Four-letter monosyllables replace high invective. "We ARE apes, after all".

We were talking last night in the ol’ embie about the very old saying that Aristasia in Telluria is one long conversation and how the founding of a Lay College has been a natural continuation of that – for a Lay College is a place of discourse and learning, not directed to an end, like the Graduating Colleges, but continuing always as a way of life.

And we spoke of how our conversation was a feminine form of education – for masculine conversation is often about “winning” or “who is right”, while feminine conversation is a search for truth within an agreed world of thamë – a Unanimous Society, to borrow a phrase from Ananda Coomaraswamy.

And one of the things I have always loved about this kind of academic discussion (academic in the sense of the groves of trees [academe] where the pupils of Sappho or Sai Hermya sat in discourse) is that the teacher often learns as much as the pupil (and of course in informal discussion “teacher” and “pupil” may change places instantly), for by examining our subjects of discussion carefully and responding to the questions of our intelligent and thoughtful academiciennes, we refine our thoughts and oft-times learn things we did not know we knew.

Such a moment occurred last night when we were talking about thamë, morality and cursing. The point was made that the Christian concentration on morality and sin can actually be corrosive. Many serious Christians will, for, example, use filthy language in the belief that they are not committing any sin in doing so. Some of these would agree that to offend anyone with their cussing would be sinful, and will reserve it for like-minded “liberated” company. But they do not believe – and even those who are offended do not believe – that dirty words are sinful in themselves.

And, by the narrow Christian definition of sin, they are not. That is why this morality-morality is so dangerously inadequate.

Christians of an earlier generation avoided cuss-words because they did not take the barrack-room-lawyer attitude that “it isn’t actually sin so I can do it”. They understood that impropriety and sin are close cousins – an attitude that is dismissed as “illogical” by the post-Eclipse mind.

And, indeed, it is illogical – because earlier generations of Christians, no less than their more recent counterparts, had lost the doctrine of thamë.

A good analogy would be if the current world had forgotten the germ theory of disease. Surgeons would still go on washing their hands just because “it is better to be clean”. Until a generation of post-modern critics started saying “why are you washing your hands – there is no logical reason for it”. And the surgeons would have to agree, and many would stop washing their hands.

Many also would cling sentimentally to the old, illogical discipline of rigorously washing their hands like the outmoded ritualists they are, but slowly a generation of surgeons would arise among whom hand-washing was seen as the antiquated superstition it clearly is (at least for those who no longer know the germ-theory of disease).

In our case, the germ-theory of disease is the law of thamë. The knowledge that harmony is fundamentally important and that to invoke ordure or coarse sexuality is literally dirty, and as disease-bearing to the soul as physical filth is to the body.

We also spoke of the decline of invective. If I were really angry and wished to state my anger, I should indulge myself in high rhetoric, excoriating the object of my anger. I flatter myself that I have a reasonable vocabulary and a fair-to-middling knack with words. I think I could come up with some pretty scathing diatribes should the need arise.

But for most educated people in the Pit, in moments of extreme anger, their highest invective consists of a few schoolyard monosyllables, endlessly repeated and strung together with semi-articulate prose.

Our reaction to it is not one of shock, but of contempt. That an educated person should be reduced by temper to the mental level of a drug-addled vagrant is simply laughable. “Rhetoric” of this kind is not just offensive, but weak. Having established that they can pronounce the same dirty words that make pre-teens giggle, they have exhausted their repertoire.

Now this is a new thing. In the past anger moved educated people to rhetoric, not to semi-literate monosyllables. What has changed? A friend last night suggested that it was laziness, and on thinking about this suggestion carefully, and feeling it, as it were, I feel sure this is not the main reason.

The main reason, I feel quite sure, is Darwinism. At first this may seem an odd suggestion, but let us consider it for a moment. Miss Trent, in The Feminine Universe documents the huge change that came about in Tellurian culture in the late 19th century, leading Prof. C.S.Lewis to declare (in his inaugural lecture as professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge) that the author of Beowulf has more in common with Jane Austen than we have. A huge watershed took place at the end of the 19th century. And Miss Trent shows that the reason for it was the change in the underlying mythos of the western world from real myths, that convey metaphysical truth, to the pseudo-mythos of evolutionism.

Now I am not going to go into all the ramifications of that myth. Its effect on bad language is one tiny part of a vast change. But it is there and it is obvious.

In the past an angry person would seek to express her anger in terms that were most in keeping with what she conceived herself to be – an intelligent being, ultimately a reflection of the Divine. High rhetoric was her natural mode for expressing passion.

What does the modern person think of high rhetoric? That it is “artificial”.

Why – in the end – will she not use it in anger? Because she feels her hearers will dismiss her anger as “phony”.

