"Probably coming from the term psychein = to breath, it [psyche] has become internalized into life substances in its main usage in the Iliad. Most often, psyche seems to be used in just the way we would use life. But this can be very misleading. For 'life' to us means something about a period of time, a span between birth and death, full of events and developments of a certain character. There is absolutely nothing of this sort in the Iliad. When a spear strikes the heart of a warrior, and his psyche dissolves, is destroyed, or simply leave him, or is coughed out through the mouth, or bled out through a wound, there is nothing whatever about time or about the end of anything....Generally, it is very simply a property that can be taken away..."
All references to the Pythagorean teaching of soul transmigration "use psyche in this new sense, as a clearly separable soul that can migrate from one body to another..."
"The word soma had meant corpse and deadness, the opposite of psyche as livingness. So now, as psyche becomes soul, so soma remains as its opposite, becoming body. And dualism, the supposed separation of soul and body, has begun."
     - Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

"Above all, Pythagoras was a metaphysician and moralist. His view of the soul probably stems from, or was encouraged by, his sense of the unseen mathematical Principle. The essence of every creature, the soul too was unseen, an invisible wisp on the wheel of transmigration. The body was the temporary dwelling place of the soul, and the soul was doomed to continue hunting for similar apartments through all eternity unless is was fortunate and inhabited for one lifetime a human being sufficiently withdrawn to have lived al his hours purely and nobly, in which case the single soul might escape the body altogether and rejoin the universal and divine soul drifting in the ether, lulled, doubtless, by the harmony of the spheres."
"In order to favor the tenant soul, its temporary landlord was admonished by Pythagoras to live the good life. we descend into the realm of magic again. According to Pythagorean tradition, the good life included touching the earth when it thundered, spitting on one's nail parings, keeping swallows out of the house, leaving on the floor what had fallen from the table, and not eating beans, to mention only a few of his curious commands."
"The world was teeming with masks and mysterious malign forces. Pythagoras came to terms with them, not as we have done, using science and a token dash of religious sentiment, but by conceiving of man himself as a mask, another mystery."
     - George Galt, Trailing Pythagoras

The heavens, Pythagoras "taught, are the realm of pure number, where objects move in perfect, unchanging circles, the realm that can best be perceived through pure reason. The earth, realm of sense and appearances, is where human souls are condemned. Our only release from our earthly body, 'the tomb of the soul', is withdrawal from the world to dispassionate contemplation of reason and mathematics."
"Plato emphasizes the ethical implication of this distinction: the ideal forms are the source of all good, while base, earthly matter is the source of the world's evils. The mundane, changeable world of everyday life cannot be used to understand the eternal, perfect, and unchangeable heavens."
     - Eric Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened

Plotinus, almost seven hundred years after Pythagoras, succinctly expresses the duality of mind (the realm of Idea) and body (base, earthly matter.)

"The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty."
     - Plotinus, Six Enneads

"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself."
     - Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet

"For man is a being of divine nature, he is comparable, not to the other living creatures on earth, but to the gods in heaven, or at any rate he equals them in power. None of the gods in the heaven will ever quit heaven, and pass its boundary, and come down to earth; but man ascends even to heaven, and measure it; and what is more than all beside, he mounts to heaven without quitting the earth; to so vast a distance can be put forth his power. We must not shrink then from saying that a man on earth is a mortal god, and that a god in heaven is an immortal man."
     - Libellus

"The concepts of Orphism were assimilated not only by the philosopher Pythagoras, but also by the favorite of Greek poets, Pindar (522 to 443 BC); by the philosopher and poet Empedocles (495 to 438 BC); and most notably by the philosopher Plato (429 to 347 BC)."
     - "Orphism, Return to the Gods" in Advance, Issue 119

"Happy is he who has seen the mysteries before being buried underneath the earth. He knows the end of life, and he knows its beginning, even by Zeus."
     - Pindar

