St Katherine of Alexandria and Hypatia

Preparing Wisely for Deep Winter.

St Katherines’ Day: 25th November

Today is my saint’s day, as I am one of the tribe of Katherine. Caitlín (pronounced Kathleen) is the Irish version: it literally means ‘a small Kate,’ which is a correct appellation, as I am only 5’2”.

This is traditionally the day when I make the Christmas cake, which is in the oven as I write, doing its last hour of slow baking at half a degree of gas, since it has already had a whole 3 hours at 1.5 degs. It will be put away and fed with best Jura malt until the day, but the smaller one I made will be eaten later this afternoon for my saint’s day tea. All those wonderful golden sultanas, cherries, peel, currants and raisins will have combined with a whole half pound of butter and 4 eggs (and absolutely no sugar) to make something very rich, with the help of some black treacle to give it colour and depth, and some more Jura malt to preserve it.

While other people will have already made their cakes a while back, I always do mine on this day because it marks the beginning of deep winter. And now we have had snow and floods, that is confirmed by the weather - even though it is a sultry 10 degs C in Oxford today and so we have left off wearing our huge woollens and slipped into something lighter. (No, not that light!) Also, the mixing together of so many choice ingredients reminds me of all the keepers and guardians of wisdom who grace our spiritual path like so many jewels.

St Katherine of Alexandria is remembered in this day in Britain, for she is traditionally the matron of spinsters and female students, as well as of archivists, secretaries, haberdashers and philosophers. She has a rich hagiography. Martyred in the reign of Maxentius in the 4th century CE, Katherine famously held out in disputation with 50 philosophers, but was finally tortured and imprisoned as a Christian. She was going to be broken on the wheel, but the wheel shattered, and she was beheaded instead. She was declared a saint from quite early on, with her relics being allegedly found at Mount Sinai.

Images of her with her Wheel and the sword of her execution are the mainstays of art throughout the Middle Ages when she was very popular, being one of the 14 Holy Helpers: along with Roman captain, St. Acatius – St. Barbara who looks after engineers, St. Blaise who does throats, St. Christopher – St. Cyriacus who does eyes, St. Denis of Paris, St. Erasmus or Elmo, who looks after sailors and gut conditions, St. Eustace who protects against fire, St. George, St Giles who does serious diseases, St. Margaret of Antioch who cards for women in childbirth, St. Pantaleon who does lung diseases. and St. Vitus who fends off paralysis and epilepsy.

St Katherine was declared a Doctor of the Church ( a position she held as the only Doctor of the Church for many centuries, until St Theresa of Avila, St Therèse of Lisieux and St Hildegard were added.). I bet they have a great laugh and if there were saints you might ask to a party, then these women would constitute interesting company. St Katherine’s day has been celebrated on 25th November for centuries. Then in 1969 Vatican II decided to deselect some saints as being ‘not supported by historical evidence’ and Katherine was one of them. She was reinstalled in 2002 with her day becoming an optional memorial. I’m sure I not the only one from the tribe of Kate who had never stopped being under her wise guidance in that dishonourable expulsion from grace! You cannot set up a saint and then demote her, honestly!

Hypatia: First Neoplatonic Martyr

However, on this day, too, I maintain another observance. The Church’s embarrassment at not finding any hard evidence for Katherine, may well be based on the fact that, though there were Diocletian persecutions in Alexandria in 4th century CE, there was also another notable martyrdom. Let me introduce you to Hypatia: here she is in the icon I painted of her a few years ago. (Yes, I make icons of many wise and inspirational people, not just Christian ones, and they are just as worthy of our prayer and remembrance.)

Hypatia lived also at the latter end of the 4^th century in Alexandria, the daughter of the teacher Theon. Like him, she was a Neoplatonist who followed the work of Plotinus; she was considered a better mathematician than her father, as well as being an astronomer of note. She is believed to have edited the surviving text of the Almagest of Ptolemy – which was the go-to book if you did astronomy at the time, but which, because it was based upon the assumption of the sun going around the earth and not the other way round, was itself a deeply flawed work.

 Hypatia was described in her time as "... a person so renowned, her reputation seemed literally incredible. We have seen and heard for ourselves she who honourably presides over the mysteries of philosophy." Her pupils included both Christians and Pagans, but the times were not propitious to her. She was sought out as a counsellor by many important figures, including Orestes, the Roman prefect of Alexandria, whom she advised about his feud with Cyril, bishop of Alexandria. The Roman administration, despite being nominally Christian by the beginning of the 5^th century, still had a lot of trouble with militant Christians who were themselves, still sorting out their beliefs – this led to a lot of argumentative administrative problems. Unfortunately, the rumour got out that Hypatia was responsible for preventing the reconciliation of Orestes and Cyril, and a group of fanatic Christian group of parabalani (men who put their lives at risk caring for the sick and dying,) led by Peter the Lector, set upon her as she drove in her carriage through the streets.  She was dragged into the Caesarion (once the temple of the Roman Imperial cult and afterwards repurposed as a church), where they stripped her naked and de-fleshed her body with ostraca or pottery shards, before burning her remains.

The horrified response to this murder was immediate throughout the empire, where philosophers had been held in the highest esteem, with their persons inviolate from attack. The parabalani were strictly sanctioned and put under Orestes’ authority, but only a couple of years later, Cyril was back in control of Alexandria and Christianity got the upper hand. Hypatia’s death was seen by many at this juncture of Pagan Philosophy and Christianity as the death of a philosopher-martyr. 

