By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 24, 2015
“Fables
should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic
fantasies. To teach superstitions as
truths is a most terrible thing. The
child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps
tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for superstition as
quickly as for living truth, even more so, since a superstition is intangible,
you can’t get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, as so is changeable.”
- Hypatia of Alexandria
AGORA, a word that means 'gathering place' or 'assembly', is a period piece film set back in the 4th century AD, Roman Egypt, that tells the story of a brilliant Greek philosopher and astronomer named Hypatia. She was a free thinking woman that was a teacher and mentor; she was an inventor, mathematician and authority on the philosophy of Plato. She lived in Alexandria, in northern Egypt off the coast of the Mediterranean, with her father Theon who was the director of the Musaeum of Alexandria, which was an institution for music, poetry, philosophy and science. It also housed the vast number of texts in the great Library of Alexandria. Hypatia would teach future leaders and scholars in assembly rooms.
Alexandria,
in its inception, was to become a multi-cultured metropolis where all types of
people who seek knowledge and growth were to reside. Philosophers, scientists, mathematicians,
astronomers and high priests were all to co-exist under the same sky directly
above Alexandria, where writers and scientists would debate and pioneer thought.
It was a dream imagined by Alexander the
Great where all knowledge could be stored in one place. The intellectual city combined this wonderful
mix-match of Roman, Greek and Egyptian architecture to erect its monuments and build
its temples. 
When the
Christians arrived they soon began to mock and defile the pagan gods which
forced the Pagans to take action. The
Pagans ambushed the Christians, causing many deaths, leading to a massive bifurcation
of the city where Pagans and Christians stood apart. This social unrest began to challenge the
Roman rule as the Christians began to take over, gaining more and more power. 
Hypatia was
a non-believer; she was a woman of science and philosophy and was quite frankly
thinking about more important things than fake gods that scared Christians were
forcing people to believe. When the Pagans
instigated the battle with the Christians, they ended up finding themselves barricaded
in the Library of the Serapeum, a massive temple where the documents and texts
from mostly all the worlds thinkers were held.
While taking
refuge behind the walls of the Serapeum, Hypatia continued thinking about the
widely believed astronomical, geocentric Ptolemaic system that the Earth was
the center of the Solar System, a theory that philosopher Aristotle believed to
be true as well. This model she felt was widely
flawed but she was still baffled by the possibility that the Earth was in fact
moving. She considered the 3rd
century astronomer Aristarchus of Samos’ Heliocentric hypothesis that the Earth
and the planets, which Hypatia at the time called ‘wanderers’, actually circled
the Sun.
Soon an envoy of the Roman Emperor declared that the Pagans would all be pardoned, however the Christians would be allowed access to the library to do with it as they wish. Hypatia and a number of others furiously scramble to gather as many important scrolls and texts from the Library as possible before fleeing. Christians ended up overtaking the library, destroying statues and burning all the remaining works of philosophy, science, literature, poetry and mathematics scrolls that were unavoidably left behind. A body of knowledge that one could only imagine about the possibilities of even furthering an understanding of our species, how we live our lives and the elements that form the world and space around it. Civilization itself stood still that day as all that knowledge was destroyed out of fear of difference, fear of oneself, fear of loneliness, fear of abandonment and fear of change. Paganism became outlawed and the Ancient World ended giving birth to what we now call - Modern History.
“Reserve
your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at
all.”
– Hypatia of Alexandria
As the years
past, the Christians began to dominate Alexandria where even the current
Prefect was converted to Christianity.
Their power grew and they wanted to impose their Christianity onto other
communities within Alexandria. Jewish
people at this point became their new rivals and sadly remain so to this day in
various forms of disagreement. The
Jewish people believe their God of Abraham is the true God were the Christians
are saying that Jesus is the true son of God.
The battle back and forth, as these ludicrous futile arguments go, leads
to violence against each other.
Christians kill some Jews, Jews stone some Christians, Christians take
up swords and kill more Jews and round and round we go. These two groups among too many on this
planet, fight over wanting to be number one, the sad thing here is, they both
claim to be peaceful as they cowardly kill one another because these incredulous,
hypocritical believers loathe opposition to their insane way of thinking.
