The Pythagoreans
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
The Mysteries were taught within a community founded by Pythagoras in
lower Italy in the sixth century before Christ. The Pythagoreans saw
the foundation of things in numbers and figures, whose laws they
investigated mathematically. Rudolf Steiner says in Christianity As Mystical Fact: The Essence Of Christianity
(1972) that Aristotle says of the Pythagoreans, “They were the first to
advance the study of mathematics, and having been brought up in it they
thought its principles were the principles of all things. Since of
these principles, numbers are by nature the first, and in numbers they
seemed to see many resemblances to the things that exist and come into
being—more than in fire and earth and water, such and such a
modification of numbers being justice, another being soul and reason,
another being opportunity—and similarly almost all other things being
numerically expressible; since, again, they saw that the attributes and
ratios of numerical scales were expressible in numbers; since, then,
all other things seemed in their whole nature to be modeled after
numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of
nature, they supposed the demands of numbers to be the elements of all
things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.”
Iamblichus, 300-330 A.D., was the founder of a Syrian School of
Neoplatonism. History tells us that he was responsible for a systematic
interpretation of Plato, best known due to his work in Neoplatonism,
writing the “Life Of Pythagoras.” Iamblichus was one of the first
thinkers to systematically examine the thought of Pythagoras and the
Pythagoreans. History notes that he was one of the “first men to not
only look back on the thought of the Pythagoreans, but also to analyze
it, and actually commit it to paper. His ‘Life of Pythagoras’ is one of
the most important ancient documents in determining the doctrine and
teaching of Pythagoras.”