The Cabin in the Woods: The Sacrifice and Learning to Survive the Inevitable

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON MARCH 06, 2015

“Society needs to crumble.  We’re all just too chickenshit to let it.”

  - Marty

Warning: spoilers ahead!!

The Cabin in the Woods is a masterful horror/monster movie like no other.  It starts out wearing every horror movie cliché on its shoulder and then throws them all away.  Five young people travel out to a cabin in the woods for some good times.  Little do they know an evil lurks within, only this time it’s in the form of a government facility over-seeing everything.

This ambitious genre film follows these soon-to-be scared shitless college students while all manner of horrifying debaucheries are unleashed on them.  The five teenagers are made up of a lascivious, sexually-free blonde hottie named Jules, her athlete jock of muscle boyfriend, Curt, the goody-two-shoes virgin Dana, the smart guy that could go into politics, Holden, and the pot-smoking nerdy conspiracy theorist, Marty.  The group travel in a RV for a weekend trip in this seemingly deserted cabin.

While there they drink and swim as Marty gets high.  At night while in the cabin they play truth or dare when they happen upon a cellar underneath the cabin.  It wouldn’t be a horror film if they didn’t go down there so they do.  It’s naturally creepy and dark with elongating shadows.  The cellar is filled with old objects from over a century ago, among them is the diary of Patience Buckner, a young girl who lived in the cabin long ago and was abused by her sadistic family.  

Dana reads from the diary and then recites, against the wishes of Marty and likely the entire audience, incantations from the pages.  This inadvertently summons the zombified Buckner family from the depths of the dark forest surrounding them.

Unknown to the five students, they are actually being put up as a sacrifice for the Ancient Ones via an underground government facility run by a bunch of middle-class white coat types.  Sitterson and Hadley are the senior technicians at the site; they facilitate the environment for the creatures to do what they do.  They intoxicate the students with psychotropic drugs that they disperse through various hidden outlets.  While this is all going on they have an office bet with other staff members about the outcome of the ritual and what monster will attack the teenagers.  They clearly do this to lighten the proceedings, allowing those involved to live with themselves as they serve up five people to certain death.

This facility is among many around the world that perform similar rituals, altered only by culture and religion.  The idea is one of these facilities must offer up five young people, many fail, but the American branch intends on fulfilling their duty buy getting all their teenage sacrifices murdered.   

After getting sprayed with pheromones that increases their libidos, the jock and the blonde fool around in the woods, when they are met by the marauding Buckner zombies that cut Jules’ head off, while Curt barely escapes with his life.  Curt later rides his motorcycle fast enough to jump a ravine only to smash into a transparent wall that was obviously constructed to keep the sacrifices within the perimeter of the cabin.  Holden is then killed leaving Dana on her own.  Marty finds concealed surveillance equipment in the walls of his room.  Before being able to tell anybody he is dragged off into the forest by one of the Buckner zombies.

The staff in the facility begin to celebrate, thinking everyone is dead other than the virgin, which is apparently an acceptable loss for the Ancient Ones, Marty shows up to save Dana from a massive Buckner zombie trying to kill her.  They both end up in an elevator that takes them down into the viscera of the facility, where they move beside a menagerie of other creatures entombed in glass elevators as well.  Dana and Marty find themselves in a control booth cornered by a SWAT team trying to kill them.  Dana hits the purge button and opens all the elevators, releasing the monsters to slaughter the SWAT team and facility staff.

Dana and Marty stumble into a temple while escaping monsters and figure out that they were sacrifices in some ritual.  The project’s Director shows up and tells them that it’s much bigger than that.  She tells them that they have been offered up to keep the Ancient Ones satisfied, these malevolent beings living beneath the facility.  These Ancient Gods are kept in a perpetual slumber through an annual sacrifice of five young archetypes: the whore, the athlete, the scholar, the fool, and the virgin.  The virgin may survive as long as the other four die.  For a moment Dana considers killing Marty but is attacked by a werewolf.  The Director is killed by the zombie Patience Buckner while Dana and Marty hold on as the temple crashes down around them.  They decide that humanity is not worth saving so they smoke a joint while the beginning of the end collapses down around them.

The interesting thing about The Cabin in the Woods is no one is at fault here.  Sure you can split hairs but the zombies and all the other creatures are killers with no moral compass, like spiders and sharks, they just kill because that’s what they do.  All the members of the facility were doing their job, albeit a morbid one, but never the less, a job that had to be done for the betterment of mankind.  Which brings us to the five teenagers, wrong place wrong time; they were victims until the end.  Dana and Marty made the choice to let it all, literally, go to hell in a hand basket.   

