FOUNDATIONAL ROLE OF THE WISDOM SCHOOLS

The intent of the wisdom schools was to preserve knowledge within esoteric lineages available only to initiates vowed to secrecy. Considering the mystery invoked by the wisdom schools it is not surprising that their teachings have been lost and found and lost again time after time. What is surprising is the central role esoteric teachings of the wisdom schools played in developing modern science and mathematics despite their secrecy. Pythagoras, founder of the wisdom schools in Greece and initiate of the Egyptian schools, is generally recognized as the father of modern mathematics. Now, Pythagorean mathematics are still seen in new applications of crop circle designs. But Pythagoras' influence is not limited to the very ancient and the cutting edge of mathematics. His influence stretched through the ages to Johannes Kepler and beyond.

Eighty years after Pythagoras' death, Plato left Athens when Socrates was executed and joined the Pythagorean Society. Plato collected documents and writings about Pythagoras, which he incorporated into his own work, particularly Tamaeus. He traveled to Egypt, where Plato was initiated into the degrees of learning in the temple, which were slowly recovering from the Babylonian-Persian conquerors. Plato founded the Platonic Academy in Athens where it survived for 900 years. Proclus served as the head of Plato's Academy, where he had access to literature available in no other library, for centuries after Plato's death.

Johannes Kepler cited Proclus in his studies that led to Kepler's discovering the three laws of planetary motion that are still the only three laws of planetary motion that NASA has today. Kepler's laws of planetary movement, in turn, served as the foundation for Isaac Newton's laws of gravitation.

Robert Temple writes in The Sirius Mystery that Kepler was steeped in Proclus and quotes Kepler on this: "But also I have recently fallen upon the hymn of Proclus the Platonic philosopher, of whom there has been much mention in the preceding books, which was composed to the Sun and filled full with venerable mysteries in the context of speculation about 'what did the ancient Pythagoreans in Aristotle mean, who used to call the center of the world (which they referred to as the 'fire' but understood by that the sun) 'the watchtower of Jupiter''?"

Temple continues explaining that a particularly puzzling passage in Plato's Timaeus was actually a Pythagorean treatise that Plato disguised in his own work rather than see it lost. Temple cites from the Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius.

"'Philolaus of Croton was a Pythagorean, and it was from him that Plato requests Dion to buy the Pythagorean treatises… His doctrine is that all things are brought about by necessity and in harmonious inter-relation. He was the first to declare that the earth moves in a circle (round the central fire [the sun]), though some say it was Hicetas of Syracuse… Philolaus was the first to publish the Pythagorean treatises, to which he gave the title On Nature, beginning as follows: 'Nature in the ordered universe was composed of unlimited elements and so was the whole universe and all that is therein''

"'In line with this tradition that the treatise embodied into the Platonic Timaeus was of Pythagorean origin - and presumably from thence derived itself from Egypt and Chaldaea (Babylonians), being taught by the gods, prior to observations, were of a similar opinion to Plato, concerning the motion of the fixed stars. For the Oracles not once only but frequently speak of the advancing procession of the fixed stars.'

Temple finishes this account reiterating the implications of the Pythagorean speech about information imparted to men by the gods. "Note the pointed expression 'taught by the gods, prior to observations'. This highlights the aspect of the tradition as one imparted to men 'by the gods' and then later carried on in concert with observations by the ancient Egyptians. Without my going into a minute discussion of Pythagoreanism, Orphism, and what Proclus calls 'the Oracles', I hope the reader will have gathered sufficient idea of the gist of the matter."