Nice node! A little more information on the monad/dyad thing might help, tho...

Pythagoras and his guys did indeed believe that one fell on the good side of his Table Of Opposites and that two fell of the bad side. The reason for this stems from the ancient belief that Unity was the natural state of things; when something got split, or divided, that was when you got two, and when you got conflict. According to Plotinus (a later contemporary of Pythagoras), everything on his Table of Opposites USED TO BE One; something made it into two. This fits with Plato's tale of the Hyperboreans and how we used to be single entities of both sex before we got "divided" into male and female.

In numerology, two still represents evil or "The Devil"; the devil being our symbol for the result of the splitting--the second thing. Females are thought to be the "devilish" (two) side of the male-female split, and at least symbolically, this makes sense.

The underlying philosophical theory of this idea, if anybody's interested, goes back to the Garden of Eden: In the beginning, all is whole and peaceful. Something (in the Bible, is it super-symbolically a snake and a woman) causes a rift, makes two. The two have to find a way to make three, the holy Trinity (and you can't get to three from one, remember), which will lead back to Paradise. Er...back to a completed Paradise, that is...like coming around a spiral so you're back at the same place, but a level higher.

Okay, I hope that wasn't horribly confusing. Oh, one more thing: Daimon, the word Socrates used to describe his conscious / conscience and the word ancient Artists used to describe the voice of their muse coming to them, actually only means "spirit" and has no demonic overtones. The "two" aspect of the Daimon is meant to illustrate the "otherness" of that particular kind of influence, not its evil. Funnily enough, though, Socrates was killed largely because the ruling class of Athens at the time thought he was talking to demons when he referred to his Daimon--so it's literally an ancient mistake!

Plato created another perspective on the ten principles of Pythagoras that he called the world soul, which is a mathematical (rather than philosophical) model of the universe itself, and later became the foundation of the seven-tone diatonic scale used in western music.

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