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# Wednesday
- URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/32975/
- Published: 2014-06-18T06:27:17.000Z
- Updated: 2014-06-18T06:27:17.000Z
- Author: Eric Scheske
- Tags: Miscellaneous, #wpChunk

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ea/fd/eafdb338-c9b6-4f87-8363-78ab94cc3a18/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Sleepwalkers.jpg "Sleepwalkers")

While looking up Koestler's chapters on Pythagoras, I ran across this great passage:

> The sixth pre-Christian--the miraculous century of Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-tze, of the Ionian philosophers and Pythagoras--was a turning point for the human species. A March breeze seemed to blow across this planet from China to Samos, stirring man into awareness, like the breath in Adam's nostrils.

He's right, of course. I just wonder why he didn't mention the other luminaries from that century: Zoroaster, Solon, Heraclitus, Nehemiah, and the author of the Book of Isaiah.

Anyway, here's one of those passage about Pythagoras that I vaguely recalled:

> The Pythagoreans were, among other things, healers; we are told that 'they used medicine to purge the body, and music to purge the soul.' One of the oldest forms, indeed, of psycho-therapy consists in inducing the patient, by wild pipe music or drums, to dance himself into a frenzy followed by exhaustion and a trance-like, curative sleep--the ancestral version of shock-treatment and abreaction therapy.

Compare that passage to this article I saw last week at Lew Rockwell: [The Myth of Mental Illness](https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/06/ciaran-ryan/the-myth-of-mental-illness/?ref=thedailyeudemon.com). The article makes some interesting points and presents things I'd never considered, like the possible link between our psychiatric-therapeutic culture and the modern phenomenon of mass shootings.

It makes me think we ought to ditch all psychiatric medicines . . . or at least make them a last ditch effort, to be utilized only after the frenzied dancing is over.