Formality and Fun Monday, Apr 21 2008

This exchange came immediately after the conversation recorded in Timeless Motherhood:

Miss Suzanna wrote:
Thank you very much for your replies to my questions. It is wonderful to ask a question and get such replies. They present an enticing vision of a grave and beautiful way of life. By grave, I don’t mean lacking in fun, in fact I don’t quite know what I mean, but the word seems to fit!

It is heartbreaking to think how, from childhood, there is so much misery and suffering in the Pit, due to spiritual starvation… You said [earlier] that we have control over our own hestia - our homes and hearts, and can do something about them. If we try to lead our lives in a way which is pleasing to Dea, will that have an effect on the suffering of others, even if it is not directly helping them? Or is there some other way we can do this, in the way that nuns in a convent believe that their prayers will have a potent effect on the atmosphere somehow.

Miss Sushuri Novaryana replied:
I believe that by living lives that are pleasing to Dea and are racinated, we do have an effect on that part of the anima mundi to which we are connected.

I also believe that ideas are much underrated. By making available ideas and ways of looking at things that are nourishing (though largely forgotten by the current world) I think we provide new possibilities for people. So much of life, after all, is in the mind, and all cultural developments, good and bad, begin there.

I understand your word “grave”. It probably applies to Estrenne thinking rather than Westrenne in Aristasia. But in the end the Estrenne way of thought underlies all our thinking.

The quality you are describing, I think could also be called “measured” (remember that the term “a measure” used to be used for a dance-step as well as mensuration) or “in tune with the universal harmony”. It is the quality of thamë. Such terms as “stately”, “formal” and “ritualised” are also associated with it. To the modern Western mind these things seem very serious and lacking the joy of spontaneity; but we should remember that to our ancestors, these things were supremely joyful, which is why the quality of Jupiter ( Thamë ) is called jovial. Nowadays joy tends to be trivialised, so “jovial” has lost all its ritual and formal associations; but for those who first used the world, formality and fun went hand-in-hand to the point where they could be expressed by the same word.

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How Do You Like My New Mindset? Sunday, Mar 16 2008

Lady Aquila wrote:
I was thinking about the fact that we need a new Decanter. There are so many dreadful words not included in the old one. “Recycling” isn’t there. Ridiculous word. It sounds like coming back from somewhere on a bicycle. What is wrong with good old Kadorian “salvage”? And all those words used as the wrong part of speech: “party”, “critique” and “access” as verbs, for example, or “savvy” as an adjective.

And what about “mindset”? What on earth is a “mindset”? It sounds like something bongos might call their television sets. You know the thing that sets their minds. “Do not adjust your set - it will adjust you”.

Or is it the result of the mind-setting?

“How do you like my new mindset, darling?”

“It’s just the same as everyone else’s.”

“Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that! It is completely different. I am a rebel. I am an individualist.”

Well, of course she is. They all are. She probably has a “warped sense of humour” too. Not nasty messy warping like that caused by over-exposure to the sun or water on the brain, but nice neat warping, moulded to the correct curvature (politically and otherwise) and each with the same little dreadfully-clever swear word neatly turned up at the end. Rather like factory-torn jeans.

Of course she is a rebel, an individualist and a non-conformist. She ought to be. Milliards of taxpayers’ pounds and quintillions of corporate dollars have gone into making her one. She is a piece of precision engineering wrought upon the most delicate and difficult raw material available - the human mind. She has been successfully detached from the traditional ground from which she sprung, like ore extracted from a mine, and turned into something new.

She is the most expensive and the most successful mass-product on earth.

==========================

The Decanter is a guide to words and expressions only used in the Pit.

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Jnana - Knowledge and Beauty Tuesday, Mar 4 2008

One of the more important Sanskrit words is jnana. Jnana means literally knowledge, and specifically the Supreme Knowledge: that which delivers from avidya (ignorance). Therefore pure jnana is nothing other than Realisation itself. Normally the term is used in such phrases as jnana marga (the Path of Knowledge) or jnana yoga (the yoga of knowledge — which is normally equivalent to the Path of Knowledge). These terms differentiate the way of Knowledge from the ways of Love (bhakti marga) and of (ritual) action (karma marga).

The root of the word is a fundamental Indo-European one, kn or gn, which gives us the English knowledge as well as the Greek gnosis. It also forms the basis of the Germanic word kennen, to know, and of course the English/Scots form, ken, and related words such as cunning and canny. Thence it is a short step from knowledge to ability. To say that one can do a thing is originally to say that one knows how to do it. So this fundamental word encompasses all knowledge and ability from the highest to the most everyday.

