stenudd.COM
Stefan Stenudd           Author, Artist, Aikido instructor
MYTH

Myths of Creation

The Logics of Myth

Psychoanalysis of Myth

Genesis 1: The first creation of the Bible

Enuma Elish: Babylonian Creation

Cosmos of the Ancients: Greek philosophers

Cosmos of the Ancients: The book

Aristotle - life and work

Aristotle's Poetics

Ideas and learning

Life Energy
Encyclopedia


The Taoist source

About the writer

ANCIENT GREECE
Introduction
Thales
Anaximander
Anaximenes
Pherecydes of Syros
Pythagoras
Xenophanes
Theagenes
Hecataeus
Heraclitus
Pindar
Parmenides
Anaxagoras
Empedocles
Herodotus
Gorgias
Melissus
Protagoras
Euripides
Prodicus of Ceos
Leucippus
Democritus
Critias
Antisthenes
Diagoras of Melos
Plato
Aristotle
Epicurus
Euhemerus
Table of the Greek Philosophers
Literature

Aristotle - life and work
Aristotle's Poetics

Books by Stefan Stenudd:
Cosmos of the Ancients, by Stefan Stenudd.
COSMOS OF THE ANCIENTS
by Stefan Stenudd. What the Greek philosophers thought about religion, cosmology, myth, and the gods.
Get the book at Amazon.


Life Energy Encyclopedia, by Stefan Stenudd.
LIFE ENERGY ENCYCLOPEDIA
by Stefan Stenudd. Qi, prana, spirit, and other life forces around the world explained and compared.
Get the book at Amazon.


Murder, by Stefan Stenudd.
MURDER
by Stefan Stenudd. Thoughts on life, death, and the meaning of it all.
Get the book at Amazon.


QI - increase your life energy.
QI
Increase your life energy
by Stefan Stenudd. The life energy qi (also chi or ki), with exercises on how to awaken, increase, and use it.
Get the book at Amazon.



Parthenon

Cosmos of the Ancients

The Greek Philosophers
on Myth and Cosmology


Pythagoras


T o Pythagoras (circa 582-500 BC) it seems the gods were both factual and worthy of reverence, if the later commentators are to be trusted. Of his own words nothing remains. According to Hieronymus, Pythagoras had descended into Hades, where:
     he saw the soul of Hesiod bound fast to a brazen pillar and gibbering, and the soul of Homer hung on a tree with serpents writhing about it, this being their punishment for what they had said about the gods.
     His teaching was strict, full of rules to live by, some peculiar and some expressions of piety. He was secretive of his learning and demanded much of those who wanted to be his disciples, among other things a long waiting before being accepted. Not only did he avoid meat, but for several reasons he refused beans, to the extent that he was reported to have died because of it – when fleeing from his enemies he stopped before a field of beans, not wanting to cross it, whereby they caught and killed him.

Pythagoras

     Diogenes Laertius claims that "his disciples held the opinion about him that he was Apollo come down from the far north" and Pythagoras himself had no less a view on his person – according to Heraclides of Pontus he said about himself that he was the son of Hermes, who had offered him any gift except immortality. "So he asked to retain through life and through death a memory of his experiences." Thus, his soul wandered from person to person, all of them noble men, keeping its memory through each new life lived. To Pythagoras, this was nothing ordinary, since: "He was the first, they say, to declare that the soul, bound now in this creature, now in that, thus goes on a round ordained of necessity." This is, in essence, identical with the metempsychosis of Pherecydes, who would then most likely be primary to Pythagoras in expressing the theory.
     This wandering of the soul was not exclusive to man, nor was the soul itself. Pythagoras avoided meat, and "forbade even the killing, let alone the eating, of animals which share with us the privilege of having a soul."
Pythagoras      From Alexander's book Successions of Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius receives the mathematical cosmology of Pythagoras:
     The principle of all things is the monad or unit; arising from this monad the undefined dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad, which is cause; from the monad and the undefined dyad spring numbers; from numbers, points; from points, lines; from lines, plane figures; from plane figures, solid figures; from solid figures, sensible bodies, the elements of which are four, fire, water, earth and air; these elements interchange and turn into one another completely, and combine to produce a universe animate, intelligent, spherical, with the earth at its centre, the earth itself too being spherical and inhabited round about. There are also antipodes, and our ‘down' is their ‘up'.
     Such a strictly ordered universe has little room for gods and their adventurous ways of creating the world, as told by Hesiod. It seems therefore, though Pythagoras fondled mythological ingredients in his relation to himself and his calling, in his cosmology he replaced them with principles of higher purity and precision, numbers and their relations rather than anthropomorphic creatures. The Pythagoreans, his followers, frequently used allegorical concepts for essential matters in their teachings, claiming this practice to stem directly from their founder, and if indeed their master did the same, mythology could to him have been nothing but a colorful way of expressing his meaning. Then the mathematical cosmogony of his would rightly be categorized as an atheist one.

Literature
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, translated by R. D. Hicks, volume II, Loeb, London 1950.
Freeman, Kathleen, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Oxford 1946.

© Stefan Stenudd 2000

How to get the book
An edited and extended version of the texts on this website was published in 2007.
     If you want to buy the book, you can do so at most international web based bookstores, such as Amazon and the like. Here are links to the book on Amazon US and Amazon UK. Use the latter if you are European - then you get the book cheaper and quicker. Otherwise, you may want to buy it at Amazon US.

At Amazon US:
Cosmos of the Ancients, by Stefan Stenudd - at Amazon US.
At Amazon UK:
Cosmos of the Ancients, by Stefan Stenudd - at Amazon UK.


Search Amazon for books about Pythagoras:




Stefan Stenudd
To top page:

stenudd.com


Stefan Stenudd
Stefan Stenudd
is a Swedish author and historian of ideas, who researches the thought patterns in creation myths. He has also written books about Chinese and Japanese traditions.



Tao Te Ching - the Taoist source.
TAOIST SOURCE
The Taoist source. The complete Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu.


More on this website:
Aikido
Aikibatto sword exercises
Myth
Greek Philosophers
Aristotle and his Poetics
The Taoist source
Qi - life energy
Fiction by Stenudd
Art by Stenudd
Astrology and horoscopes