“Modernism” in Aristasia Thursday, May 1 2008

One of the fundamental differences between Aristasia and Telluria — even when regarded as parallel worlds — is that the rationalist revolution of the 17th Century (miscalled the “Enlightenment”), which has shaped modern Tellurian thought and culture, did not take place in Aristasia. Aristasian science fiction, such as The Princess and the Captain explores a world in which technics have developed to a high degree, but are seen as an extension of the traditional metaphysical outlook, and are not the result of a revolutionary rationalism.

Even the Classical Aberration of Greece and Rome, with its republicanism, individualism and proto-rationalism, has no equivalent in Aristasia. In Telluria, this aberration was consciously revived at the time of the Renaissance (literally a “rebirth” of the Classical spirit). In Aristasia the traditional view of the world (as upheld by Plato in Telluria against the spirit of his time) continued unbroken.

In Westrenne Aristasia, a spirit of individualism and a weakening of tradition has certainly manifested itself in recent centuries. However the Westrennes have never regarded this as a “progress” or “advance”, and have never adopted an attitude of superiority and condescension toward the ancient world or the East. On the contrary, they regard their own “modernism” as a decline from the highest standard and as somewhat regrettable, while at the same time acknowledging that it has made their particular culture possible.

The fact that the most advanced technics in the West have come out of Novaria — the Western nation most closely adhering to the traditional thought of the East — seems like a paradox only to non-Aristasians. To the Aristasian mind, the strong connexion of Novaria with the wellsprings of traditional intellectuality is precisely the reason for its successful adaptation of that intellectuality to the forms and possibilities of the Iron Age.

Again and again one must remind oneself that in Aristasia technics are not associated with a revolutionary ideology as they are in Telluria, but on the contrary, are seen as the latest application of traditional Intelligence.

No Responses »

 

The Three Aristasian Refuges Tuesday, Apr 29 2008

Miss Sakura tells her thoughts:

In the Aethyr I was thinking of the Three Great Refuges of Buddhism: the Acts by which one becomes a Buddhist. These are:

I take Refuge in the Buddha

I take Refuge in the Dharma

I take Refuge in the Sangha

Now we must understand that “Buddha” means the supreme Spirit; the Atma.

The Dharma is the “Wonderful Law”.

The Sangha is the Buddhist community or congregation.

What I felt I was told was that the process of becoming an Aristasian is a precise parallel to this. We too take the Three Great Refuges:

I take Refuge in Dea

I take Refuge in the Thamë

I take Refuge in the Motherland

We must understand that:

Dea is the supreme Spirit, the Atma, and the Mother of every soul.

The Thamë is the Golden Order, the Wonderful Law which governs the stars, the Empire and our own hearts.

The Motherland is the true Home of every Aristasian. By the care and direction of our Puran mistresses we live, as part of the great Familia of the Celestial Empire, which is seen as a saving community. By extension we also take refuge in the sisterhood of Aristasians in Telluria, who are the legitimate and adopted continuation of the Familia in this world.

What I felt that I was being told was that the taking of these three Refuges was the way a Tellurian becomes an Aristasian.

I humbly pass this forward to my Elders for their wise consideration.

No Responses »

 

Timeless Motherhood Monday, Apr 14 2008

Miss Suzanna wondered about Motherhood:
To me, motherliness and motherhood are prime qualities of femininity. [In our discussions it seems to be] a glamorous, powerful, exciting sort of femininity which is in view, and throughout the Aristasia website, I see this also portrayed. So I wonder about mothers, who, in their selfless service to their children, may not always have time to appear well-turned out, but to my mind become beautiful in other ways. What do you think, dear Ladies?

Miss Sushuri Novaryana replied:
You are absolutely right, Miss Suzanna. Motherhood is one of the most important aspects of femininity, and one of the most fundamental Archetypes. God Herself is the first of all Mothers.

Up to and including the 1950s, mothers made time to be well-turned-out (not necessarily fashion plates, but neat and smart); certainly whenever they left the house. They did this because they saw it as a fundamental aspect of motherhood.

A mother represents the most precious and fundamental Archetype we have, and embodying that Archetype properly is as vital to a child’s psychic health as feeding her is to her physical health. For a child to grow up (to take an extreme example) applying the sacred word “Mother” to someone in torn jeans with tattoos and a ring through her lip does untold damage. It is the spiritual equivalent of malnutrition - if not of food-poisoning.

