Esotericism in Philosophy: Pythagoras and Parmenides

the history we choose to tell and how we choose to tell it is often an expression of the kind of stories who want to believe about ourselves the historical story we tell tells as much about us as it does about them this is certainly true in the history of philosophy generally the way that we tell the story of philosophy is to support a narrative that the West whatever that is is rational enlightened skeptical democratic and analytical and that there is a chain of tradition anchoring our values and concepts and hallowed antiquity but just how true is all that if we look closely at the early origins of philosophy if that story so simple I don't think so this is a second in a series on the history of Western as a terrace ism in this video we're going to explore how the foundations of mystical insight magic and occult initiation can be found right alongside the foundations of logic democracy and rationalism i'm dr. justin sledge and this is esoterica where we explore the arcane side of history philosophy and religion you [Music] [Music] you in the history of philosophy we often tell a certain story and I'm even guilty of telling this story in my classes the story goes something like this prior to the sixth century BCE the world was dominated by the category of myth or muthos in which the gods were understood to be the origin and arbiters of reality then the Greek miracle occurred I'm not kidding there are people that really call it that and the likes of Hesiod and the irrational myth mongers were confronted and defeated by logos logic in the form of philosophy science and democracy the end now this is a bit of a caricature but it's not off the map by much think of how many pre and non Greek philosophers and scientists you read in your philosophy class just ask most philosophers to name a single ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian thinker or intellectual text they can't I don't even think most philosophers even know these texts exist further they're happy to ignore what doesn't fit into this weird artificial box of logic rationalism and strict analytical argumentation now I don't want to discount the dramatic and serious breakthroughs that did occur in ancient Greece the development of early naturalism physics and metaphysics ethics etc and the logical form of argumentation are certainly all there I don't doubt that and neither do I want to discount it I just want to point out that by focusing exclusively on that material we're missing something very important and just honestly doing our history badly alongside these breakthroughs I want to focus on some aspects of early Greek philosophy that don't fit into this rationalist logical paradigm and argue that this other more arcane side of philosophy forms at least part of the foundation for Western esotericism to be sure I can't cover everything about this development in one video I think you could do an entire class on the history of early as a terrorism in Greek philosophy so I just want to focus in on a couple of figures and concepts in this video the first being Parmenides and the concept of revelatory initiation our gnosis and Pythagoras in the concept of harmonic totality we'll get to other philosophers in a later video this is also the first in a series exploring the arcane side of Western philosophy a topic largely ignored by academic philosophy much to its own and I think most people know Pythagoras of Samos from the theorem attributed to him although Pythagorean triplets were known centuries earlier in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt what most people don't know is that Pythagoras was one of the first people to call themselves a philosopher he found that a mystical monastic order he introduced the concept of reincarnation into the Western world we know nothing for sure about the early life of Pythagoras everything about him in the belief system that he founded is shrouded in legend lore and mystery I want to build out a kind of composite account of what seems to be at least likely though even if we can't sort out exactly what was true about him his beliefs and the community he founded we can at least describe what was commonly believed about them in antiquity he seemed to have thrived in the early fifth century BCE and southwestern Italy this area had numerous Greek colonies at that time it appears that he traveled through the Mediterranean Basin and seems to have visited Egypt and perhaps Mesopotamia I guess it makes sense that anyone interested in triangles would visit Egypt I mean they kind of had that figured out though in all seriousness the mathematics of Egypt would have far surpassed anything to have been found in ancient Italy or ancient Greece further and I think this is really key Pythagoras may have picked up and transformed a key Egyptian idea the idea of the persistent soul I say persistent soul because the Greeks already had the idea of a disembodied aspect of oneself that persists after death but from the Homeric period this entity is just literally a shadow of oneself Pythagoras seems to have held that the soul is actually the seat of personality in that personality actually persists through death unlike the Egyptian cop and BA which persist into the afterlife assuming a sinless life Pythagoras seems to have helped the soul actually migrates from life to life a doctrine sometimes called metempsychosis transmigration and reincarnation in fact there's a story about pythagoras hearing the voice of a former friend and the yelping of a dog being beaten we can also conclude that pythagoras founded a series of initiatory religious communities in which mathematical spiritual and philosophical concepts of greater and greater complexity were revealed to initiates these communities seem to have had a very complex set of ritual laws around the concept of purity famously pythagorean's were vegetarians they didn't eat beans they wouldn't stand on their fingernail clippings and they wouldn't urinate facing the Sun among other laws the core doctrine of the pythagoreans was ponte arethe moss all is number although our earliest sources for these concepts is Aristotle and remember Aristotle is a non initiate and an opponent of Pythagoras so he might be a bit skeptical of Aristotle here there's very little scholarly consensus about just what this is supposed to mean it seems as if pythagorean's noticed that nature from the movement of heavenly bodies to the harmonics of music was unified by a cult mathematical relations that space and time were fundamentally