Pythoness

“ All the Pythiæ did not seem to have had the same talent at poetry, or to have memory enough to retain their lesson.—Plutarch and Strabo make mention of poets, who were kept in by Jupiter, as interpreters.
The solemn games instituted in honor of Apollo, and in memory of his killing the serpent Python with his arrows, were called Pythia or Pythian games.
37. The art of knowing the humour, temperament, or disposition of a person, from observation of the lines of the face, and the character of its members or features, is called Physiognomy. ”

“ Happy indeed are you, dear Psyche, and blissful in your ignorance. There you sit, unknowing of your own danger, but we who care for you so deeply are in despair at what threatens you. For we have discovered for a fact, nor can we longer conceal it from you, that your love, that secretly entwines you at night, is nothing but an evil serpent of base and venomous nature. Remember for a moment how the Pythian oracle said you were destined to wed a wild and fierce animal. ”

“ For one need only lay aside an instant the bandage of prejudice to see that an Universal science, linked throughout to what men recognize as the most holy, can not be the product of folly and stupidity, as has been reiterated a hundred times by a host of moralists. All antiquity is certainly neither foolish nor stupid, and the sciences it cultivated were supported by principles which, for us today, being wholly unknown, have none the less existed. Pythagoras, if we give attention here, revealed to us those of genethlialogy and of all the sciences of divination which relate thereunto. ”

“ Whether the legend of the slaying of the Python was or was not originally an allegory of the defeat of winter by sunlight, it certainly at a very early period became mixed up with ancient legal ideas and local traditions. It is almost as necessary for a young god or hero to slay monsters as for a young lady to be presented at court; and we may hesitate to explain all these legends of an useful feat of courage as nature-myths. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Pythius, the monster, is called Dracæna, the female form of drakon. ”

“ Such was the basis of Metempsychosis, which became one of the most powerful political engines in the hands of the ancient rulers, legislators and mystagogues. Pythagoras brought this doctrine from the Orient to Greece, and to Italy. This philosopher, and Empedocles after him, taught that the souls of the criminals, when death separated them from the bodies they animated, passed into the bodies of beasts in order to suffer, under those divers forms the punishment of their wickedness, until they might recover, by expiation, their native purity. ”

“ Hence also, the Pythagoreans were studious of divination. For this alone is an interpretation of the benevolence of the Gods. And in short, he will conceive an employment of this kind to be worthy of regard, who believes that there are Gods; but he who thinks that either of these is folly, will also be of opinion that both are foolish. Many of the mandates, however, of the Pythagoreans were introduced from the mysteries; for they did not conceive them to be the productions of arrogance, but to originate from a certain divinity. ”

“ Now Pythagoras teaches his disciples saying “Bind up the bed-sack,” since they who are setting out on a journey make their clothing into a bundle, so as to be ready for the road. Thus he wishes his disciples to be ready, as if at any moment death might come upon them, so that they may [24] not be caught lacking anything. Wherefore he is obliged to enjoin the Pythagorean every morning to bind up the bed-sack, that is to prepare for death. “Do not stir the fire with a sword,” meaning do not provoke angry men; for he likens an angry man to a fire and speech to a sword. ”

“ I nodded. "It has always been human to admire and respect that only which is in any way different to ourselves; in archaic times those whose teachings were above men's comprehension, or who were remarkable for any singularity of action were immediately deified. Pythagoras recognized this truth when he shrouded himself in mystery and delivered his lectures from behind a curtain, though to be sure he has come to be regarded as something of a charlatan in consequence."
"Pray, sir," said the Preacher, absent-mindedly puffing at his pipe again, "may I ask what you are?"
"A blacksmith, sir." ”

“ At the solemnity of the Pythian names, there was a consult about taking away all such sports as had lately crept in and were not of ancient institution. For after they had taken in the tragedy in addition to the three ancient, which were as old as the solemnity itself, the Pythian piper, the harper, and the singer to the harp, as if a large gate were opened, they could not keep out an infinite crowd of plays and musical entertainments of all sorts that rushed in after him. ”

“ Take and add then to what is here so well said, the conception that the God of this place employs the Pythia for the hearing as the sun employs the moon for the seeing. He shows and reveals his own thoughts, but shows them mingled in their passage through a mortal body, and a soul which cannot remain at rest or present itself to the exciting power unexcited and inwardly composed, but which boils and surges and is involved in the stirrings and troublesome passions from within. ”

“ Philolaus, the celebrated Pythagorean, wrote: "The ancient theologists and priests testify that the soul is united with the body for the sake of suffering punishment, and that it is buried in the body as in a sepulchre"; while Pythagoras himself said: "Whatever we see when awake is death, and when asleep a dream." ”

“ This truth of which you were enamoured, seems, from what has been agreed, not to be a part of yourself, nor a creation of your own, like Pygmalion’s statue—how then has it not happened to you to be even more miserable than Pygmalion till you were sure that truth loved you in return?—and, moreover, till you were sure that truth had free choice as to whether it should return or refuse your love? ”

“ Yet we, who think that the God, when he “signifies”, uses the cries of herons and wrens and ravens, and never ask that they, as the messengers and heralds of the God, should put things into clear rational phrases, do nevertheless ask that the Pythia should use a voice and style as though from the Thymele, not unembellished and plain, but with metre and elevation, and trills, and verbal metaphors, and a flute accompaniment! ”

“ LI. ‘When then the imaginative and prophetic faculty of the soul is attempered to the current as to a drug, the inspiration must be brought about in the persons who are to prophesy, when not, not; otherwise the result will be a distortion by no means free from trouble and disturbance, as we know was the case with the Pythia who lately died. A deputation came from abroad to consult the God; the victim remained motionless and impassive under the first sprinkling, then the priests in |B| excess of zeal persisted, and at last it did give in when drenched 170with their shower-bath. ”

