Why was Pythagoras against eating beans?

One of Pythagoras’ strangest obsessions with food was his relationship to the fava bean. He believed you should never eat fava beans because they give you gas and expelling gas took away the “breath of life.”³ At the same time, he claimed fava beans contained the souls of the dead.
 

Did the ancient Greeks eat beans?

Together with wheat, beans of all kinds, along with lentils, chickpeas and split peas, form the very foundation of the Greek diet and have done so since Neolithic times.
 

When did humans start eating beans?

For thousands of years, beans have been a staple food which was first domesticated more than 7,000 years ago in southern Mexico and Peru.
 

What food did Pythagoras advise his followers to avoid?

Pythagoras’ legendary abstinence from beans (DL 8.24), which has given rise to all manner of interpretations, ranging from the purely dietary (see Delatte 1930) to the religious and the doctrinal (see Burkert 1962 [1972], p.

Why did Pythagoras become vegetarian?

Since a human might become an animal at death, and an animal might become a human, Pythagoras believed that killing and eating non-human animals sullied the soul and prevented union with a higher form of reality. Additionally, he felt that eating meat was unhealthy and made humans wage war against one another.

Why didn t Pythagoras touch beans?

Greece. Pythagoras’s aversion to beans, though, always got a lot of attention, even from ancient writers. According to Pliny, Pythagoreans believed that fava beans could contain the souls of the dead, since they were flesh-like.
 

Who first ate beans?

Numerous ancient cultures depended on beans, including the Egyptians and classical Greeks, with a history of legume consumption going back more than 20,000 years in some Eastern cultures. A couple of older favorites in Europe were smallish, flat lentils, which were eaten in Greece as long as 13,000 years ago.
 

Who is the Greek god of beans?

Cyamites

KYAMITES (Cyamites) was the demi-god or hero of the cultivation of beans–or, more specifically, of the broad bean (species Vicia faba). He was one of the deities of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

What was Pythagoras favorite food?

To avoid such risks, Pythagoras and his disciples lived on a simple diet of bread, honey, and vegetables, a diet he also believed to be healthier than a meat-based one (as modern science shows, he was probably right).
 

What was Pythagoras Favourite food?

Cereals were the basis of the diet of the Golden Age of people like Hesiod tells us in his “Works and Days” and the staple food of the Pythagoreans.
 

What does Pythagoras say about eating animals?

Pythagoras viewed vegetarianism as a key factor in peaceful human co-existence, putting forward the view that slaughtering animals brutalised the human soul. Other notable Ancient Greek thinkers that came after Pythagoras favoured a vegetarian diet.

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