A Taste of Bacon Sir? - The Secret of Shakespeare

[Steve Franklin]

PS, I think you'll find the Qabalah dates back well before Pythagoras, btw.

While doing the research for my Origins of the Tarot Deck, it became fairly apparent that Pythagoras was syncretizing a whole series of earlier and foreign ideas. I can't say for sure that this included the Tetraktys/Tree of Life or not, but it certainly wouldn't be out of character. I should point out that the man claimed to remember his past lives, though, interestingly enough, their dates don't match the cometary cycle, though I have him as one of the cometary avatars that include Socrates, da Vinci, and "Shakespeare." Many of these folks can honestly be described as the "genius of the age."

It's also interesting that the scholarly community has recently entered a phase of revisionism that has cast doubt on the reality of even folks like Pythagoras and Socrates, not to mention King Arthur and Simon bar Kokhba. I haven't looked at the reasons for this renewed skepticism, and I don't think the "authorship question" is part of this. In this particular case, Shakespeare is quite the exception, though it may be that the drift toward the idea of multiple authors is part of it.