Secret_History

Chapter 8: The Culture of Stones 281
original secret numerical formulas of Pythagoras, but the sad fact is that there is no
real evidence of it in the writings that have issued from these groups for the past
millennium. Though everyone discusses Pythagoras, no one seems to know any
more than the post-Pythagorean Greek speculators who, as Manley Hall put it,
“talked much, wrote little, knew less, and concealed their ignorance under a series
of mysterious hints and promises”. There seems to be a lot of that going around
these days! Even Plutarch did not pretend to be able to explain the significance of
the geometrical diagrams of Pythagoras. However, he did make the most
interesting suggestion that the relationship which Pythagoras established between
the geometrical solids and the gods was the result of images seen in the Egyptian
temples. The question we would ask is: what do geometrical solids have to do with
“gods”?
Albert Pike, the great Masonic symbolist, also admitted that there were many
things that he couldn’t figure out. In his Symbolism for the 32nd and 33rd degrees
he wrote:
I do not understand why the 7 should be called Minerva, or the cube, Neptune.
...Undoubtedly the names given by the Pythagoreans to the different numbers were
themselves enigmatical and symbolic—and there is little doubt that in the time of
Plutarch the meanings these names concealed were lost. Pythagoras had succeeded
too well in concealing his symbols with a veil that was from the first impenetrable,
without his oral explanation. 185
Manly Hall writes:
This uncertainty shared by all true students of the subject proves conclusively that it
is unwise to make definite statements founded on the indefinite and fragmentary
information available concerning the Pythagorean system of mathematical
philosophy. 186
With what little we have examined thus far, we are beginning to realize how true
this latter remark is. Of course, in the present time, there is a whole raft of folks
who don’t let such remarks stop them. Any number of modern gurus claim to have
discovered the secrets of “Sacred Geometry”! Not only that, they don’t seem to
have even studied the matter deeply at all, missing many of the salient points that
are evident in the fragments of Pythagorean teachings. Regarding this, there is a
passage in Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, that explicates the problem:
Amid all the nonsense there are some unimpeachable truths... I invite you to go and
measure [an arbitrarily selected] kiosk. You will see that the length of the counter is
one hundred and forty-nine centimeters—in other words, one hundred-billionth of
the distance between the earth and the sun. The height at the rear, one hundred and
seventy-six centimeters, divided by the width of the window, fifty-six centimeters,
185 Cited by Hall, ibid., p. LXIX.
186 Ibid.