These Respected Figures Were Also Some of the Weirdest People in History

28. A Full Blown Beans Phobia

Pythagoras’ adherents worshipped him as a demigod, and referred to him as “the divine Pythagoras“. They thought he possessed supernatural powers that allowed him to write words on the face of the moon. They also thought his strokes could tame the wild animals of the earth and the birds of the sky, and that his voice could control them. Pythagoras’ followers claimed that he was the son of the god Apollo, or as other accounts have it, that he was fathered by the god Hermes. As a sign of his divinity, they claimed that he had a golden thigh, whose shimmering sight turned doubters into believers. Pythagoras encouraged such beliefs, and claimed that the gods had blessed him with the ability to return to life after death via a divine rebirth.

The weird mathematician had a weird stance on beans, especially fava beans. He believed that humans lost a bit of their soul whenever they farted, which exited along with the expelled gasses. He also believed that beans contained dead people’s souls. He got there after a “scientific” experiment to prove that humans and beans were spawned from the same source. Pythagoras buried beans in mud, and left them for a few weeks. When he dug them up, he saw a resemblance to human fetuses. So he convinced himself of an intimate relationship between beans and humans, and reasoned that to eat beans was akin to eating human flesh. Thus, Pythagoras equated bean consumption with cannibalism. Not just as any cannibalism, but cannibalism of one’s father and mother. As he explained it to his followers: “Eating fava beans and gnawing on the heads of one’s parents are one and the same“.