Paths of the Ancient Sages: A Pythagorean History Peter Kingsley, Ph.D.

n the present article, we follow the trail eventually was transmitted from southern of Pythagorean wisdom as it wends its Egypt back to Persia. Iway from the Greek islands through For him this tradition wasn’t just a the Mediterranean to the world of Sufis and matter of history. He presented himself as its alchemists. Peter Kingsley is an honorary living representative in his own time. And he professor both at the University of New explained that he was the person responsible Mexico and at Simon Fraser University in for bringing it to its fulfillment by returning Canada. Dr. Kingsley believes his work is to it, full circle, to its roots in the East. bring back to life, and make accessible again, The few people in the West who study the extraordinary mystical tradition that lies Suhrawardi nowadays like to believe his forgotten right at the roots of the Western world. vision of the past is strictly symbolic; that his He has worked together with many of the most interpretations of history aren’t to be taken prominent figures in the fields of classics and literally, or seriously. And yet Suhrawardi was anthropology, philosophy and religious studies, very serious about what he said. So were his ancient civilizations and the history of both successors—people who down to the present healing and science. He is the author of In day claim they have perpetuated intact an the Dark Places of Wisdom; Reality; and esoteric tradition based not on theorizing Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic. or reasoning about reality, but on direct For further information about Dr.Kingsley and his work, visit www.peterkingsley.org. The year: 1191. At Aleppo in Syria a man called Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi was executed on direct instructions from the great Islamic ruler, Saladin. He was thirty- eight years old. His death and short life might seem to have nothing to do with Pythagoras, or the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece. But that’s not the case. Suhrawardi has been known in Persia since his death as “The Sheikh of the East,” or simply as “He who was killed.” While still alive he taught and wrote about how he had discovered a continuous line of esoteric tradition: a tradition that started in the East, Rosicrucian passed to the early Greek philosophers, then Digest was carried from Greece to Egypt where No. 1 Bust of Pythagoras. Roman Copy of a Greek Original. 2009 it traveled a long way up the Nile and Rome, Capitoline Museum.

Page 2 experience gained through spiritual struggle Western philosophy is presented and specific techniques of realization. nowadays as strictly a Greek phenomenon, For them this tradition was alive, explainable in Greek terms alone. Claims incredibly powerful. Suhrawardi described it made by ancient sources that the earliest as an eternal “leaven,” capable of transforming philosophers traveled to distant places in whatever it touches, of raising people who search of wisdom are dismissed as romantic are ready into another level of being. And fantasies, dreamed up by Greek writers just as yeast acts subtly but irresistibly— long after the time of the people they were transforming from the inside, unrestrainable, writing about.

Historians like to speak about what they call the “Oriental mirage”— the exotic illusion conjured up by Greeks that their culture owed a great deal to the East. But the real mirage is the “Greek mirage,” the illusion that the Greeks grew up in a self-enclosed world of their own. precisely because it’s so subtle—the The trouble is that, in the case of theologians in his time saw that the only way Pythagoras, the reports about him traveling to try and stop his teaching would be to kill far and wide go back more or less to the time him. But they killed nothing. when Pythagoras was alive. Historians like And Suhrawardi, like his successors to speak about what they call the “Oriental among Persian Sufis, was quite precise about mirage”—the exotic illusion conjured up by his ancestors. He mentions two early Greek Greeks that their culture owed a great deal philosophers in particular: Pythagoras, to the East. But the real mirage is the “Greek and a man from Sicily called Empedocles. mirage,” the illusion that the Greeks grew up He also states, as we’ll see, the name of the in a self-enclosed world of their own. town in southern Egypt where the tradition The reality is this: the ancient world eventually arrived. And he gives the name was one vast, interrelated whole. Everything of the man responsible for carrying it out was intimately and subtly interconnected. of Egypt in the ninth century—nearly one You only have to look at what happened and-a-half thousand years after Pythagoras in Pythagoras’s own lifetime and you find and Empedocles. Babylonian astrological traditions being As we’ll also see, he knew what he was introduced into Egypt by Persian Magi. saying. But let’s start at the beginning. Further to the east, the same traditions were being carried by Magi to India. One Vast, Interrelated Whole Everywhere nowadays it’s written or said Those who specialize in the history of that Alexander the Great was responsible classical Greece naturally tend to dislike any for opening up the East, centuries after talk about contacts with the ancient East. It Pythagoras. But that’s just a myth. The can be disconcerting to find that the area one routes that Alexander’s army followed had has given one’s life to studying is nothing but been used by Persian traders and teachers a tiny square on a far vaster chess board, that long before Alexander was even born. the details one has been analyzing are just Then there’s the case of Pythagoras the marks left behind by chess pieces being himself. His home was an island called Samos, moved from somewhere one doesn’t know just off the mainland from what’s now the about to somewhere one doesn’t understand. Mediterranean coast of Turkey. It so happens