Interesting also is the fact that the root is connected with the idea of beauty. Cunning is used dialectically to mean “beautiful” as is quaint, another form of the word. Here we are conceptually rooted in the essential connexion between the Absolute, Realisation and primordial Beauty (Plato’s to kalon).

What is most interesting, however, is that the same root also gives us some fundamental words related to femininity, such as queen and a now-obscene term for the female genitalia. The Sanskrit word for woman is the related jani and the Greek is gunos (which gives us our gynaecology, etc.)

From Jnana and Femininity

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The Jewel in the Lotus Wednesday, Feb 27 2008

Miss Miggles asked why Aristasians sometimes use Sanskrit mantras such as Om Mani Padme Hum (which may be translated as “The Jewel in the Lotus”).

Lady Aquila answered:
Mantras are very special words, because Dea is immanent in Her names. In pronouncing them, we are - through Her grace - literally in-voking Her.

It must be borne in mind that our connexion with Aristasia Pura is an aethyric one. While conversations are “translated” into words, they are not actually verbal, which is why, for example, we cannot say whether Westrenne closely resembles English in a “literal” sense or only symbolically.

It must also be understood that, both in Telluria and Pura there are Sacred Languages and languages that are not sacred. Sanskrit, Chinese, Hebrew and Arabic are sacred languages. Latin, although it is an Ecclesiastical language is not a sacred language. And neither are any modern languages.

What this means is that a Sacred Language has a more direct connexion to “the first, the Mother-language” and its words are more closely related to the metaphysical actuality of the things they speak. In the original Angelic Tongue, each word would be the precise sound-analogue of an Archetype. In the Sacred Languages that have survived into the Age of Iron this, of course is very far from the case, but they have, especially in sacred contexts, a sufficient remnant of the Angelic Tongue to be effective for Divine Invocation.

In Aristasia Pura, Westrenne is not a Sacred Language and true Raihiralan Cairen is: so words of sacred efficacy will be retained from older languages.

There is further the case of certain very special special syllables, notably OM and HRIM (HREEM) which are directly analogous to the Primordial Word (OM in the pure, beyond-form aspect, HRIM as the Supernal Mother). These are transmitted from the earliest Tellurian times and are as near to the Primordial Universal Language as we can possibly come. It should be noted that even in the Far East these Mantras are unchanged from their “Indo-European” forms: and we place “Indo-European” in inverted commas precisely because we have here to do with something that far transcends and predates any surviving (even if “dead”) Tellurian language.

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Language and the Pattern of History Friday, Jul 13 2007

In all places and at all times it has been agreed that the direction of history is always “downward”, from the Golden Age, or Garden of Eden to the Iron Age or Latter Days. The religions, philosophies and traditions of the world are unanimous in seeing not a pattern of progress, but of decline and degeneration.

If they are correct, then it follows from what we know about the matriarchal origins of civilisation that the highest and noblest and most spiritual forms of culture must have been those primordial feminine ones, while masculine-dominated civilisations must have come into being as quite a late phase of the process of decline.

This view of history, is, of course, completely alien to that of the late-patriarchal world-view with which we have all been inculcated from the earliest age, and which places late-patriarchy itself at the pinnacle of a long process of ‘human progress’, relegating earlier civilisations to varying degrees of ‘ignorance’ and ‘barbarism’.

Nevertheless, when one looks at the facts pertaining to the very medium of our thought itself—language, it is hard to deny that superior intellectuality lies with the past rather than the present. Every language we know is a debased and simplified “scaling-down” of some earlier language. The modern Romance languages, for example (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Roumanian) are greatly simplified dialects of Latin. Many of the grammatical complexities have slipped away with time, leaving the language less expressive, less flexible, less capable of dealing with subtle ideas, but very much easier. Latin and Greek are a maze of case-endings for modern speakers, but as we go back further in time, to even earlier languages in the same Indo-European family, such as Sanskrit, we find language which makes Latin and Greek seem positively childish by comparison.

And wherever a language or group of languages can be historically studied, we find the same thing. The ancient forms of language require more concentration, more presence of mind, more sheer intelligence on the part of speakers than do the later forms. Language is clearly being progressively simplified for a simpler people.

These changes, as we might expect, also alter the character of language. It becomes less and less an instrument for expressing subtle spiritual and metaphysical concepts and fine shades of meaning, but it becomes increasingly well adapted to handling physical phenomena and the material world.

