"Knowing Yourself is the Beginning of All Wisdom" ~ Aristotle
∞
From the Michael Frampton novel:
"Embodiments of Will: Anatomical and Physiological Theories of Voluntary Animal Motion from Greek Antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages, 400 B.C-A.D. | 1300"
By Michael Frampton
Chapter 4: Embodiment Theories in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages
Iamblichus of Chalcis (ca A.D. 245 - 325) quotes approvingly Aristotle's explanation of Pythagorean Numerology:
- 4.17 - "The Pythagoreans having devoted themselves to mathematics, and admiring the accuracy of its reasonings, because it alone among human activities knows of proofs, and seeing the facts about harmony (in music), that they happen on account of numbers...they deemed these (facts of mathematics) and their principles to be, generally, causative of existing things, so that whoever wishes to comprehend the true nature of existing things should turn his attention to these, that is to numbers and proportions, because it is by them that everything is made clear." (Iamblichus, De Communi mathematica scientia 7.8-18).
"The numerology account on the nature of man was thus not unique to Macrobius, Capella, or Calcidius, but was a commonplace among the various Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean compilations and commentaries of the period. Such numerical reductionism had its precedents much earlier in Greek antiquity."
"Numerological thinking, particularly with regard to the number seven, is evident in some Presocratic philosophers and Hippocratic physicians of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., whom the Neopythagoreans of later antiquity cite when the opportunity arises. The reckoning of human life in multiples of sevens was a commonplace of Greek thought. Indeed, the tendency to group all sorts of things into 7's, and so to see 7 as a critical number in human physiology was apparently common to all Greek ages. "