YEARS OF TRAVEL
At the beginning of the sixth century before our era, Samos was one of
the most flourishing islands of Ionia. Its harbour fronted the violet
peaks of a slumbering Asia Minor, the abode of luxury and charm. The
town was situated on a wide bay with verdant coasts, and retreated,
tier upon tier, up the mountain in the form of an amphitheatre,
itself lying at the foot of a promontory on which stood the temple of
Neptune. It was dominated by the colonnades of a magnificent palace,
the abode of the tyrant Polycrates. After depriving Samos of her
liberty he had given the island all the lustre of art and Asiatic
splendour. Courtesans from Lesbos had, at his bidding, taken up their
abode in a neighbouring palace to which they invited the young men
and maidens of the town. At these _fêtes_ they taught them the most
refined voluptuousness, accompanied with music, dancing and feasting.
Anacreon, on the invitation of Polycrates, was transported to Samos in
a trireme with purple sails and gilded masts; the poet, a goblet of
chased silver in his hand, sang before this high court of pleasure his
languishing odes. The good fortune of Polycrates had become proverbial
throughout Greece. He had as a friend the Pharaoh Amasis who often
warned him to be on his guard against such unbroken fortune, and above
all not to pride himself on it. Polycrates answered the Egyptian
monarch’s advice by flinging his ring into the sea. “This sacrifice I
offer unto the gods,” he said. The following day a fisherman brought
back to the tyrant the precious jewel, which he had found in the belly
of a fish. When the Pharaoh heard of this, he said he would break off
his friendship with Polycrates, for such insolent good fortune would
draw down on him the vengeance of the gods.--Whatever we may think
of the anecdote, the end of Polycrates was a tragic one. One of his
satraps enticed him into a neighbouring province, tortured him to
death, and ordered his body to be fastened to a cross on Mount Mycale.
And so, one evening as the blood-red orb of the sun was sinking in
the west, the inhabitants of Samos saw the corpse of their tyrant,
crucified on a promontory in sight of the island over which he had
reigned in glory and abandonment.
To return to the beginning of Polycrates’ reign. One star-lit night a
young man was seated in a wood of agnus castus, with its glimmering
foliage, not far from the temple of Juno, the Doric front of which was
bathed in the rays of the moon, whose light added to the mystic majesty
of the building. A papyrus roll, containing a song of Homer, had
slipped to the ground, and lay at his feet. His meditation, begun at
twilight, was continued into the silence of the night. The sun had long
ago disappeared beneath the horizon, but its flaming disc still danced
in unreal presence before the eyes of the young dreamer. His thoughts
had wandered far from the world of visible things.
Pythagoras was the son of a wealthy jeweller of Samos and of a woman
named Parthenis. The Pythoness of Delphi, when consulted during a
journey by the young married couple, had promised them: “a son who
would be useful to all men and throughout all time.” The oracle had
sent them to Sidon, in Phoenicia, so that the predestined son might be
conceived, formed, and born far from the disturbing influences of his
own land. Even before his birth the wonderful child, in the moon of
love, had been fervently consecrated to the worship of Apollo by his
parents. The child was born; and when he was a year old his mother,
acting on advice already received from the priest of Delphi, bore him
away to the temple of Adonaï, in a valley of Lebanon. Here the high
priest had given him his blessing and the family returned to Samos.
The child of Parthenis was very beautiful and gentle, calm and sedate.
Intellectual passion alone gleamed from his eyes, giving a secret
energy to his actions. Far from opposing, his parents had encouraged
him in his precocious leaning towards the study of wisdom. He had been
left free to confer with the priests of Samos and the savants who were
beginning to establish in Ionia schools in which the principles of
natural philosophy were taught. At the age of eighteen he had attended
the classes of Hermodamas of Samos, at twenty those of Pherecydes at
Syros; he had even conferred with Thales and Anaximander at Miletus.
These masters had opened out new horizons, though none had satisfied
him. In their contradictory teachings he tried to discover the bond
and synthesis, the unity of the great whole. The son of Parthenis had
now reached one of those crises in which the mind, over-excited by the
contradictions of things, concentrates all its faculties in one supreme
effort to obtain a glimpse of the end, to find a path leading to the
sun of truth, to the centre of life.