“ For we are persuaded that the Divine Spirit “mortifies the deeds of the body,” and destroys that enmity against God which the carnal passions serve to excite. If, then, the Pythian priestess is beside herself when she prophesies, what spirit must that be which fills her mind and clouds her judgment with darkness, unless it be of the same order with those demons which many Christians cast out of persons 428possessed with them? ”

“ The being who presides over the light is called God; he that rules over the darkness is called Hyle, or Demon. The ruler of the light is supremely happy, good, and benevolent, while the ruler over darkness is unhappy, evil, and malignant.
Pythagoras also maintained this doctrine of two antagonistic principles. He called the one, unity, light, the right hand, equality, stability, and a straight line; the other he named binary, darkness, the left hand, inequality, instability, and a curved line. Of the colors, he attributed white to the good principle, and black to the evil one. ”

“ Physiology, the science of the world and all the phenomena of the world could never lead to the conception of the soul’s separateness from nature and its life. It was not from Greek science, but neither was it, as ancient tradition would have us believe, from foreign lands, that Pythagoras got his belief in the fallen nature of the soul, descended from supra-mundane heights to this earthly nature, and in its long pilgrimage through many bodies on the completion of which it is to be free at last, through purifications and initiations. ”

“ Sometimes they foretell the future through living men, as in the case of those who are possessed: this is divination by "pythons," of whom Isidore says that "pythons are so called from Pythius Apollo, who was said to be the inventor of divination." Sometimes they foretell the future by means of shapes or signs which appear in inanimate beings. ”

“ They will not therefore cease,—neither Discord dividing the world, nor Love attaching to the world the divided parts. Of some such description as this, so it appears, is the distribution of the world according to Pythagoras. But Pythagoras says that the stars are fragments from the sun, and that the souls [2] of animals are conveyed from the stars; and that these are mortal when they are in the body, just as if buried, as it were, in a tomb: whereas that they rise (out of this world) and become immortal, when we are separated from our bodies. ”

“ Order, harmony, the temperance, which, as Plato will explain to us, will convince us by the visible presentment of it in the faultless person of the youthful Charmides, is like a musical harmony,—that was the chief thing Pythagoras exacted from his followers, at least at first, though they were mainly of the noble and wealthy class who could have done what they liked—temperance in a religious intention, with many singular scruples concerning bodily purification, diet, and the like. ”

“ The moral lessons of the Second Pythian reappear to some extent in the Third and First Odes of the same group, also addressed to Hiero. In each we find the same mingling of praises and warnings,—warnings against ambition, avarice, rashness, seductions of evil counsellors, and the like. ”

“ The philosophy of Pythagoras, which was full of superstition, did first plant a monstrous imagination, which afterwards was, by the school of Plato and others, watered and nourished. It was, that the world was one entire, perfect, living creature; that the ebbing and flowing of the sea was the respiration of the world, drawing in water as breath, and putting it forth again. They went on and inferred, that if the world were a living creature, it had a soul and spirit. ”

“ But the infinity you assert is a fable, and so indeed are the images you dream of: and he breeds in young men rashness and self-conceitedness who writ of Pythocles, not yet eighteen years of age, that there was not in all Greece a better or more excellent nature, that he admirably well expressed his convictions, and that he was in other respects behaved like a women,—praying that all these extraordinary endowments of the young man might not work him hatred and envy. But these are sophists and arrogant, who write so impudently and proudly against great and excellent personages. ”

“ Ah Pithias, now come is thy doleful hour:
A perfect friend, one [135] such a world to seek.
Though bitter death shall give thee sauce full sour,
Yet for thy faith enroll’d shall be thy name
Among the gods within the book of fame.
Who knoweth his case, and will not melt in tears?
His guiltless blood shall trickle down anon. Then the Muses sing.
Alas, what hap hast thou, poor Pithias, now to die!
Woe worth the man which for his death hath given us cause to cry. ”

“ Now, whatever may be the primordial cause of Evil, concerning which I can not nor do I wish to explain myself, until the triple veil, extended over this formidable mystery by Moses, may have been raised, I will say, according to the doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato, that its effects can be neither necessary, nor irresistible since they are not immutable and I will reply to the much-lauded argument of Epicurus, that by this very thing they are neither necessary nor irresistible; God can and will remove them and he does remove them. ”

“ In like manner I can never sufficiently praise that Pythagoras in a dunghill cock, who being but one had been yet everything, a philosopher, a man, a woman, a king, a private man, a fish, a horse, a frog, and, I believe too, a sponge; and at last concluded that no creature was more miserable than man, for that all other creatures are content with those bounds that nature set them, only man endeavors to exceed them. ”

“ The one class bears a resemblance to the other, adultery being a sort of inquisitiveness into |C| another’s pleasure, and a prying search into matters protected from the general eye, while inquisitiveness is the illicit denuding and corrupting of a secret. While a natural consequence of much learning is having much to say, and therefore Pythagoras enjoined upon the young a five years’ silence, which he called ‘Truce to Speech’, the necessary concomitant of curiosity is speaking evil. What the curious delight to hear, they delight to talk about ”

“ The philosopher Aristotle, who examined and catalogued human qualities, could not have failed to come across the fact of pity. But he seems even to have regarded it as a troublesome emotion—a disturbing force which had better be got rid of in practical concerns. The Greek tragedy, which by its marvellous presentations of the weakness of man was calculated to evoke the sentiment of pity in great intensity, he regarded as a vent or outlet for the emotion which in this way could be purged off and leave the Greek citizen in untroubled serenity in face of actual life. ”