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Thamë and Sithamë Tuesday, Jun 26 2007

Harmony, Comeliness, Seemliness: such are the watchwords of Aristasian “Law and Order” — a phrase from another land which would not be in the least out of place upon Aristasian lips, but would carry with it quite another colouring. All law, to the Aristasian, is akin to the laws of mathematics or of music — an expression of the underlying harmony of being; all order fundamentally the order of a dance, which is ultimately the great dance of the cosmos, presided over by Sai Thamë, the Angel of Harmony. To an Aristasian, grace in the sense of “gracefulness” is not a different concept from grace in the theological sense. They are intimately bound up one with another - and all of life is intimately bound up with them.

Sithamë (pronounced sit-ah-may) means the special thame of an individual. Thamë (with a small “t”) is a complex word that means “law” and “harmony” and “own-nature”. In a traditional society there is the thamë that is proper to everyone, there is the thamë that is proper to a particular estate (priestesses and intellectuals, nobles, artisans, servants), to a particular job or function (motherhood, musicianship, etc.) There is also the thamë that is special to an individual - her own personal nature, her “calling”, her “way”. This is called her sithamë or own-thamë.

See also:
Thamë, The Golden Order

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Forms of Address Saturday, Jun 9 2007

Miss Dessie Octavia Vargas recalled:
One thing we discussed was the intimate form of address, “thou”, now obsolete in English. Almost all of us have at least enough knowledge of some European language to know that there are different words for the second person according to whether one is intimate with them or formal: “Usted” and “tu” in Spanish, “Sie” and “du” in German, and so on.

By coincidence, on a mailing list I’m on, just yesterday a German pette was asked a question about the use of the German “du”. One thing she said seems relevant: schoolchildren address their classmates as “du”, but only since the Eclipse (not that she called it that) have college students begun doing the same.

It made me so sad to learn that. It makes me glad we’ve stopped using the intimate form in English, since if we still had it bongos would doubtless misuse it. 

Lady Aquila commented:
People have often talked about a revival of the intimate-singular “thou” in Telluristasian usage. It is a very charming form, used properly. But Miss Vargas is quite right in saying that it is fortunate that Tellurians have lost it as they would undoubtedly be misusing it by now.

The widespread abuse of first-names in Telluria is the exact equivalent of the wrongful use of “tu” in France or “du” in Germany. In fact some more civilised English people (of whom there is a tiny handful left) refer to this outlandish first-naming of everyone as “tutoiement” which is the French term for “tu-ing” and “toi-ing” people inappropriately.

Among some Tellurians the avoidance of surnames is almost a taboo, so that when two Jims have to be distinguished, they will say “Jim from Woodford” or “Jim with the beard”. It has an almost mediaeval ring to it. Perhaps eventually these cognomens will become hereditary and they will have surnames again!

One sometimes wonders what lies behind this horror of the surname. A false intimacy, certainly. A crude egalitarianism too. But is it not also a near-psychotic individualism that hates to associate a person with her roots in estate or even in family? Each person must be a floating atom belonging to no-one but herself (and the Octopus), with no roots and nothing but a personal name.

The new bonds which many of us form in Aristasia are for us a new rootedness and the beginnings of a sound, wholesome and home-like non-atomised society. 

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The Angels Created Speech Sunday, Jun 3 2007

This is a commentary on two verses from The Angelic Hymn to Dea from the Indian Devi Gita:

The angels created Speech which pervades all things, and whereby all creatures speak.

According to the modernist doctrine, speech “evolved” from animal squeaks and grunts. Yet a study of language teaches us that the earliest languages are the most complex and expressive, while the latest ones are the simplest. Language is continually simplified for the lesser minds of the Age of Iron (Kali Yuga). Even as this Age progresses, language is continually “scaled down”. So modern Italian is a much simpler language than Latin.

Where, then, does language come from? Tradition teaches us that it proceeds from the single Word, in which all speech and all being is immanently contained. In the sacred language of Sanskrit, this single Word is represented in our earthly speech by the sacred monosyllable OM, or by the seed-mantra sacred to Dea, HRIM.

Most comely is this Speech: a Heavenly Cow yielding food and all desires. Through Her do we praise You. May She dwell ever among us.

From the single Divine Word grows the first language, the Language of the Angels. Thus we are told that the angels created speech. But speech (Vac), in the earliest Vedic literatures, is Herself known as a Form of Dea. She is the all-pervading cosmogonic (world-creating) Deity. Vac is associated with the cow, which represents the nourishing Mother, the Source of all good things*. Thus Speech, in Her highest aspect, is a manifestation of Dea Herself.

