As the most distinguished scholar of her day, "Hypatia wore a philosopher's robe as a male would. She drove her own chariot, sailed her own boat, rode blooded horses alone out into Alexandria's encircling deserts. She stood before thousands when she spoke, and being both young and lovely, knew many men. Before she was twenty, she surpassed her famous father in mathematics and astronomy." In other words, Hypatia represented everything misogynists feared: a brilliant woman scholar who was outside the control of any male authority. As long as she existed she was a blatant challenge to Church doctrine that dictated all women were "Daughters of Eve" and subject in all ways to men. Hypatia was "subject" to no one and a living monument to the liberating effect of education for women. In fact Hypatia was famous for having corrected many of the texts written by a man - her father - and other male mathematicians for the manuscript collections of the great Library of Alexandria. As the Christian church gained temporal as well as 'spiritual' power, the schools and libraries of the ancient world, even the famed academies of Athens that gave us Plato and Socrates, were destroyed by Christian mobs and the soldiers of Christian emperors plunging Europe into what are known now as the infamous Dark Ages.
The Most Hated Woman In The World
Hypatia was a brilliant mathematician, an astronomer, and prominent lecturer on the philosophy of Plotinus as head of the School of Philosophy at Alexandria. She was, of course, a pagan and that did not sit well with the local Christian Bishop, Cyril. By the time of Hypatia, @370 to 400 C.E., the church had abandoned its earliest roots in which women were priests and bishops. An ascetic strain of religiosity had taken over the hierarchy and an Old Testament misogyny had marred the priesthood. Although pockets of goddess worship and the ancient 'Mystery Schools' survived, their days were numbered. As the universally acknowledged genius of her age, Hypatia was an easy target for those who saw the survival of paganism - or worse atheism - as a personal affront. The Church's power had to be absolute; the hierarchy would brook no 'alternative philosophies', especially the agnosticism of the open- minded. Whether motivated by pure misogyny or political expediency, priests began to preach the evils of permitting this pagan 'whore' to appear in public lecturing to thousands, mostly men! She refused to marry and be subject to a husband and she claimed the right to drive her own chariot, to walk freely and unaccompanied around Alexandria, to ride out into the desert at night to observe and map the movements of the stars.
Pathological Power Drive
The problem was that the Christian state was about submission not independence.The priests and bishops had far less freedom than Hypatia had since they depended on Church stipends for their upkeep. The Christian ideal was "holy poverty" whilst Hypatia, as the pre-eminent authority of her day, attracted wealthy patrons and students from all over the pagan world. Then, as now, wealth is power and both excite greed in those who have neither. It is thought that her alignment with Orestes on matters civil was the excuse the Christian hierarchy seized upon as an excuse to kill her. Whatever the motive, her death suggests an unusually strong level of personal hatred. Hypatia was dragged from her study by a male mob, stripped and skinned to death with the edges of sea shells and broken tiles. As if that were enough, her body was then hacked to pieces and burnt and her bones scattered for carrion so there could be no memorial to attract adherents to her cause.Her voluminous correspondence with other scholars andher treatises on various aspects of mathematics and astronomy were mostly destroyed after her murder and those that remained were lost when Library of Alexandria was burned by a now victorious Church of Rome. But enough of her work survived to make her a pain in Rome's side and a symbol of hope for oppressed women everywhere.
Things have changed since then, right?
Women - in some places - can vote, hold jobs, drive cars, live alone if they choose to do so, refrain from child-bearing if they so choose. That's progress, right? Yes, as far it goes. But there has always been a sizeable male opposition that threatens the rights of women like the American "Christian" Right Wing, pseudo-religious patriarchal cults, men who engage in sexual harassment of women on the streets, at work, and even within institutions of higher learning where date rape and gang rape are seen as male rights to assert their power and dominance. And now we have the embodiment of militant malignant misogyny, the various branches of "Radical Islam": Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS-ISIL, and their myriad sympathizers around the globe. Mass murder, sexual slavery, and the entire of catalogue of testosterone-fed psycho-pathology masquerades as "religion" to justify the torture, rape, enslavement, and murder of any female who takes the ISIS sadistic fancy. ISIS's objective is totalitarian political power, economic power, sexual power and lethal power. Make no mistake: ISIS has one religion only, Death; and its sacraments are rape, torture and murder.ISIS is not Muslim; it is Malignant Misogyny. Hypatia would recognize it immediately.
