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Pythagoras: Ancient Pythagoreans
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Pythagoras’ religious and scientific views were, in his opinion, inseparably interconnected. However, they are looked at separately in the 21st century. Religiously, Pythagoras was a believer of metempsychosis. He believed in transmigration, or the reincarnation of the soul again and again into the bodies of humans, animals, or vegetables until it became moral. His ideas of reincarnation were influenced by ancient Greek religion. He was one of the first to propose that the thought processes and the soul were located in the brain and not the heart.
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Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher and mathematician. He was the leader of the Brotherhood of Pythagoreans, a secret society which studied mathematics. Their motto was "All is number." The Pythagoreans explored the "magic 3-4-5 triangle." This type of triangle was called "magic" because any triangle with sides of 3, 4, and 5 units always created a right triangle. The Pythagoreans found that in 3-4-5 triangles, the area of the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the areas of the squares of the other two sides.
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Pythagoras lived in the 500's BC, and was one of the first Greek mathematical thinkers. He spent most of his life in the Greek colonies in Sicily and southern Italy. He had a group of followers (like the disciples of Jesus) who followed him around and taught other people what he had taught them. The Pythagoreans were known for their pure lives (they didn't eat beans, for example, because they thought beans were not pure enough). They wore their hair long, and wore only simple clothing, and went barefoot. Both men and women were Pythagoreans.
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Although Pythagoras was indisputably one of the greatest figures in ancient Greece, remarkably little is known of his life and work. This is largely because of the cultivated mystery surrounding the work and teachings of the Pythagorean brotherhood. He was probably a pupil of Pherecydes in Lesbos and of Thales and Anaximander in Miletus. He is known to have spent 22 years in Egypt with the priests of Memphis, Heliopolis and Diopolis. When Egypt was conquered by Cambyses of Persia, Pythagoras was taken to Babylon as a prisoner: there he had the opportunity to meet and talk with Persian magi. Twelve years later he was released, through the good offices of the (Greek) court physician Democedes, and returned to Samos: by this time he was 56 years old.
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Pythagoras is associated with mathematical discoveries involving the musical intervals of the octave, fourth and fifth - the simple ratios of the lengths of stretched strings and the pitch of their vibration. Intervals could be expressed in the numbers from 1 to 4; ... 1:2 the sound of an octave; 2:3 the fifth; 3:4 the fourth. Aristoxemus maintained that the true method of determining intervals was by the ear, not by numeral ratio. The dominant notes of the universe are proportion, order, and harmony. From Pythagoreans originated the doctrine of the "harmony of the spheres", a theory according to which the heavenly bodies emit constant tones, corresponding to their distances from the earth. The cosmos is thus perceived as a single lyre.
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Pythagoras was born in Samos and traveled widely in search of wisdom. He settled in Crotona, a Greek colony in Italy, about 530 BC, and soon attracted disciples who devoted themselves to the study of cosmology, science, and philosophy. They concentrated on ethical, moral, and social relationships, emphasizing personal character building, asceticism, moderation in all things, and communal service. After a time, there was a revolution in Crotona and the Pythagorean community dispersed. The transmission continued until approximately the middle of the fourth century BC. By then, some admixtures had crept in, as indeed had been the case earlier with the Orphic tradition.
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