Throughout that glorious night Pythagoras fixed his gaze on the earth,
the temple, and the starry heavens in turn. Demeter, the earth-mother,
the Nature whose secrets he wished to pierce, was there, beneath and
around him. He inhaled her powerful emanations, felt the invincible
attraction which enchained him, the thinking atom, to her bosom, an
inseparable part of herself. The sages he had consulted had said to
him: “It is from her that all springs. Nothing comes from nothing. The
soul comes from water, or fire, or from both. This subtle emanation of
the elements issues from them only to return. Eternal Nature is blind
and inflexible, resign thyself to her fatal laws. The only merit thou
wilt have will be that thou knowest them, and art resigned thereto.”
Then he looked at the firmament and the fiery letters formed by the
constellations in the unfathomable depths of space. These letters must
have a meaning. For if the infinitely small, the movement of atoms,
has its _raison d’être_, why not also the infinitely great, the widely
scattered stars, whose grouping represents the body of the universe?
Yes; each of these worlds has its own law; all move together according
to number and in supreme harmony. But who will ever decipher the
alphabet of the stars? The priests of Juno had said to him: “This is
the heaven of the gods, which was before the earth. Thy soul comes
therefrom. Pray to them, that it may mount again to heaven.”
These meditations were interrupted by a voluptuous chant, coming from
a garden on the banks of the Imbrasus. The lascivious voices of the
Lesbian women, in languishing strains, were heard accompanying the
music of the cithara, responded to in the Bacchic airs chanted by the
youths. Suddenly other cries, piercing and mournful, from the direction
of the harbour, mingled with these voices. They were the cries of
rebels whom Polycrates was embarking to sell as slaves in Asia. They
were being struck with nail-studded thongs, to compel them to crouch
beneath the pontoons of the rowers. Their shrieks and blasphemous cries
died away in the night and silence reigned over all.
A painful thrill ran through the young man’s frame; he checked it in
an attempt to regain possession of himself. The problem lay before
him, more pressing and poignant than before. Earth said: _Fatality_.
Heaven said: _Providence_. Mankind, between the two, replied: _Madness!
Pain! Slavery!_ In the depths of his own nature, however, the future
adept heard an invincible voice replying to the chains of earth and
the flaming heavens with the cry: _Liberty!_ Who were right; sages, or
priests, the wretched or the mad, or was it himself? In reality all
these voices spoke the truth, each triumphed in its own sphere, but
none gave up to him its _raison d’être_. The three worlds all existed,
unchangeable as the heart of Demeter, the light of the constellations
and the human breast, but only the one who could find agreement between
them and the law of their equilibrium would be truly wise; he alone
would be in possession of divine knowledge and capable of aiding
mankind. It was in the synthesis of the three worlds that the secret of
the _Kosmos_ lay!
As he gave utterance to this discovery he had just made, Pythagoras
rose to his feet. His eager glance was fixed on the Doric façade of
the temple; the majestic building seemed transfigured beneath Diana’s
chaste beams. There he believed that he saw the ideal image of the
world and the solution of the problem he was seeking. The base,
columns, architrave, and triangular pediment suddenly represented, in
his eyes, the triple nature of man and the universe, of the microcosm
and the macrocosm crowned by divine unity, itself a trinity. The
Kosmos, controlled and penetrated by God, formed
“The sacred Quaternion, the source of Nature; whose cause is
eternal.”[2]
Yes, here concealed in these geometrical lines was the key of the
universe, the science of numbers, the ternary law regulating the
constitution of beings, and the septenary law that governs their
evolution. Pythagoras saw the worlds move through space in accordance
with the rhythm and harmony of the sacred numbers. He saw the
balance of earth and heaven of which human liberty holds control;
the three worlds, the natural, the human, and the divine, sustaining
and determining one another, and playing the universal drama in a
double--ascending and descending--movement. He divided the spheres
of the invisible enveloping the visible world and ever animating it;
finally, he conceived of the purification and liberation of man, on
this globe, by triple initiation. All this he saw, along with his life
and work, in an instantaneous flash of illumination, with the absolute
certainty of the spirit brought face to face with Truth. Now he must
prove by Reason what his pure Intelligence had obtained from the
Absolute, and this needed a human life, it was the task of a Hercules.