Page 3 that the people of Samos were among the ancient Persia, for Samos was an island that, specialists of specialists in long-distance from century to century, had the closest of trade. They had a reputation that was almost ties with Persia. mythical in its dimensions for traveling and The realities of history are full of ironies trading. The great temple of Hera on Samos and paradoxes at every turn. With Pythagoras became a storehouse for objects imported the paradoxes start multiplying from the from Syria and Babylonia, from the Caucasus, moment he decided, in around 530 BCE, to Central Asia, and India. leave Samos and settle in Italy. Of all the places that people from Samos The island where he had grown up had did trade with, there’s one in particular that contacts with Egypt; and one would suppose they had close ties with. This was Egypt. They that in leaving Samos for the West he was built their own depots and places of worship leaving those contacts behind. But he didn’t along the Nile, together with other Greeks. leave anything behind. Italy was saturated For them Egypt wasn’t just some foreign or with influences from Egypt. The most exotic land; it belonged to the world they extraordinary finds have been made, there and knew and lived and worked in. in Sicily, like Egyptian magical objects dating And that’s only part of the story. from the seventh century BCE that show the According to an old tradition, Pythagoras’s goddess Isis suckling her son Horus. Their father was a gem engraver. What Pythagoras’s similarities to the imagery of Persephone father did, Pythagoras himself would have suckling her son Dionysus—imagery that learned as a matter of course. But for a Greek depicts the crucial moment in Orphic gem engraver of the time, in the middle of mysteries of initiation when the initiate dies the sixth century BCE, life would have meant to be reborn as Persephone’s child—are far learning skills introduced from Phoenicia too close to be a coincidence. and bringing in materials from the East. Orphic tradition blossomed in Italy. We happen to know about other famous Early Pythagorean tradition absorbed its gem engravers on Samos at the time when language and techniques, made them its Pythagoras was alive. They trained in Egypt; own. And in origin they’re plainly Egyptian. worked for kings of Anatolia; produced some This is particularly clear in the case of the finest works of art right in the heart of of the famous Orphic gold plates that

Rosicrucian Digest No. 1 2009 Pythagorean School in Egypt

Page 4 originally were buried together with initiates They were placed there during the seventh, in southern Italian tombs. They’re pieces of sixth, and fifth centuries BCE. The strips were folded gold foil, inscribed with directions made by Phoenicians—but they’re engraved for finding one’s way in the world of the with Egyptian images. And they were rolled dead and with promises for obtaining up, like amulets, inside tubes often sculpted immortality. They describe the guardians with pictures of Egyptian gods.

