A generally popular belief is that ancient sages, such as Orpheus, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and others, established "philosophical systems," which we moderns dissect, distort, and debase while trying, through the blinkered eyes of our academic philosophy, to explain them, and sometimes adapt them to our modern sensibilities.

We thus hasten to assure that the "philosophy" that the sages in question advocated was anything but philosophy as we understand it today. Let us not forget that Greek philosophy was primarily intertwined with the Greek Mysteries and these with Greek Religion.

Library of the Sphinx 004a