3. ...Revere the memory Of the Illustrious Heroes, of Spirits demi-Gods...

    Pythagoras considered the Universe as an animated All, whose members
were the divine Intelligences, each ranked according to its perfections, in
its proper sphere.  He it was who first designated this All, by the Greek
word Kosmos, in order to express the beauty, order, and regularity which
reigned there; the Latins translated this word by Mundus, from which has
come the French word monde.  It is from Unity considered as principle of the
world, that the name Universe which we give to it is derived.  Pythagoras
establishes Unity as the principle of all things and said that from this
Unity sprang an infinite Duality.  The essence of this Unity, and the manner
in which the Duality that emanated from it was finally brought back again,
were the most profound mysteries of his doctrine; the subject sacred to the
faith of his disciples and the fundamental points which were forbidden them
to reveal.  Their explanation was never made in writing; those who appeared
worthy of learning them were content to be taught them by word of mouth.
When one was forced, by the concatenation of ideas, to mention them in books
of the sect, symbols and ciphers were used, and the language of Numbers
employed; and these books, all obscure as they were, were still concealed
with the greatest care; by all manner of means they were guarded against
falling into profane hands.  I cannot enter into the discussion of the
famous symbol of Pythagoras, one and two, without exceeding very much the
limits that I have set down in these examinations; let it suffice for me to
say, that as he designated God by 1, and matter by 2, he expressed the
Universe by the number 12, which results in the union of the other two.
This number is formed by the multiplication of 3 by 4:  that is to say, that
this philosopher conceived the Universal world as composed of three
particular worlds, which, being linked one with the other by means of the
four elementary modifications, were developed in twelve concentric spheres.
The ineffable Being which filled these twelve spheres without being
understood by anyone, was God.  Pythagoras gave to It, truth for soul and
light for body.  The Intelligence which peopled the three worlds were,
firstly, the immortal gods properly so-called; secondly, the glorified
heroes; thirdly, the terrestrial demons.  The immortal gods, direct
emanations of the uncreated Being and manifestation of Its infinite
faculties, were thus named because they could not depart from the divine
life - that is, they could never fall away from their Father into oblivion,
wandering in the darkness of ignorance and of impiety; whereas the souls of
men, which produced, according to their degree of purity, glorified heroes
and terrestrial demons, were able to depart sometimes from the divine life
by voluntary drawing away from God; because the death of the intellectual
essence, according to Pythagoras and imitated in this by Plato, was only
ignorance and impiety.  It must be observed that in my translation I have
not rendered the Greek word ******** by the word demons, but by that of
spirits, on account of the evil meaning that Christianity has attached to
it, as I explained in a preceding note.
    This application of the number 12 to the Universe is not at all an
arbitrary invention of Pythagoras; it was common to the Chaldeans, to the
Egyptians from whom he had received it, and to the principle peoples of the
earth: it gave rise to the institution of the zodiac, whose division into
twelve asterisms has been found everywhere existent from time immemorial.
The distinction of the three worlds and their development into a number,
more or less great, of concentric spheres inhabited by intelligences of
different degrees of purity, were also known before Pythagoras, who in this
only spread the doctrine which he had received at Tyre, at Memphis, and at
Babylon.  This doctrine was that of the Indians. One finds still today among
the Burmans, the division of all the created beings established in three
classes, each of which contains a certain number of species, from the
material beings to the spiritual, from the sentient to the intelligible.
The Brahmans, who count  fifteen spheres in the universe, appear to unite
the three primordial worlds with the twelve concentric spheres which result
from their development.  Zoroaster, who admitted the dogma of the three
worlds, limited the inferior world to the vortex of the moon.  There,
according to him, the empire of evil and of matter comes to an end.  This
idea thus conceived has been general; it was that of all the ancient
philosophers; and what is very remarkable, is that it has been adopted by
the Christian theosophists, who certainly were not sufficiently learned to
act through imitation.  The followers of Basil, those of Valentine, and all
the gnostics have imbibed from this source the system of emanations which
has enjoyed such a great renown in the school of Alexandria. According to
this system, the absolute Unity, or God, was conceived as the spiritual soul
of the Universe, the Principle of existence, the Light of lights; it was
believed that this creative Unity, inaccessible to the understanding even,
produced by emanation a diffusion of light which, proceeding from the centre
to the circumference, losing insensibly its splendour and its purity in
proportion as it receded from its source, ended by being absorbed in the
confines of darkness; so that its divergent rays, becoming less and less
spiritual and, moreover, repulsed by the darkness, were condensed in
commingling with it, and, taking a material shape, formed all the kinds of
beings that the world contains.  Thus was admitted, between the Supreme
Being and man, an incalculable chain of intermediary beings whose
perfections decreased proportionally with their alienation from the Creative
Principle.  All the philosophers and all the sectarians who admired this
spiritual hierarchy considered, under the relations peculiar to them, the
different beings of which it was composed.  The Persian magians who saw
there genii, more or less perfect, gave them names relative to their
perfections, and later made use of these same names to evoke them: from this
came the Persian magic, which the Jews, having received by tradition during
their captivity in Babylon, called Kabbala.  This magic became mixed with
astrology among the Chaldeans, who regarded the stars as animated beings
belonging to the universal chain of divine emanations; in Egypt, it became
linked with the mysteries of Nature, and was enclosed in the sanctuaries,
where it was taught by the priests under the safeguard of symbols and
hieroglyphics.  Pythagoras, in conceiving this spiritual hierarchy as a
geometrical progression, considered the beings which compose it under
harmonious relations, and based, by analogy, the laws of the universe upon
those of music.  He called the movement of the celestial spheres, harmony,
and made use of numbers to express the faculties of different beings, their
relations and their influences.  Hierocles mentions a sacred book attributed
to this philosopher, in which he called the divinity, the Number of numbers.
Plato, who, some centuries later, regarded these same beings as ideas and
types, sought to penetrate their nature and to subjugate them by dialectics
and the force of thought.  Synesius, who united the doctrine of Pythagoras
to that of Plato, sometimes called God, the Number of numbers, and sometimes
the Idea of ideas.  The gnostics gave to the intermediary beings the name of
Eons.  This name, which signifies, in Egyptian, a principle of the will,
being developed by an inherent, plastic faculty, is applied in Greek to a
term of infinite duration.  One finds in Hermes Trismegistus the origin of
this change of meaning.  This ancient sage remarks that the two faculties,
the two virtues of God, are the understanding and the soul, and that the two
virtues of the Eon are perpetuity and immortality.  The essence of God, he
said again, is the good and the beautiful, beatitude and wisdom; the essence
of Eon, is being always the same  But, not content with assimilating beings
of the celestial hierarchy to ideas, to numbers, or to the plastic principle
of the will, there were philosophers who preferred to designate them by the
name of Words.  Plutarch said on one occasion that words, ideas, and divine
emanations reside in heaven and in the stars.  Philo gives in more than one
instance the name of word to angels; and Clement of Alexandria relates that
the Valentinians often called their Eons thus.  According to Beausobre, the
philosophers and theologicians, seeking for terms in which to express
incorporeal substances, designated them by some one of their attributes or
by some one of their operations, naming them Spirits, on account of the
subtlety of their substance; Intelligences, on account of the thought;
Words, on account of the reason; Angels, on account of their services; Eons,
on account of their manner of subsisting, always equal, without change and
without alteration.  Pythagoras called them Gods, Heroes, Demons, relative
to their respective elevation and the harmonious position of the three
worlds which they inhabit.  This cosmogonic ternary joined with Creative
Unity, constitutes the famous Quaternary, or Sacred Tetrad, the subject of
which will be taken up further on.