Hypatia’s death and that of the Christian Decian martyrs was subsequently conflated, causing the legends of Hypatia and of St Katherine of Alexandria to have a singular overlap. St Katherine sits very close to Hypatia: the Pagan and Christian woman both dedicated to wisdom, both coming to very nasty ends.  Alejandro Amenáber’s 2009 film, Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, caught the spirit of Hypatia and Katherine’s world, only he conflated the death of Hypatia in 415 with the burning of the Serapeum in 391: and though the film pointed to the rise and dangers of Christian fundamentalism in a compelling way, it misled viewers about Hypatia’s work in many regards. Unfortunately, very little of her studies survive, although we always have hope that someone’s mummy case will turn up a papyrus mâché of her writings one day!

The martyrs to wisdom are many because, when persecutions come or oppressive régimes arise, it is usually the intellectuals that are first against the wall.  This was demonstrated nowhere better than in Cambodia, where anyone of skill or knowledge was summarily done away with, and the only ones who survived disguised themselves as people of no account, happy to work in the fields, if it meant they lived.  Like Alexandria and the world of Classical antiquity that knew so much only to lose most of it, Cambodia was left with the sad work of the reclamation its skills and traditions that were almost lost during that terrible time.

Hypatia’s subsequent legacy reflects the longing for arete or excellence in most women who hear her story, and she has remained a figure of hope for all girls and women seeking an education in times and places where the female sex are still not supposed to hope for such a privilege. So Hypatia and Katherine stand together in my house. At this time of deep winter, they still hold a torch up for us against the darkness of ignorance, at the gates of winter for us to follow.

A St Katherine’s Day Wise Christmas Cake Recipe

Wisdom needs nourishing. I have made the same cake for about 50 years now, and it has served our needs well into January every year. In the recipe below I am using Imperial Measure, as I left school before metrification. I cannot give alternatives for people with gluten free or other needs, I’m sorry, as I have no idea how the cake would come out, and I am very suspicious of zanthan gum which once spilled on my kitchen tile floor, rendering it into a skating rink - and there is no known scientific method of removing that stuff from the same, you know! I also have no idea how microwaves, air-fryers, Agas, crock-pots etc. cook things nor how mountainous altitudes change the process, so you are on your own there, as I have no idea how they behave! Note, that the cake has no sugar in it, as it is full of fruit and needs no further sweetness. It also has no raising agent, so DON’T USE self-raising flour.

Beforehand:

On the day before: put all currants, sultanas and raisins into a bit bowl and pour enough boiled water over them to plump them up and remove any nasties. Leave to stand for 2 hours, strain fruit and drain it of water. Go over the fruit and remove any stalky bits. Now pour a half cup of your preferred alcohol over it to make the fruit even plumper, leave overnight.

On the day: Line an 8 inch cake tin and grease well. And preheat the oven to 1.5 degs. gas/ 285 F /145 C, setting the shelf tray to the middle of the oven. That seems low, I know, but it is the length of time that cooks the cake. You need:

9 ozs plain flour ( that is flour without a raising agent)

2-3 ozs ground almonds

4 large eggs

8 oz of good unsalted butter (don’t be stingy or use anything else that is not good butter.)

A small handful of mixed spice or a spoonful if you prefer. (I am a hand-measure cook)

A pinch of salt

A large dessert spoon or two of black treacle

half the juice and all the peel of one unwaxed lemon and orange

12 ozs each of the following: Sultanas, Raisins, Currants (drained of their alcohol, which you can now drink!)

4 oz of ready mixed peel.

4 oz of glacé or morello cherries. (To stop cherries dropping to the bottom of the cake, put them in a sieve and wash away the syrup they come in - unless you are using Morello cherries, in which case it would be a terrible crime and the juice can go into the cake instead of orange/lemon juice! Dry the cherries and half them, rolling the halves in a plateful of flour until they are all covered. They will now stand firm in the mixture)

2 dessert spoonfuls of your favourite alcohol - (spirit or liqueur - we are talking whiskey, brandy, Cointreau, Benedictine etc. here, not beer or cider, though they can make nice cakes of another sort!)

1. Melt the butter at a low temperature with the treacle. Put in the bowl and with a handful of flour for each portion of egg mixture, add in the beaten eggs

2. Continue to add the rest of the flour, stirring well, add ground almonds, salt and spice.

3. Pour in all the fruit, cherries and peel, only then add the lemon/orange juice to see how the mixture looks when you’ve stirred the mixture.

If the mixture looks too shiny then there is too much butter/egg in proportion to the mixture: add more liquid or flour judiciously.

If the mixture is very dry and doesn’t hold well together, you need more liquid or you have skimped on the egg/butter. However, don’t keep adding eggs to make it right, or you will have made a brioche omelette by that time!

Cook at 1.5 degs gas in the middle shelf of the oven for 3 hours. Then lower the gas to half a deg/ 160F /70C and cook for another hour, but keep your nose on alert to catch any burning. If you have a fierce oven, then covering the mixture loosely with a piece of kitchen paper/foil is wise.

Put cake, still in its tin on a cooling rack. Disgorge the cake from its tin only after half an hour has elapsed. When it is entirely cold, feed some chosen alcohol in tiny amounts by means of inserting a skewer all over the bottom of the cake partway down into the cake so it can trickle down inside and sustain its wisdom until you need it a month later. Wrap in kitchen foil. You can marzipan and ice it later on Xmas Eve.

My cake is now resting. I made an extra loaf-tin one which has now been partially consumed, even though it had barely cooled.

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My new course, which has just begun this month is outlined here below. It is based upon the wisdom of Pythagoras, the Golden Verses of Hierocles of Alexandria - he was a fellow philosopher of Hypatia’s. This is a 35 part course for paid subscribers where we will follow the wisdom of living in an ensouled cosmos with the help of many of the philosophers whom St Katherine and Hypatia have under their guardianship. You are very welcome to join me. This is he outline