In a recently published test, children who were shown pictures of various bongo couples with a few 1950s-style couples included, and asked to pick out “mummy and daddy” almost invariably picked the 1950s-style couples regardless of what their own parents looked like.

This tells us two things:

1. That the archetypes of real parents are alive in the hearts of small children, however starved they may be. They know what parents ought to look like, even if they have never seen an example in their own poor little lives.

2: That however untraditional the 1950s may have been they are still on the right side of that radical break known as the Eclipse. In 1950s parents (and those who are still traditional enough to look much like them) one can still recognise the fundamental and timeless reality.

No Responses »

 

Vehicles of Transformation Monday, Apr 7 2008

Miss Barbara asserts:
I do believe that a bongo could be transformed into an Aristasian just by sitting in a real car, if she were intelligent enough to know what real means. A Trentish automobile, black or maroon, is a little universe, a microcosm of the culture that produces it. It is luxurious, glamorous, sophisticated, elegant, comfortable, and dignified because Trent is all of those things.

But a recovering Pit-maiden needn’t wait until she can find a real automobile to experience her epiphany. She can have a similar experience with almost anything from the real world, for everything is a little universe and a microcosm of the larger world from which it comes. If she were to watch one real movie with the knowledge that it was real (and with the conviction that everything in the Pit is truly obsolete), or wear one pair of silky, seamed, sheer stockings, or listen to one wireless program, she would wake from a slumber and begin to allow the fire of Realness and Truth to catch in her heart; she would stop collaborating with the Pit, not because somebody has told her to stop but because she sees it all for what it is: obsolete and shoddy, trivial and banal.

She would begin to walk with dignity and take pride in the right things and never feel self-satisfied with shabby behavior or dress. She would rise above the mire below and happily join her sisters up above the Pit, who are like an angelic chorus flying above the mindless world below. I know she would do and think all of these things, for, you see, I have just described myself to you in this little story.

No Responses »

 

The Problem with Aristasia Monday, Mar 17 2008

Dessie Octavia Vargas wrote:
The problem with Aristasia is that we have to leave it! Those of us who are not fortunate enough to have seceded and live in Aristasia full-time, that is.

I have been a “part-time Aristasian” for nine years now, and it’s becoming quite maddening. I always preferred up-to-date movies and clothes and other things, but it was merely a preference until I discovered Aristasia. Aristasia influenced me to actively seek out up-to-date things instead of merely enjoy them when I happened upon them. I bought up-to-date magazines, acquired a lot of the Kadorian and Quirrie ads Coca-Cola has reproduced on refrigerator magnets and coffee mugs and postcards, and while I did not give up post-Eclipse movies and books entirely, an increasingly large proportion of my viewing and reading have become up-to-date. (I didn’t watch television in the first place, so that wasn’t a factor.)

The result of these years of cultivating my taste for Real things is that now I have become almost unbearably sensitized to the Pit. Movies and statements and things that wouldn’t have bothered me before are now like Chinese water torture. I’m especially conscious of this right now because I just visited some relatives and of course they had newspapers around and the television on, two abominations which have long since been banished from my own hestia. Before my personal racination began these things would have been merely dreary or dull, but now accidentally reading one line in a newspaper while I am passing the scrambled eggs can make me depressed for an entire day, and did.

And it isn’t merely that bongo things are ugly, though most of them are. (Not quite all; bongos are still human beings, hard as they try to forget it, and they can’t help occasionally doing something right.) It isn’t merely the immorality, because they’re not always being immoral; a bongo commercial I saw this week exhorting youngsters not to use dangerous substances struck me as being every bit as dangerous to those youngsters as the substances themselves. It’s the fundamental wrong-headedness that underlies all of it. It seems that everything in the Pit, even things that have a degree of soundness in them, is covered in a layer of slime. Sometimes it is only a thin layer, but it is always there. Miss Ayn Rand, a sagette I disagree with on many things but must nonetheless admire for her genius, once described the evil she saw as “not Satan with a sword, but a corner lout sipping a Coca-Cola”, and another time she said, “Not fire and brimstone, but goo.” I couldn’t have put it better myself, so I won’t try.

