Auditing your daily energy management, diet, sleep schedule, or recovering from burnout caused by extreme routines. ---

Take active care of your physical health by measuring out food, drink, exercise, and mental rest in exact proportions that cause your system no distress. Pythagoreanism never despised the body through destructive asceticism; Pythagoras himself was famed as a healer and trainer of athletes. The Greek text (p. 118) commands that one must not neglect the health of the body (*hygieiēs tēs peri sōm'*), but apply *metron* (measure/proportion) to drink, food, and *gymnasiōn* (physical exercises—rendered by d'Olivet/Redfield as "to the mind repose"). Crucially, the poem defines *metron* not as an abstract mathematical dogma, but through a bio-feedback rule: *metron de legō tod', ho mē s' aniēsei* ("And by measure I mean that which will not pain/distress you"). If a dietary or training regimen leaves the body sluggish, inflamed, or exhausted, it has violated *metron*. The body is the lyre of the soul; if the strings are tuned too tightly (starvation/overwork) or too loosely (gluttony/indolence), the instrument cannot play philosophy. [INTERPRETATION: PRISCA THEOLOGIA / ESOTERIC] Marsilio Ficino's masterwork on the health of scholars, *De Vita Libri Tres* (*Three Books on Life*, 1489), is a direct Renaissance expansion of this Pythagorean precept. Ficino argued that philosophers and magi are uniquely prone to Saturnian melancholy and exhaustion of the *spiritus*—the subtle vapour distilled from the blood that bridges body and soul. If the scholar neglects somatic *metron* in food, wine, exercise, and luminous rest, his *spiritus* becomes thick, dark, and incapable of receiving celestial influences. Caring for the physical vehicle with measured gentleness is therefore a primary magical obligation: you cannot channel solar light through a ruined lantern.