Pythagoras

Within the depth-psychology corpus, Pythagoras functions less as a historical mathematician than as an archetypal figure standing at the threshold between shamanic antiquity and philosophical rationality. Edinger, who provides the most sustained engagement, reads Pythagoras as a semi-legendary shamanic personality whose community enacted the transition from primitive to Hellenic streams of the ancient psyche, and whose central discovery — the numinosity of number (arithmos) — represents a collective encounter with a genuine divine disclosure. The irrational number born from the Pythagorean theorem becomes, in this reading, a psychological datum: the unresolvable remainder that disturbs rational closure. Burkert and Rohde situate Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration (metempsychosis) within broader Greek soul-belief, connecting it to Orphic eschatology and shamanic excursion traditions examined by Dodds. Seaford traces Pythagoreanism’s synthesis of mathematics, ethical self-restraint, and politics to the monetised milieu of sixth-century Samos, arguing that the abstraction of number from quality sublimated the logic of monetary value. Place links Pythagoras to the Neoplatonic emanation scheme that structured Ficino’s Renaissance cosmology and, by extension, Tarot symbolism. Sullivan emphasises the Pythagorean identification of the migrating soul as psyche. Across these voices, Pythagoras serves as a node where mathematics, soul-doctrine, number-mysticism, and cosmological speculation converge — a convergence that depth psychology inherits and continues to theorise.

In the library 17 passages

Pythagoras is a semi-legendary figure — no first-hand writings by him remain. According to the surviving material, he had magical attributes, indicating that he was a shamanic figure. Pythagorean writings clearly show the transition from the primitive to the Hellenic streams of the ancient psyche.

Edinger establishes Pythagoras as a shamanic, semi-legendary founder whose community marks the psychic transition from primitive to Hellenic consciousness, with number (arithmos) as the central numinous concept.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis

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A central concept of the Pythagoreans was arithmos, number. They were responsible for the discovery of numbers as a conceptual paradigm; they were gripped by the numinosity of numbers and experienced them as divine.

Edinger argues that the Pythagoreans’ original experience of number as numinous and divine is the psychological core of their contribution to the ancient psyche.

Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy thesis

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This discovery was considered a divine disclosure. Pythagoras is said to have sacrificed an ox in gratitude for this revelation. The Pythagorean theorem is part of the discovery of irrational numbers.

Edinger reads the Pythagorean theorem and the consequent discovery of irrational numbers as a divine disclosure with deep psychological resonance — a revelation that disturbed the ancient mind.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis

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One view he seems to have held is that the soul is immortal. It dwells for a time in living creatures, endowing them with life. It experiences transmigration. Pythagoras probably adopted the second idea from traditions in the East.

Sullivan identifies Pythagorean soul-doctrine — immortality and transmigration of psyche — as foundational to Greek psychological thought, tracing its Eastern origins.

Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis

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The Pythagoreans also maintained the idea of palingenesia, reincarnation. Pythagoras himself was supposed to have remembered many of his reincarnations.

Edinger connects the Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation (palingenesia) to analytical psychology’s concept of the collective unconscious, using clinical cases to illuminate the psychic reality behind the doctrine.

Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy supporting

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The Pythagorean idea of reincarnation is the result of the influence of Orphism. The Orphics thought that life on earth was an expiation for crimes or impurities of previous lives. They were dedicated to the idea of katharsis, ‘purification’ of their souls.

Edinger situates Pythagorean reincarnation doctrine within its Orphic context, tracing the shared concern with katharsis that flows through Empedocles and Plato into philosophical soul-purification.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting

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Aristotle also knew Pythagorean myths according to which ‘any soul can enter any body.’ In a satirical poem, Xenophanes, our earliest witness for Pythagoras, ascribes to him the belief that a human soul, indeed the soul of a friend, could be present in a whipped dog.

Burkert documents the earliest external testimony for Pythagorean metempsychosis, linking it to broader Greek soul-transmigration belief while noting Xenophanes’ satirical distance.

Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting

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Given the unreliability of our sources for the history of early Pythagoreanism, this can remain no more than a hypothesis. But it gains support from various considerations. It is generally accepted that in 532/1 bc Pythagoras left the tyranny of Polycrates on Samos for Southern Italy. Samos at that time was monetised and technically advanced.

Seaford argues that Pythagoras’s historical context — the monetised commercial milieu of sixth-century Samos — is essential for understanding the emergence of number as an abstract philosophical principle.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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Mathematics, ethical self-restraint, and politics are all attributed by our sources to early Pythagoreanism. Among the very few mentions of Pythagoras himself before the mid-fifth century are Heraclitus’ condemnation of his ‘learning many things’ and Empedocles’ admiration of ‘a man of surpassing knowledge.’

Seaford establishes the breadth of early Pythagorean activity — mathematics, ethics, and politics — through the earliest contemporary reactions to Pythagoras from Heraclitus and Empedocles.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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For all things to be number, or made of number, it must be the same sort of thing as, and yet ontologically prior to, everything else. The doctrine focuses on the quantitative aspect of things to the exclusion of the qualitative, with the result that numbers seem concrete.

Seaford connects the Pythagorean doctrine that all things are number to the logic of monetary abstraction, arguing that the trader’s reduction of quality to quantity prefigures or structurally parallels Pythagorean ontology.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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Plato seems to have been influenced by the teachings of his predecessor, the sixth-century B.C.E. mystic Pythagoras, and we will need to learn more about Pythagoras as well.

Place situates Pythagoras as the originating mystic whose influence on Plato’s emanation doctrine shaped the Neoplatonic cosmology later encoded in Tarot symbolism.

Place, Robert M., The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting

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The secrecy and the veneration go together in the punishment of the early Pythagorean Hippasus either for revealing a secret of geometry or for claiming its discovery for himself although it was Pythagoras’.

Seaford examines the authoritarian and secretive structure of early Pythagoreanism, using the Hippasus episode to illustrate how mathematical discovery was guarded as sacred property within the community.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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216 is the cube of 6, and also the sum of 3 cubed, 4 cubed, 5 cubed, the numbers 3, 4, 5 representing the Pythagorean triangle, of which the sides when squared equal the square of the hypotenuse. It is also the period of the Pythagorean Metempsychosis.

This passage from Plato’s Republic demonstrates the deep integration of Pythagorean mathematical symbolism — the triangle, irrational proportions, and the cycle of metempsychosis — into Platonic cosmological numerology.

Plato, Republic, -380supporting

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These new elements were acceptable to the Greek mind because they answered to the needs of the time. Religious experience of the shamanistic type is individual, not collective; but it appealed to the growing individualism of an age for which the collective ecstasies of Dionysus were no longer wholly sufficient.

Dodds contextualises the shamanic and individualistic dimensions of the tradition Pythagoras represents, arguing they responded to a psychological need unmet by collective Dionysiac religion.

E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting

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From the point of view of psychology, these early formulations are not only valid for the external world, but are also the projection of pure psychology. They represent the sequence of psychic development in infancy.

Edinger interprets the Pythagorean geometric progression from point to solid as a projection of psychic developmental sequence, reading their cosmological mathematics as unconscious psychology.

Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy supporting

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Aristotle says that Plato agrees with the Pythagoreans in making numbers the causes of the reality of other things, but that he differs from them in his ‘separation’ of numbers from the world.

Seaford notes, via Aristotle, the key doctrinal distinction between Pythagorean and Platonic number theory — Pythagoreans embed number in physical bodies, while Plato separates it — as a footnote to the argument about abstraction.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside

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