I just ordered a kinnie-shiny of up-to-date television commercials and one of up-to-date newsreels. I already have some of Real cartoons, and I’ve long thought it would be lovely to have a cartoon and a newsreel before the movie when I go to the Magic Cinema. I can imagine the expression on the faces of my unseceded friends who know my tastes when they learn that I intend to interrupt my viewing to watch up-to-date commercials! But I know that it is only going to make me even more frustrated with the so-called world that I have to live in.

One Response »

 

On Sentimental Religious Art Tuesday, Mar 11 2008

Miss Annya Miralene wrote:

In many Catholic religious pictures and statues, as well as many modern Hindu pictures, we see a sentimentality that is absent from earlier iconographic works. These have been criticised as “sentimental” both by traditionalists who deplore their lack of intellectual content and by modern “realistic” rationalists who dislike “prettiness” and prefer the dark and stark as part of their inverted aesthetic. Once again we see the Law of Tamasic Inversion — both the Sattwic and the Tamasic mentality attack Rajasic sentimentality, one from above and the other from below.

Now clearly the traditionalists are right and the modernists are wrong. But what we must reply to the traditionalists is simply that this is the latter end of Kali Yuga. The majority of people are ruled by sentiments and it is important to direct those sentiments upward rather than downward.

To say that sentimental religious pictures are devoid of intellectuality is true on one level. But one must also remember that it is intellectuality that discriminates, intellectuality that decides whether to direct our sentimentality toward images of Dea or (as almost every modern women’s magazine seems to do) toward images of sexuality and impure thoughts.

In my view, as a modern, sentimental person, I find sentimental religious art attractive. I like to see pictures of my loving Mother looking sweet and beautiful. I have on my shrine a very pretty picture of Sri Lakshmi that even has little bits of glitter. I also have more traditional icons. I understand that some people genuinely do not like the more sentimental pictures for reasons that are traditional or artistic rather than modernist and cynical. They have more sophisticated tastes than I have. That is quite all right.

What should be remembered is that such sentimental images, for those who do appreciate them, serve only good purposes. They are there to direct the heart upwards, toward Dea. In short, they are Good.

No Responses »

 

Beauty and Civilization Monday, Mar 10 2008

Modern scholarship, often to its own surprise and consternation, finds itself continually making discoveries that undermine the evolutionist prejudices with which it approaches its task, and confirm again and again the wisdom handed down from the earliest times: that Primordial Maid represented not a lower, but an immeasurably higher state of humanity and that her increasing involvement with the world of matter, the progressive ‘consolidation’ of herself and her environment, while leading to ever greater developments on the horizontal plane — from language to art, from art to cities — was bought at the cost of a steady decline on the highest plane of all: that of pure Intellect and spiritual vision.

But let us recall that in these relatively early times — let us say, the period of maid fully acclimatised on earth in the first Silver-Age cities — we are still speaking of a state of spiritual refinement, of subtlety and beauty almost inconceivable from our position toward the dark end of the historical cycle. The life of maid, as all traditions agree, was much longer than the hundred years or less enjoyed by the people of the Iron Age, and her wisdom, though descended from its primordial pinnacle was yet majestic. Her vision, while now fixed upon ‘things’ rather than the Principle, was far subtler than ours, seeing always, though at an ever lower level, the immaterial essences behind material manifestation. Much of what later ages achieved by material force, she accomplished by subtle means which a later age might call ‘magic’; and the essential harmony of her being with nature as a whole (being at one with the essence behind it) allowed her to live with but minimal “struggle for existence” and great concentration upon the higher things.

What might strike a modern visitor most about life in these early times would be its beauty — especially if she were enabled, as the people of those times were, to see the subtle forms as well as the outward physical shell of such a civilization. Beauty has always been considered primarily a feminine quality, and as the patriarchal age progressed has been more and more relegated to the position of an inessential and trivial part of life: increasingly the first thing to be sacrificed when ’serious’ practical or economic considerations conflicted with it, yet, until very recently, preserved carefully and at times fiercely by the female sex, in her surroundings, her home and her personal appearance.

Plato, so often the spokesman for the traditional consciousness to the early patriarchal West, by no means thought beauty trivial or unimportant. He used to kalon — the Beautiful — as a term for the Absolute, expounding the primordial knowledge that all earthly beauty is such only because it participates in the absolute Beauty of the Divine. Beauty is not, as the modern dogma would have it, a mere subjective product of the human brain, but a universal quality that predates the very existence of earthly humanity.

