Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria

by Ki Longfellow

  We discuss the words of Mary Magdalene, beloved companion and teacher of the Christ, she who once lived and studied in Alexandria under Philo Judaeus, then taught her beloved what she herself had learned as they walked to his death. We discuss the words of The Gospel of Philip. “God created man and man created God. So is it in the world. Men make gods and they worship their creations. It would be fitting for the gods to worship men.” I wait for intake of breath, but it does not come as it would from one or more of the Companions. “Most who heard such words would dismiss them. Others would misunderstand them. Philip is not saying God is no more than a fabrication of man. He is saying, as did Parmenides of Elea, that out of our own Thoughts, through our own Minds, we brought forth the World…and with the World came the idea of God. He is saying that out of his own Thoughts and through his own Mind, God brought forth Man. But how can this be? God made man and man made God? Is it not one or the other? The answer is simple. Man and God are the same. There is no separation.”

  I tell them further, as a faith named for Christ drives our gods from the world and makes the source of “evil” a woman, they are made rapt to discover that the Christ is not a history but a spiritual myth, that the word “Christ” is not a name or a title but a state of being: Christ Consciousness, which in Greek is called gnosis or divine knowing, and in the language of those I have met from the land of the Gupta it is Moksha.

  As we talk my women and I become runners of the sun, those who would know.

  ~

  “By their own laws, Christians are forbidden taverns, brothels, and public assemblies. They are forbidden the theater.” Bishop Synesius tells us this. After a moment of thought, he adds, “Few obey.”

  Meletus, who stands in the Agora’s center courtyard as I do as does Minkah and Orestes, nods. “Jews, no different, attend theater even on the Sabbath. They become unruly, for the Law that binds the Jews has loosened and many have escaped.” He says this in all seriousness and I see he does not mean to be amusing.

  Synesius sighs. “The true faithful of any religion are not many.” At this my old friend and student looks at me knowing I know he does not count himself among the true faithful.

  Orestes, as Prefect, laments: “If they do not stop, Jewish theater must stop.” This he also says, “And yet no Jew threatens Imperial authority. Only Cyril does. As I labor to return order to the law courts and to public gatherings, his people, forbidden by their church to attend either, create hell on earth. Now they attack Jews for attending their own theater on their own Sabbath, as if it was any of their accursed business…yet as Prefect, I am required to maintain public order.”

  “Orestes,” say I, “when you do this, might I come along?”

  Minkah grows alert beside me. “Why would you go?”

  “All I have known of Jews is Meletus. I would know more.”

  “There are better ways than maintaining order with Orestes.”

  “Are there?”

  Since the death of Theophilus, I well understand Minkah protects me. Even Felix Zoilus protects me. Do they assume a bloodbath? But knowing Meletus, stranger to a smile, we are all eager to see a Jew revel. Orestes agrees. How could there be danger? Wherever goes the Prefect of Alexandria, so too goes any number of imperial guards.

  ~

  We go on a night when the moon is full. From the theater, built into the side of a limestone ridge on the Street of Theaters, one can look down at the Great Harbor and across its waters to the island of Pharos…but once inside—by Queen Vashti, hero to all wives—what a sight! Jews stand on benches. Jews throw dates, olives, bread. They shout, they stamp their feet, they pull their beards. As for those on stage, dancing and miming, who sees them? Jews are here not for the stage, but for freedom.

  Keeping well back, I revel in the revelry, until beside me Orestes sighs, “As myself, I would not, but as Prefect it is time to pour cold water on heads.” And with this, he and his men push their way to the stage. Orestes leaves a handful to look after us, making Minkah bristle and Felix growl. How long Orestes must shout before he is noticed, I could not say, but man by man, the Jews grow quiet.

  “Friends,” he calls out to them, “In my person I am required to keep the peace. It does not matter who breaks it: young or old, man or woman, Christian or Jew, if the people of Alexandria cannot or will not govern themselves, then it is I who must govern for them. Complaints have been made against you.”

  ‘What complaints?” shouts one, his face still red from blowing the horn he holds.

  “You ignore your Sabbath.”

  “These complaints…do they come from our rabbis?”

