It's a mystery

Since the earliest times in recorded Graecoroman history, there have been mystery cults. Every cultic practice for a god had secret rituals and spaces, and there were a number of mystery religions, known as the Eleusinian mysteries, that developed that we know little about. In an excellent review of a new book by Hugh Bowden, it is suggested that actually there were no secret doctrines, just rituals and objects. These mystery religions developed later into the Gnostic traditions (a Gnostic is “one who knows”, gnosis), eventually ending up as Rosicrucian, Masonic, and various other modern mystery religions and cults.

It has been said to me by a friend that he thinks that the Phaedo is a presentation of the esoteric (inner circle) teachings in exoteric (outer circle) form of Pythagorean cultic teachings. It may be this is true, but given Bowden’s thesis, I wonder if it is supportable. Clearly the Pythagoreans had doctrines, as well as rituals and sacred objects, and even more clearly they had extensive esoteric mathematical doctrines. It would be good to see how he treats them.

Coincidentally, Scientific American has a piece in which Michelangelo and da Vinci are supposed to have encoded secret teaching about the brain in the Sistine Chapel, which I wonder might be a case of pareidolia on the part of two neurobiologists.