The Language of the Angels passed to maids upon earth, and in the earliest days our human speech was very pure, very close to the Angelic Language. But as the Age of Gold gave place to the Age of Silver, and the Age of Silver to the Age of Bronze, so human speech became less perfect, less an instrument for expressing pure Truth. At last there came a time when the Primordial Language was broken into different tongues — at first only a few, representing the major divisions of humanity, and then each of these languages split into various increasingly simplified sub-dialects, until we have the multiplicity of languages that we find today. This is the meaning of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

Thus it is said that the angels created Speech, but also that Speech, in Her purest essence, is an aspect of Dea that transcends even the angels. Ultimately, it is only through Dea (in Her form as Speech) that we praise Dea.

————

*Curiously, some scholarly Western commentators have expressed surprise at this maternal, cow-related aspect of Vac in addition to Her grander “cosmic” nature, but the name is clearly related to Latin vacca, a cow (French vache) as well as to vox, voice etc.

The cosmogonic nature of Speech — the association of Speech with the world-creating Power — is clear in the light of the metaphysical link between the naming of things and their creation. The names of things are not mere arbitrary “signs”, ultimately evolved from animal noises, but contain, in the Primordial Language, the real Essences of those things. Thus in Sanskrit we have the distinction between nama and rupa: nama being the name of a thing — its Angelic or primordial Name, and hence its Archetype or real Essence — and rupa, or shape, being its outward or worldly manifestation. In a sacred language like Sanskrit, which still retains unbroken links to the Primordial Language, certain names or mantras contain the essence of that which they name. Hence, most obviously, the importance of the Primordial Words OM and HRIM, but also many other words and mantras.

The importance of words and of the Primordial Word (Logos) was understood by classical Greek philosophy and passed into Christian thought (note the opening of the Gospel according to St. John). However both Greek and Latin had already ceased to be true Sacred Languages, even though Latin functioned as an ecclesiastical language in the West.

In the Old Aristasian calendar, the name of the eighth month, Vois (pronounced Voish), means both speech and butter.

From The Angelic Hymn to Dea

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Why the Pit? Saturday, May 19 2007

Miss Amalya Corinthian wrote:

We are all familiar with the Pit insofar as it refers to late-patriarchal Telluria. But, dear pettes, how many of us have considered why this particular term is used? Aristasians do not use words lightly, and words like Pit are not used arbitrarily. Why, then, do we call late-patriarchal Telluria the Pit? Why not call it simply “Late-Patriarchal Telluria?” And, furthermore, does the Pit mean more than just late-patriarchal Telluria?

Dearest fellow Aristasians, I believe I have the answer to at least some of these questions. Let us all think for a moment about pits. What is a pit, in the most “literal” sense? A pit is a deep hole in the earth. Sunlight rarely penetrates, and there is a real danger of falling in. Imagine falling into a pit, particularly if one is walking alone. With broken limbs from the fall, it would be very difficult to climb back out again on one’s own. It would be cold, and one would have no recourse from the elements.

How does this relate to late-patriarchal Telluria? This should be quickly obvious to anyone who has spent time there. Telluria often does not feel the light of Our Mother, just as a pit in the ground is in perpetual shade and hidden from sunlight. If one finds oneself in Telluria, escape seems impossible, given that often, the only company one has is other late-patriarchal Tellurians; others in the pit. It may seem that there is no one up there, on the outside, to help you out of the pit. Similarly, Tellurians are wounded from their fall into the pit, which makes ascension difficult. Like a maid who, walking alone, falls into a deep chasm, the situation may seem hopeless if one feels mired in the pit

Let us all remember, however, that when we fell into the pit, we weren’t, in fact, walking alone. Dea watches over all of us, even (and I might add especially) those trapped in Telluria, and She is eager to extend a luminous hand to those mired in Darkness, so that we might become closer to Her. She, too, can tend our wounds and heal us from our fall, if we only call to Her.

I know, dear ones, that ascent from the Pit may seem a perilous task. Here, it is important to remember another thing about pits in general, which I will illustrate with an example. I once knew of a deep, dark hole near my home, and never went near it, for fear of tumbling in. It was very large. Several years later, I returned, and found that years of rain had entirely filled it with water. I no longer feared tumbling into it, knowing that, even if I did, I could easily kick to the edge and escape. Just as water can save a maid from a dark physical pit, Divine Love can save maid from a spiritual pit, by filling her heart and surroundings with buoyancy, lightening her burdens, and carrying her to the edge.

