Pythagorus (41 page)

In 1799, Sylvain Maréchal wrote a six-volume biography titled
Voyages of Pythagoras
that raised its protagonist above the level of an ideal for this one revolutionary period. Kepler had dubbed Pythagoras ‘the grandfather of all Copernicans', but the family became considerably larger when Maréchal insisted that all revolutionaries of all times were ‘heirs of Pythagoras'. The Pythagoras of Maréchal's biography was a great geometer who was driven from the island of Samos by the tyrant Polykrates and fled to Croton, where he founded a philosophical-religious brotherhood with the goal of transforming society. The story went on, reimagined from the point of view of those who felt themselves part of a noble, centuries-old tradition devoted to that same goal: Neo-Pythagoreans who were radical intellectual reformers had flourished in Alexandria in the second century B.C. . . . the Pythagorean Apollonius of Tyana, the itinerant wonder-worker, was not a rather ridiculous cult figure but a legitimate and important rival to Christ, since discredited by Christian writers. . . . in the Middle Ages, those attracted to Pythagorean ideas recognised that Pythagoras was a secret Jewish link between Moses and Plato. . . . Pythagoreanism had never ceased to fascinate thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment but had remained only an undercurrent until the time for its new awakening had come, in the revolution that would transform France and the rest of Europe. Maréchal wrote of ‘the equality of nature' and a Pythagorean ‘republic of equals', and echoed Weishaupt and Buonarroti in advising his readers to ‘own everything in common, nothing for yourself'. Volume VI of the
Voyages
included no fewer than 3,506 supposed ‘Laws of Pythagoras'.

Billington has found that Masons, Illuminists, and intellectual revolutionaries associated Pythagoras with prime numbers, though there had been no suggestion in antiquity of such a link. Great significance was attached to what were believed to have been the central prime numbers of Pythagorean mysticism: 1, 3, 5, and 7. The most extreme uses of ‘Pythagorean principles' were efforts to find paths, by means of mystical numbers and numerology, to the deep truths of nature, different from the use of numbers by early Pythagoreans, and even more different from their use by scientists to reach a mathematical understanding of nature and the cosmos. In a moment of leftist paranoia about a possible Jesuit plot for a secret takeover of Masonry, there was a suggestion that 17 was the number needed to understand the Jesuit plan. A rightist pamphleteer turned that idea around and proceeded, ingeniously, to show how all of revolutionary history derived from the number 17. Other opponents on the right picked up on this same type of pseudo-Pythagorean number mysticism and produced pamphlets suggesting that the prime numbers were a code for the organisation of revolution.

The obsession with Pythagoras did have something to do with the way revolutionary activities were organised, though this involved triangles and circles rather than prime numbers. The link revolutionary intellectuals made between Pythagoreans and the circle and sphere was not far-fetched. The Pythagoreans (as reflected, for instance, in the fragments of Philolaus) had been among the earliest to think in terms of a system in which the Earth and the universe were both spherical. Furthermore, Newton's laws of gravity, which Newton himself had linked with Pythagoras, revealed a ‘circular harmony'. Another Pythagorean doctrine, the transmigration of souls, also suggested a circular movement, forever returning to begin again. Illuminist ‘Pythagoreans' were fond of the idea that a purification process took place within the framework of this ‘circular' transmigration of souls, beginning with the lowest forms of life, spiralling upward through the level of humanity to the divine spheres of pure rationality. The ‘rules of geometry', as they called the laws behind such schemes, were appropriate for those who thought of themselves as the ‘mason-architects' of a new society. The architect Pierre Patte argued that there was a superior morality about circular shapes because they were essentially more egalitarian and communal.

Accordingly, one way of organising Illuminist groups was in a hierarchy of concentric circles. A flame ‘at the centre' represented the central fire around which Earth, Sun, and planets moved in the Pythagorean ten-body system. As one advanced in Illuminism, one progressed from the outer circles inward, freeing oneself from physical limitations to join, or rejoin, life in the inner circle or most heavenly sphere. The same symbolism applied to societies, connecting the circles to the idea of ‘revolution'. Like individuals, societies could revolve inward through concentric circles, freeing themselves from the limitations of old traditions and beliefs to join the inner circle of freedom and rational simplicity. According to the report of a young collaborator of Buonarroti's, Gioacchino Prati, the first organisation that Buonarroti instituted, in the 1790s, the Sublime Perfect Masters, was composed of concentric circles each of which had its own secret creed. The inner circle was absolutely egalitarian and so secret that the outer circles were unaware of its existence. If the writings of some critics of the Illuminists are to be trusted, Illuminist groups organised also in another way into ‘circles', a code name for nine-man cells of conspiracy. Weishaupt, the Bavarian Illuminist, was particularly fond of circles as symbols and considered it symbolic to speak of ‘circulating' his ideas by means of ‘circulars'.

Billington continues: The triangle used in revolutionary symbolism was the equilateral triangle, the
tetractus
, previously an important symbol in Masonry. On seals, stamps, placards, and banners, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity made up sides of a triangle, coloured in red, white, and blue. Hats were tricornered. In 1798 Franz Xavier von Baader wrote a book called
On the Pythagorean Square in Nature
, a strange title for a book that celebrated triangles. Three elements – fire, water, and earth (air seemed not to interest von Baader) – were given life by an ‘all-animating principle', a ‘point of sunrise', represented by a dot in the centre of an equilateral triangle.

This image became hugely popular. Maréchal saw triangular harmonies in the three roles of a man as father, son, and husband, three persons in one, replacing the Christian Trinity with a trinity centred in each individual.

