The Pythagorean Tetractys

Philaletheians GR · The Masque of Love Series · 1 page

*A single-page drawing with no text beyond its title. It is the last of the eleven plates gathered in Celestial Hierarchies of Sentient Beings*, and is held here separately as its own file.

The image is built from three elements. At the top is a black disc with one small white point at its centre — the same device used for ABSOLUTENESS on the hierarchy sheets, here reduced to a circle with a dot in it, the oldest of the symbols for the unmanifested first cause. Overlapping it from below is a large luminous yellow sphere with a violet halo. Drawn across that sphere in fine line is a broad triangle, and within the triangle stand the ten points of the tetractys in their four ranks — one at the top, then two, then three, then four along the base — the figure by which the Pythagoreans held the whole of number, and so of the world, to be contained in the first four integers. The arrangement makes an argument without a word of commentary: the point in darkness above, the manifested light below it, and within that light the descent from unity to the four which sums to ten.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.3 MB, 1 page)