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Edited on Mon Sep-12-05 08:20 PM by Peace Patriot
in Alexandria, under orders from a Bishop Cyril, the first of the Christian bishops to term himself "patriarch" (the "Patriarch of Alexandria" --later made a saint and "Father of the Church"), were sacking the Alexandria Library (repository of all ancient learning) and dragging its famous and beloved philosopher, Hypatia, from her chariot (a vehicle that she often stopped in the middle of traffic, to stand on the street disputing a point of mathematics with ordinary citizens), and skinned her alive.
415 A.D. End of the Roman Empire. Beginning of a thousand years of darkness.
The Roman Catholic Church celebrates this vicious murder of the most famous woman teacher of the ancient world--a representative of the Goddess of Learning, Progress and Tolerance--every day, in their voodoo incantations of the Mass, with its fetishistic cleanliness and male exclusivity, over the "body and blood of Christ." It is not Christ's sacrifice that they are reenacting, but rather the skinning alive of the free mind, and their triumph over women.
That is why the Mass is so weird--so secretive, fetishistic and voodoo-ish. It hides a great sin.
Cyril was the first to require women to be veiled in church, and the first to forbid them to speak in church (unlike the early Christians who were egalitarian). He was a principle player at the Council of Ephesus where bishops stabbed each other with swords, in angry fighting about the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
His guilt for Hypatia's death was well known at the time (and well documented). The failure of Rome to punish him for it (she was a Roman citizen) was a scandal, and marked a major failure of Roman law in the hub of its empire, Alexandria.
Alexandria had been founded by the enlightened Ptolemaic kings (Alexander the Great's generals) who had instilled a policy of reverence for learning and tolerance of all religions and cultures. Cyril changed all that. He was responsible for driving the Jews from Alexandria, and confiscating all their property. The Gnostics (truer in spirit to the first Christians) were also persecuted, and their gospels burned (including the earliest dated gospel, the Gospel of Mary, in which Mary Magdalen was head of the Apostles--a copy of which was found buried in a cave near Alexandria, 1500 years later, and was published in the 1980s, in the book, "The Gnostic Gospels").
Loss of learning, loss of lawfulness, the repression of women, environmental destruction--Alexandria, "the breadbasket of the Roman Empire," was turning to sand--and crazy, unbalanced, male ideas of spirituality and dominance all go together. It was in those deserts , that were creeping up on Alexandria, that the Nitrian monks who slew Hypatia, went to whip themselves into visions of devils.
History does not repeat itself. It is a gyre (as described by William Butler Yeats) in which certain themes keep recurring, and humans experience repeated opportunities to learn, grow and evolve. We have for sure arrived at that place on the gyre where the matters of enlightened behavior, equality, learning and progress, are in flux and in peril. I think that the more of us who know this history, the more we will be able to tip the balance toward progress and higher evolution. We are by no means doomed to repeat the past. And it's amazing, isn't it?, that the learned work of odd people here and there, over these 1500 years, managed to preserve Hypatia's story--despite every attempt to extinguish her name, her works and her fate--so that her spirit now shines like a beacon to us, across the ages. Let it shine forever!
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