“All formal
dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting
persons as final.”
- Hypatia
While all
the men fight in the streets over piety, Hypatia continued work on her theory that
the Earth not only revolves around the Sun but it doesn’t do so in a perfect symmetrical
circle. She also was trying to prove the
Earth was in fact moving even though everyone on it wouldn’t necessarily feel
it moving. Clearly here she wasn’t
considering what we know now about gravity, but her insight into the physics of
the planet was ambitious. The Christians
figured that the world must be flat because if it was a sphere which was being
suggested, then why aren’t people and animals falling from the top of the earth
down the side and then sliding off it?
It seems a bit silly these days, to even consider such a thing, but we
were all born into a planet where all these questions had answers. To
Christians, the Book of Genesis is their scientific text that explains how the
Earth came to be. All Christians and
certainly many Christians to this day believe that God created the Earth and
the Stars. They believe the geocentric
model is the center where God placed his blessed children, and thinking otherwise
is an act of heresy.
Hypatia didn’t
believe in any of it and today we know now she was more or less correct in not
believing in it. Her purview was still understandably
limited by the senses and the capacity of the mind with such a minute amount of
cosmic information. She continued to prove
that the Earth was moving and that the motion would not affect a falling object
on the Earth itself. The Christians
ended up forbidding Hypatia to teach at school anymore because of their
objections against heliocentrism.While being subjugated by the Christians, Hypatia still focusing on her work, discovered an astrodynamic theory that the Earth orbits the Sun in an elliptical motion, not a circular one. This explains why the Sun sometimes appears closer to the Earth than other times. This oval orbit placed the Earth in various distances from the Sun and thus explained why the seasons changed.
The
Christians, reading straight from their bible that a woman should never be in a
position of power over a man, declared Hypatia a witch, a godless woman and inciting
religious turmoil, and vowed to kill her.
Hypatia, a lover of wisdom and the endless possibilities of human
thought, was kidnapped on her way home by a group of Christians. This mob of mad men tore her clothing off,
stripping her naked in front of an increasing heathen crowd. They dragged her naked into the Caesaruim,
which was a temple and then converted to a church, and grabbed sharp pieces of
any wood or rock they could find and they then began to fillet her alive. Once she was dead, like a pack of wolves, they
pulled her limbs apart and took her dismembered body parts to the edge of the
city and burnt them. 
The core of
all this isn’t necessarily religion, the core is fear which at its feet spawns
violence, through the rationalization of rejecting fear and weakness, violence
in the mind becomes reasonable if one wants to protect the very structure of
their being. This is the madness found
at the heart of most all religions. It
promises so much and is never able to live up to those promises, thus moving
the believer into a psychotic disposition that must force its fantasy into the
world and oddly, in this person’s fractured mind, validate it. Here they would have believed that they were
doing God’s work for him and would have excused themselves of all blame, which
would relieve any guilt, which would make them feel better about themselves and
ultimately this would result in an avoidance of fear. 
Alexander the
Great would have been profoundly disappointed to what eventually happened to
his great city. This city was to be a
place of enlightenment yet that act of barbarism blew out the candle of
Alexander’s dream of a more knowledgeable, informed future. Instead of human growth, understanding, respect
to all the living, silly superstitions manifested into real world consequences was
how these men chose to solve what they perceived as a problem, a problem that
we all know too well today. Thankfully Christianity has matured to the point that in the developed countries this type of thing doesn't regularly happen. All Hypatia wanted was to learn and teach
what she had learned to a group of open-minded people in a city that welcomed
difference and thrived on change.
Hypatia’s achievements
are even more exceptional because she was able to study the stars in a very
male dominated ancient world. She was a
humanist, a person that looked beyond gender, allowing her mind, equal
neurologically to anyone else’s, to expand without the weight of everyday
banality and religious dogmatism truncating it.
“Life is an
unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door
is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.”
- Hypatia