The “real” and “natural” way to express anger is in inarticulate shouts, in monosyllabic grunts that refer to irrelevant animal functions.

Why? Because ultimately, we are animals. Any attempt to bring the refinements of civilization to our anger just prove that is not “real anger” because in extremis we should be reduced to our animal base.

That is why pre-Darwin anger was expressed in high rhetoric and post-Darwin anger in monkey monosyllables.
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See also: The Animal Thesis

Insights often come in a flash. What I mean by that is that a very important idea may often be conveyed to one in an instant, as a sudden vision or apprehension of the true nature of things. I suspect that happens to all of us. The difficult part is following up that insight: grasping it between one’s teeth and methodically shaking out the meaning of it. This activity is what is called philosophy. At least it is the feminine and spiritual approach to philosophy: taking the insights or intuitions that are granted to us and diligently teasing out their full meaning.

Such an insight came to me yesterday. There has always been a lot of philosophical work and discussion in Aristasia on the subject of dress and its real meaning, : on why bongos dress as they do, what it signifies about their culture and how it helps to create the spiritual and psychological conditions that are the Pit. Yesterday I accompanied my friend to the post office and I was watching a group of bongos shuffling about in their jeans, soft, floppy clothes and bits of tracksuit, and suddenly an insight came to me. At first it seemed like a very strange one.

“These people are naked!” I suddenly realised. It seemed like an odd thought, because obviously they were wearing clothes. Admittedly that is giving the word “clothes” an exceptionally broad definition, but they were undeniably wearing something. Now of course this insight was not unaware of that. It was saying “These are not clothed people. They are naked bodies with some rags thrown over them. They are essentially naked. And they are not naked like a classical nude in a painting. They are naked in the way that cats and dogs and monkeys are naked.”

I knew what I was seeing was true, but it was hard to make rational sense of it. After all, to say a clothed person is a naked person with clothes on is surely a tautology. Cannot one say that of any clothed person from the 1930s or from ancient Greece? No, this insight was saying. Not in the same way. Those people were authentically dressed these people in front of me were not. They were just naked bodies with odd bits of cloth thrown over them. The comparison that had been in my mind when I first saw them was a reference in a Quirinelle book to “the hour at which ladies like to dress for cocktails”. Such ladies dressed; these people did not dress. They just put things onto what they still regarded as mere bodies in the animal sense: essentially naked.

Why was that the case? I asked myself. Was it something to do with their loose and casual attitudes to what they call “sex”? Or was that too simple an answer?

I tried to explain the answer to a brunette friend, partly because having to explain an idea often forces it to be clarified. We started to analyse it. What was the fundamental difference between dressed people — whether in the 1950s at the cocktail hour, or at any other hour, or in the eighteenth century, or in Mandarin China, or in a tribal society — from these “naked apes” with clothes on?

Suddenly it began to make sense. By going back to more ancient societies we were taking the thing back to its roots. We were applying the principles of Essentialist thought. If one looks at the earlier societies, it is clear that dress is a ritual thing. In tribes, adornment may represent what are called “totem animals” (actually the animal embodiments of Janyati or Archetypes), they also represent status within the order of the tribe, which is conceived as a microcosm of the order of the cosmos. The tasselled fringes worn by some Red Indian tribes represent the sun’s rays, with all the metaphysical significance of solarity. Dress in old China was carefully regulated by ritual considerations and those of social function, which — as everywhere else, including the Mediaeval West — was seen not only as reflecting, but as being organically related to the functioning of the cosmos itself.

By the time we get to the Renaissance West, these ritual considerations are waning. We are moving from a Sattwic to a Rajasic society. But as is the case in every aspect of Rajasic society, it continues to reflect, in its outward-directed forms, the upward-directed prototypes of it Sattwic roots. They are increasingly unaware of the spiritual and metaphysical significance of their dress — which is now vestigial — but the thread is still not broken. Even in the 1950s, on the very verge of the Eclipse, women dress for cocktails, men go to business carefully attired with bowler hats and furled umbrellas. Postmen, policemen, cinema usherettes and dozens of other functionaries (and I use this term in the positive and vestigially-Sattwic sense of “performers of functions within the Great Order”) are meticulously uniformed. Evening dress is worn for theatre, opera and dining at good restaurants and hotels, but even at the local cinema and palais de dance (vulgarly termed “the pally”) people are conscious of “going out” and dress accordingly.

What we are saying is that all these people are dressed in the same sense that a tribal dancer, a Chinese mandarin or a mediaeval courtier is dressed. The thread is diminished but as yet unbroken. With the eclipse and the onset of a Tamasic society, the thread, in dress as in most other things, is broken. People are no longer dressed in the true sense of the word. In a Sattwic society, as Dr Coomaraswamy often said, “body and soul are served together”. The objects of craft, whether a drinking-bowl or a chariot, have both functional and metaphysical significance. In a Rajasic society, the ritual (or intellectual) significance of the products of human art and craft is increasingly forgotten; but there is still a sense of rightness that links them back to their Sattwic origins. And of all artefacts, clothes are the closest to us — both literally and figuratively.