Where could he find the knowledge necessary to bring such a labour to a
successful issue? Neither the songs of Homer, nor the sages of Ionia,
nor the temples of Greece would suffice.
The spirit of Pythagoras, which had suddenly found wings, began to
plunge into his past life, into his mist-enveloped birth and his
mother’s mysterious love. Childhood’s memory returned to him with
striking clearness. He recalled the fact that his mother had carried
him in her arms, when only a babe of twelve months, to the temple
of Adonaï, in a vale of Lebanon. He saw himself again as a child,
clinging to the neck of Parthenis, with mighty forests and mountains
all around, whilst the river formed a waterfall close by. She was
standing on a terrace shaded with giant cedars. In front of her stood a
majestic-looking, white-bearded priest, smiling on the mother and child
as he uttered grave-sounding words the little one did not understand.
Often had his mother brought back to his mind the strange utterance of
the hierophant of Adonaï: “O woman of Ionia, thy son shall be great
in wisdom; but remember that, though the Greeks still possess the
science _of the gods_, the knowledge _of God_ can no longer be found
elsewhere than in Egypt.” These words came back to him along with his
mother’s smile, the old man’s beautiful face, and the distant murmur of
the waterfall dominated by the priest’s voice, with that magnificent
scenery all around, like the dream of another life. For the first
time he guessed the meaning of the oracle. He had indeed heard of the
wonderful knowledge of Egyptian priests and their dreadful mysteries,
though he thought he could do without it all. Now he understood that
he needed this “science of God,” to penetrate to the very heart of
nature, and that he could find it only in the temples of Egypt. It was
the gentle Parthenis who, with maternal instinct, had prepared him for
this work, and borne him as an offering to the sovereign God! From this
moment he made up his mind to go to Egypt, and there undergo initiation.
Polycrates prided himself on being the protector of philosophers
as well as of poets. He willingly gave Pythagoras a letter of
recommendation to Pharaoh Amasis, who introduced him to the priests of
Memphis. The latter were opposed to receiving him, and were induced
to consent only with the utmost difficulty. Egyptian sages distrusted
Greeks, whom they charged with being fickle and inconstant. They did
all they could to discourage the young Samian. The novice, however,
submitted with unfaltering patience and courage to the delays and
tests imposed on him. He knew beforehand that he would only attain to
knowledge by entirely mastering his will throughout his entire being.
His initiation under the pontificate of Sonchis the high priest lasted
twenty-two years. All the trials and temptations, the soul-rending
dread and ecstatic joy passed through by Hermes, the initiate of
Isis, even to the apparent, or cataleptic death of the adept and his
resurrection in the light of Osiris, were experienced by Pythagoras,
so that he now realized, not as a vain theory, but as something lived
through, the doctrine of the Logos-Light, or of the universal Word, and
that of human evolution through seven planetary cycles. At each step
of this giddy ascent the tests became more formidable. A hundred times
the risk of death was incurred, especially if one’s object was to gain
control over occult forces, and attain to the dangerous practice of
magic and theurgy. Like all great men, Pythagoras believed in his star.
No path that led to knowledge disheartened him, the fear of death could
not check him, for he saw life beyond. When the Egyptian priests had
recognized that he possessed extraordinary strength of soul and that
impersonal passion for wisdom, which is the rarest thing in the world,
they opened out to him the treasures of their experience. Whilst with
them he daily improved, and became filled with divine knowledge. He
mastered sacred mathematics and the science of numbers, or universal
principles, which he formulated anew and made the centre of his system.
The severity of the Egyptian discipline in the temples also impressed
on him the prodigious power of the human will when wisely trained and
exercised, the endless applications, both to body and to soul, that
can be made of it. “The science of numbers and the art of will-power,”
said the priests of Memphis, “are the two keys of magic; they open
up all the gates of the universe.” It was in Egypt that Pythagoras
obtained that view from above, which allows of one seeing the spheres
of life and the sciences in concentric order, and understanding the
_involution_ of the spirit into matter by universal creation, and
its _evolution_ or re-ascent towards unity by way of that individual
creation called the development of a consciousness.
