All these precepts belong to primitive tabu-conceptions.
Cornford (From Religion to Philosophy) says that, in his opinion, "The School of Pythagoras
represents the main current of that mystical tradition which we have set in contrast with the
scientific tendency." He regards Parmenides, whom he calls "the discoverer of logic," as "an
offshoot of Pythagoreanism, and Plato himself as finding in the Italian philosophy the chief source
of his inspiration." Pythagoreanism, he says, was a movement of reform in Orphism, and Orphism
was a movement of reform in the worship of Dionysus. The opposition of the rational and the
mystical, which runs all through history, first appears, among the Greeks, as an opposition between
the Olympic gods and those other less civilized gods who had more affinity with the primitive
beliefs dealt with by anthropologists. In this division, Pythagoras was on the side of mysticism,
though his mysticism was of a peculiarly intellectual sort. He attributed to himself a semi-divine
character, and appears to have said: "There are men and gods, and beings like Pythagoras." All the
systems that he inspired, Cornford says, "tend to be otherworldly, putting all value in the unseen
unity of God, and condemning the visible world as false and illusive, a turbid medium in which the
rays of heavenly light are broken and obscured in mist and darkness."
Dikaiarchos says that Pythagoras taught "first, that the soul is an immortal thing, and that it is
transformed into other kinds of living things; further, that whatever comes into existence is born
again in the revolutions of a certain cycle, nothing being absolutely new; and that all things that are
born with life in them ought to be treated as kindred." †It is said that Pythagoras, like Saint
Francis, preached to animals.
In the society that he founded, men and women were admitted on equal terms; property was held in
common, and there was a common way of life. Even scientific and mathematical discoveries were
deemed collective, and in a mystical sense due to Pythagoras even
* Quoted from Burnet Early Greek Philosophy.Cornford, op. cit., p. 201.