twelve spheres without being understood by any one, was God. Pythagoras gave to It, truth for soul and light for body.[1] The Intelligence which peopled the three worlds were, firstly, the immortal gods properly so-called; secondly, the glorified heroes; thirdly, the terrestial demons. The immortal gods, direct emanations of the uncreated Being and manifestation of Its infinite faculties, were thus named because they could not depart from the divine life—that is, they could never fall away from their Father into oblivion, wandering in the darkness of ignorance and of impiety; whereas the souls of men, which produced, according to their degree of purity, glorified heroes and terrestrial demons, were able to depart sometimes from the divine life by voluntary drawing away from God; because the death of the intellectual essence, according to Pythagoras and imitated in this by Plato, was only ignorance and impiety.[2] It must be observed that in my translation I have not rendered the Greek word [Greek: daimones] by the word demons, but by that of spirits, on account of the evil meaning that Christianity has attached to it, as I explained in a preceding note.[3]
This application of the number 12 to the Universe is not at all an arbitrary invention of Pythagoras; it was common to the Chaldeans, to the Egyptians from whom he had received it, and to the principal peoples of the earth[4]: it gave rise to the institution of the zodiac, whose division into twelve asterisms has been found everywhere existent from time immemorial.ə The distinction of the three worlds and their development into a number, more or less great, of concentric spheres inhabited by intelligences of