The Cabin in the Woods is about the reality of mortality and not allowing one to escape it.  It’s also about humanity itself and whether or not it’s worth saving.  In order to keep shopping and keep celebrating ourselves, the governments in this film made a deal with the devil of sorts.  They made a deal with evil by giving it a little taste of death so the rest of us can have 500 channels, so we can watch the world end everyday on TV shows and movies.  What makes this film satisfying and unique is Dana and Marty came to terms with the banality of it all.  What are we doing to truly better ourselves and each other on this planet?  Dana and Marty experienced an existential awakening that led them to nothingness.  Maybe the film can be seen as a call to action and wants to end the conversation about hope.  Or maybe it’s sending a message to the genre itself, stop churning out the same shit.  Maybe Dana and Marty had to die in the end to kill off the actual clichés they represented.

MR. TURNER and Painting a Portrait of the Future of Existential Modernity

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON FEBRUARY 12, 2015

“What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it.  You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.  You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”  

- Morpheus, The Matrix

"My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there."

 - J. M. W. Turner

MR. TURNER is a fascinatingly masterful film by the always brilliant English director Mike Leigh.  The film is a look at the life and work of the great British painter J. M. W. Turner.  The film is wonderfully acted by every single actor involved and the look of the film is breathtaking. Mr. Turner is truly a work of art in its own right, which in that regard lets its audience become aware of its respect for the artistry of its subject.

The film Mr. Turner follows “the painter of light” which Turner was commonly known as because of the beautiful sunsets he painted.  Early in his life he sketched and worked quite delicately and beautifully with water paint.  This talent for painting got him accepted into the Royal Academy of Arts in London.  He later moved on from water painting to oil and started painting these amazingly majestic landscape and sea canvases.  His father, William Turner worked with him mixing his paints and building his canvases.  When his father died this had a profound effect on Turner and his outlook on life and death which made its way into his paintings.

Turner became more subjugated from the people in the world around him.  He traveled to find new vistas and to revisit beloved old ones.  He visited brothels to sketch prostitutes and once had himself strapped high up to the mast of a ship during a massive snow storm at sea, so he could later accurately paint such a storm on canvas.  That particular incident gave him bronchitis which began a decline in his health that eventually led to his death in Chelsea, England in 1851.

Turner was not a soberly sane person which ended up being ideal for his craft.  Soberly sane people generally don’t make good artists in anything really.   The world’s great advances in creativity and invention were more often than not achieved by little encounters with madness.  This form of artistic madness can be destructive not only for the artist but for the poor people that are often in their company, but that is what is often required of the human mind navigating such a structured, controlled society in order to break itself free of the shackles of conformity.

Turner felt that there was something wrong with the world, like The Matrix quote from above, Turner felt it like a splinter in his mind.  He articulated this feeling on his canvases.  His marine paintings were pushing toward the edge of reality itself, where the existential angst of the coming modern machine world made it on his canvas.  Mankind at the time of Turner’s pivotal painting period was losing its religious solidarity.  Turner himself was at least agnostic during his life, forgoing the presence of God for the reality he was searching for in his paintings.  God was in the foreground for many centuries because people generally knew nothing about the natural world.  During Turner's time science was beginning to become just as much a part of life as religion.  For Turner and many other free thinking people, this started to push God to the background and in some cases, out of the picture entirely.  Instead of painting cathedrals he painted the Industrial Revolution as it unfolded.

"It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and the more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye."

 - J. M. W. Turner

The events leading up to the end of the film were at their most existential.  Death is coming for us all and as much rhyme or reason we might want to apply to it, it’s still coming.  This film sees us in our most naked form, spinning thousands of miles per minute in the bleak cold nothingness of the universe.  Turner tried to paint his way behind the curtain to see the truth like so many before him and so many after.  Like others though he became restricted by the very structure he was trying to escape.  The frames of his paintings were as far as he was permitted to go, where the poet is limited by the length of his page, Turner was only able to go so far.  This limitation though is where great art is born.  It’s because of these restraints that ideas hidden in the abyss of the mind can surface, and here the artist’s task is to diagnose them and articulate them in some form of creative expression. What Turner did do was pave the way for impressionism as well as abstract art, essentially launching Modern Art.  He not only painted beautiful landscapes and raging seas, he painted the wonders of science and progress, not necessarily optimistic progress but never the less progress.  He saw that mankind was on a bifurcating precipice and the times as he knew them would be changing forever.  He was born in the age of sail and died in the age of steam during the Industrial Revolution.

