Pythagoras and his Musical, Mysterious, and Harmonious Numbers

Your time machine has landed. This time we’re going way back to the 6th century BCE to a place known as Croton in Southern Italy.

You’re here to meet the man (or maybe woman) that gave you a glimpse into the magic of geometry… our pre-Socratic philosopher, Pythagoras.

He’s a mathematician…or is he? Because, unlike the math teachers you’ve known before, he doesn’t just study and teach it, he worships it, literally.

Pythagoras believed in numbers like religions believe in gods. And he had evidence… music…numeric scales. Music doesn’t simply go through our ears but touches our souls, and he believed we were connected to it beyond language, because we, too, were a product of numbers…numbers of the soul.

When most people hear the name, “Pythagoras,” they think “a squared plus b squared equals c squared…the Pythagorean theorem. But he was more than that. He was considered a spiritual mystic, a scientist, and to some a cult leader.

Let’s get to know him (and her too)…

A Philosopher with Secrets

Pythagoras founded a type of “spiritual” school called the Pythagorean Brotherhood, and it was beyond just a math class.

His followers took vows of silence, for years at a time, until they were believed to be spiritually mature. Like the philosophers from the East, they believed in reincarnation, were vegetarians, and lived by strict ethical codes.

So what guided their beliefs?  That the entire universe was simply made of numbers. The Pythagoreans believed that everything in existence had a numerical harmony beneath it.

They actually might have been on to something…think coding. All those numbers behind the screen? zeros and ones? Hmm…

But Pythagoras went way beyond that, that numbers weren’t just quantitative; they had qualities:

• 1 was unity.
• 2 was duality — tension and balance.
• 3 was harmony.
• 4 was stability (think: the square, the seasons, the classical elements).
• 10? Perfection.

Now you know where the idea of a “perfect 10” comes from.

And 3 as harmony? Sounds like Nikola Tesla agreed when he said, “If you want to understand the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” Tesla believed everything came down to the numbers 3, 6, 9. He worshipped them! Everything in threes…

And then there’s the Freemasons and their beloved 33rd degree…hmm

They even worshipped shapes.

Look at the picture of the tetractys above. It’s a triangle made of ten points across four rows. Each row symbolized a deeper level of reality. They understood numbers as existence.

Ironically, 10 x 4 = 40… there’s that feminine number again we see throughout all religions. 10 being perfection (10 months in the womb) and 4 represents the elements, stability, and the birth of existence.

So the harmony of the three points of the triangle is made up of the feminine number 40. Interesting, right?

So was Pythagoras a philosopher, scientist, or mystic?
What do you think?

Finding the Silent Philosopher (the feminine) in the Brotherhood

They called it a brotherhood, but women were there too, and not just there to serve or sit silently. They contributed more than history wants us to know.

Her name is Theano:

She’s thought to be Pythagoras’s wife. And there are trails of evidence that she wrote many of the ideas on ethics, on cosmology, and might have even come up with the early concepts of the golden mean.

And some scholars even suggest that it wasn’t Pythagoras who developed the Pythagorean theorem, but may have been Theano.

Can we verify this?

Not exactly, but there are tidbits and crumbs that lead to Theano as the developer. Unfortunately, so much of women’s intellectual history was either recorded secondhand or lost, but the possibility is profound:

What if the theorem was really the Theano Theorem?

Honestly, the alliteration is quite harmonious, don’t you agree? It even has three iams… harmony and balance. Yet, the Pythagorean theorem is a mouthful.

It doesn’t really matter whether she created the theorem, tweaked it, or simply taught it to others in the school; the fact remains that…

Feminine wisdom was always there, as a whisper in the wind…

Whether as a woman from the past, or the guiding feminine light of intuition, Theano is a symbol of what could have been had we listened more closely to the silent philosopher of the soul.

What’s your take on this?

Let’s philosophize!