The philosophical sects of the Hellenic world had far more mystical intent when they used the word philosophy. The goal of the mystic is union and direct communion with Ultimate Reality. It is assimilation with, and perfect knowledge of Absolute, Omnipotent consciousness, what we call God. This assimilation extends to the concept of Theosis, or becoming god.

Pythagoras was calling himself a mystic when he named himself Philosopher, and this can be shown with a look at the Hellenic philosophy that succeeded him.

The literal meaning of Philosophy in Greek is Love of Wisdom. Plato, who was the most famous of the Pythagoreans (2), wrote in the Symposium, "Love is the longing for the Good."(3) To the Pythagorean, love was not something that you had. It was an activity associated with not having. It was a longing, a force that drew us toward its object. Once the object was achieved, love was replaced by happiness or satisfaction. Love for any particular object was seen as a miss-directed love for the Good. The Good is God, the One, or Absolute Reality, it is the Universe and all things in it in perfect harmony with itself. Achieving the Good brought with it happiness, or unqualified satisfaction. Plato taught that a person is happy in so far as he has the Good, (4) and if the person has the Good he can lack nothing, for the Good is All.

Wisdom is the link between man and the divine and it also is the Divine. Iamblichus the Pythagorean calls Wisdom, "a virtue through which we are assimilated to the gods in the highest degree."(5) He also says, "Wisdom is a certain executive leader of men and of the whole order of nature; and referring cities and homes and the life of everyone to a divine exemplar, it forms them according to the best similitude- exterminating some things, and purifying others. Thus, Wisdom renders its possessors similar to Divinity."(6) Heraclitus renders Wisdom as the Good by saying, "The Wise is One, Alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name Zeus."(7) In the first part of this phrase Heraclitus is telling us that, "the Wise," or Wisdom, is a self-subsisting Unity. In the second part he is saying that its nature is otherwise indefinable, but that it is Omnipotent God. To the Pythagorean Zeus, or Jove was synonymous with The One, Omnipotent God or the Good as we see from this Orphic Hymn: