Introduction

Pythagoras – the priest

A god who never loses sight of humankind, the judgement of souls, the transmigration of souls and sparing all that has a soul: the religious side of Pythagoras.

The divine is watching

Pythagoras’ teaching about the gods could be called a theism. He taught that the divine watches over humankind and does not let it out of sight with indifference. His ethics follow from this. They assume that human beings tend by nature towards excess and need a higher power to deter them and call them to prudence and order.

That is why Pythagoras also taught a judgement of souls. Iamblichus interprets this with some subtlety: Pythagoras knew that the story of the judgement of souls rightly exists and that it is useful because it deters from injustice. By his command one should rather suffer wrong than kill a human being, for judgement is reserved to the underworld.

Transmigration of souls

Pythagoras taught the transmigration of souls and, according to Iamblichus, even knew his own earlier lives. There was no lack of mockery. A scoffer is said to have given him a letter for his dead father, asking him to bring back the reply. Pythagoras answered that he had no intention of going to the place of the godless, where, as he knew well, murderers were punished.

The scholar of ancient philosophy Walther Kranz called Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence a Pythagorean thought. How the teaching on the soul is seen today is discussed on the page Death and reincarnation.

Sparing all that has a soul

If the soul can be reborn in human and animal bodies alike, it follows that blood sacrifice must be rejected and that everything ensouled must be treated humanely. The Pythagorean teaching on friendship, regarded as the essence of their wisdom, explicitly includes friendship with animals, the beings without reason.

Virtue as agreement with the divine

From this idea of the divine follows an ethics that has in parts remained valid to this day. Everything the Pythagoreans laid down about what to do and what to avoid aimed at agreement with the divine. According to Iamblichus Pythagoras emulated Orpheus in speech and outlook and worshipped the gods as he did. People set up the gods in images of stone and bronze, but they were not bound to human shape. Their form was divine, all-embracing, all-foreseeing and in growth and shape like the universe.

Here we see an idea that leaves the mythical thinking of Homer or Hesiod far behind. Almost Christian is the command that Iamblichus attributes to Pythagoras: never to swear oaths and so misuse the names of the gods. Perhaps it is the Neoplatonist Iamblichus himself speaking here.

Rites and rules

A whole series of further commandments concerned behaviour on feast days and in the sanctuary, rules of purification and diet, and customs of burial and sacrifice. The rule of life included white clothing, periods of silence for newcomers and odd prohibitions, such as the famous ban on eating beans.

In later tradition Pythagoras himself became a holy figure. He was said to have a golden thigh, to work miraculous cures and to be able to be in two places at once. His followers are said not to have called him by name but only “that man”.