has been said about the secrecy of the most esoteric branch of his school, but like Plato and Jesus he also involved himself in public life, often to his cost. As a political reformer and giver of laws to several cities, he provided a field for the improvement of all, even of the lowest types -- for that is what politics should be about. Within his school he went against contemporary custom in giving equal status to women, and his biographers are careful to record the names of his female disciples. I am sure that much evil would have been avoided had Western civilization not indulged in such parodies of the hierarchical principle as the simplistic division into Saved and Damned, and the restriction of public office and education to men alone.

Naturally Pythagoras did not invent his philosophy: it was not original except in the brilliance of his synthesis. Since Truth is perennial and invariable, to create an "original" philosophy is merely to hatch another untruth. Pythagoras' unique advantage was that he studied in every available school, philosophic and religious alike. Orphic by temperament, he also knew the early natural philosophers Thales and Anaximenes, but far from stopping with Greece he investigated the mysteries of Egypt, the science of Babylon, even the wisdom of the Hyperboreans (presumably the Ancient Britons). When he was in his fifties he began to teach the distillation of what he had learnt. Some of it, such as his mystery initiations, he could not pass on. He retained, in fact, only what would be useful to a coming age in which those mysteries would decline and disappear. The discovery of the Divine within oneself (the "Kingdom of Heaven within you") was to be its goal, aided by contemplation of that which "sacred Nature" reveals. There is no reason why this could not have been adapted to make an exoteric religion to serve the whole civilization. This actually seems to have been happening in the time of Caeser and the early Roman Empire, scene of so many religious might-have-beens. As it was, the Pythagorean strain survived only in its more esoteric cultivation by the Neoplatonic philosophers. Neoplatonism is to a very large degree Neopythagorean: it shares the typical interests in theosophy, cosmology, arithmology, speculative music, and exotic religion. In fact, just as Platonists regard Aristotle as a rather limited successor to their master, so Pythagoreans may well regard the Divine Plato.

Since the end of the Roman Empire Pythagoreans have periodically found shelter in the esoteric schools of Christianity and Islam. From time to time their presence has manifested, especially in architecture and the other arts. While I do not believe, as some do, that these schools can have been the motive force behind a history as disappointing as that of the West, one should mention some of those who have publicly carried the torch. Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century cast Pythagoras as a link in his genealogy of "prisci theologi": Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophamus, Pythagoras, Philolaus, Plato. The astronomers Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler invoked the Pythagorean school as a precedent for their heliocentric astronomy; in Kepler's case there was much more, including his researches into the geometry and harmony of the spheres. Later there were two great "romantic" Pythagoreans, Thomas Taylor (1758-1835) and Fabre d'Olivet (1767-1825), perhaps the only ones up to their time who were not also Christians. Fabre published the Golden Verses in French, with his remarkable commentary, in 1813; Taylor published his Theoretic Arithmetic in 1816, his translation of Iamblichus's Life of Pythagoras, the basis of Guthrie's version, in 1818. Largely as a consequence of the work of these two men, the nineteenth century swarms with semi-Pythagoreans, great and small, but all of rather limited effect on the world in general. A stronger impetus was given by the Theosophical Society at the end of the nineteenth century, and by the various esoteric groups that surrounded and derived from it. Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie's work belongs in this context, as does the better-known achievement of Manly Palmer Hall.

Our civilization is now, quite unconsciously, more imbued with Pythagorean influences than it has ever been. The evidence is plain to see wherever one looks, in phenomena as various as vegetarianism and the whole-food movement; postmodernist architecture; the synthesis of religions; travelers in search of Oriental wisdom; researches into ancient Egypt and Babylon; the revivals of sacred geometry, arithmology and speculative music; reprints of Pythagorean literature; meditation; music therapy; the speculations of modern physicists; communes and spiritual communities; the widespread belief in reincarnation. Pythagoras is the center towards which all these scattered impulses point. If he failed as the avatar of the passing age, perhaps he is coming into his own as a new one dawns.

-- JOSCELYN GODWIN

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