  “They come from certain—”

  “Christians! And do we Jews complain when a Christian is found in a whorehouse? Or a gutter?”

  “Never,” shouts someone I cannot see, “Instead, we laugh!” At which point all laugh: mimes, dancers, Jews, and Felix.

  I remember what Orestes has said: Jews are not the problem, Cyril’s Christians are. He would treat these laughing men well, but before he can, a scuffle breaks out nearby. We cannot see who hits whom, or why, but our guards and half those gathered around Orestes, push and shout their way through the crowd, and there set about whacking heads with the flat of their swords.

  “Well,” says Minkah, “We get our money’s worth tonight.”

  Felix says this, “I am minded of home—which is why I seldom go there.”

  Four Jews are dragged to the stage where stands Orestes. Five others, not Jews, are forcibly made to kneel.

  “Look!” Minkah pokes Felix. “Peter the Reader.” The smile of Felix fades from his bearded face.

  Peter the Reader! I look and I see that all five who kneel are those Synesius named in his book “Black Mantles,” and that one has a face as white as bone. I have seen this face before, long ago when the Serapeum burned. He called me Satan’s child. So this is Minkah’s nemesis!

  Orestes poses before the fires that light the stage. If he were not a fine politician, he would make a fine actor. He is angry, yet appears calm. “Choose that one,” he asks of the four Jews, “who is most able in speech and least able at lying. I will know what happens here.”

  “That one” chooses himself. “As you have come, agents of Cyril have also come, so that you might witness our ‘supposed’ violence. But it was they who began it this night.”

  “Is that so? And who are these agents?” Dozens of fingers point at Peter the Reader. “You!” he shouts at this Peter, “is the truth spoken here?”

  Not Peter, but another lifts his arm, both arm and man so thin I would feed him on the instant. Actually, I would not—but Lais would. I know him. He sat beside Cyril at the consecration of Synesius and now sits beside Cyril who pretends he does not attend my lectures. “My name is Hierax and I am a Christian.”

  “Do you deny you cause trouble?”

  “One of those,” and now it is this Hierax who points, “looked at me oddly.”

  “I see. And as a Christian are you in the habit of attending a theater when you know it to be full of Jews? As a Christian are you in the habit of attending any theater?”

  “No. Well, yes. I mean yes. Tonight we, by which I mean my friends and I, thought we might…”

  “Cause grief to the Jews?”

  Orestes shows favor. He has taken sides. If all thought Cyril troublesome before, it will be nothing to what comes now.

  Minkah’s eyes glitter with interest. This is the world he understands, the world he and Felix were born into. I have stepped out of my world for only this moment; I know I shall quickly step back.

  Hierax may be thin as a marsh reed and his voice as high as a child’s, but he does not lack courage. Quickly rising, pushing away from the guard, he strides towards the stage. “I am Hierax the Christian and favored of Cyril, who I favor. These are the Jews who killed our Christ. Do you speak out for them?”

  Before Hierax disappears under a mass of furious Jews, Orestes’ own anger flashes forth. “Flog t
his man where he stands!”

  Hypatia of Alexandria, rescuer of books and guest of Rome under siege, has seen much, but she has never seen this. Cyril’s spy is stripped on the instant. A man I thought thin, I now think emaciated. A man I thought brave, shrinks away from the lash. But then, so should I.

  Hierax is nothing but blood and the theater nothing but hoots and howls and the stamping of feet by the time Minkah covers my head and Felix carries me out into the street.

  ~

  I dream of caves again. I have no candle, no lamp, no lantern, but feel my way by trailing a hand along the cold rough stone of the walls. I cannot see, but I can hear. A murmuring, a sighing, the slight skitter of something small near my unshod feet. And though I do not move, all else moves about me. Unmoving, I listen. Through air, scented with bat dung, I hear the papery beat of papery wings. I am touched by the tips of bony claws. And all the while I grow colder…and when I fold my arms around myself, I know I stand naked against what I cannot see.

  In my dreaming caves, I search for what I cannot find.

  I come awake to screams.