mathematical in geometrical relations built up from infinitely small points flow the line than the figure and then the solid all placed into the flow of time infinitely flowing in plus one this idea seemed a little odd at first until you take a little physics or study fractals or do a little music theory it's not a far leap from the idea that mathematics best describes reality to the idea that mathematics just is reality the Pythagorean seemed to have built a kind of numeral mystical symbol may be the earliest esoteric symbol in the Western world the tetrakis the symbol is extremely fecund and probably represents a whole host of secret mathematical mystical doctrines it begins with a single monad unfolding into ten different points the base 10 decimal counting system containing all on the way all the points lines and figures which make up the fundamentals of arithmetic and geometry and by extension all knowledge from astrophysics to musical theory this symbol would persist in esoteric lore for through the late Classical period and what end up being fused in Kabbalah and Freemasonry if esoteric and occult symbolism interests you this might just be the grandfather of all those symbols oh yeah remember when I said that the pythagorean's may have actually assassinated a guy there's a legend that Pythagoras actually sent it's one of his own initiatives to death by drowning a guy named hip Asus one legend actually has Pythagoras himself throwing he passes off a boat what was he passes his crime the discovery of the irrational numbers either this discovery didn't fit the Pythagorean worldview and they sought to suppress the idea or hip Asus wasn't meant to reveal this kind of knowledge to the public and was assassinated for doing so the story isn't clear but it's worth pointing out that even in antiquity there was an air of secrecy and even danger associated with pythagorean mysticism if Pythagoras was the first so-called philosopher that we can see that philosophy intersected in overlap what we would now call mysticism and religion and while ancient sources provide all kinds of colorful legends about Pythagoras in his community none of them deny that he was a philosopher of the first sort he's praised as such and more young blackest even declares him as quote the leader and father of divine philosophy and even more he calls him a quote divine man many contemporary philosophers actually distanced themselves from Pythagoras because of the overt mystical character of his philosophy though - one of my professor in graduate schools credit we did take just as much time with Pythagoras as we did all the other pre-socratics with copious caveats provided well they say while Pythagoras may have been a sort of weirdo cult leader no doubt his younger contemporary was certainly a dyed-in-the-wool philosopher Parmenides of alia the founder of metaphysics was no mystic right one of the most obscure and difficult philosophers of all time has to be Parmenides of alia who flourished sometime around 475 BCE like many of his contemporaries he was focused primarily on understanding the fundamental structure of reality what the ancient Greeks called the RK out of which all reality was composed and upon which all reality was built philosophers prior to him had offered several different solutions to this problem Bailey's had argued that everything was fundamentally water Heraclitus had argued everything was fundamentally fire and pedak Lee had argued that there was actually four fundamental substances earth air fire and water with two forces propelling all change love and strife aristotle and minnie role-playing games have since adopted this physical theory Parmenides solution of this problem was as elegant as it is obscure for him what fundamentally is is being because otherwise it would have to be no thing are not being which doesn't make any sense now of course saying what is is sounds something like a truism it's like when people say well it is what it is well of course it is what it is but there's actually something really strange going on under the hood of Parmenides is philosophy here the first really strange consequence of Parmenides is philosophy is that the only thing that exists is being and that's the only thing that's really real then that thing can't change because the only change that could occur would be from being to non being and if things were changing from being to non-being well we would see existence sort of fluttering in and out of existence all the time which we don't existence seem to persist all the time well the immediate question arises why is it that we experience constant change it's because we're trusting something that we shouldn't we're trusting a sensation or opinion and when we trust sensation well sensation can get it wrong we experience hallucinations all the time if you look at something in a distance it appears small I'm sure all of us have the experience of our phone vibrating in our pockets and we go to check it and there's nothing if sensation tricks us all the time what can we trust well we should trust according to harmonies logos and this is a really technical difficult Greek word to translate but in this case it means something like truth our logic in according to Parmenides if we trust that we know to be true we must conclude that despite all appearances the contrary that change is an illusion and that being is the soul unified reality his slogan and this is the key link to Western esoteric philosophy is hint upon all is one we even see this per minute II and idea in an early alchemical manuscript depicting the Ouroboros the famous snake eating its own tail maybe one of the most famous symbols in hermetic or esoteric philosophy now how does Parmenides come to this conclusion the writings that have come down to us are notoriously enigmatic and often philosophers actually just dive into the second section so-called way of truth and startlogic shopping to figure out what Parmenides actual arguments for this bizarre position is it's this move jumping directly to the second section of humanities as work that actually causes us to miss appreciate what's actually going on in the thought of Parmenides before the second action on truth there's a prolem or introduction in this prolem something extraordinary plays out rather than the image of the solitary rational philosopher working through their problems using all the tools of logic we instead have Parmenides being caught up into the heavens on a journey to meet with a goddess who reveal to him that he must quote learn all things both the way of truth