Pythagorus (40 page)

That ancient Harmony of Government.

That was by no means an isolated allusion. The harmony of the heavens had become a beloved poetic image. William Shakespeare, a contemporary of Galileo and Kepler, had given it beautiful expression in
The Merchant of Venice
, where he had Lorenzo tell Jessica,

. . . soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony . . .

Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings.

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

Shakespeare's contemporary John Davies had written a ‘justification of dance' titled ‘Orchestra' that was full of such allusions – not only to the celestial music but also to the four elements. Davies was not making a scientific or philosophical statement. He was correcting one lady's disparagement of dancing by pointing to its ancient, primordial origins.

Dancing, bright lady, then began to be

When the first seeds whereof the world did spring,

The fire, air, earth and water did agree,

By Love's persuasion, nature's mighty king,

To leave their first disordered combating

And in a dance such measure to observe

As all the world their motion should preserve.

. . . . .

The turning vault of heaven formed was,

Whose starry wheels he hath so made to pass

As that their movings do a music frame

And they themselves still dance unto the same.

. . . . .

All the world's great fortunes and affairs

Forward and backward rapt and whirled are

According to the music of the spheres.

John Milton, a later contemporary of Galileo and Kepler, like Shakespeare referred to the inability of human ears to hear this music:

But else in deep of night when drowsiness

Hath locked up mortal sense, then listen I

To the celestial Sirens' harmony . . .

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie,

To lull the daughters of
Necessity
,

And keep unsteady Nature to her law,

And the low world in measured motion draw

After the heavenly tune, which none can hear

Of human mould with gross unpurged ear.

Another Englishman, John Dryden, born in 1631, the year after Kepler died, like Davies gave music a voice in creation:

From harmony, from heavenly harmony,

This universal frame began:

When Nature underneath a heap

Of jarring atoms lay

And could not heave her head,

The tuneful voice was heard from high:

Arise, ye more than dead!

Joseph Addison, born later in the century, was the author of a poem that combined the ideas expressed in Psalm 19 with the image of the music of the spheres. Christian congregations still sing it, to music by Franz Joseph Haydn. The final verse says of the planets:

What though in solemn silence all move round the dark terrestrial ball?

What though no real voice nor sound amid their radiant orbs be found?

In reason's ear they all rejoice, and utter forth a glorious voice:

Forever singing as they shine, ‘The hand that made us is divine.'
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Johannes Kepler (and nearly everyone who has sung this hymn) would have disagreed with the Earth-centred cosmos these lines implied, but Kepler himself – who had imagined the planets arranged in perfect harmony at the moment of creation – could not have put it better. His harmony was a harmony audible to ‘reason's ear'. Even a century after Addison, William Wordsworth, whose lifetime spanned the turn of the century from the 1700s to the 1800s, could still be certain no explanation or footnote was required when he wrote of ‘harmony from Heaven's remotest spheres'.

Pythagorean ideas and
traces of the Pythagorean tradition also showed up in more surprising contexts. One of the most bizarre examples was the reimagining, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of Pythagoras as the hero of intellectual revolutionaries in Europe and Russia. This use, or misuse, of Pythagorean themes was brought to light by James H. Billington in his book
Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith
.
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Billington showed that in the midst of confusion, when nothing was stable and dependable, Pythagoras became an icon of revolution, and his name and the ideals and symbols associated with him ran as leitmotifs through the decades of revolution and revolutionary thinking.

