The First Rosicrucian

I googled "first rosicrucian" and the first like that popped up said "Understanding reincarnation" which leads me to the topic of today's post: Pythagoras.

He is primarily remembered today for his theorem concerning right triangles, but the history (mostly mythology, actually) of Pythagoras goes much deeper than that.

As a seeker of knowledge, he did not seem to distinguish between empirical and mystical ideas, and he was said to have been very keen to learn from cultures older than his native Ionian Greek civilization. Hence he traveled to Egypt and, it is claimed, to India.

An Indic concept of reincarnation first enters recorded western thought through the Pythagoreans, along with the concept of the monad or brahman as the source of all creation. If Pythagoras was not a real, historical individual, it certainly seems that the character must have been based on one or more real people who were exposed in some depth to the Vedic tradition and brought its ideas back to the West - kicking off a cycle of historical and legendary Westerners periodically "rediscovering" the knowledge of the East, from Pythagoras to Christian Rosenkreuz to Mme. Blavatsky to the Beatles.