Free US shipping over $150

A free sticker on orders $35+

New: The Illuminati Comic

Conspiracy file · c. 570-c. 495 BC

Pythagoras

The Greek sage best known for a theorem he probably did not discover. In his own time he was famous for something else: a secretive brotherhood with strict rules, a belief in reincarnation and the conviction that the universe is made of number.

Also known as Pythagoras of Samos · The Pythagoreans · The Brotherhood of Croton

On the recordTimelineFrom the comicsIn Paranoid American comicsSources & further reading

Pythagoras, a panel from a Paranoid American comic
From Secret Mystery School #4

The story

Pythagoras was born on Samos around 570 BC and moved to Croton, in southern Italy, around 530 BC. There he founded a community that was part school, part religious order and part political club, with years of silence for new members and a list of rules, the akousmata, that ran from the profound to "don't eat beans". He wrote nothing, and his followers credited their own discoveries to him, so the real man is hard to find.

What is reasonably sure: he taught that the soul is immortal and is reborn in other bodies, human and animal. His school is credited with finding that musical harmonies follow simple ratios of whole numbers (2:1, 3:2, 4:3), and with the idea that number underlies the cosmos. The famous triangle rule was known to Babylonian scribes more than a thousand years earlier; a Pythagorean may have been the first to prove it.

The brotherhood's politics made enemies, and an uprising at Croton burned its meeting house. The story that Pythagoras was caught because he would not cross a bean field is ancient. Later Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists made him a demigod; Renaissance occultists, Freemasons and Manly P. Hall made him an initiate of every mystery school on Earth. In Secret Mystery School, he is the headmaster.

Memorandum for the recordSubject: Pythagoras

On the record

  1. Pythagoras moved from Samos to Croton in southern Italy around 530 BC and founded a community there.
  2. New members kept silence for five years before they could see him, according to Diogenes Laertius (Book VIII).
  3. His symbolic rules included "don't stir the fire with a knife" and "don't step over the beam of a balance" (Diogenes Laertius VIII.17). Iamblichus lists another: don't look in a mirror beside a lamp.
  4. The ban on beans was the most famous rule; ancient writers disagreed on why, from flatulence to beans' resemblance to the gates of Hades (VIII.24, 34).
  5. Xenophanes, a contemporary, mocked him for stopping a man beating a puppy because he recognized a dead friend's voice in its yelp (VIII.36).
  6. Pythagorean triples appear on the Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322, written about 1,200 years before Pythagoras.

The theory

  • Pythagoras was initiated into the Mysteries of Isis by the priests of Thebes, the lore of the Chaldeans and the wisdom of "the learned Brahmins of Elephanta and Ellora" (Frank C. Higgins, quoted by Manly P. Hall, 1928). The cave temples at Elephanta and Ellora were carved about a thousand years after he died.
  • His was the first mystery school of the West, and its secrets passed down through Plato, the Neoplatonists, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons (a common claim in esoteric and Masonic writing).
  • The rules are a code: "don't stir the fire with a knife" means don't provoke the powerful (a reading already in Diogenes Laertius).
  • He had a golden thigh and was seen in two cities at the same moment (ancient legends told by Porphyry and Iamblichus).

Timeline

  1. c. 570 BCPythagoras is born on Samos
  2. c. 530 BCHe settles at Croton and founds his brotherhood
  3. c. 495 BCTraditional date of his death, at Metapontum
  4. c. 400 BCPhilolaus and Archytas carry Pythagorean ideas to Plato's generation
  5. c. AD 300Iamblichus writes On the Pythagorean Way of Life
  6. 1928Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages makes him a universal initiate
  7. 1945Neugebauer and Sachs publish the Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322

From the comics

Panels straight from the page. Click one to read it full size.

From Secret Mystery School #4 · Pages 5, 9

Weird Rules From the Headmaster

Accepted on trial, the students get the school's rules from the headmaster, Pythagoras: no beans, no mirrors next to lights, don't step over crossbars. Every one is a real Pythagorean taboo. Later Pythagoras tells them what it takes to graduate.

Weird Rules From the Headmaster, 1 of 4
Weird Rules From the Headmaster, 2 of 4 Weird Rules From the Headmaster, 3 of 4
Weird Rules From the Headmaster, 4 of 4
  1. The sign is real but belongs to Plato: tradition says "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter" was written over the door of the Academy. It was Greek, not Latin, and it is first reported by commentators some 900 years later.
  2. Diogenes Laertius lists "don't step over the beam of a balance", and Iamblichus warns against looking in a mirror beside a lamp. Ancient writers argued over the bean ban: beans cause wind, beans look like the gates of Hades, beans were used for voting.
  3. Diogenes Laertius gives the rule as "don't stir the fire with a knife" and already reads it the way Sophia does: don't stir up the passions of the powerful.
  4. Arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, the four mathematical arts later called the quadrivium, go back to the Pythagorean Archytas.

Get the evidence

Comics, stickers & more

More conspiracy files