If we look at the typical bongo clothes they are, in their own words designed to be “casual” and to reject the element of form (that is why they are called informal). In theory their design is for comfort and convenience and many bongos do choose their dress for those reasons (or at least imagine that they do). In this respect, bongo clothes are precisely “animal” in nature because they are designed to perform the same functions as a non-human creature’s fur or feathers — simply to keep her warm and be as convenient as possible in all ways.

Now as soon as one says this, it is clear that even the term “animal” requires some qualification. The function of bongo clothes does not correspond to the real function of animal skin. It corresponds to the notion of animal skin held by the post-Darwinian mind. The notion that animals are simply “functional units designed* for survival” and that the best functional units are the ones that survive. This is not what tradition teaches us about animals. From tradition we learn what every traditional people knows: that animals embody particular qualities. Thus their fur or feathers, like human artefacts, have both a functional and a symbolic aspect. So when we said at the beginning that bongo dress resembles the nakedness of dogs, cats or monkeys, we were, in fact taking an unfairly low view of dogs, cats and monkeys. They are in fact more dressed in the true meaning of the term, than the bongo wearing what are termed Pit-pyjamas. Their fur is not merely functional. It is part of the expression of the fundamental reality that lies behind dog-ness or cat-ness, while the Eclipse has precisely revolted against the expression of fundamental realities through outward appearance.

This is yet another illustration of the dictum that maid, as the Axial creature of this world, has the power to rise above the earthly state, or to fall below it. Sattwic humanity seeks to express realities that transcend the worldly plane. Animals cannot do this. Rajasic humanity reflects the earthly plane in all its beauty and variety, and, of course the earthly plane is the reflection of the heavenly. This is what animal also do, on a very different level. Tamasic humanity turns away from the earthly plane in the downward direction. Animals cannot do this either. They cannot desert their thamë, their natural worldly function, either by transcending it or by falling below it. In this respect, Tamasic humanity is below the animal level.

So how does Tamasic humanity fall below the animal level in its dress? In the first place by adopting a dress that is (in theory at least) solely functional and stripped of all symbolic depth no animal can do this. Secondly bongo dress often finds ways to fall below even this level: jeans are bought deliberately faded and torn, for example, expressing the desire not for simple functionality but for chaos and dissolution. Clothes are worn with jokes or commercial slogans spelled out across their fronts, not merely serving the functions of comfort and warmth, but also insulting the dignity of the wearer and turning her into something trivial and foolish. Clothes are often unnecessarily baggy and floppy, to a point where they must surely become cumbersome and inconvenient. In the quest for symbolic looseness and degeneration, the actual function of “comfort and convenience is left behind. I am sure the reader can supply many examples of her own, some of which we may be unaware of.

So is it true to say that nobody in the Pit is dressed? No. Businessmen, for example, are still dressed to express their function in a manner that is vestigially Rajasic. But note that this is under attack with “dressing down days”, “informal offices” etc. The Pit has an inbuilt instinct to attack everything that is vestigially Rajasic, and we can expect to see the business suit coming under increasing attack**. It is common for bongos to refer to business people disparagingly as “suits”.

The use of the term “suits” is deeply significant. The implication is that the person wearing a suit has simply become the suit. He is no longer a person, just a “suit”. What is the reason for this perception? It is rooted in the Pit’s hatred of Archetypes and of the concept of conforming to what it calls a “stereotype”. It fears that in adopting the dress suitable to a function, the individual will be somehow swallowed up by the function and cease to exist. It has often been pointed out that the bongo in her loose, floppy clothes or her jeans and T-shirt is just as conformist as the most rigidly-uniformed functionary. Her style of dress is dictated from outside and is necessary for social acceptance within particular bongo groups. The illusory “individualism” she has been taught to value is as stereotyped and mass-produced as any other form of conformity. When bongos dress differently from other bongos it is almost always in conformity with some particular group or sub-set within the Pit, often associated with some form of commercially-produced music.

Some might, therefore, be tempted to say that bongo “casual” dress is the exact equivalent of uniforms, suits or real-world fashions — both being the prescribed dress of a particular group or culture. However this is not actually the case. While both are equally prescribed, one is the dress of form, and the other is the dress of anti-form: and while anti-form is just as much a conformity as form, it does not thereby become a form. The “informal” or a-formal bongo is very consciously not “dressed” in the sense that a person from the real world is dressed. She often fears dress as something that might rob her of the looseness she mistakes for “freedom”. Being dressed is a form of mask, and any mask might take away one’s “real self”.