The great philosophers, poets, painters, psychologists and physicists all owe their work to those that came before them, and so the future generation will owe theirs to the present.  This work belongs to mankind; it’s a project to better understand ourselves and the space around us we all share.  Turner was a controversial figure during his time because he pushed at the walls of conformity.  Members of the aristocracy and royalty did not approve of many of his paintings, especially the final phase of his career where even his sinking ships and recognizable stormy seas were dissolving on his ghostly canvases, where his paint became quite free and loose blurring the land and horizon, leaving an impending hazy void that he subconsciously saw coming.

Turner’s long time housekeeper, who loved him dearly, was exploited by him sexually and was taken for granted.  She was for the most part, an object for him to use as he wished.  Once she discovered that Turner was living with a woman in Chelsea, she left heartbroken and after his death was left a drift.  Her life was structured around waiting hand and foot for Turner’s grumpy demands.  This defined her life and with him gone she no longer had any idea what to do with herself.  This has always been a tragedy for some people, where they devoted too much time towards the will of others and never really stopped to work on developing themselves. 

Turner’s relationship with the seaside landlady, Sophia Booth, who was a widower twice already, was certainly sad to see Turner die, but she lived on.  A perfect scene at the end of the film has her meticulously cleaning demarcated windows, recognizing life goes on and as such must be lived.  Unlike the hapless housekeeper, Sophia Booth was able to lose herself in structure and routine in order to carry on.  This is also a tragedy for some people where they cling to their things and their routines in order to avoid feeling the pain of loss.      

Society has become so structured that we no longer see the fine detail of it anymore.  If a double-decker city bus takes a busy London street corner at a fast speed, as they often do, the wannabe punk rocker standing on the sidewalk on that same corner, listening to the Sex Pistols through the re-mastered digital download on his iPhone, would barely blink an eye.  But if you were to remove the buildings, all the people, and other vehicles, placing him and the bus in an open field with the bus making the same maneuver, you might find that same bad ass punk-rocker soiling his leather pants.  The reason for this is the structure is an understood agreement in societies.  Without it, it would be just us alone in the world.  So the structure is our predictable Pavlovian maze trap that we as a member of society no longer see but yet require immensely.

J. M. W. Turner lived during a precarious time, where his contemporary Soren Kierkegaard developed existentialism, postulating that the anxiety we feel is the result of our total freedom to choose.  While the sodality of the church continued to proselytize people into believing what the church believes, many were looking to science for their answers about existence.  Alessandro Volta built the first electric battery and Pompeii was discovered at the base of Mount Vesuvius, which put an end to the frivolity of the Rococo Era ushering in Neoclassicism, which was a return to sterile academic form.  The Romantic Era followed as a philosophical and literary movement focused away from disciplines of the Neoclassics and more toward, feelings, emotions, introspection and atmosphere as mankind struggled against the forces of the natural world.   Turner became a vital figure in the art world and in how we look at ourselves while we look toward the horizon searching for the nature of reality.  Mr. Turner is a celebration of the artist's plight in life, the film is raw and as real as they come just as Turner would have wanted it. 

Jupiter Ascending and Harvesting the Most Precious Resource of all, Time

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON FEBRUARY 12, 2015

"Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry.  Right now, Balem is entitled to Earth.  Once you claim it, the Earth will belong to you."

- Kalique to Jupiter

Jupiter Ascending was not a good movie but it also wasn’t that bad either.  The visual effects were stunning but the plot, character development and interactions were more problematic.  The space opera is about a young woman named Jupiter, who’s a Russian immigrant house keeper in Chicago that scrubs a lot of toilets, and is brought into this intergalactic turf war over whether or not she is a gene-matched reincarnation of a royal queen of the universe.

Jupiter, with the help of Caine Wise, a human/wolf genetically engineered interplanetary warrior, discovers that she is in fact royalty.  She must then legally claim her royal position and what inheritance comes with it, namely possession of Earth.  When it is discovered that the matriarch of the House of Abrasax, which is the most powerful of all the alien dynasties, has died, her three children Balem, Kalique and Titus go to war over many years for the inheritance.  Then it becomes known that Jupiter has the same genetic signature as the matriarch of the House of Abrasax and is the rightful heir.  The matriarch’s three children all one way or another, want Jupiter to hand over her inheritance to them.  The more extreme case here is Balem who wants her dead so he can claim the inheritance.

Caine Wise with his pointy ears and Atomic Anti-Gravity boots that allow him to rollerblade in the sky and off building surfaces, comes to Earth to protect Jupiter so she can claim her royal position and reinstate him as a legionnaire, which is a mercenary-type organization that he was banished from for ripping out the throat of what's known as an Entitled, which is another way of saying privileged or elite.  Balem has put a bounty on Jupiter’s head, resulting in her and Caine being intercepted and attacked by interplanetary lizard hunters with wings, these little Gollum-like alien creatures that are able to shape shift into human form, and a number of other bounty hunters.  Caine and Jupiter fight off and evade a number of these unwanted forces until a couple of bounty hunters finally capture Jupiter and take her into space.

