May not the reason why Ikhnaton was later described as a "heretic" be that he violated the code of the priestly hierarchy by revealing this secret doctrine to the profane? Hence, too, perhaps the necessity in which the King found himself of suppressing the priesthood, which by persisting in its exclusive attitude kept what he perceived to be the truth from the minds of the people. The earliest European centre of the Mysteries appears to have been Greece, where the Eleusinian Mysteries existed at a very early date. Pythagoras, who was born in Samos about 582 B.C., spent some years in Egypt, where he was initiated into the Mysteries of Isis. After his return to Greece, Pythagoras is said to have been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries and attempted to found a secret society in Samos; but this proving unsuccessful, he journeyed on to Crotona in Italy, where he collected around him a great number of disciples and finally established his sect. This was divided into two classes of Initiates--the first admitted only into the exoteric doctrines of the master, with whom they were not allowed to speak until after a period of five years' probation; the second consisting of the real Initiates, to whom all the mysteries of the esoteric doctrines of Pythagoras were unfolded. This course of instruction, given, after the manner of the Egyptians, by means of images and symbols, began with geometrical science, in which Pythagoras during his stay in Egypt had become an adept, and led up finally to abstruse speculations concerning the transmigration of the soul and the nature of God, who was represented under the conception of a Universal Mind diffused through all things. It is, however, as the precursor of secret societies formed later in the West of Europe that the sect of Pythagoras enters into the scope of this book. Early masonic tradition traces Freemasonry partly to Pythagoras, who is said to have travelled in England, and there is certainly some reason to believe that his geometrical ideas entered into the system of the operative guilds of masons. The Jewish Cabala[15] According to Fabre d'Olivet, Moses, who "was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," drew from the Egyptian Mysteries a part of the oral tradition which was handed down through the leaders of the Israelites.[16] That such an oral tradition, distinct from the written word embodied in the Pentateuch, did descend from Moses and that it was later committed to writing in the Talmud and the Cabala is the opinion of many Jewish writers.[17] The first form of the Talmud, called the Mischna, appeared in about the second or third century A.D.; a little later a commentary was added under the name of the Gemara. These two works compose the Jerusalem Talmud, which was revised in the third to the fifth centry[A]. This later edition was named the Babylonian Talmud and is the one now in use.