Pythagoras of Samos (Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος, c. 570 - c. 495 BC) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and initiate and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. Around 530 BC, he travelled to Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a school in which initiates were sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic lifestyle. This lifestyle entailed a number of dietary prohibitions, traditionally said to have included vegetarianism. He may have also devised the doctrines of Metempsychosis (transmigration of souls) and Musica Universalis, which holds that the planets move according to mathematical equations and thus resonate to produce an inaudible symphony of music. His political and religious teachings were well known in Greece and Magna Graecia and influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them, the West in general.
The essay by Manly Palmer Hall that our publishing house is now proposing to modern readers, The Life and Philosophy of Pythagoras, was one of the most interesting chapters of his monumental work The Secret Teachings of All Ages, published in San Francisco in 1928.