Phoenician Influence Traditions have their ebbs and flows, just as cultures do. You won’t find much mention of these People go, whether they strips of gold foil in Phoenician tombs. Most modern historians have little respect for understand why or not, Phoenicians, and disregard them as inferior exactly where they’re needed. to the Greeks. Evidence that Pythagoreans in Italy included Phoenicians among their number, or were taught by Phoenicians, in the underworld that challenge the soul, is neglected. And no significance is seen in prevent it from finding the refreshment how one particular man—the man who it needs. And they remind the soul how to most blatantly gives the lie to the modern state its real identity by claiming it belongs with the gods. fantasy that ancient Pythagoreans were impractical dreamers—is said to have Empedocles learned mechanics and engineering from a Phoenician in Carthage. Here we come to the other man men- The man’s name was Archytas. He tioned by Suhrawardi alongside Pythagoras: was Plato’s greatest friend among the the great philosopher Empedocles, who Pythagoreans; and he, along with his lived in the fifth century BCE and played the major role of transmitting Pythagoras’s disciples, transmitted to Plato the wisdom teachings in Sicily. He used the language of preserved in the famous Platonic myths. But the gold plates in the poetry he wrote, and already in Plato’s own circle the tendency to through what he says, he shows that the glorify the Greeks, especially the Athenians, process of dying to be reborn doesn’t just refer at everyone else’s expense quickly covered to dying physically. Initiates had to die before over the facts. It was Plato’s secretary who they died—face the underworld before their wrote down the famous statement that physical death. “Whatever Greeks receive from barbarians they improve on, carry to perfection.” The similarities in detail between the magical sayings on the gold plates and And it was precisely the people who were Egyptian texts in the Book of the Dead are in a position to know best who went so far obvious. But what hasn’t been realized is that in creating our Western sense of superiority this isn’t just a case of parallels between texts that now we find ourselves proudly clutching from Italy and texts from Egypt; the missing at straws. links have also been discovered. Traditions have their ebbs and flows, They’re strange discoveries, like stepping just as cultures do. People go, whether stones carefully marking out a curve of they understand why or not, exactly where influence that stretches from Egypt across to they’re needed. Italy. Strips of gold foil have been found in Egyptian ideas had for a long time been tombs at Carthage, on the coast of what is carried to Italy, but eventually the opposite now Tunisia; and on the island of Sardinia. movement started—from Italy back to Egypt.

Page 5 It began in a big way when Alexander the Hermetic Texts Great had the city called Alexandria built at The Hermetic texts, or “Hermetica,” the mouth of the Nile during the late fourth that began being produced in Greek were century BCE. People in southern Italy and initiatory writings. They served a very Sicily gave themselves all kinds of reasons particular and practical purpose inside the for doing what they had to do: emigrating circles of Hermetic mystics. And many of the to Egypt. methods they describe, as well as a great deal Pythagoreanism itself had always been of the terminology they use, are specifically a flexible tradition. Its personal demands on Pythagorean in origin. anyone who wanted to become a Pythagorean But the Hermetica are far more than were immense. But, paradoxically, to be a adaptations of Pythagorean themes. They Pythagorean meant belonging to a system are also the most obvious manifestation of that encouraged initiative and creativity: Pythagoreanism returning to Egypt. Until that kept changing, consciously adapting not long ago, the occasional references to to the needs of different people and places Egyptian gods and religion in the Hermetic and times. writings were dismissed as superficial So when Pythagoreans started arriving veneer—as touches of local color added to the in Egypt they didn’t simply set up shop as Greek texts to give them the illusion that they Pythagoreans. They also started merging contained the authentic wisdom of Egypt. their teachings with a tradition that was But the Hermetic literature is Egyptian eminently Egyptian. This was the tradition to its core. Even the name Poimandres that belonged to the god Thoth—or, as or Pymander, the title often given to the he came to be called by Greeks in Egypt, Hermetica as a whole, is Egyptian through Hermes Trismegistus. and through. It’s simply a Greek version of P-eime me-re, “the intelligence of Re.” And the god who was known in Egypt as the “intelligence” of the sun god, Re, was Thoth—the Egyptian Hermes. Already in the early 1990s it was possible to start mapping out the details of how much the Hermetica owed to Egypt. The resulting picture was startling enough. But then something extraordinary happened. In 1995 two historians quietly announced the existence of a Book of Thoth, written in Demotic Egyptian. Just like the Greek Hermetica, it’s a dialogue between a teacher and disciple. The teacher is Thoth “the three times great”—the exact equivalent of Hermes Trismegistus. He talks, like in the Greek Hermetica, about the process of rebirth— about the need to become young when you’re Rosicrucian old, old instead of young. D. Stolcius von Stolcenbeerg, Hermes Trismegistus Digest The Book of Thoth is purely Egyptian, with No. 1 from the Viridarium Chymicum. 1642 2009 not a trace or sign of any foreign influence.