In 1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence and eleven years before the date usually identified as the beginning of the French Revolution, a group in Bavaria founded by one Adam Weishaupt and recruited from the Masonic lodges in Munich was calling itself ‘Illuminist'. Though ‘Illuminism' was difficult for anyone at the time (or today) to define, for Weishaupt it meant a ‘revolution of the mind', discarding and avoiding all ‘spiritualist distortions' and occult practices and ideas. However, the name and concepts vaguely associated with Illuminism predated Weishaupt, and so, probably, did the connection with Pythagoras. Because Illuminists were usually as secretive as Pythagoras and his earliest followers, many questions about them cannot be answered, and a danger of being a secret society is that your popular and historical image may be created not by yourself but by your most vocal and influential enemies. Some credited the Illuminists with almost single-handedly precipitating the French Revolution. Others said they never really existed at all but were a ‘police myth' conjured up by rightists to inspire public fear of clandestine plots, a myth half believed by the authorities themselves. Others assert that they were a fictional invention of propagandists who opposed Masonry and tried to tarnish its image by associating it with insurrection and revolution. Yet others claim that they were an extreme branch of Masonry, or something independent that ‘infected' Masonry. The Masons also were intensely secretive, though not necessarily for the same reasons the Illuminists were.

At the time of Columbus there were ‘Alumbrados' in Spain whose mysticism centred around the idea that a human soul could be subjected to inner purification leading to complete submission to God's will and direct communication with and through the Holy Spirit. Eighteenth-century Illuminists also emphasised inner perfection and purification, but with a secular stress on reason and logic. This ideology, Billington writes, either first appeared in lodges of the Freemasons and other Masonic orders, such as Weishaupt's in Bavaria, or else found fertile ground there and rapidly took over. For Masons, working towards inner perfection and purification was already central to their teaching, and it was also attractive to see themselves as re-creating an ancient brotherhood. In fact, it must have been difficult for a member of a Masonic lodge to know whether he was merely taking part in an inspiring ceremony full of ancient symbols, or dealing with something that really was supposed to have supernatural power, or fomenting revolution – or what, if any, of this made him an ‘Illuminist'. How much more difficult for anyone looking from the outside! Not only was there ‘fire in the minds of men'; there was also considerable confusion. The Illuminist slant, however, does seem to have been that the road to perfection and purification could and should be taken not only by individuals but by human societies. Had not Pythagoras engineered a marvellous reconstruction of society in Croton? However, Illuminists believed that this time, in the eighteenth century, the process was going to require enormous upheaval and the violent overthrow of existing authority.

As early as 1780, seven years before the French Revolution began, the attempt to legitimise revolutionary thinking by reference to ancient ideas had ceased to be something happening only in closed lodges and secret gatherings. Intellectual revolutionaries found it inspiring and reassuring to resurrect what they regarded as primal, natural truths that had been discovered in antiquity, and much that was attributable to, or at least attributed to, the Pythagoreans entered the symbolism of the incipient revolution itself. The rhetoric and the images that began to appear openly in the 1780s featured four ‘Pythagorean' geometric figures: the circle, the triangle, and their solid counterparts the sphere and the pyramid. These had also been symbols for God in medieval Christianity, but that use was militantly rejected.

Pythagoras and also Prometheus seemed ideal role models. Concepts associated with Pythagoras, correctly or incorrectly – prime numbers, geometric shapes, and the harmonic ratios of music – were ‘truth' that was more ancient and fundamental than the doctrines of Christianity that intellectual revolutionaries had discarded. Plato had spoken of ‘a gift of the gods to human beings, tossed down from the gods by some Prometheus together with the most brilliant fire', and Plato's ancient readers had assumed this ‘Prometheus' was Pythagoras. Prometheus, according to legend, had stolen that ‘most brilliant fire' from the gods, and fire had long been associated with Pythagoras, the Pythagorean ‘central fire'. So Pythagoras seemed a splendidly appropriate symbol for the hope that darkness would vanish forever, a new day was dawning, and the sun would never set. The fact that he had left Samos to avoid a tyranny also qualified him as a model intellectual turned revolutionary. In pre-revolutionary Paris, Benjamin Franklin was dubbed ‘the Pythagoras of the New World', when he served as Venerable Master of the Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters (La Loge des Neufs Soeurs), whose membership also included such noteworthy revolutionary figures as Nicolas de Bonneville, ‘Anarcharsis' Cloots, Georges Danton, and Sylvain Maréchal.