"To die is to be initiated."
     - Plato

"Plato represented Pythagoras as teaching a whole 'way of life'. It was practiced at Croton by a secret society -which took over the city's government; and similar brotherhoods temporarily seized control at Rhegium and Taras and elsewhere. At Croton, however, in the middle of the fifth century, a hostile movement burned down the local brotherhood's center, and compelled Pythagoras to withdraw to Metapontum, where he died.
"But the decline of Pythagoreanism spread and the Order in Italy was almost totally extinguished. It was revived, however, by fugitive survivors who settled at Thebes and Phlius; those at the former city included the famous Philolaus from Croton or Taras in southern Italy, who clothed Pythagorean doctrine in philosophical argument and invented or developed the school's astronomy....It was Taras, however which became the principal headquarters of the resuscitated order, especially under the rule of Archytas, who was visited by, and greatly affected, Plato.
"The membership, which was open to women as well as to men, entailed a strict ascetic discipline, But within its ranks were divergent groups, dedicated to religion and science respectively: it was the latter group which came under the leadership of Archytas (and Aristoxenus). The Hippocratic Oath may have been drawn up for a Pythagorean brotherhood. Before 300, however, the Pythagorean school had vanished from view once again, only to revive as the neo-Pythagoreanism which appeared at Rome and Alexandria in the first century BC"
     - Michael Grant, The Classical Greeks

"The education which he [Plato] laid down for the Guardians in the Republic took them through a rigorous physical and intellectual training, to a point where they could gain intuitive knowledge of the Good. In a famous lecture (which he presumably delivered, but which has not come down to us), Plato was reported to have spoken of this vision of the Good in a way that hinted that it shared the ineffable splendor commonly found in the experience of contemplative mystics."
"In the Timaeus, Plato spoke of a Creator, the Demiurge or Supreme Craftsman. But he did not identify this Creator with the Good. In fact his conception of the Creator was of one who used the world of timeless Forms as a kind of blueprint to construct the temporal cosmos."
     - Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind

"The Divine Craftsman is good and desires all things to be like himself. So he brings order out of chaos and fashions a world-soul; the cosmos is thus a living creature endowed with life and intelligence. The material universe includes fire and earth to make it visible and tangible, and the other elements to give it proportions. The father creates the divine heavenly bodies, the visible gods, and entrusts to them the fashioning of the mortal part of man; he himself creates form what is left over from the creation of the world-soul souls equal in number to the stars."
     - John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions

"Plato's Republic, a rejection of Athenian democracy, was modeled on Sparta, where a small body of landholders ruled over a mass of rightless serfs, or helots. Sparta had defeated Athens in the thirty-year-long Peloponnesian War, begun in the year of Plato's birth, 428 BC. Deprived of its colonies in the wake of defeat, Athens erupted in social conflict as rich landholders battled free-holders and artisans. To protect themselves from the growing demands for abolition of debts and land distribution, the landholders sought to combat political democracy and to erect a hierarchical society. Plato became the theoretician of this new society, rationalized in the Republic and justified by the cosmology of Timaeus."
"Platonic dualism describes a cosmos knowable only to the pure reason of the few so then had the right to rule over the many, as the heavens rule earth, as the soul rules the body, as the master rules the slave. It was the world view of the slave holder. The alternative Ionian science assumed a world knowable by observation, where thought and work joined together. It was the world view of the free craftsman and peasant."
     - Eric Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened

"The ancient cities of the east - Babylon, Jerusalem, even Elephantine - all had temples at their centers, lavish statue-houses of the gods served by a traditional, hierarchical priesthood. Here, people lived in houses built like beehives, stacked up tightly and joined by dark alleyways with no open public spaces. They were cities built round the ancient gods. But the new cities of Alexander's empire were built around the recreation and labors of mankind. Just as man and not the gods now determined the course of history, so he had also moved into the light at the center of these cities."
     - John Romer, Testament

"The Mevlevi [order of Sufis] movements could have originated with the Pythagorean schools which performed certain dances or 'movements' in which each person turned to the ratio of the particular planet in the universe which he represented. Although the Whirling Dervishes represent the planets, it is unlikely that the esoteric information of the Pythagoreans have been passed on to those who turn today."
"In the beginning, Mevlevi music was not for enjoyment but was a medium for the transmittal of Mevlana's [d. 1273] words and thoughts as it was also for Pythagoras, Homer, and Orpheus."
     - Ira Friedlander, The Whirling Dervishes

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