Pythagoras had reached the summit of Egyptian priesthood, and was
perhaps thinking of returning to Greece, when war, with all its misery,
burst upon the valley of the Nile, carrying away the initiate of Osiris
in another direction. The despots of Asia had long been meditating
the ruin of Egypt. Their repeated attacks had failed, for centuries
past, before the wisdom of the Egyptian institutions, the power of
the priesthood, and the energy of the Pharaohs. But the refuge of the
science of Hermes, the kingdom from time immemorial, was not to remain
for ever. Cambyses, son of the conqueror of Babylon, descended on Egypt
with his innumerable hosts, famished as clouds of locusts, and put an
end to the institution of the Pharaohs, the origin of which was lost
in the night of time. In the eyes of the sages this was a catastrophe
for the whole world. Hitherto Egypt had sheltered Europe against
Asia. Her protecting influence still extended over the whole basin
of the Mediterranean, by means of the temples of Phoenicia, Greece,
and Etruria, with which the high Egyptian priesthood were in constant
connection. This rampart once overthrown, the Bull, with lowered head,
was about to burst upon the land of Greece. Pythagoras saw Cambyses
invade Egypt, he may have beheld the Persian despot, worthy scion of
the crowned villains of Nineveh and Babylon, plunder the temples of
Memphis and Thebes, and destroy that of Ammon. He may have seen the
Pharaoh Psammitichus brought in chains before Cambyses, placed on a
mound, and surrounded by the priests, the principal families, and the
royal court. He may have witnessed the Pharaoh’s daughter, clad in
rags and followed by all her maids of honour similarly demeaned, the
royal prince and two thousand young men, brought forward, bit in mouth
and bridle on neck, before being beheaded; the Pharaoh Psammitichus,
choking back his sobs before the frightful scene, and the infamous
Cambyses, seated on his throne, gloating over the anguish of his
vanquished enemy. Cruel though instructive this lesson of history
after those of science! What a picture of the animal nature let
loose in man, culminating in this monster of despotism who tramples
everything under foot, and, by his horrible apotheosis, imposes on
humanity the reign of a most implacable destiny!
Cambyses had Pythagoras taken to Babylon, with a portion of the
Egyptian priesthood, and kept him within the gates.[3] This colossal
city, which Aristotle compares to a country surrounded by walls,
offered at that time an immense field for observation. Ancient Babel,
the great prostitute of the Hebrew prophets, was more than ever,
after the Persian conquest, a pandemonium of nations, tongues, and
religions, in whose midst Asiatic despotism raised aloft its dizzy
tower. According to Persian tradition, its foundation dates back to the
legendary Semiramis. She it is who was said to have constructed the
monster _enceinte_, over fifty miles in circumference: the Imgur-Bel,
its walls on which two chariots ran abreast, its superimposed terraces,
massive palaces with polychrome reliefs, temples supported on stone
elephants and surmounted by many-coloured dragons. There had followed
in succession the series of despots who had brought into subjection
Chaldea, Assyria, Persia, a part of Tartara, Judaea, Syria, and Asia
Minor. Hither Nebuchadnezzar, the assassin of the magi, had led
captive the Jewish people who continued to practise their religion
in one corner of the immense city which would have contained London
four times over. The Jews had even given the great king a powerful
minister in the person of the prophet Daniel. With Balthazar, the son
of Nebuchadnezzar, the walls of the old Babel had finally disappeared
beneath the avenging hand of Cyrus, and Babylon passed for several
centuries under Persian rule. By reason of this series of preceding
events, at the time Pythagoras came there, there were three different
religions side by side in the high priesthood of Babylon: the ancient
Chaldean priests, the survivors of the Persian magi, and the _élite_ of
the Jewish captivity. The proof that these different priesthoods were
in mutual agreement, on the esoteric side, is found in the part played
by Daniel, who, whilst acknowledging the God of Moses, remained first
minister under Nebuchadnezzar, Balthazar, and Cyrus.
Pythagoras was now obliged to enlarge his horizon, already so vast,
by studying these doctrines and religions, the synthesis of which
was still preserved by a few initiates. In Babylon he was able to
thoroughly study the knowledge in the possession of the magi, the heirs
of Zoroaster. Though the Egyptian priests alone possessed the universal
keys of the sacred sciences, the Persian magi had the reputation
of carrying farther the practice of certain arts. They claimed to
control those occult powers of nature called pantomorphic fire and
astral light. In their temples, it was said, darkness reigned in broad
daylight, lamps were lit without human agency, the radiance of the Gods
was visible and the rumble of thunder could be heard. The magi gave
the name of _celestial lion_ to this incorporeal fire, the agent that
generates electricity, which they could condense or disperse at will,
and that of _serpents_ to the electric currents of the atmosphere and
the magnetic currents of the earth, which they claimed to be able to
direct like arrows against mankind. They had also made a special study
of the suggestive, attractive, and creative power of the human word.
