Pythagoras, one of the greatest philosophers and intellectuals of Greek history had an obsession, or rather a dislike for fava beans.
His discoveries regarding several mathematical principles are still profoundly useful today, but this is only one of many of his contributions to society.
Born in Samos c. 570 BC he made intensive efforts to also teach others what he had learned. He established a school in the city of Croton in today’s southern Italy to teach his philosophical and scientific ideas.
Pythagoras had some pretty strange beliefs, even for his time. He ran the school that forbade followers from wearing wool and forced them to put on the right sandal before the left.
Pythagoras’ dislike for beans
The lesser-known fact about Pythagoras of Samos although a vegetarian, disliked beans.
Pythagoras believed that when you die, your soul gets transferred into another animal. It’s claimed that he stopped eating meat in order to prevent that scenario.
He also believed that humans and beans come from the same source and decided to conduct an experiment to prove it. He got a bunch of beans and buried them, not noticing how this is rarely done to humans, and waited for them to grow for a few weeks. When he dug them up again, he noted that they looked a bit like human fetuses.
Satisfied with his experimental design he concluded that eating beans would basically be like cannibalism, and forbade his commune from eating them. To Pythagoras and his followers, beans could contain the souls of the dead.
Sceptics point out however that the Pythagoreans did not have the technology to build an ultrasound and see the bean nature of the 8 week fetus.
“They are flatulent,” Pythagoras explained. When that gas came out, it would “partake most of the breath of life.”
Beans were so sacred to the Pythagoreans that, in the end, Pythagoras gave his own life to protect them. According to one story, Pythagoras met his end when a man, furious that he couldn’t see Pythagoras’s face, burned Pythagoras’s house to the ground.
Pythagoras had to run for his life but stopped before a field of beans. He would rather die, he declared, than step on a single bean. He let the men cut his throat so that the beans could live.
There is also some evidence to show that ancient medical dietetics recognized a form of favism, the hemolytic response (rupturing of red blood cells) in some people, but that this did not necessarily cause Greek and Roman physicians to forbid the eating of beans.
The debate raged in classical antiquity about why the Pythagoreans proscribed beans, ranging from Aristotle’s statement that beans are “like the gates of Hades” to Varro’s report that beans contain the souls of the dead.
Ancient observers of the strict rituals of the Pythagorean community did assume an “explanation” of occasional magic, but modern scholars who presume these ancient guesses correct have ignored the historical and social context of those negative views held by observers outside the tightly-knit Pythagorean community.
Silence was another obsession of Pythagoras
Another strange obsession of Pythagoras was silence. Staying quiet was a way to learn self-control, so he made sure that anyone who wanted to join his school could do it.
Anyone who signed up had to close his mouth and keep it shut for five years straight.
In part, this was to help people stay pure. But there’s a lot of reason to believe that it had more to do with ensuring they could keep secrets.
Even in ancient Greece, calling yourself the son of god and getting people to worship numbers wasn’t exactly considered being a model citizen.
The Pythagoreans tried to keep that part of their lives quiet. As a result, they wouldn’t let anyone into the fold unless they proved that he could keep his mouth shut.