It was all based on divine shapes and tapestries etched by early mathematicians to represent what they thought were powerful concepts, especially “moral” ones, that they thought could shape people’s behaviour.

People like Pythagoras could go insane worshipping these shapes, even though they had useful mathematical properties that could predict things about what the real world was like. They weren’t totally stupid, and maths without technology wasn’t extra hard.

Scholars like Jesus would go around spreading ideas about how perfect the triangle was. It contained three simple connected points that were very similar. Specifically, it had a C3 rotation in mathematical group theory. If you spin it by 120 degrees, it’s the same afterwards. It contained three equally important geometric points that could never be transformed or “manipulated” so you could easily tell them apart. This was His Trinity.

Shapes like this are actually very important and have special properties in quantum dynamics nowadays, so their beliefs still hold a lot of power in many very logical people and how they think the world works based on science.

There were also more complicated systems popular in the past, too, that built up other forms of mathematics. Astrology was a good example too. They actually had very complicated systems for predicting lots of things based on measurements of time. If the data you had generally fit what usually happened (at least most of the time), you could be quite confident in those beliefs without being totally moronic.

I actually think some of these more mathematical beliefs may see a resurgence in the near future as proper quantum technologies are developed. People could fear them as they disrupt beliefs about technology, even those that only know a limited subset of modern physical laws (like Newton’s laws, which are very accurate, but not universally “true” by modern scientific standards).

Most people don’t realise how much technology is about to change. It’s already happening and it’s scary.