  My house is awake. My horses are awake. They kick out at their stalls, tossing their heads. Nildjat Miw running before me, I quickly pass frightened servants, each peering out into the night as Alexandria is shaken by the tumult of men. Have Galla’s adopted Goths crossed the sea and we are attacked? Has a burning star shaped as a spear fallen through the roof of the Agora? Does a Leviathan, its great mouth wide and ringed with a thousand fearsome teeth, rise from the lake?

  Minkah, whom I have sought before all else, stands by the window that once was mine.

  “Why do they scream, beloved? What do they say?”

  “There is a fire.”

  “Where? I see no flames. I smell no smoke.”

  “They say the Church of Alexander burns.”

  “But the Church of Alexander is Christian.”

  “Indeed.”

  Enheduanna, poet of Ur, wrote of Lugalanne who so hated her father, she destroyed the great temple Eanna. The Romans razed the temple of the Jews. Greek temples were desecrated by Jews. Christians burned the Serapeum. Now Jews burn the churches of Christians.

  “Oh Minkah, is man ever this foolish?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will he ever grow less foolish?”

  “No.”

  ~

  Minkah the Egyptian

  Christians found not flames but Jews. Emboldened by the public favor of the Prefect Orestes, maddened by the outrages of Cyril and his monks, they had run through the streets shouting, “Fire! The Church of Alexander burns! Fire! Fire!” Christians, hearing this, fell from their beds and rushed from their doors, desperate to stop a fire that would take their church as they themselves had taken temple after temple by fire. What a night of slaughter followed! Before the Parabalanoi could act, Jews killed at least a hundred Christian souls, then vanished back into the night…this time without a sound.

  As a “heretic” and ex-Parabalanoi, I am not allowed into the House of Theophilus so cannot see Cyril, as fat as Nero was fat, nor can I see Theophania, thin as the flogged half-dead Hierax. But all Alexandria sees them in the streets. At daybreak, he bouncing on a laboring litter, she prim and poised on hers, and followed by a great crowd who love them—or, if not them, then carnage and plunder—they rushed to the nearest and largest synagogue. Within an hour, nothing remained. Cyril took the tiles from the floor and the brass from the doors. What he did not take, he smashed, the rest he burned. And then he and his mother went home. But monk and Parabalanoi cut through the Jews as a scythe through grain, exacting a revenge so terrible the wiser, faster, richer Jews ran before they came, fleeing the city of their birth and their father’s birth and their father’s before them. Their homes and their shops now plundered, Cyril closes their synagogues, destroying or stealing what he finds inside, then—as his uncle before him of temples—makes churches of them.

  We will sink under the weight of churches.

  Cyril will rue this action. He would lose the Jews, down to the last babe in its cradle, but he would not lose their business. With them go riches few Christians possess. Even Felix Zoilus, whose brain would not incommode a fly, understands the sense of this.

  The rage of Orestes is the equal of Cyril’s. Seated on the edge of Hypatia’s pool, she watches as the man strides up and down her atrium, trampling Theon’s stars. “Cyril goes too far! He would hold both reins, religious and secular! All that he does, he does to this end. But I am the Prefect and he is a pig! A dog! The shit of a pig or a dog! How dare he call himself a man of God? He knows only one god and its name is Cyril!”

  In her innocence, Hypatia speaks. “You have troops. Can they not protect the Jews?”

  “Cyril’s mobs outnumber my troops by hundreds. But that will change.”

  So saying, he writes immediately to Anthemius, taking care to address himself to Theodosius II, Emperor of the East, who has attained the advanced age of twelve. He is as his father Arcadius was: useless. Not so his sister Pulcheria. All thank the stars in the heavens for Anthemius.

  Who doubts a second letter rushes towards Constantinople, this one written by Cyril.

  No matter who or what weighs down the Throne of Mark, Hypatia’s lectures at the Agora fill to the point of bursting. Her salon lifts her heart. We sail the Irisi. We ride Ia’eh and Bia. I will not allow Hypatia to sail alone, ride alone, teach alone. She does nothing without me.

  Tonight the Companions meet. Tomorrow she holds her salon. Before this, she will lock herself away with her work, and I will be invited to join her. These are the moments I treasure above all else in the world. Not only do I speak with Hypatia whose mind knows no equal, I sit with her, breathe the air she breathes, touch her hand as I make a point. She listens to me! If Glory there is, this is Glory to me.