The triangle showed up in a triangular organisation of revolutionary groups. An individual from an inner group recruited two apprentices from an outer group, and eventually each of those recruited two more to form his own triangle. As Weishaupt described it,

I have two directly under me into which I breathe my entire soul, and these two each have two others, and so forth. In this manner I am able, in the simplest way, to set thousands of people into movement and flames. In this manner the Order must be organised and operate politically.

This meant that each man knew the name and identity of only one from the inner group above him. It was a relatively secure form of organisation, an interlocking system that was difficult to infiltrate effectively. The Spanish Triangle Conspiracy of 1816, a plot to kill King Ferdinand VII, was appropriately named.
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In a less potentially deadly usage, the mystic Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin wildly mixed images and cultures in his hope that Pythagorean forms and numbers could be employed to transform Paris into a new Jerusalem, with revolutionary democracy becoming a ‘deocracy'. Others made related plans for an innovative Parisian architecture, based on the circle, triangle, pyramid, and sphere – an idea that was remarkably realised in the 1980s in I. M. Pei's controversial modern entrance to the Louvre, a glass pyramid.

The ‘Pythagoreans' who idealised their role model as an intellectual turned revolutionary also celebrated his association with music and were particularly fond of ‘songs without words'. These seemed a link with the music of the spheres, expressing ‘the harmony of creation, or rather of the world as it should be'. Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, who composed music for Napoleon's coronation, also set to music the
Golden Verses of Pythagoras
, the pseudo-Pythagorean work that had been popular in the Roman/Hellenistic era, and wrote that music was ‘the science of harmonic relationships of the universe'.

In 1804, Napoleon, who five years earlier had installed a military dictatorship in France with himself as ‘First Consul' – the event usually identified as the end of the French Revolution – declared France a hereditary empire and crowned himself emperor. Thus, with the beginning of the new century, European revolutionary hopes waned seriously, but Billington points out that the iconic Pythagoras became important in a new way to those who opposed Napoleon. As France followed the Roman example and transformed herself from a republic to an empire, Pythagoras was viewed nostalgically as an ancient, nobler alternative to Napoleonic images of conquest, expansion, and domination. Both Paine and Maréchal envisioned themselves as still following in the footsteps of Pythagoras, as intellectuals temporarily unable to act effectively (‘in exile') but devoted to constructing a brotherhood that would eventually free human society. In the words of Billington, two labels – Pythagoras and ‘Philadelphia' (signifying brotherly love) – ‘recur like leitmotifs amidst the cacophony of shifting ideals and groups during the recession of revolutionary hopes. . . . Pythagoras became a kind of patron saint for romantic revolutionaries', who more than ever were in need of ‘symbols of secular sanctity'.

Pythagorean inspiration and iconography reached Russia the same year Napoleon became emperor in Paris, when Maréchal's biography of Pythagoras began to appear in official Russian government journals, a volume each year, and parts of it were excerpted in other Russian periodicals. A
kruzhkovshchina
(mania for circles) began in Russia and would last into the twentieth century. In 1818, in the western Ukraine, young men organised a ‘society of Pythagoras' with its own collection of ‘rules of the Pythagorean sect'. A series of groups calling themselves free Pythagoreans were soon forming in other areas of the Russian empire. Groups of radicals frequently debated one another about rival sets of ‘laws of Pythagoras'. Some preferred those that banned private ownership of property; others, those (whose Pythagorean origin was dubious) stressing that weapons and friendship could conquer all. Still others insisted that Pythagorean teachings regarding moral perfection had to be given priority over legal reform. Billington also tells of one student group in Vilnius that met at night in locations of great natural beauty to hear occult wisdom of an ‘arch-illuminated visitor' from an ‘inner circle'.

A brief new tide of insurrections against monarchs in Europe that started with the Spanish Triangle Conspiracy of 1816 ebbed dramatically in 1823. The pope condemned Masonry, and several of the monarchies outlawed it. Throughout Europe, civil liberties were curtailed and organised discussions came under suspicion. Vestiges of republicanism, including Pythagorean symbols, fell out of official and public favour. The rector of the University of Kazan decreed that the Pythagorean theorem should not be taught.

The Russian revolution of December 1825 was a failed echo of the fervour that had inspired intellectuals in Europe for more than half a century. Young officers who had helped defeat Napoleon and marched into Paris in 1814 had experienced there a freer, more enlightened world. They, rather than the lower classes in Russia, had begun to organise with the hope of bringing reform to Russia – in the words of one of the Turgenev brothers, to resist being turned ‘back into gingerbread soldiers! And by whom? Political pygmies'.

Among those whose thinking and work led up to that brief, doomed Revolution of 1825, Pythagoras was again an inspiration. F. N. Glinka, who founded a group called the Union of Salvation, one of many secret societies formed at this time, was strongly moved by a French work that he read in translation about ‘the institute of Pythagoras'. A leading Russian periodical featured an article about the Sect of Pythagoreans that included a series of questions and answers like those favoured by the
acusmatici
(‘What is universal? Order. What is friendship? Equality') and a description: ‘not having any private property, not knowing false pride and vain praise, far from petty things that often divide, they competed with one another only in doing good . . . and learned to use things in common and forget about ownership.' One of the leaders of a ‘circle' that helped foment the revolt, called the Green Lamp, wrote a piece that imagined St. Petersburg three hundred years in the future. Billington tells us that in this vision, the tsar and all Orthodoxy would have given way to Pythagorean forms represented by a circular temple, music, and a phoenix with an olive branch.