The Sleepwalkers Read Online Free Page A

by a small Persian ruler, and was crucified. But by that time Pythagoras, with his family, had emigrated from Samos, and around 530 B.C. settled in Kroton – which, next to its rival Sybaris, was the largest Greek town in Southern Italy. The reputation which preceded him must have been tremendous, for the Pythagorean Brotherhood which he founded on his arrival soon ruled the town, and for a time gained supremacy over a considerable part of Magna Grecia. But its secular power was short-lived; Pythagoras, at the end of his life, was banished from Kroton to Metapontion; his disciples were exiled or slain, and their meeting-houses burnt down.
    This is the meagre stem of more or less established fact, around which the ivy of legend began to grow even during the master's lifetime. He soon achieved semi-divine status; according to Aristotle, the Krotonians believed him to be a son of the Hyperborean Apollo, and there was a saying that "among rational creatures there are gods and men and beings like Pythagoras". He worked miracles, conversed with demons from heaven, descended to Hades, and possessed such power over men, that after his first sermon to the Krotonians, six hundred joined the communal life of the Brotherhood without even going home to bid their families farewell. Among his disciples his authority was absolute – "the Master said so" was their law.
    2.
The Unifying Vision
    Myths grow like crystals, according to their own, recurrent pattern; but there must be a suitable core to start their growth. Mediocrities or cranks have no myth-generating power; they may create a fashion, but it soon peters out. Yet the Pythagorean vision of the world was so enduring, that it still permeates our thinking, even our vocabulary. The very term "philosophy" is Pythagorean in origin; so is the word "harmony" in its broader sense; and when we call numbers "figures", we talk the jargon of the Brotherhood. 1
    The essence and power of that vision lies in its all-embracing, unifying character; it unites religion and science, mathematics and music, medicine and cosmology, body, mind and spirit in an inspired and luminous synthesis. In the Pythagorean philosophy all component parts interlock; it presents a homogeneous surface, like a sphere, so that it is difficult to decide from which side to cut into it. But the simplest approach is through music. The Pythagorean discovery that the pitch of a note depends on the length of the string which produces it, and that concordant intervals in the scale are produced by simple numerical ratios (2 : 1 octave, 3 : 2 fifth, 4 : 3 fourth, etc.), was epoch-making: it was the first successful reduction of quality to quantity, the first step towards the mathematization of human experience – and therefore the beginning of Science.
    But here an important distinction must be made. The twentieth-century European regards with justified misgivings the "reduction" of the world around him, of his experiences and emotions, into a set of abstract formulae, deprived of colour, warmth, meaning and value. To the Pythagoreans, on the contrary, the mathematization of experience meant not an impoverishment, but an enrichment. Numbers were sacred to them as the purest of ideas, dis-embodied and ethereal; hence the marriage of music to numbers could only ennoble it. The religious and emotional ekstasis derived from music was canalized by the adept into intellectual ekstasis , the contemplation of the divine dance of numbers. The gross strings of the lyre are recognized to be of subordinate importance; they can be made of different materials, in various thicknesses and lengths, so long as the proportions are preserved: what produces the music are the ratios, the numbers, the pattern of the scale. Numbers are eternal while everything else is perishable; they are of the nature not of matter, but of mind; they permit mental operations of the most surprising and delightful kind without reference to the coarse external world of the