One of my Ancestor-patrons is Hypatia, the last Librarian of Alexandria. Ancestor-patrons are folks who decide to hang around and help after their time as a mortal. (You don't necessarily have to be in their line of descent, though it helps; and you can have more than one if they're willing to share.) Hypatia helps me out by enhancing my ability with words, showing me where to find just the right books, protecting my library, that sort of thing. She is my primary support for all matters pertaining to words, knowledge, books, libraries, and related things in this general sphere of influence.
Someone once asked me how I made contact with this particular patron; actually, it's more like she made contact with me. I wasn't deliberately looking for a patron or for Hypatia in particular. I have always loved books and libraries. Sometime when I was little, I started noticing that I kept seeing a sinuous green dragon coiled around bookcases ... not all the time, but often. I realized that she was guarding the books as her hoard, and that really tickled my fancy. My parents have a lot of really old books from my great-aunt Lydia's library (if you've seen the movie The Music Man that was based on my aunt's story), so I thought maybe the dragon had come with those. Turns out she's a bit older than that....
Eventually I got around to asking the dragon what she was doing. "I'm guarding the books," she said. "I used to be a librarian and I looked like this." And she turned into a tall lady with black curly hair, wearing a white robe with a zillion folds. I thought that was really cool, especially since it was around the time I was reading Greek myths and I recognized the outfit. But she almost always stays in dragon form -- I don't know why, maybe it's easier for her to protect against fires in that form or something. She has a regal bearing, the way some of the best scholars do, wearing knowledge like a crown.
I was older when I finally read about Hypatia and the fire at Alexandria, in high school or college. Her reaction to that: "I wondered when you'd find my story." Wow. (Actually there are several different versions of the tragedy at Alexandria, just that I've found so far, and they make for interesting if morbid reading; some accounts place her death before the burning of the Library, while others place her on the Library steps in an attempt to defend it.) So it wasn't like a big sudden discovery where I met a patron all at once, it was finding out that somebody I had known for a long time was rather more important than I'd suspected. After that, we got a lot closer.
Hypatia started helping me with my schoolwork, too. Funny thing, I never thought to ask her about math, for which I have minimal aptitude -- probably wouldn't have made a difference anyway, with my luck. But she would take me through the vast sprawling library system at the university and say "Turn here, walk down this hall, up these stairs, round that corner..." leading me along until I would find myself standing in front of a shelf dedicated to whatever topic I was researching. That's how I found out there was an English library, a women's studies library, a map room ... it was terrific. That pattern has held true over the years, too; she doesn't hand over answers very often, but instead points me towards finding my own. I like that.
Then when I got out of college and started writing book reviews, Hypatia just loved that, so she kind of gave things a little nudge and made it easier for me to get review copies from publishers. (All I needed was a foot in the door; once they see a review of their merchandise, most publishers gleefully send me boxes of stuff.) I even named my reviewing column after her: "Book Reviews from Hypatia's Hoard" has run in several different magazines with different books (plus music, videos, divinatory decks, and other products) featured in each. I've done reviews for many venues including Eternity Online, Keltria Journal, PagaNet News, PanGaia, SageWoman,and Terra Incognita. It just seemed like a logical and natural way of honoring this particular allegiance.
Sometimes Hypatia leads me around on the Web, too. I'll be surfing along and get a sudden urge to follow up some link that doesn't look like much, and it turns out to have a link list of terrific sites that goes on for pages or something like that. Now that I have my own website, I figured this would be a good time to introduce her to other folks. Hypatia is pretty nifty to work with. I think she'd be happy to take any booklover under her wing, though she seems to favor women with a scholastic bent; math probably counts too although I haven't seen that side of her myself.
Hypatia does play into my life in some interesting ways ... I found a bumper sticker that says "They got the library at Alexandria -- they're NOT getting mine!" and hung it on my office wall where I keep my reference books. I also have a purple t-shirt from the Urbana Free Library, which has a picture of the building on it, under which I wrote "Try to burn this one!" in white fabric paint. Hypatia probably has some influence on my note-taking tendencies too, one of which is to write down as much as I possibly can on the one-in-a-trillion chance that my record might be the only one surviving in dark and distant future. And it is Hypatia's patronage I'm referring to when I say that censorship and book-burning are sacrilege according to my tradition.
There are some restrictions and obligations as well as benefits to having Hypatia for a patron. For starters, I often make some sort of annual contribution to libraries, generally fostering literacy and books, that kind of thing. A favorite option is to take some spare review copies and donate them to the local library; and I prefer to do this on Hypatia's Day, March 10. The most noticeable restriction is that I can't damage books, even dreadful ones. I have this one awful paperback that is so bad I actually gave it a negative review -- I don't want to give it away because then somebody might read the benighted thing, but I can't just chuck it in a landfill or a bonfire! I finally decided to use it for propping up wobbly table legs. Likewise, I tend not to underline phrases in books, even textbooks. The one exception is autographs, especially by the author or cover artist -- I collect those and it's perfectly okay. The publishing industry's filthy habit of stripping book covers for returns just gives me the creeps; I actively support the handful of small and medium-sized publishers who refuse to allow that and insist that booksellers return unsold books in marketable condition so they can be resold -- a much more civilized policy in my mind. So while there are things I'm not allowed by my tradition to do, most of those mesh well with my innate proclivities. What I get in return is really worth it.
There are not a whole lot of resources around that really highlight Hypatia's role at the Library of Alexandria. There is a brief mention of her in The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker. City of the Stargazers: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Alexandria by Kenneth Heuer gives a more thorough account along with a lot of geopolitical background. Speculative fiction author Mercedes Lackey has taken some tidbits of inspiration from Hypatia as well, which you can see in her novels The Ship Who Searched and The Robin and the Kestrel. Occasionally you can find other references about Hypatia in articles or encyclopedias, too. I have also found this fine page featuring the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
The following links have information on banned books: