Hypatia of Alexandria
(Egypt, c. 370 CE to 415 CE)

“Behold the Divine, and then recognize in yourself that which beholds the Divine,” is a surviving fragment of Mystery teachings from the Neoplatonic School to which Hypatia belonged.

Hypatia (pronounced high-PAY-sha) was the daughter of the mathematician Theon of Alexandria, the last known teacher in the age-old tradition of the Mystery Schools, the spiritual universities of antiquity. The year and month of her death are known, the year of her birth is less certain, but 370 C.E. is generally accepted. Thus she would have been around forty-five when she was murdered. Historians have long regarded her death as the event that defined the end of the classical civilization in Mediterranean Europe. It signaled the end of Paganism and the dawn of the Dark Ages.

Theon was headmaster of the Museum of Alexandria, the place dedicated to the Muses, daughters of the ancient goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. Each of the Muses embodied a “sacred art” such as astronomy, lyric poetry, and history. The nine daughters of Memory presented a model for the curriculum of the Mystery Schools.

Hypatia’s beauty was legendary, and equaled only, it was said, by her intelligence. In the year 400, when she was about thirty, Hypatia assumed the chair of mathematics at the university school. The daughter of Theon was noted for her mastery of Platonic philosophy… Her dialectical 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.”

Hypatia’s expertise in theology typified the Pagan intellectual class of Gnostics, gnostokoi, “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 education and the sciences of our time. The word philosophy means “love (philo) of wisdom (sophia).” To Gnostics, Sophia was a revered divinity, the goddess whose story they recounted in their sacred cosmology. 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 gnostokoi were polymaths, savants, and prolific writers. From around 600 B.C.E. to Hypatia’s time – a period of a thousand years – they produced the countless thousands of scrolls stored in the Royal Library of Alexandria and other libraries attached to the Mystery centers around the Mediterranean basin.

Hypatia had a thousand-year-old tradition of literacy and learning to draw upon when she lectured to her classes. Modern ignorance of history in general, and of ancient history in particular, makes it difficult to grasp the scope and richness of learning in the Pagan world.

Hypatia is known to have written a treatise on arithmetic and commentaries on the Astronomical Canon of Ptolemy and the conic sections of Apolloniius of Perga. None of her writings survive, but eight ancient sources describe her murder and her accomplishments…

Hypatia’s accomplishments were not confined to theology and didactics. She was also involved in applied science related to geography and astronomy. Working with a Greek scientist Synesius, who was proud to be called her student, she invented a prototype of the astrolabe, a device later to prove essential in the navigation of the world oceans…

Hypatia was murdered by a Christian mob in 415 C.E. Public opinion held that Cyril, the Christian bishop of Alexandria, who was on record for calling Hypatia a sorceress, was complicit in the attack. She was beaten and dismembered, and her flesh scraped from her bones, and then her bones were burned to ashes.

Like countless others of her time, and in the centuries to follow, Hypatia was the victim of religiously inspired sectarian violence driven and fed by faith in the redeemer complex… Salvationism arose in Palestine and spread as quickly to Alexandria as it did to Rome. Consequently, non-European Pagans such as Hypatia were on the front lines of an assault that would eventually sweep over Europe in waves.

Gnostics in Egypt, the Levant, and the Near East were instructors and guides to the Greeks who launched the Western intellectual tradition, and they were something more as well. They were for the indigenous peoples of Europe the first line of defense against salvationist ideology originating in Palestine…

Locating Gnostics like Hypatia in the Mysteries puts ancient learning in a sacred context and points to the Pagan initiates as the educators of the ancient world, but modern scholarship leaves the Gnostics in a void, and totally ignores their centuries-long involvement in classical education.

(Excerpts from Not In His Image by John Lamb Lash; Part One: Conquest and Conversion, Chapter 1: The Murder of Hypatia)

Order Not In His Image: Chelsea Green Publishing

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