An article exploring Pythagoras, the person – cult leader, eccentric vegetarian, philosopher, and curiously…murderer?

Think about Pythagoras in your head and you’re sure to have a Pavlovian response of muttering ‘a²+b²=c²’ under your breath. Him and his theorem are so ubiquitous with Mathematics globally that it is next to impossible to study the subject and NOT come across him. But did you know that beyond his work, he was an eccentric vegetarian, a cult-leader, a presumed incarnation of God, and most shockingly, a potential murderer?

The year is 520 BC. Pythagoras has come to the island of Samos and established his school, which will soon become a cult. He calls it the ‘Semicircle of Pythagoras’ (Top 3 cult names of all time, IMO). But this is no ordinary cult. To be a part of it, one has to subject themselves to an absurd amount of rules. Interestingly, he did allow women to join and he was a proponent of educating women, particularly in matters of philosophy.

Consent Form to be an arc in the semi-circle

• You can’t share what you learn outside.
• You can’t eat meat.
• You have to be vegetarian but you can’t eat beans. Beans cause flatulence and that is your soul leaving you.(No, genuinely! This is what he felt)
• You can’t wear rings.
• You have to touch the earth whenever it thunders.
• You have to ‘worship’ the number 10.
• When you join, you have to stay silent for 5 years!
• You have to practice abstinence or strict monogamy because a man’s sexual fluids contain his soul and strength so they must be conserved. If you must have sex, do it in winters, not summers.

Kindly sign in the box with a quill dipped in ink and deposit it in Counter 5.

Yours sincerely,

Pythagoras

Why would people defer to such a litany of rules? Because Pythagoras was no ordinary teacher offering crash courses in ‘How to draw Right-Angled Triangles’. He was a highly-respected thinker of his times with a myth surrounding him that he had a golden thigh and was either Apollo or Apollo’s son. Imagine flexing to your friends that you’ve been taught by God himself!

Pythagoras was so captivated by numbers that he felt all things are numbers. To him, 1 symbolized unity, 2 was symbolic of female, 3 was for male, 4 was justice, 5 was marriage (5=2+3) and 10 was the ‘perfect’ number because 10=1+2+3+4. As a teacher, he wouldn’t allow questions to be asked. To those who weren’t in his inner circle, pun intended, he would lecture from behind a curtain so you couldn’t even see his face.

The most controversial and fascinating incident surrounding his life was that of his student, Hippasus. There are contradicting stories about how Hippasus earned Pythagoras’ wrath. The common account says that he discovered the dodecahedron and in the process of inscribing it in a sphere, chanced upon irrational numbers. Rationality of numbers was a pillar of the Pythagorean cult. His act was seen as going against natural law and was heretic in its thought. By one account, he was banished from the cult. By another, Pythagoras went all Don Corleone on him and drowned him in a lake. Either way, the possibility of entertaining irrational numbers was far ahead of its time.

Pythagoras’ death is also shrouded in mystery. When his cult started worrying local leaders, they banished him. There are as much as ten stories of his death. One suggests an angry mob killed him. Another mentions him getting into a fatal argument on a bean farm where he was crushing the beans, his mortal fart-inducing enemy. A famous account hints that he was burned in a building along with a wrestler friend, Milo, so that’s like Richard Dawkins and John Cena dying together.

There is so much confusion regarding his life because none of what we know comes from him directly. Most of it is from his students who documented his teachings. One can also pontificate if it was the cult perpetuating him as a mighty being. Nonetheless, his myth and his math prevail.

The next time his name props up, think of him as a God-like figure, an eccentric philosopher, a bean-hating vegetarian, a cult-leader. Don’t reduce him to the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. Don’t be so…irrational.

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Edit : My friend, Diksha pointed out that Pythagoras was the earliest documented case of synesthesia. That could explain why he characterized every number with an attribute and personality.

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PS. I am planning to make this a series of articles about people/things/events that were part of our syllabi in school but left out some really interesting stuff about them. If you have recommendations, please share them in the Comments below.

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Sources

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/1996/03/13/pythagoras-the-cult-of-personality-and-the-mystical-power-of-numbers/92ef23a9-fad2-4c12-8089-ddd0aaf8c4a7/

[2] https://medium.com/swlh/pythagoreanism-the-story-of-pythagoras-and-his-irrational-cult-4111ece047ea

[3] https://esoterx.com/2014/12/03/murder-by-math-the-irrational-demise-of-hippasus/

[4] https://www.britannica.com/topic/number-symbolism/Pythagoreanism