The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)
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The first kind of virtue is called ivOpunrlni, human, and the second ^puiKJ) Kol 8(0, heroic and divine. Attention should be given to these epithets which are related to the three principal faculties of man. Aristot., ad Nicom., 1. vii., c. I ; Plato, in Themtet.; Gallien, in Cognit et Curat, morb. anim., 1. i., c. 3, et 6; Theod. Marcil, in Aur. Carmin.
* In Somn. Scip., c. 8.
"^ Aristot., de Calo et Mundo, 1. i.; Philo, de Mund. opific.
^ Pausan., in Corinth., p. 72; Tzetz., in Schol.
' Suidas, in Ettott; Harpocr., ibid.
1 Clem. Alex., 1. v., p. 582.
« Psellus, Ad Oracul. Zoroastr.
Examinations of the Golden Verses 221
Goddess was removed. This manifestation, called Epiphany, shed the most brilliant light upon the darkness which until then had surrounded the initiate. It was prepared, said the historians, by frightful tableaux with alternatives of both terror and hope." The grade of Elect has replaced that of Epopt among the Free Masons, without in any sense offering the same results. The forms are indeed nearly preserved; but the substance has disappeared. The Epopt of Eleusis, Samothrace, or Hierapolis was regarded as the foremost of men, the favourite of the gods, and the possessor of celestial treasures; the sun shone, in his sight, with a purer brightness; and the sublime virtue that he had acquired in the tests, more and more difficult, and the lessons more and more lofty, gave him the faculty of discerning good and evil, truth and error, and of making a free choice between them.*
But if the various grades of initiation expressed symbolically the different degrees of virtue to which men in general can attain, the tests that one was made to pass through at each new grade, made known in particular, whether the man who presented himself to obtain it, was worthy or unworthy. These tests were at first sufficiently easy; but they became increasingly difficult to such an extent that the life of the new member was frequently in danger. One would know in that way to what sort of man this life belonged, and verify by the crucible of terror and of suffering, the temper of the soul and the claim of his right to the truth. It is known that Pythagoras owed to his extreme patience and to the courage with which he surmounted all the obstacles, his initiation into the Egyptian mysteries. Those who attained as he did the last degree of initiation were very rare; the greater number went no ftuther than the second grade and very few attained the third. Lessons o Meurs. Eleus., c. 12; Dion. Chrysost., Oral. xii.
* Sophocl. apud Plutar., De Audiend. Poet. Schol.; Aristoph., De Pace.
6 Porphyr., VM Pythag., p. 5.
222 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras proportionate to their strength and to those of the faculties that had been recognized as dominating in them were given ; for this is the essential point in this Examination, one learned in the sanctuaries to divide the mass of humanity into three great classes, dominated by a fourth more elevated, according to the relations that were established between the faculties of men and the parts of the Universe to which they corresponded.
In the first were ranged the material or instinctive men; in the second, the animistic, and in the third, the intellectual men. Thus aU men were by no means considered as equal among them. The pretended equality which was made on the exterior was mere compliance to the errors of the vulgar, who, having seized the authority in most of the cities of Greece and Italy, forced the truth to conceal an exposure which would have injured it.
The Christian cult, raised upon the extinction of all enlightenment, notuished in the hearts of slaves and lowly citizens, sanctified in the course of time a precedent favourable to its growth.
Those, however, among the Christians who were called gnostics," on account of the particular knowledge that they possessed, and especially the Valentinians who boasted that they had preserved the knowledge of the initiation, wished to make a public dogma of the secret of the mysteries in this respect, pretending that the corruption of men being only the effect of their ignorance and of their earthly attachment, it was only necessary in order to save them, to enlighten them regarding their condition and their original destination*; but the orthodox ones, who felt the danger into which this doctrine was drawing them, condemned the authors as heretics.
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