The Murder of Hypatia
The Murder of Hypatia
The Murder of Hypatia
A " a spring day in the year 415 c.r., a Pagan noblewoman emerged
\-/ from the lecture hall attached to the great library of Alexandria
and called for her chariot, intending to drive herself home. Although
there were many educated Pagan women of high social standing and
good education in Alexandria in rhat era, Hypatia, as she was called, was
one of the few who owned and drove her own chariot. A familiar sight
to the local populace, she often halted her horses and descended into the
street to chat amiably with local people, or to debate issues of philosophy
with whomever might wish to engage her. Her openness, combined
with her kind and elegant manner, won her the admiration and affec-
tion of the townsfolk. Hypatia was also acrive in an official capacity in
civic affairs normally dominated by men. "Such were her self-possession
and ease of manner, arising from the refinement and cultivation of her
mind, that she not infrequently appeared in public in presence of the
magistrates, without ever losing in an assembly of men rhat dignified
modesty of comportment for which she was conspicuous, and which
gained for her universal respect and admiration."'
Hypatia's beauty was legendary, and equaled only, it was said, by her
intelligence. Tall and confidenr, commanding her charior with ease,
clothed in a long robe and the signature scarf of the teaching class, she
must have cut a striking figure in the thriving streets of that mosr cos-
mopolitan of cities. No realistic image of her survives.
On that March day in 415, as Hypatia entered a public square near the
Caesarean Church where Christian converts were known to gather, she
found her path blocked by a menacing crowd. At the head of the group
stood a rough-looking man called Peter the Reader who roused those
gathered to approach Hypatia and impede her way. "Now this Peter was
a perfect believer in all respects of fesus Christ,"2 a zealous convert who
CONQUEST AND CONVERSION
Wrsoov INcRnNnrn
*For a definiton ofMystery Schools and other special rerms, see the glossary
CONQUEST AND CONVERSION
In the year 400, when she was about thirty, Hypatia assumed the chair
of mathematics at the university school. This was a salaried position,
equivalent to professorship in a modern university. The daughter of
Theon was noted for her mastery of Platonic philosophy and her skill in
theurgy, literally "god-working," a form of magical invocation that
might be compared to Jungian active imagination, or, more aptly,
advanced practices of visualization in Tantra and Dzogchen. Her dialec-
tical powers were exceptional, honed to a fine edge by her mathematical
training. When it came to debating ideas about the divine, "Hypatia
eclipsed in argument every proponent of the Christian doctrines in
Northern Egypt."' Her expertise in theology typified the Pagan intellec-
tual class of Gnostics,gnostoftoi, "those who understand divine matters,
knowing as the gods know," but she was also deeply versed in geometry,
physics, and astronomy.* Ancient learning was multidisciplinary and
eclectic, contrasting strongly to the narrow specialization of higher edu-
cation and the sciences in our time. The word philosop&y means "love
(philo) of wisdom (sophia)." To Gnostics, Sophia was a revered divinity,
the goddess whose story they recounted in their sacred cosmology.t To
the people of her time and setting, Hypatia would have been wisdom
incarnate.
In addition to their religious function, the Mysteries provided the
framework for education along interdisciplinary lines. The gnosto\oi
were polymaths, savants, and prolific writers. From around 600 s.c.r. to
Hypatia's time-a period of a thousand years-1hey produced the
countless thousands of scrolls stored in the Royal Library of Alexandria
and other libraries attache d to Mystery centers around the
Mediterranean basin. Hypatia is known to have written a treatise on
arithmetic and commentaries on the ,4stronomical Canon of Ptolemy
and the conic sections of Apollonius of Perga. None of her writings sur-
vive, but eight ancient sources describe her murder and her accomplish-
ments; the latter, not always in an approving manner. Cyril, whom pop-
ular opinion implicated in her murder, became an imporranr theologian
fI propose the pronunciatiooso-FI-ah for the mythological name of the goddess, as disrinct
from the common name pronounced so-FEE-ah. The ad jective is sophianic.
THE MTJRDER OF HYPATIA
known for formulating the doctrine of rhe Holy Trinity. He was later
canonized by the Church, along with other early Christian ideologues,
the so-called Church Fathers, men whose theological polemics and his-
tories of the One True Faith celebrate its triumph over "heretics" such
as she.
Hypatia's accomplishments were not confined to theology and didac-
tics. She was also involved in applied science relatecl to geography and
astronomy. Working with a Greek scientist Synesius, who was proud to
be called her student, she invented a prototypeofthe astrolabe, a device
later to prove essential in the navigation of the world oceans for the
twinned purposes of conquest and conversion.
PacnN LEanNtr.rc
For the next 1000 until the coming of Islam, it would look
ye ars,
to the Mediterranean and the wider worid. Alexandria's full
title was "Alexandria by Egypt"-not "in Egypt." It was
founded as an entrep6t through which the weaith of Egypt
would flow; and within two centuries it would become the "the
crossroads of the entire world": the El Dorado of the Hellenistic
Ag.. ... In the first century A.D. Alexandrian merchants sailed
to South India on the monsoon winds, linking up with the trade
to the Ganges, Vietnam, and China; part of the explosion of
ideas and contact initiated by the Age of Alexander.*
In Hypatia's lifetime, her native city was still the greatest cosmopolitan
center of antiquity, the undisputable capital of the Western world, com-
mercially, spiritually, and intellectually speaking, but it belonged to an
empire teetering on the brink of collapse. She r.l'as born around ten years
after the initial wave of barbarians, the Huns, poured into Europe, and six
years after the Roman Empire was divided geographically between east
and west. In her lifetime the Roman legions evacuated Britain, conquered
CONQUEST AND CONVERSION
by |ulius Caesar four and a half centuries earlier, and the borders of the
Empire shook continually from barbarian assaults. In 410, when Hypatia
would have been forty, Alaric, chieftain of the Visigoths, captured and
sacked Rome, inflicting a mortal blow on the Empire. At that very
moment Augustine of Hippo was writing The City of God, a book des-
tined to become a cornerstone of Catholic doctrine. As the Roman Empire
shattered and burned, another imperial entity, the institution of the
catholic church, was rising in its place. A fateful handover of power was
in progress.
