Pherecydes

[Editor’s Note: The following brief account survives in a manuscript in H. P. Blavatsky’s handwriting and was published posthumously by Boris de Zirkoff in H. P. Blavatsky: Collected Writings, Vol. XIII, pp. 283–285. De Zirkoff suggested that, from its form, it may have been intended for a glossary. This is strongly supported by the manuscript itself: it begins in the characteristic form “Pherecydes (Gr.),” reads throughout as an extended biographical glossary entry, and closes by distinguishing another Pherecydes as having done nothing “to merit a place in this work.”

No entry for Pherecydes appears in either the glossary to the second edition of The Key to Theosophy or the posthumously published Theosophical Glossary (1892). Comparison shows, however, that Blavatsky based much of the entry upon William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, s.v. “Pherecydes,” retaining its general sequence of biographical and doctrinal details while substantially recasting them from a Theosophical standpoint—particularly in regard to the Eastern origin of Greek philosophy, esoteric teaching, reincarnation, and the septenary constitution of nature. The manuscript therefore appears to represent an unused or displaced glossary entry, possibly connected with the projected glossary to The Secret Doctrine and/or the larger Theosophical Glossary undertaken in Blavatsky’s final years.]

Pherecydes (Gr.). A Greek philosopher from Syros, the teacher of Pythagoras. Like the latter he is credited on the concurrent testimony of antiquity, to have travelled many years in the East, to have visited India and Chaldea, and lived in Egypt, where he was the disciple of the initiated priests of the two latter countries. On the other hand, such writers as Clemens Alexandrinus and Philo Biblius, assert that “Pherecydes did not receive instruction in philosophy from any master, but obtained his knowledge from the secret books of the Phoenicians.”¹ The latter assertion cannot, however, interfere in any way with the former statement, that which is most interesting in it being the fact that the Phoenicians like all other ancient races had secret books, i.e., an exoteric religion for the profane and masses, and an esoteric system for those who aspired to initiation into the mysteries.

Pherecydes is denied by modern Encyclopaedists the title of philosopher, because, as alleged, “he lived at the time at which men began to speculate on cosmogony and the nature of the gods, but had hardly yet commenced the study of true philosophy.”² This is an error as great as so many others. Real philosophy dates from Pythagoras only in Greece, but was pursued millenniums earlier in other countries; nor would Pythagoras, the “lover of truth” . . . . . that which he called philosophy, in the insanely materialistic albeit scientific speculations and theories of our modern philosophy, so-called. However it may be, Theosophists may well look up to Pherecydes as one of their earliest Western teachers and authorities, since his work Eptamuchos (Ἑπτάμυχος)—which others call Theokrasia and others again Theologia—is the first in classical literature which speaks of reincarnation, or metempsychosis, now so falsely understood; but which was synonymous with the ancients, with rebirth or the immortality of the soul. It is by the latter name that Suidas calls the doctrine taught by Pherecydes, and says that it was contained in two books, in which moreover, the septenary principle was plainly taught, though, of course, in more or less symbolical and allegorical languages. Thus he states in Kosmos there are three high principles, which he designates as Chthona (Chaos), Aether (Zeus) and Chronos (Time), and four lower principles, the elements of fire, water, air and the earth. Of these everything visible and invisible in the Universe was formed. He was a great collector of Orphic writings, and his own were extant in the days of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonists.

He is referred to by Aristotle as a mythological, and by Plutarch as a theological writer; and mentioned in a great number of classics. Diogenes Laertius calls him a rival of Thales, and some credit him with having been the first writer in Greece in prose, which he used to explain philosophical subjects. There was another Pherecydes of Athens, often confused with Pherecydes of Syros. But while the latter was a contemporary of Servius Tullius (cf. Cicero and Diogenes Laertius), the sixth King of Rome, and must have lived, therefore, according to the Olympiads, in the sixth century B.C., Pherecdyes the Athenian lived a century later being a contemporary of Herodotus. He was a logographer, and has done nothing to merit a place in this work. It is curious that Democritus hints at, and Cicero denounces, the philosophy of Pherecydes and Pythagoras as being “cribbed” wholly from the Eastern systems. The charge is strange since both Pherecydes and Pythagoras never made a secret of the Eastern origin of their doctrines.