The French Revolution began in 1787, and the storming of the Bastille in Paris took place July 14, 1789. The execution of the French royal family, members of the nobility, and clergy began in 1792, and the guillotine was busy for several years as those who had overthrown the monarchy turned on one another. It was a time of chaos, ferment, and confusion – and not only in politics. Conflicting reinterpretations of history, religion, and science vied with one another as factions right and left sought legitimacy, and those caught in the maelstrom clutched desperately not only for safety or victory but also for new self-images. Billington pointed out that it was not insignificant that many of the musicians in Strasbourg who first played the hymn of the French Revolution, ‘La Marseillaise', in 1792, the year the royal family were executed, had also played in the orchestra when Mozart's
Magic Flute
was first introduced to French audiences there a few months earlier. Illuminism had reached Mozart in its Masonic guise, and
The Magic Flute
was chock full of Masonic, ‘Illuminist', and Pythagorean symbols.

The opera seems, to most twenty-first-century eyes and ears, a delightful fairy tale embellished with some archaic pseudo-religious ideas. However, in the 1790s, many would have seen it differently. It spoke symbolically and eloquently for an era when traditions and assumptions were being called into question or crumbling outright, when new discoveries of science and the ideas of the Enlightenment were continuing to undermine or transform older versions of Christian faith, and, when the over-ornate, elaborate, simpering, aristocratic artificiality of the Rococo had little to offer but denial of reality. In this milieu, Mozart, Masons, Illuminists, and revolutionaries were alike in preferring simple harmonies and forms in nature that could provide a securer philosophical foothold – a new, surer, more inspiring pathway to truth.

In about 1786, a young man who would later be dubbed the ‘first professional revolutionary', Filippo Michele Buonarroti, had encountered Illuminism in a ‘Scottish Rite' Masonic lodge in Florence. This lodge had become a forum where Illuminists held sway and discussed radically revolutionary ideas. So severely did the Florentine authorities frown on Buonarroti's involvement that although he was married to a noblewoman, held a doctorate of law, and was highly regarded for his literary talents, his library was raided and Masonic and anticlerical books confiscated. Shortly thereafter, an unrepentant Buonarroti found himself banished to Corsica.
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In 1789 – the year the Bastille fell – it looked for a short time as though he would join several young Italians who were starting up of a new journal in Innsbruck (for which city they used the code word ‘Samos'). These men had been influenced by Weishaupt's Illuminism while studying in Bavaria. However, events in France proved too enticing to Buonarroti, and instead of going to ‘Samos', he was soon deeply involved in revolutionary activities there.

As Billington tells it, Weishaupt, meanwhile, had been the first in many centuries to consider what he thought were Pythagorean principles as guidelines for public policy. In 1787, his
Pythagoras
laid out a design for the most politicised form of Illuminism and reiterated the idea that simple principles first taught in Croton were a splendid guide for reforming and rebuilding society. He especially approved of ending ownership of private property. Following Weishaupt's lead, when Buonarroti drew up his own blueprint for revolution, he emphasised that same practice. Others joined the Pythagorean chorus: Nicolas de Bonneville composed poetry about ‘the numbers of Pythagoras' and insisted that Pythagoras ‘brought from the Orient his system of true Masonic instruction to Illuminate the Occident'. The American Thomas Paine, the famous pamphleteer of the American Revolution and author of
Common Sense
, living a liberated life in a ménage à trois with Bonneville and Bonneville's wife, worked Pythagoras into his version of the history of the Masons, though he gave the Druids primary credit for providing Masonry with an ideology that Paine thought a finer alternative to Christianity. The sun worship of the Druids – paralleling the Pythagorean belief in the central fire – had passed into Masonry, Paine wrote, in
An Essay on the Origin of Free Masonry
.