The Hellenistic era lasted from the death of Alexande r in 323 B.c.E. to
30 n.c.t., when Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies' killed herself with
the bite of an asp. After Alexander's death, his empire was dividecl
among three of his generals. The southernmost part, comprising Egypt
and Judea (including Jerusalem), became the Ptolemaic kingdom'
Culture and custom were uniform throughout all three parts of the
,,Natives of Galilee and
empire. fudea wore fhe same sort of clothes as
were worn in Alexandria, Rome or Athens."5 The entire southern
region, including Palestine, was thriving with lvlystery Schools, many of
them founded and directed by Gnostics such as Hypatia." In the twilight
ofthe Egyptian dynasties, cross-cultural exchange reached a fever pitch,
but the death of cleopatra brought a change of political regime that
would permanently darken the skies of learning. f ulius Caesar's arrival
in Egypt in 47 e.c.n. completed the shift that had begun in 63 s.c.r. when
the Roman general Pompey, Caesar's greatest rival, had declared |udea
a Roman province. The transition from Hellenistic haven to Roman
domain affected the entire Near East. In Hypatia's time, the Royal
Library had existed for over seven hundred years, but it fared far less
well in the four centuries of the Roman era than in the preceding three
centuries of high Hellenistic syncretism.
The Royal Library was founded by a general of Alexander the Great,
Ptolemy I, as a center of learning for the vast territories united by the
Greek language following Alexander's campaigns. Ptolemy earned the
title of soter, "savior," a title that would later be applied to Jesus Christ,
because Ptolemy saved the wisdom of the ancient world. His son,
Ptolemy lI (d.246 n.c.n.), commanded that all boats entering the port of
Alexandria be searched for scrolls and papyri. Those found were taken
THE MURDER OF HYPATIA
to the library and copied, the originals were deposited in the stacks, and
the copies returned in their owners. A staff of librarians, scribes, and cal-
ligraphers worked continuously to maintain an ever-growing collection
that included first editions of Homer and Hesiod, the Greek play-
wrights, Aristotle, and many others. Ptolemy II proudly claimed a pri-
vate collection of the 995 best books of all time.
The vast archives of the Royal Library were not limited to Greek-
language writings. It stocked works in other languages such as Syriac
and Aramaic, and translators labored nonstop to produce Greek edi-
tions. One of these works was the Hebrew Torah (the first five books of
the Bible). Rendered into Greek, it was called the Septuagint because
seventy fewish scholars worked on the translation. Upon founding the
city, Alexander had guaranteed lews the same rights as other citizens of
his empire. In Hypatia's day, it is likely that five to ten percent of the
city's population were fews-around 40,000 people.
Ptolemy I had built a rnassive hall called the Bruchion to house the
ever-expanding collecdons. When it outgrew its capacity, his successor
Ptolemy III erected the Serapeum. G. R. S. Mead notes that the Royal
Library where Hypatia lectured was the hrst great public library in
Egypt, but not the first in Egypt. Each temple had its own in-house
library, and Egypt was a land of many temples. In mainland Greece and
in the Grecian coionies around the Mediterranean basin, temple libraries
housed large and ancient collections. Since the introduction of secular
alphabets to the general public around 600 n.c.r., the adepts of the
Mysteries had been pouring out a vast body of writings on every conceiv-
able subject. In 400 c.n. Hypatia had a thousand-year-old tradition of lit-
eracy and learning to draw upon when she lectured to her classes.
Modern ignorance of history in general, and of ancient history in par-
ticular, makes it difficult to grasp the scope and richness of learning in
the Pagan world. Writing in the 1940s, classical scholar Gilbert Highet
observed:
the savages and invaders broke into it. It was, in many respects
until a few generations ago,
a better thing than our civilization
and it may well prove to have been a better thing all in all.
When the Roman Empire was at its height, law and order,
education, and the arts were widely distributed and aimost uni-
versally respected. In the first centuries of the Christian era
there was almost too much literature; and so many inscriptions
survive, from so many towns and villages in so many different
provinces, that we can be sure that many, if not most, of the pop-
ulation could read and write. . Expeditions have found
papyrus copies of Flomer, f)emosthenes, and Plato, fragments
of what were once useful libraries, buried under remote
Egyptian villages now inherited by illiterate peasants.T
*C)n the Nag Hammadi Codices-not to be conlused with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which also
6gure in the argument c,f this book-see chapter 7 and "Suggestions for Reading and
Research." The Dead Sea Scrolls are discussed in chapters 4,5,6, and elsewhere.
THE MURDER OF HYPATIA
"The Mysteries were the last redoubts of Paganism to fall. Prior to that
their adherents were the educators of the ancient world.""
Locating Gnostics like Hypatia in the Mysteries puts ancienr learning
in a sacred context and points to the Pagan initiates as the educarors ofthe
ancient world, but modern scholarship leaves the Gnostics in a void, and
totally ignores their centuries,long involvement in classical education.