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Commentaries of Hierocles on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras

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Interesting book. It's an interesting book about the Pythagorean Philosophy and the legendary Pythagorean Precepts of how men could achieve Virtue and gain the right to walk in Heaven with the other Gods made from the thoughts of the all-powerful Creator. This book and its commentary was written in the 5th century A.D., but it's highly doubtful that these Principles come from the Pythagoras era, although Pythagoreans believed that they were delivered to them by Pythagoras himself, whom they worshiped as a God. I think it's an interesting book about philosophy and it teaches something abouth the pythagorean beliefs, like the beliefs- in the perfectness of the number seven, in the quaternal nature of the Universe and their abstinence from eating meat. The content of the Principles and its commentary ressemble in some way the beliefs of the gnostic sects of Judaism and early christianity. The God of Gods, when creating a Universe that ressembled the Image of his own thoughts, established an Order of things which is meant never to be broken: and so was created the Heaven with all its seven Celestial Spheres. The Beings created by the thoughts of God were (in hierarchy of power and virtue): the Immortal Gods, the Heroes endowed with goodness and light (or Angels), and the Terrestrial Demons (who are mortals that by walking the path of Virtue divested themselves of the corruptible flesh and achieved immortality in Heaven). This Order is maintained by the Law, which is the Intelligence that created all things, and all the Intelligent Beings (of which man is the last) must obey its rules. Yet, unlike the other Intelligent Beings who are always turned towards its Creator, man is of an unstable nature and forgets its Creator and the precepts he should guard - by so doing man enters a life of sin and suffers from the pains induced by its folly and its passions. Men doesn't recognize the Demon that he uses and forsakes God by not understanding that the pains he encounters were given by God to help him regain the virtuous ways. Men reencarnates many times and when reencarnating can decay or arise according to the goodness of his deeds. No misfortune or wealth happens by chance: Providence distributes everything according to the laws of God and the deeds chosen by the will of Man. Yet, Man never falls as low as the beasts (because they are made only of body and passions - Nature was not created by God, because it has no Spirit or Rational Sense, since Man has a material body and an immaterial Soul, he stands as the only hybrid between Heaven and Nature). When Man completes the Purification of the Reasonable Soul by the ways of the mathemathical sciences and its Deliverance by the ways of the dialectics he is freed from the corruption of the body can be again a luminous soul in Heaven. And so the final Verses of Pythagoras say: "And when after having divested thyself of thy mortal body, thou arrivest in the most pure Aether, Thou shalt be a God, immortal, incorruptible, and death shall have no more dominion over thee."

Carlos Madeira 12th of July of 1999