To those of you who have heard me rant about this recently, no need to read further. But I wanted to write this idea out before letting go of it. I’d been working on it over Passover, and Passover is now over, so now seems a good time to do so.
As you may or may not know, the Passover seder in its formal ritual form was modeled on the Greek symposiim. A symposium was a dinner and drinking party mixed with philosophical discussion. The leader of the symposium, literally called “the mixer,” both decreed the topic of conversation and mixed the wine, thus controlling how drunk everyone got.
This tidbit of knowledge, tying the seder to Ancient Greek tradition, is not a new connection. Many have done so before me. They have pointed to the afikomen for proof. The word afikomen has it’s roots in the Greek epi, meaning after, and koman, meaning meal. So you see, it’s no new thing that we have drawn from Greek tradition to create the Passover seder. But I do have something new to add.
The Pythagorians were a mystery cult in Ancient Greece. They centered their lives around the teachings of their leader, Pythagoras. Pythagoras is said to have had a golden thigh. He is also said to have merited a boon from the gods at the end of one of his lives. He asked for the power to remember each of his lives as he went on to the next ,and thus acquired great wisdom. Pythagoras famously taught both men and women, and there were both male and female Pythagorians in clergy-type positions. Many of his teachings were of numbers and shapes, for the Pythagorians believed (much as we moderns do) that a thorough understanding of mathematics would allow one to grasp the underlying principles of the universe.
Among these numbers, a couple stood out as special. The number 4 is an example of a number that Pythagorians saw as special. For one thing, fours dictated passages of time. There are four seasons , four stages of human life (infancy, childhood, adulthood, old age), and so on. For another, a triangle with a base of 4 is comprised of ten segments. For an illustration of this, see below:
1 1
11 +2
111 +3
1111 +4
=10
And ten was a very important number. This triangle, often with decorative borers, is found on Pythagorean jewelry, and seems to have been used as a good luck charm.
The compilers of the seder knew of a story that had important tens in it: that of the Jews leaving Egypt. That story is bookended with tens. Ten plagues start us off, and ten commandments bring us into freedom as a people to create our own hierarchy. (Or Gods, if you want to get picky.) And they knew what important number went with ten: four. They knew this because they lived concurrently with Neo-Pythagorians, who lived by many of the same invectives as the Classical Pythagoreans discussed above.
And so the Passover seder they formalized is broken into four stages with four cups of wine. The youngest opens up discussion with four questions. We discuss four sons, we break each plague into four components. I rest my case.
Happy Freedom!
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