La freccia e il cerchio
anno 6, numero 6, 2015
pp. 139-142

Paolo Scarpi
The Perfection of the Number Four, the Moon and I.
The Secret of the World

   Flesh is the boundary, body is the prison where the essence of man is caught. This is a recurring theme, a constant Leitmotiv of most Western thought (I would not know whether such a theme also occurs in what is to Westerners the Orient). Without a body, I would be able to fly, go beyond the boundaries of the world. At the beginning of the 1990s an exanorexic writes: «I do not have to eat. I have to be able to stay in this sanctity, in this almond of light that envelops me and diffuses warmth… Perhaps I will manage to fly. If I climb my window and stretch myself upwards, I am sure I will be able to fly, white wings will appear and I will soar in the sky, higher and higher» (Anna M. Dadomo, Regression).
   Followers of a health movement, the Natural Hygiene Movement, now with many branches around the world and identifiable with the American Natural Hygiene Society inc., practice a preliminary purifying fasting, in order to later embrace a strictly vegetarian diet, because «fasting degrades the flesh and elevates the spirit.» It seems that this movement was born in the United States around 1830, thanks to Sylvester Graham, an American dietary reformer, and experienced a second life with Herbert M. Shelton in the 1950s – ’60s, this time gaining a strong entrepreneurial impulse. Supporters of the macrobiotic diet think along similar lines, as they translate in their choices and in food consumption their rejection for a certain type of modernity, together with the longing for a purity channelled by the body. In the end, the goal of the followers of macrobiotics and of Natural Hygiene (but also that of vegetarians of all kinds) lays in the recovery of a direct relationship with nature, in order to lead man back within the boundaries of the natural flow, into a universal sympathy, in a coniunctio with otherness, if not with the divine.
   All this reminds me of medieval saints, of Saint Catherine of Siena, or of Angela of Foligno. But it also reminds me of the ancient followers of Orpheus, who practised vegetarianism, a type of diet Theseus accused Hippolytus of following, because it entailed eating food devoid of soul. For the Orphics, the body was the tomb of the soul, buried there as if to atone for its sins. That body, container and prison, was also the means for salvation: once the debt had been paid, the soul would reincarnate according to the law of Adrastea. It wasn’t exactly a sinful body. The soul was sinful: had it been incapable of moving with the god to whom it had been assigned, the soul would have lost its wings and fallen down on earth. But wings would have turned up again, once the soul had served the term of imprisonment within a body. Dike, Justice, would then carry the purified soul to spend a second life in an undefined place up in heaven.
   Pythagoreans also seem to have been persuaded of this. According to an ancient biographer, Pythagoras had first maintained that the soul is immortal and that, after undergoing the cycle of necessity, it would enter other living bodies. Perhaps Pythagoras was not the first to formulate such a doctrine: according to Herodotus, it belonged to ancient Egyptians. Nevertheless, to Pythagoreans this cycle, this reincarnation, was meant to start a progressive process of purification, eventually leading the soul to perfection. In the first half of the fourth century BCE., Philolaus, the Pythagorean who had placed the earth with the sun in rotation within the cosmos around an unidentified fire, stated that ancient theologians maintained that the soul was united with the body because it had to atone for some sin, and was buried in the body as in a tomb. Another Pythagorean thinker, Euxitheus, thought in a similar fashion, for he believed that the souls of all men were linked to the body and to life in order to atone for something. The Carmen aureum, which was probably known to the Stoic Crysippus and to the Platonic Plutarch, encouraged people to abstain from food, to abandon the body and soar in the air as immortal gods, no longer mortal. To reach this goal, to become divine and just, Pythagoreans followed ethical and dietary principles, taught by mothers to children. They were trained to follow the rules of measure and moderation, and pay no attention to pleasure. Clothing and food could not but be the expression of such a life choice, of a style that Plato knew of as «Pythagorean». Eating and drinking needed to follow nature, since few and simple things are enough to satisfy hunger and thirst, and little is required in order to protect oneself from the cold. On the contrary, search and desire for exotic food were considered a major vice. As an élite of intellectuals, remote from the symbolic dynamics of ancient cities, Pythagoreans had found in the vegetarian diet, in the super-food that allowed them to eat like the gods, a means of distinction from other Greeks, but also the food that would draw men closer to gods, sparing them the danger of falling into the cycle of rebirths and encouraging «the health of the body and the sharpness of the soul.» In this fashion, the Pythagorean would escape from the tyranny of the body and proceed towards the divine world. As a commentator of Homer tells us, Pythagoras had exited his body and heard perfect harmonies, possibly those of the heavenly spheres. He could perceive the harmony of the universe, and thus the universal harmony of heavenly spheres and of stars moving along with them, but we are unable to do the same, because of the limits of our nature.
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