Page 6 But its general correspondences with the It was here, when the real meaning Greek Hermetic texts, and its parallels with of early Greek philosophy had already them down to the most specific expressions become lost in the West, that the alchemists and details, prove without any doubt that kept those philosophers’ teachings alive— here we have a lost Egyptian prototype of the especially the teachings of Pythagoras and Hermetica only known to us before through the Pythagoreans. And they would go on their Greek translations and adaptations. preserving the significance of their teachings These were the Egyptian traditions intact, from generation to generation, for that Pythagoreanism started merging with hundreds of years. to become those Greek Hermetica. And It’s still possible to trace how the teachings you could say that in doing so, it was at last of Empedocles in particular were transmitted coming home. from Sicily down to Egypt and into the The Greek Hermetic writings weren’t the Hermetica, into Egyptian magical traditions, end of Pythagoreanism’s return to Egypt, but and in alchemical circles all the way down to just the beginning. Akhmim. In 1998 the remains of a papyrus, Already in the second century BCE, discovered at Akhmim, which had contained Greek-speaking Egyptians who lived on the huge amounts of Empedocles’ poetry were Nile Delta had started receiving Pythagorean published for the first time. This was much traditions on one hand and, on the other, more than a chance discovery. shaping what was to become known as the During the ninth century CE, seven art of alchemy. Northern Egypt was simply hundred years after Empedocles’ teachings the starting point for a whole process of had been copied onto this papyrus, an transmission from West back to East. alchemist in Akhmim wrote a work that was Over the centuries a combination of to have the profoundest influence on virtually Pythagoreanism and alchemy was carried every aspect of medieval alchemy. His name hundreds of miles along the Nile, down was Uthman Ibn Suwaid, and he wrote the towards the Ethiopian frontier. And it was work in Arabic. carried to one town in particular. The Greeks It became known in the Islamic world called it Panopolis; later it would become as The Book of the Gathering; translated known as Akhmim. It has been said that into Latin it came to be called the outwardly this town in the middle of the Turba philosophorum, or Gathering of the desert “has no history.” That is quite correct. Philosophers. The book described a series of Its history and significance belonged in meetings between ancient Greek philosophers another dimension. at four “Pythagorean conferences,” all of them dedicated to getting to the heart of the Zosimus of Panopolis alchemical art. The meetings were presided The most famous of Greek alchemists, over by Pythagoras himself. And in the Zosimus, lived in the third century CE. text one of the speakers at the gathering, He came from Panopolis. Already in his Empedocles, outlines genuine aspects of the time there were small groups of alchemists historical Empedocles’ teaching—about the either living in the town or staying in fundamental importance of fire at the center contact with the alchemists who lived there. of the earth—which until recently were These groups weren’t just concerned with either forgotten or completely distorted in transforming physical objects. They were also the West. preserving and perfecting techniques for the The significance of these details is transformation of themselves. immense. What Empedocles wrote and

