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!