Abstract
The Renaissance story of Pythagoras and Pythagorean wisdom, its religious and its scientific aspects alike, is a complicated one. One of the arresting dimensions of early Renaissance Pythagoreanism is consequent on the rediscovery of certain ancient sources. From Marsilio Ficino's viewpoint, Pythagoras' musical and theological debts were unquestionably to Orpheus. Not only did Ficino confront the twin Pythagorean notions of metensomatosis and metempsychosis, but he was drawn into speculating about the cycle of lives and of deaths, deaths that are inter-lives as lives are inter-deaths. This chapter shows that Ficino specifically identified as Pythagorean in his Platonic Theology 4.1.14-16, one that focuses, on the mystery and the symbolism of 12. It can serve to introduce what the Renaissance saw as Pythagoras'mathematical, though to us it is his arithmological legacy. Iamblichus gives the fullest ancient listing of the Symbola in his Protreptic, but provides long list in On the Pythagorean Life.
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