Pythagorus Read Online Free

for practical use: for construction or – when it came to the circle – for measuring such things as the capacity of a granary – but this was a culture whose worldview seamlessly included what was tangible physical fact and what was mythological or metaphorical, drawing no boundaries between practical and esoteric knowledge, or between everyday reality and the holy. The Egyptians’ elaborate preparations for another world after death had a practical motive: to supply what one needed to get there and live there. Magic was a high category of knowledge, as were religious ritual, myth, and medicine. Pythagoras would have studied the Egyptian hierarchy of gods and goddesses and beliefs about the afterlife, but not a doctrine of reincarnation. 1 He also would not have learned vegetarianism, for the upper classes ate beef and other meat fairly often.
    The Egyptians had long excelled in surveying. The near perfect squareness and north–south orientation of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza is evidence of their astounding precision, and Pythagoras could not have missed seeing that pyramid if he travelled as Porphyry thought he did. It dated from about 2500 B.C., two thousand years before him. We cannot know with certainty that the Egyptians in the sixth century still had the technical genius of those distant predecessors, but surveying for land boundaries, city plans, and buildings was routine, and the older, magnificent structures that are still wonders of the world today were much fresher and much more impressive to someone who had not encountered human-made objects on this scale.
    From the temple roofs, Pythagoras might have assisted with observations of the cycles of the moon and the movements of the stars and learned how these were related to the Egyptian twelve-month calendar and 365-day year. Egyptians thought their country was the centre of the cosmos and that there were definite connections between the stars and events on Earth. For example, the star Sirius (Sopdet), invisible for several months, reappeared in mid-July as a morning star, signalling the onset of the yearly inundation of the Nile and the beginning of the new year.

    The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza with the Sphinx in the foreground
    Different temples had different specialities. If Pythagoras did not move on too quickly from Heliopolis (in Porphyry’s scenario) he might have learned a creation theology that explained the diversity of nature arising from a single source, the god Atum, meaning ‘the All’. Atum existed in a state of unrealised potential not far different from the ‘unlimited’ in Anaximander’s teaching and later in Pythagorean thinking. At Memphis, where, as Porphyry told it, Pythagoras spent a little time before being sent on, he could have learned a more remarkable theology of divine creativity that provided an agent through which an idea in the mind of the creator became a physical reality. In many early cultures, a spoken or written word was understood to have creative power. In creation as viewed in Genesis, God spoke, and it was so. The theology of the priests at Memphis divided that creative ‘word’ into two different roles. A link was required, a divine intermediary between an idea in the mind of the creator and the actual physical creation. Memphis theology had arrived at a concept that would later be expressed in the opening of the Christian Gospel of John, where the Logos – Jesus, the second member of a trinity – bridges the creative gap between God and man: ‘through him [not ‘ by him’] all things were created, without him nothing was created that has been created.’ Plato’s ‘demiurge’ bridged the same gap. The god who performed that role in the theology of Memphis, Ptah, operated in similar manner on the human level, enabling an idea in a human mind (a craftsman or artist) to become a real-world product. This role or force was