Pagina:Agabiti - Ipazia la Filosofa, 1910.djvu/6

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Ma un’altra e maggior ragione per raccogliere notizie sulla vita e l’opera d’Ipazia (ed io non ho inteso con questo studio modesto se non di riunire, per comodo degli studiosi di Teosofia, le sparse informazioni che i suoi contemporanei ci hanno tramandato) sta nella notizia molto impressionante dataci dalla rivista Theosophy and New Thought, che Annie Besant sia stata in una precedente vita, la celeberrima cattedratica alessandrina1.

Può questa notizia venir provata col metodo storico? Si possono intuitivamente riconoscere somiglianze profonde d’indole, di sentire, di abiti e di capacità intellettuali, di aspirazione e di forza spirituale, fra le due personalità, Annie Besant ed Ipazia? Io non lo so; ma nol credo. Non mi consta che la notizia della rivista indiana suddetta, sia stata smentita dalla Besant; ed il silenzio non può venire interpretato se non quale assentimento, nel nostro caso.

Ipazia, importante pensatrice del secolo IV, dell’Egitto greco, per avere appartenuto a tempi tanto fortunosi e così decisivi per la formazione delle fondamentali idee che governarono tutto il Medioevo europeo; e degna pure dell’attenzione ed ammirazione di noi teosofi, perchè fece



    to pieces, «the flesh scraped from the bones», with oyster-shells and the rest of her cast into the fire, by order of the same Bishop Cyril, he knew so well — Cyrill, the Canonized Saint!!.
    «The cruel, crafty politician, the plotting monk, glorified by ecclesiastical history with the aureole of a martyred saint. The despoiled philosophers, the Neo-platonists, and the Gnostics, daily anathematized by the Church all over the world for long and dreary centuries. The curse of the unconcerned Deity hourly invoked on the magian rites and theurgic practice, and the Christian clergy themselves using sorcery for ages, Hypatia, the glorious-maiden philosopher, torn to pieces by the Christian mob.»
    «To guess whatt, if the coup d’état had then failed, might have been the prevailing religion in our own century would indeed be a hard task. But, in all probability, the state of things which made of the middle ages a period of intellectual darkness, which degraded the nations of the Occident, and lowered the European of those days almost to the level of Papuan savage — could not have occurred.» (V. vol. II, pag. 252).

  1. Nel vol. I, n. 10 (Bombay, October 1907). — V. l’articolo intitolato «Editorial Notes» nel quale v’è il capitolo «Past Incarnation of Annie Besant» che intieramente trascrivo:
    Of late is perceived the regrettable tendency even amongst some of our oldest members to speak disparagingly of Mrs. Besant. Perhaps they do so under the impression that their prior entry into the theosophic fold gives them a right to this claim. They seem to forget that it is not a longer contact with the T. S. but with Theosophy that wins and conquers and we are indebted to Mr. C. W. Leadheater, who himself joined the Society in its early days, to rexplaining why though a late-comer, Mrs. Besant has come to the very fore-front and among all the pupils of H. P. B., of revered memory, she alone was deemed fit to be her successor by the Real Founders of the Society. Not those who were witnesses to many a phenomenon, not those who had mereley written books and spoken mouthfuls of hearsay, not those who at one time or other, posed themselves as fullblown gurus but she whox, to use H. P. B.’s own words, is «the soul of honour and uncompromisingly truthful» whose heart she described as «one single unbroken diamond x.... transparent so that any one can see how filled to the brim it is with, pure, unadulterated theosophy,» who in the past died as Hypatia and Bruno for the sake of conscience and truth, that deserves our homage and obeisance. «Unselfishness