From Primordial Maid

No Responses »

 

Life Theatre Friday, Mar 7 2008

Life Theatre is the key to much of what happens in Aristasia. Life Theatre, as the name implies, means acting out roles - not for the benefit of an audience but as part of our own lives. In Life Theatre we explore the different people we could be in Aristasia. The same girl may play a blonde and a brunette, a schoolmistress and a schoolgirl, an eastern noblemaid full of ancient dignity and courtesy and a Vintesse Jazz Baby or Quirinelle Jive Bunny.

Life Theatre helps us both to realise our own inner possibilities and populate Aristasia with many different characters. Personae are not merely the products of casual roleplay. Some may be adopted merely for a single appearance, but others may take on a life of their own, becoming characters in their own right.

The Aristasian novel Children of the Void is the locus classicus for Life Theatre. In this book there are some 22 characters but only seven physical bodies. The whole action of the book consists of the interplay between these characters.

No Responses »

 

The Calendar Thursday, Feb 21 2008

Moura, the current month, is the last in the Aristasian year. The Aristasian Perpetual Calendar will allow you to see all Aristasian dates for any year in relation to the Tellurian dates and to find all the Aristasian Festivals and Seasons.

This is the Westrenne Calendar, a five-month solar calendar of thirteen 28-day months. It is used in the five Westrenne Provinces, including Novaria, in much of West Arcadia and in a few parts of far-West “Amazonia”.

In most parts of the East that are in regular communication with the West, the Westrenne Calendar is used for secular purposes, since it is universally known and very uncomplicated in comparison with some Estrenne calendar systems.

In the West and some near parts of the East it is both the Sacred and the secular Calendar, and that is its status in Aristasia-in-Telluria (although we also tend to use the Tellurian Calendar as a secular Calendar, at least for purposes of cross-reference).

The resemblance of the Aristasian devotional Calendar to the Christian Calendar has been observed, particularly in the festivals of Eastre and Nativity and its stress on the solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days. In fact this Calendar is the natural one for Europe because of the divinely-ordained symbolism of its climate and seasons, as it is for the Aristasian West. Even in Telluria it is much older than Christianity.

Also see the Calendar article in the Encyclopaedia Aristasiana.

No Responses »

 

Art Neo in Aristasia Pura Sunday, Feb 17 2008

Art Neo is often regarded as equivalent to Tellurian Art Deco, but it resembles only those parts
of Art Deco that are theatrical, feminine and sound. It also includes some elements of what
is usually termed Art Nouveau.
The term is also applied much
more broadly than Art Deco - for example, Trentish dance-band music is termed “Art-Neo music”.

Art Neo is considered as primarily the art of Novaria which has spread to other provinces: notably neighbouring Vintesse and Trent. Art Neo is not merely an aesthetic style but an applied aesthetic philosophy.

Art Neo in Telluria has been called a “blind aesthetic” because while it provides a counter to the aesthetics of deformism it, unlike them, has no underlying philosophy. It was a healthy aesthetic reaction against the Cult of Ugliness, but it was no more than an instinctive reflex.

In Aristasia, conversely, Art Neo is a deliberate and conscious attempt to adapt traditional aesthetic and spiritual values to the exigencies of a machine age. Art Neo, with its recurring solar motifs and uplifting quality, is a fully considered attempt to come to terms with the “problem of the machine” and bring a machine-dominated world into conformity with the eternal Principles of tradition.

This is possible because technics in Aristasia, rather than growing out of a revolutionary rationalist and anti-traditionalist movement (such as the 17th-century “Enlightenment” in Telluria) have always been seen as the legitimate, if in some respects distant, descendant of traditional Spirit-centred science.

As in Telluria, images and forms from traditional cultures play an important role in Art-Neo style. While in Telluria this is a mere “playing” with traditional forms, albeit frequently with an instinctive feeling for their remythologising depth, in Aristasia this is done with a conscious intention of maintaining and restoring links with tradition and keeping modern culture well-rooted in the sacred and nourishing Ancestral soil.

From Art Neo in the Encyclopaedia Aristasiana

One Response »