By Fabre d’Olivet
Hermeneutic Interpretation
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras
FABRE D’OLIVET
After a miniature by Augustin
1799
The Golden Verses of
Pythagoras
Explained and Translated into French and
Preceded by a Discourse upon the
Essence and Form of Poetry
Among the Principal
Peoples of the Earth
By
Fabre d’Olivet
Done into English by
Nayán Louise Redfield
Μηδὲν ἄγαν kαὶ γνῶθι σεαυτόν
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1917
Copyright, 1917
BY
NAYÁN LOUISE REDFIELD
To the Travellers who have turnedtheir Faces to the Dawn and their Stepstoward the Eternal Hills is offered thisrich Fruit of Wisdom, that, through it,they may achieve the Understanding ofKnowledge.
TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD
IN this twentieth century, the sacred books of the ancientsare undoubtedly better understood than they wereeven by their contemporaries, for their authors, by thegreatness of their genius, are as much nearer to us, as theywere distant from them. At the close of the eighteenthcentury, the light which came from the illimitable mind ofFabre d’Olivet shone with solitary splendour and was destinedto be seen by only a few devoted followers. Buthistory shows that a great inspirer always appears at thebeginning of every great epoch, and however small the numberof his disciples, these disciples with their pupils formthe magnetic chain which, according to Plato, carries histhought out into the world.
Fabre d’Olivet, born at Ganges, Bas-Languedoc, Dec. 8,1768, was distinguished even in his own day not only forthe extent of his learning but for the rectitude of his judgmentand the sublimity of his conceptions. If one can inferfrom the all too scarce records available since the calamitousfire which destroyed so many of his valued manuscripts, heevidently suffered keenly from the fetters of mortality, andsought with unfailing fervour what Porphyry so aptly calledthe “Olympia of the Soul.”
Saint Yves d’Alveydre, writing of him in La France vraie,says, that it was in 1790, while in Germany, he receivedhis Pythagorean initiation, the profound imprint of whichmarked all his later productions. After returning to Parishe applied himself to philological and philosophical studiesundisturbed by the terrible revolutionary storm. In obscureseclusion he amassed, to quote Sédir, “a disconcertingerudition.” He became familiar with all the Semitictongues and dialects, the Aryan languages, and even penetratedthe secrets of the Chinese hieroglyphics.
It was during these ten years of retirement that he wrote