To evoke spirits they employed graduated formulas, borrowed from the
most ancient languages on earth. The following is the psychic reasoning
they themselves gave thereof: “Make no change in the barbarous
names employed in evocation; for they are the pantheistic names of
God; they are magnetized with the worship of multitudes, and their
power is ineffable.”[4] These evocations, accompanied by prayer and
purification, were, properly speaking, what was called at a later date,
white magic.
Accordingly we now see Pythagoras in Babylon, penetrating the arcana of
ancient magic. At the same time, in this den of despotism, he witnessed
a glorious spectacle; on the ruins of the crumbling religions of the
East, above their decimated and degenerate priesthood, a band of
dauntless initiates, grouped together, were defending their science,
their faith, and as well as they could, justice. Boldly facing the
despots, like Daniel in the den of lions, ever prepared to be torn to
pieces, they tamed and fascinated the wild beast of absolute power by
their intellectual might, disputing, foot by foot, the ground they had
won.
After his Egyptian and Chaldaean initiation, the child of Samos knew
far more than his teachers of natural philosophy, far more than any
Greek, either priest or laic, of his time. He was acquainted with the
eternal principles of the universe and their application. Nature had
opened up to him her secrets; the gross veils of matter had been torn
from his eyes, enabling him to see the marvellous spheres of nature and
spiritualized humanity. In the temples of Neith-Isis in Memphis, and
Bel in Babylon, he had learned many secrets as to the past history
of religions, continents, and races. He had been able to compare the
advantages with the disadvantages of the Jewish monotheism, the Greek
polytheism, the Hindu trinitarianism, and the Persian dualism. He knew
that all these religions were rays of one same truth, strained down
through different degrees of intelligence and intended for different
social conditions. He held the key, _i. e._ the synthesis of all these
doctrines, in esoteric science. His vision, compassing the past and
plunging into the future, was bound to judge the present with singular
lucidity. His experience showed him humanity threatened with the most
terrible evils, through the ignorance of the priests, the materialism
of the savants, and the lack of discipline in the democracies. In the
midst of this universal decay he saw Asiatic despotism increase; from
this dark cloud a terrible cyclone was about to burst upon defenceless
Europe.
Accordingly it was now the hour to return to Greece, there to fulfil
his mission and begin his work.
Pythagoras had been kept in Babylon for twelve years. To leave the
city, an order from the king of Persia was necessary. Democedes,
a compatriot of his and the king’s physician, interceded in his
favour and obtained liberty for the philosopher. After an absence of
thirty-four years Pythagoras returned to Samos. He found his country
crushed and ruined by a satrap of the great king. Schools and temples
were closed, poets and savants had fled like a cloud of swallows
before Persian caesarism. He had the consolation however, of seeing
Hermodamas, his first master, take his last breath, and of meeting
Parthenis, his mother, the only one who had never doubted that he would
return. For everyone thought that the adventurous son of the jeweller
of Samos was dead. Not for a moment had she doubted the oracle of
Apollo. Well she divined that beneath the Egyptian priest’s white robe,
her son was preparing himself for some lofty mission. She knew that
there would come forth from the temple of Neith-Isis the beneficent
master, the light-bearing prophet, of whom she had dreamed in the
sacred wood of Delphi, and whom the hierophant of Adonaï had promised
her beneath the cedars of Lebanon.
And now a light skiff was bearing away mother and son to a new exile
over the azure waves of the Aegean sea. They were fleeing, with all
their possessions, from an oppressed and ruined Samos, and were
making sail for Greece. Neither the Olympic crowns nor the poet’s
laurels tempted the son of Parthenis. His work was greater and more
mysterious; it was to rouse to life the slumbering soul of the gods in
the sanctuaries, to restore the temple of Apollo to its former might
and prestige, and then to found somewhere a school of science and of
life whence should come forth, not politicians and sophists, but men
and women initiates, true mothers and pure heroes!