and the way of opinion or doxa Parmenides describes how the daughters of the son escort him to a temple where day and night meet a place where all opposites resolve into a greater oneness and an unnamed goddess delivers to him a kind of discourse on the fundamental oneness of reality what seems to be happening on a straightforward reading of the problem is that Parmenides is one experiencing something like an ecstatic mystical vision in which he is a recipient of a divine revelation into ultimate reality and to Parmenides himself claim that he's something like a vessel through which the goddess speaks to the reader rather than being the author of the ideas he's a kind of prophet and three the text itself is esoteric it's very difficult to understand and it's written as a poem something very much like many myths or texts about the gods are at this time while Parmenides is work does include logical argumentation though obscure and i have to say that commentaries on this 160 line poem can run in two volumes at this point there can be no denying that on its face the text is a result of mystical insight and divine revelation I think it's conspicuous to note that this text is actually very similar in some ways to the pieman der the first text in the corpus Hermeticum will be lean with those texts at length in future videos there's something ironic about the fact that Parmenides is taken to be one of the foundational characters in the history of Western philosophy the founder of metaphysics itself his Sofia seems to be the result of a mystical insight rather than strictly logical argumentation in my experience this aspect of Parmenides is thought simply goes either untaught and certainly unstressed and I think this is just dishonest and a misrepresentation of the history of philosophy well I hope I have shown in these two characters Pythagoras and Parmenides that the very foundation of Western philosophy the alleged rational logical attempt to discover the fundamental nature of reality is simply more complicated there clearly exists a mystical initiatory and esoteric aspect at the very root of Western philosophy itself both logic and mysticism seem to exist side-by-side at this period with no apparent contradiction or tension we as modern people insert that tension are worse just ignore suppress the reality of our intellectual and spiritual history and worse we do it to our own intellectual and spiritual detriment if you're interested in the foundations of Western philosophy or the so called pre-socratics in general although I don't like that term it seems to lump them all together as if they're similar and just label them as if they're all just before Socrates which i think is unfair to them I'd like to recommend a couple of books specifically on Parmenides and Pythagoras but also on the pre-socratics generally despite the term I don't like the first collection is by Kirk Raven and Schofield this is a great introduction of the texts with the actual original Greek a translation and commentary another text published by Hackett one of my favorite publishers is philosophy before Socrates by makeer Han it's a great text it goes over many of the fragments he does a lot of explaining of the fragments and it's it's a really solid text a great text in the field disrupting this idea that the Greeks were somehow fundamentally rational is the Greeks in the irrational by Eric Dodds this is a classic text the section on Plato and the Minea the idea of madness as the origin of philosophy is foundational highly recommend the Dodds text definitely pick that one up if you're interested in Pythagoras I hate to tell you but the best text is relatively difficult to find and very expensive Walter briquets text lore and science and ancient pythagoreanism is in my opinion the best exploration of the doctrines and ideas of Pythagoras and the early pythagorean's including Phil Olaus it's a bit difficult to find it's pretty expensive but if you iõll it it's great it's a bit of a tome it is in my opinion the single best text for exploring pythagoreanism in all its complexity another great text on Pythagoras and the pythagorean's also published by Hackett is Pythagoras and the pythagorean's by Charles Khan again a really great introduction not terribly expensive if you get the briquette tax this is also a fantastic text on the difficult nature and the strangeness of the pythagorean's if you're really interested in the mystical or mythical side of pre-socratic philosophy fantastic text is ancient philosophy mystery and magic in pedak leaves in the pythagorean tradition by Peter Kingsley this does a really fantastic job of exploring these early pre-socratic philosophers in the context of religion and context of mystery religion in the context of the sort of ancient Greek cult life that existed in pedicle eezol so there's all kinds of fascinating fascinating stories about him I think my favorite one is he used to wear golden shoes and allegedly threw himself in a volcano approve he was a God I don't know that you survived but I will say that the literature on Parmenides is very uneven and very difficult if I were you I would just stick to the Kirk Raven in Scofield text it has again has the ancient Greek there it has the English and has a very long detailed commentary on the Parmenides text it's a little analytically and I think it downplays the religious and mystical side of Parmenides but the text is there for you explore I hope this video on the origins of philosophy and esotericism is one United form of thought and experience has been interesting if you're interested in the history of philosophy especially the esoteric aspects of the history of philosophy stay tuned it's going to be a core aspect of what we do here at esoterica until next time i'm dr. justin Sledge and you've been watching esoterica where we explore the arcane side of history philosophy in religion

Channel: ESOTERICA

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Keywords: necromancy, occultism, grimoire, magic, mysticism, magick, hermetic, witchcraft, esoteric, esotericism, necromancer, occult, demons, spirits, evil dead, western esotericism, hermetic philosophy, cornelius agrippa, john dee, enochian, aleister crowley, theosophy, dark arts, occult lecture, alchemy, supernatural, mystic, carl jung, paracelsus, history of alchemy, pseudo-geber, lead to gold, spiritual alchemy, newton, boyle, pythagoras, greek mysteries, mystery religion, parmenides, occult philosophy

Id: qQ84delhpuw

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Ariael33]

Interesting video.