A Society Built on Secrecy from Its Very Beginning

This entry addresses Pythagoreanism as a broader philosophical and religious movement beyond the Golden Verses catalogued individually elsewhere in this atlas, since ancient Pythagoreanism, founded by Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE, was organized from its origin as a secretive philosophical and religious brotherhood whose specific teachings, including its distinctive doctrines concerning number, cosmic harmony and the transmigration of souls, were traditionally restricted to initiated members and transmitted through oral instruction rather than open publication, a structural secrecy ancient sources themselves describe and that later Neopythagorean and Neoplatonist writers, including those who compiled and transmitted the Golden Verses, worked within and around to varying degrees. This ancient tradition of restricted transmission means that considerably less is confidently known about specific ancient Pythagorean ritual practice and prayer, as opposed to Pythagorean mathematical and philosophical doctrine that leaked out or was later published more openly, a gap in the historical record structurally comparable to the deliberate secrecy affecting Mithraism, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, though arising from a Greek philosophical rather than a Roman mystery-cult context.