Jupiter is acknowledged as royalty and is helped to make it official by space military forces who wish for new representation, after fighting in a number of wars.  Jupiter is then captured by Kalique, daughter of Jupiter’s genetic signature which they call a Recurrence, and told of the great resource that is fought so hard for in space, which is - time.  Kalique demonstrates this by walking into a plasma pool as a woman that looks like she’s in her later forties, submerging herself and then exiting the same pool looking like a twenty year old woman, her age is actually over 14 millennia.  Jupiter is clearly amazed at this level of technology and is then rescued by Caine where she is taken again but this time to Kalique’s brother’s massive gold-plated ship.  There Jupiter is told about the harvesting of human beings into a youth serum that allows these well-to-do aliens to live forever.  She is told by Titus that many planets just like Earth are farms for the purposes of harvesting, once the humans on that planet reach their Darwinian state of perfection and have exhausted all their resources.

Jupiter Ascending is pretty silly throughout and there is zero chemistry between Jupiter and Caine, even though the story attempts to create a romance between them.  The real interesting part here is the extent that capitalism is willing to go so the filthy rich get to live forever.  This movie knocks that home in the clearest sense, if the oligarchy of this planet scientifically found a way to harvest the third world for their life force, would they do it?  They absolutely would within a fraction of a blink of an eye.  In the movie people are described in the form of a pyramid with the royalty on top where the people at the bottom are seen as mere cattle.

The movie is saturated with so much visual effects that it will make the average candy-junkie truly feel what a sugar rush is, but hidden beneath all the explosions and cheesy dialogue is a true commentary on the future of mankind in cautionary tale form.  This movie demonstrates the potential effects of capitalism, if technology allows it to exploit even more of this planet and its living organisms for profit.  The movie explores the extent of what ownership means to the elite as well as the poor people that inhabit the lands that are being bought up by corporations.

Jupiter Ascending is about the future of mankind after abandoning the socialist recommendations of Karl Marx, where the fruits of industry must be shared for mankind to prosper.  Clearly that project was railroaded by the power structure because the world we live in today is cutthroat capitalistic economics, where the rich kill anything or anyone that even breathes near their piles upon piles of money.

Probably the greatest fallacy of not only human existence but all living organisms is that everything dies.  Human beings are in the unique and probably unfortunate position to be aware of their own mortality.  The fear of all our impending deaths has given rise to all manner of beliefs to distort that reality.  Everything from religions to reincarnation were invented by men as an illusory scapegoat from death.  Most of our existence is based on lies that can be traced back to that first major cover-up; we die and that’s it.  There’s no heaven for us to visit long dead loved ones while we sip red wine at a dinner banquet with God.  There’s no soul that lives on as our bodies die and are reincarnated into some other life form.  We die, like any other species on this planet.  We are only special because there isn’t anything else around that can tell us otherwise.  Every human on this planet was born into this lie and most believed it because the thought of death scares the hell out of them.  Not to mention its abstract, the very concept is almost incomprehensible because our only experience on this planet is living.  So life after death was invented to carry on that experience.
  

Jupiter Ascending is a cartoonish movie with big ideas. On its surface it wants us to have a fun and exciting movie going experience.  Beneath its gloss it wants us to feel that there's something wrong with the current system we are all living under. Governments and corporations are controlling our potential, they are controlling our minds ability to evaluate what's truly right or wrong for our well-being.  Instead our ability to evaluate has been appropriated for the purposes of mass consumption.  We are being lured away by fantasies of being famous and recognized and are severing ourselves from the very planet that we need to survive.  If this wasn't so incredibly pervasive and omnipresent it might be seen for what it truly is, sheer madness. 

In the ancient past the stars and the sun were gods, then the Greeks and the Romans anthropomorphized them into their gods which led polytheism to monotheism.  Today along with superheroes and celebrities, average people are scratching the eyes out of competitors in order to deify themselves into god-like status.  In our consumer society, we've become increasingly desperate to be seen and someone special but sadly, not with skills and talent.  We want the fast food route to greatness without all the work and struggle that Nietzsche said was required to overcome what holds us back.  The villains of Jupiter Ascending 'harvested' entire planets to benefit themselves both physiologically and financially, without any real afterthought of the millions of lives whose future potential was stolen from them. This is the unfortunate path we as a society are seeing ourselves on as corporations and governments harvest our wills to live outside their overpowering agendas. 

AGORA: Hypatia and being a Philosophical Woman in a Violently Religious Ancient World

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 4^th 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 3^rd 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