“According to the Hellenic tradition, Pythagoras restricted the use of the word wisdom (sophia) so as to make it refer only to the science of immaterial realities treated as true Being, against the fluid material world of becoming whose very flow imitates the archetypes of true Being and derives from them. Before him wise men in Greece called themselves sages (sophoi, tantamount to those “exceeding in wisdom” who bear the attributes of the god Ea in Mesopotamia), but Pythagoras was the first among the Greeks to call himself a lover of wisdom, philosophos. He regarded philosophia as a form of purification, a way of life aimed at assimilation to God and the gaining of immortality.”