  ~

  Hypatia safe at home, Ia’ah and I move slowly along the Street of Gardens, and I am filled with pride that I sit a creature more beautiful by far than anything made by the hand of man, even by Minkah the Egyptian.

  Unknown to Hypatia, Orestes awaits me. Seated in his praetorium within a building of shining white marble, his notary beside and surrounded by guards, day in and day out, the poor man listens to pleas and supplications. If I were he, which even if asked I would never be, half those whining and waving papers I would bang on the head with their own staffs and half I would kick out the door with my boot.

  Some time back, Orestes had asked help from Aurelian, old friend to Synesius, and Constantinople’s Prefect. How Aurelian answered caused the words of Orestes to sound as the hiss of water on hot coals: “I am counseled to care for my own city as he cares for his.” But a second letter has come, this from Cyril. If our new Patriarch has any more support in the East than Orestes, he would never have written such a unique and curious document. Orestes read it to us, meaning Hypatia and I, more than once, savoring every word. As boastful as it is cringing, as demanding as it is giving, Cyril has backed down. Hypatia called it a triumph of irony.

  Orestes also wishes private words with Felix Zoilus. Felix is exceedingly pleased. What could Orestes want with Felix but a crusher of bones and a buster of heads…which means money. As I do not rejoin the brotherhood, Felix does not rejoin the brotherhood. As I do all I can to protect Hypatia, so too does he. Hypatia finds a valuable friend in Felix Zoilus. Felix decided this the night she drank herself stupid so that they could talk as equals.

  There stands Felix, a good head taller than all around him, and a good foot wider; even his beard is twice as wide and twice as wild as all others. All skirt the place where he leans on his sun-warmed wall. And there is Orestes, striding along surrounded on all sides by imperial guards. This man stands between Hypatia and all who would harm her. As do I. But I do not command a troop of imperial guard.

  I ride Ia’eh. Felix is on foot. Orestes steps into his chariot. “By Pluto, Minkah! Listen to this! Cyril waddled into my private chambers, not alone, of course
, not alone. With him came a man with a face so white I thought him embalmed…” Felix looks up. Again, Peter the Reader. “And a monk of some beauty, even dignity.” Felix winks at me. I know what he means by it. Isidore walks openly with Cyril. “He held out a book of Gospels, saying ‘Take it! Accept its truths. Honor your God, and then we shall be friends and equals as is wished for by God.’ But I knew if I took his Bible, I would not be showing obeisance to God, but to Cyril, and those who had come as witness would tell all I had done this.” Orestes taps his horses. “Come. We will have Cyril show obeisance to me, or Anthemius will know the reason why.”

  Orestes is off, Felix and the guard trotting as fast as they can, but Ia’eh dances beside the chariot of Orestes. He knows his business; the handling of the reins is finely done. Rounding a corner, the matched bays would run, but there is no going faster, there is no going anywhere at all. Before us, blocking the whole of the street, stand a silent mass of black robed monks. As soon as Felix and the guards of Orestes are caught up with us, behind them appear a second group of silent monks. And here we are, trapped between a hundred men before us and a hundred men behind. Our number, counting Orestes, is no more than a dozen.

  Separating himself out from his fellows, as alike as one black snake to another, steps Peter the Reader. “Minkah, brother! Why do you ride with this killer of Christians?”

  Ia’eh is made skittish by so many so close. She would rear up under me, but I lean over so that I might whisper in her uneasy ear. My whisper is for all to hear. “Why does Peter the Reader, who honors Christ who preached love for all, show nothing for all but hatred?”

  He calls me thief and spy and a bugger of men, and is through with me, turning instead to shout out to all who stand before us and behind us, “This Prefect came to us claiming to be Christian.”

  Orestes, no coward, is also no fool. We are vastly outnumbered here, his men no match for so many whose knives are no longer hidden, or who bend low for loose stones in the street. “Atticus,” he cries so that all may hear him, “Bishop of Constantinople, baptized me Christian before the Emperor Theodosius II and before the blessed Pulcheria. I have killed no Christians.”