The Tetractys
There was a man here, Pythagoras, ...living in voluntary exile. Though the gods were far away, he visited their region of the sky, in his mind, and what nature denied to human vision he enjoyed with his inner eye.
-Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk XV
When I went to high school, it was taught that Western culture was the inheritor of the achievement in thoughts and beliefs of the ancient Greek philosophers. Figures like Pythagoras gave us great theorems of geometry, such as:
a^2 + b^2 = c^2
and taught that the whole of reality was generated and governed by numbers.
It was (and still is) taught that Pythagoras, along with Plato, Socrates, and the rest were the foundation of rational thought and philosophy. But, while that is all well and good, so much was and is left out. What is selectively taught leaves an incomplete view of these men and their contributions to western culture.
And what wasn’t and isn’t taught is that they were all mystics. They took part in the Rites of Elysium, the longest running mystery school in the history of man. Pythagoras especially got around and was initiated in many other mystery schools. He also studied with the Egyptian Priests and Jewish Rabbis and even purportedly with the Indian Brahmins!
I delight in journeying among the distant stars: I delight in leaving earth and its dull spaces, to ride the clouds; to stand on the shoulders of mighty Atlas, looking down from far off on men, wandering here and there, devoid of knowledge, anxious, fearing death; to read the book of fate, and to give them this encouragement!
-Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk XV
Pythagoras and his cohorts, the so-called Pythagoreans, were ascetics who wore white robes and lived homelessly extolling a philosophy of purity and renunciation. Pythagoras was a vegetarian who believed in reincarnation!
Oh, how wrong it is for flesh to be made from flesh; for a greedy body to fatten, by swallowing another body; for one creature to live by the death of another creature!
~~~
Everything changes, nothing dies: the spirit wanders, arriving here or there, and occupying whatever body it pleases...
-Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk XV
Pythagoras and his followers, who may have influenced the Essenes, basically led a life and practice very similar to the ancient Asian Śramaṇa culture from whence the yoga and buddhism descend. And his belief in the Tetractys - the idea of a numbered construction of existence - as expressed in this invocation:
Bless us, divine number, thou who generated gods and men! O holy, holy Tetractys, thou that containest the root and source of the eternally flowing creation! For the divine number begins with the profound, pure unity until it comes to the holy four; then it begets the mother of all, the all-comprising, all-bounding, the first-born, the never-swerving, the never-tiring holy ten, the keyholder of all.
Dantzig, Tobias ([1930], 2005) Number. The Language of Science. p. 42 via Wikipedia
is probably just a distilled version of the Ennead that Pythagoras learned from the priests of Heliopolis on how the world was formed. And if it seems very similar to the Jewish Kabbalah, that’s no coincidence either.
If all of this was taught in high school, a truer sense and appreciation of who and what contributed to the Greeks and what contributions they made to others would show the depth of their impact beyond merely numbers.