Pythagoras – Mad Shaman or Mathematician?
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” -Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers
Buckminster Fuller has described himself as a modern Pythagorean. His geodesic dome has been recreated over 300,000 times according to www.bfi.org. Other visionaries have identified with Pythagoras too, such as Plato, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leary, and a slew of biologists, chemists, musicians, and futurists. While ancient societies used sound to heal, including the Babylonians, Israelites, Hindus, Persians, Egyptians, Sumerians, Chinese Taoists and Aboriginals, just to name a few, Pythagoras, the Grecian mathematician and musician obsessed with the lyre, was curious enough about music to propose an entire cosmology on the repetitive patterns of sound he found one day when walking by a blacksmith’s shop.
Listening to the blacksmith’s iron be forged on the anvil, he noticed that it had a certain musical quality, and upon further inspection, that dependant upon where the anvil hit the iron, there was a consistent note which played as it was made malleable. He later went home and experimented with making the one-string instrument, which became the workshop for his octave discovery and the ensuing cosmology he tried to create from his initial impression at the blacksmith.
“Do you know that our soul is composed of harmony.” Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks (1451-1519)
“The highest goal of music is to connect one’s soul to their Divine Nature, not entertainment.” Pythagoras (569- 475 BC)
This premise for his entire philosophy and cosmologic portrayal was gleaned not just from the humble observance of a man at work, but also from his study of ancient teachings, which he then recast to Greece, in ‘modern’ terms. He was also the first Westerner to declare that the earth was round instead of flat. Make no mistake, the mathematician was spiritually in-spired. He built an ashram in Kroton, Italy and traveled extensively throughout Asia Minor, Egypt and India. He was inducted into Egyptian mystery schools. He developed a spiritual brotherhood that was vegetarian and devoted to social equality and yogic teachings he learned throughout his travels. He influenced even the likes of Plato with his spiritual take on mathematics and music theory. He was a history-changing figure who defies categorization.
“If you listen to Werner Heisenberg lecturing about Pythagoreanism in his own work on the quantum theory, you will hear him emphasize that the basic building blocks of nature are number and pattern, that the universe is not made out of matter, but music. The historians of science I worked with in the University regarded Pythagoras as a magician, a shamanic madman from the cults of the Near East; yet both Whitehead and Heisenberg regarded him as a genius of highest order who laid the foundation upon which our entire Western civilization is based” – William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light (London: Anchor Press Books, 1978. p. 110.)
Music as a Mathematical Formula
Pythagoras deduced that sound was based on a purely mathematical formula and later insisted that music could heal the non-virtuous thoughts of man, like anger and jealousy. He performed what were called ‘soul-adjustments.’ While many are familiar with the Pythagorean theorems taught in high school math classes, most are never introduced to the visionary’s larger ideas. This Grecian intellectual had more to offer than just equations to memorize for annual exams.
The Pythagorean (or Pythagoras’) Theorem is the statement that the sum of (the areas of) the two small squares equals (the area of) the big one.
In algebraic terms, a² + b² = c² where c is the hypotenuse while a and b are the legs of the triangle.
Pythagoras once told his students that you could soothe many human emotions with ‘musical medicine.’ He would often sit and play the kithara, a stringed instrument akin to a guitar or lyre, singing along with it. It is said that he could soothe both human and beast with his voice and playing. Pythagoras is also credited with discovering the seven modes of music and once dissuaded a drunken man from burning down his unrequited love’s house by urging a flutist playing nearby to change his tune to one of a more slow and even temperament. Aside from the emotional changes that sound can inspire, it seems that Pythagoras also used music to heal physical ailments.
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. - R. Buckminster Fuller
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