Numbers: Their Occult Power and Mystic Virtues

Westcott's Pythagoras starts out as an athlete. Born around 580 B.C., on Samos or perhaps at Sidon, the son of an engraver named Mnesarchus, he won prizes for agility at the Olympic Games, and that is nearly all anyone knows of his youth.

Then he grew dissatisfied with the knowledge at home and left. The travels Westcott lists read like a map of the old world's wisdom: Egypt, India, Persia, Crete, Palestine. In each place, he says, Pythagoras came to know both the popular teaching and the esoteric one kept behind it.

That double layer matters more than the itinerary. The man at the root of Western number mysticism went looking for what the temples told insiders, not what they told crowds, and the school he built would have the same two doors.