Now I come to the other point I wanted to make. When the phrase “the Pit” is used almost always to describe late-patriarchal Telluria, it can be easy to forget that Telluria is not the only pit we need worry about. I am sure there are many. Darkness can manifest in many ways.

Lady Aquila added:

The Feminine Universe contains the following note on the use of the word “Pit”:

Note: in this chapter the Aristasian term ‘the Pit’ is used in place of what has elsewhere been called the Tamasic or Inverted post-Eclipse world. It will be seen that the naming of the phenomenon has a certain potency, and the term is both vigorously descriptive and carries an obvious symbolic significance, both directional and in terms of Western iconography.

“In terms of Western iconography” presumably refers to the infernal Pit which is rather interesting in view of the possible status of Telluria as a purgatorial or “lower world”. Specifically the “infernal” element here would presumably be the inversion of values that came about with the Eclipse rather than the nature of patriarchal society as a whole.

Miss Corinthian’s last paragraph is extremely telling. It is true that wherever there is life there is the conflict between light and darkness, and beings everywhere must be careful to avoid what are so rightly called “pitfalls”. It is by following the Way of Thamë and by the Love of the Mother that we do so.

See also

The Encyclopaedia Aristasiana entry on the Pit

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The True “Evolution” of Language Tuesday, May 15 2007

One can scarcely open a book on the subject of any human activity without being immediately confronted by the dogma of ‘progress’. The first clothes ‘must have been’ animal skins which ‘primitive man’ draped around ‘him’self. The first drum ‘must have been’ made by primitive man’ slapping ‘his’ fat belly (no joke - we have actually read this one in a serious music book!). The first language ‘must have been’ half-animal squeaks and grunts. There has never been a scrap of evidence for any of this. It is all conjecture based on one simple dogma which has been dinned into every modern child by the age of ten — the dogma of ‘progress’.

Now let us look a little more closely at this last example of language. The popular books, of course, happily rattle out the predictable party-line; but, as in many cases, the more serious studies are faced with a more serious problem. The simple fact is that throughout the whole of the known period, language has not progressed, but degenerated. The earliest known languages are by far the most complex, subtle and phiosophical. The later ones, like Latin and Greek, are much simpler, but still complex compared to modern language, which is a crude instrument, better suited to describing physical events than subtle philosophical concepts (this, of course, is perfectly in accord with the crudity of modern philosophy and the disproportionate emphasis placed upon the physical sciences).

In order to explain this fact, modern linguists have postulated that language developed in a manner resembling Curve A in the diagram - a slow, painful ‘evolution’ (of course), followed by a relatively slight decline over the last few thousand years.

But this theory ran into another difficulty. Out of countless studies made of the languages of ‘primitive’ peoples — American Indians, Africans, Polynesians etc., not one language was found to be in a ‘primitive’ state, and few were so ‘primitive’ as modern western speech. So linguists were forced to adopt Curve B - a slow evolution many thousands of years ago, followed by a sudden huge ‘jump’, and then a long period of decline. Now this is an absurdity even from the evolutionist point of view, but when one will cling to a dogma in the teeth of all the evidence, one is frequently led into absurdity.

Actually, of course, there is no evidence for anything except the last part of the curve. The rest is pure conjecture, like the belly-slapping. If we stick to the actual known facts, we can only postulate Curve C. This is naturally unthinkable to the modern mind, but it fits in very well with the words of Scriptures:

“What is your language of the earth, My children, what are the words of your speech? Are they not fallen from the first, the mother language? Are they not brok­en and impaired?”

The Scripture is telling us that language was created not by maid, but by God. She gave us the pure and perfect language spoken by the Angels, and we have gradually allowed it to degenerate as we have turned away from Her.

Students of Aristasian philosophy will often have seen how, time after time, the analysis of the etymology and origins of a word can be used to elucidate the metaphysical significance of the concept which it expresses. This is a whole science in itself — the science of hermeneutics; and it is possible only because language is not a mere set of conventional tokens, like road signs. It is a structure as perfectly ordered and organised as the human body — for it was ordered by the same Intelligence. Nothing in it is merely accidental or arbitrary; every word has a metaphysical reason for being what it is. That is why the analysis of words will always lead us back to the same metaphysical truths.

Language developed not upward from squeaks and grunts, but downward from pure Truth. We have abused and misused it, chopped it into a thousand different tongues, twisted it to fit false philosophies and worldly sentiments; but still we have only to look clearly and closely at our language, and it will quickly lead us back to pure Truth.

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