Page 7 Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo, 9th century CE. Photo from the Rosicrucian Archives. taught during the fifth century BCE played Dhu ’l-Nun came from Akhmim. He a crucial role in shaping Western philosophy, was fiercely attacked by Islamic theologians; Western science, and the history of Western put on trial. He narrowly escaped with his ideas. But the simple fact is that a true life. And this man, who aroused so much understanding of what Empedocles had opposition through what he taught, became taught didn’t survive in the West. All that was known as “the head of the Sufis” for the left there of his teaching—about the mysteries simple reason that practically every line of of the world around us, about the nature of Sufis in existence looks back in one way or the soul—was empty theorizing and hollow another to him. ideas. The lived reality had moved elsewhere. He soon came to be considered the It’s strange, now, to look at the surviving crucial figure in “a line of secret gnostic evidence in Arabic texts about the existence teaching” that he transmitted to the great Sufi, of groups of alchemists who called themselves Sahl al-Tustari, and then—through Sahl— “Empedocles circles,” or “Pythagoras circles.” to Sahl’s disciple al-Hallaj and into the early You find “Empedocles circles” mentioned Sufi orders. But Dhu ’l-Nun was also famous again in descriptions of Islamic esoteric for his involvement with alchemy, and for groups who saw Empedocles as their guide— deriving his wisdom from the alchemical who “regard themselves as followers of his traditions preserved at Akhmim. wisdom and hold him superior to all other This connection between alchemy and authorities.” Here were people who, in spite the beginnings of Sufism has often been put of their culture, religion, language, took as aside as something of an embarrassment. their inspiration and teacher a man who And yet, as a few historians have realized, the had lived one and a half thousand years evidence for the connection goes back too far before them. into the past to be discounted so easily. The Sufi, Dhu ’l-Nun But even that isn’t all, because there’s Suhrawardi, “Sheikh of the East,” one other piece of evidence that’s strangely been missed. Rosicrucian says who it was who passed the essence of Digest Pythagoras’s and Empedocles’ teachings to This is the fact that the earliest witness to No. 1 the Sufis: someone called Dhu ’l-Nun. Dhu ’l-Nun’s involvement with alchemy lived 2009

Page 8 hardly any later than Dhu ’l-Nun himself. basic thrust of his teaching pointed in another He was Ibn Suwaid, the alchemist from direction. It was mainly through him that Akhmim who wrote the Pythagorean Book of Empedocles and Pythagoras came to be seen, the Gathering—and who, alongside the other especially by certain Sufis in Persia, as among alchemical books he produced, wrote one the greatest Sheikhs who had ever lived. specifically refuting the accusations leveled against Dhu ’l-Nun. Apart from his connections with alchemy and Pythagoras, with Empedocles and Dhu ’l-Nun, Ibn Suwaid was linked with the The oldest alchemical texts beginnings of Sufism in more ways than one. in the West which survive in He also wrote a work called Book of the Red Sulphur. That’s highly significant. Red sulphur anything like their full and played a crucial role for alchemists because original state talk explicitly it represented the light in the depths of the about alchemy as the art underworld, the sun at midnight, the fire at of inner transformation. the center of the earth. But it’s significant, too, because Book of the Red Sulphur was soon to become a standard book title among Sufis themselves. For them, red sulphur was the name used to describe the essence of the Of course, this way of viewing ancient esoteric “inheritance” that was the ultimate philosophers has no place at all in the goal of being a Sufi. standard pictures of Sufism—any more The tendency nowadays is to assume that than the idea of Empedocles or Pythagoras when Sufis took over this alchemical language as teachers, responsible for transmitting an they changed its meaning by spiritualizing it, esoteric tradition based on spiritual practice giving it a higher significance which it hadn’t and realization, has any place in the standard had before. But that’s as accurate as the belief pictures of ancient philosophy. that Carl Jung in the twentieth century was But that was bound to happen. For a long the first person who ever gave alchemy an time in the West we’ve managed to forget inner or symbolic meaning, who explained it the original meaning of the word philosophy, as relating to human transformation. which is love of wisdom, not the love of The simple fact is that the oldest endlessly talking and arguing about the love alchemical texts in the West which survive in of wisdom. And what’s even sadder is the way anything like their full and original state talk we’ve managed to persuade ourselves that we explicitly about alchemy as the art of inner haven’t forgotten anything. transformation—as the process of bringing As one of Suhrawardi’s successors—his the divine into human existence and taking name was Shahrazuri—stated very simply: the human back to the divine. the realities that Suhrawardi wrote about and These texts have never been properly died for are so fundamental they aren’t easy translated into English. They were written to understand. In the West it was a long time down in Greek during the third century by ago that “the traces of the paths of the ancient Zosimus, the famous alchemist from the sages disappeared”; “that their teachings were town of Panopolis or Akhmim. either wiped out or corrupted and distorted.” It’s no surprise that Suhrawardi was killed. But, as Suhrawardi and his followers His writings show he was a deep Muslim, knew, these realities are never lost for good. profoundly inspired by the Quran. But the © 1999 by Peter Kingsley.

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