The problem is that this “real self” is illusory, as one can see by looking at any group of bongo type-3s. How different are they from each other in their attitudes, manners, beliefs or behaviour? Among smartly dressed real people one finds far more variety of personality, far more distinctness. By rejecting form, one becomes a rootless, unfixed creature that can be blown about by every passing wind of propaganda, every new slogan or catch-phrase, every new fad or pseudo-morality. One becomes the perfect, rootless, manipulable proletarian.

NOTES

* Even the word “designed” is only used figuratively, since the theory asks us to believe that there is no intelligent “design” and that a dog evolved from a protozoon by a series of survival-related “accidents”. Actually many biologists now deny this rather extraordinary notion; but we are concerned here with the popular view of animals as derived from what the average person imagines evolutionism to be saying: for it is this that has shaped the current belief as to what an animal is.

** It is possible however, that even some elements in the Pit are aware that a degree of Rajasic culture and formality needs to be retained if bongo administration is to remain functional, which may account for the almost anachronistic survival of the business suit to the present time. Curiously, what is being recognised here is that the “functionalist” view of dress leads, in practice, to dysfunctional behaviour.

It has been suggested that there is a particular similarity between Aristasian culture in general (and Novarian culture in particular) and the traditional culture of Japan. Sushuri-chei offers some thoughts on this connexion based on the “structural assumptions” of the Japanese language.

Let us take a very simple example, and you will see that the same principle applies to a lot of japanese constructions.

I like tea = Watashi wa ocha ga suki desu

The two sentences are equivalent, but the Japanese, if I understand correctly, actually means “In relation to me, tea takes the action of being liked”.

Now this is a very important difference. The Western form places the emphasis on the personal human ego as the active entity.

According to West-Telluri philosophy, this is simply correct. To like something is an “action” taken by the liker, not by the thing liked.

Most Modern Japanese would presumably, if asked, take this view too, being steeped in the modern Western rationalist perspective. But their language says something else, and I suspect their real thinking contains elements of both perspectives.

So what are the perspectives, and how far are they “Eastern” or “Western” in an absolute sense?

Without getting too deeply into the “background theory”, let me explain briefly that modern West-Telluria’s rationalist perspective is not “the Western outlook” but a “heresy” base on the legitimate Western outlook.

So in many respects traditional West-Telluria, even as late as the Middle Ages, thinks more like the Tellurian East than does modern Western Telluria.

In Aristasia there was no Rationalist Heresy, but the legitimate characteristics of the West, were still, in subtler ways, “carried too far” in the modern era: which is why Westrenne Aristasians tend to regard Estrennes as their spiritual superiors.

(This is almost the exact opposite of the “inferiority complex” that the Tellurian East feels in relation to the Tellurian West and the corresponding “superiority complex” of the Tellurian West).

Getting back to our tea:

The Western formulation puts maid at the centre. Maid is the “subject”, tea is the “object”. It is egoic. In terms of religion, it develops into the will-centred faith of Christianity, with an emphasis on sin (that is, faults of the individual and collective will). This perspective also exists in Aristasia, particularly in the West.

See this page on the Filianic understanding of “original sin” and its differences and similarities with the Christian concept.

When it is taken to excess this outlook leads to the cultural “malpractice” of individualism (which, in the late Iron Age has happened in both Westrenne Aristasia and Telluria) and when taken even further leads to the outright heresies of rationalism and humanism (as has happened in West Telluria, but not Westrenne Aristasia)

The Japanese formulation – that tea does the action of being liked in relation to a particular person – expresses a quite different perspective, and one that is much closer to the Novarian (and generally Estrenne) outlook. It is a view that modern West Tellurians would be likely to categorize – rather misleadingly – as “animist”.

According to this view maid is not the sole experiencing center. The quality of “amity” exists not only in maid but in the tea itself – indeed more importantly in the tea.

Tea is one of the “ten thousand things” of cosmic manifestation that each express (insofar as they approach perfection) small aspects of the Divine Totality.

Between those aspects of the Divine Whole, and the individual being that constitutes “oneself” (which is really another aspect of the Divine Whole, but in some senses more separated from Her – by her sin or her ignorance, depending on perspective – and in other senses closer to Her, being made in Her image) – between those two aspects of the Divine whole exists an Affinity.

That Affinity is seen in the West from the egoic perspective and in the East from the perspective of the Totality of which an external object may act as the representative.

That is the fundamental reason for the two ways of expressing the liking of tea. And of course similar considerations will apply with many other linguistic formulae.

I have expressed all this in very Deanic terms, of course, because I am a Deanist. But the second of these two outlooks is exactly that of much of the Aristasian East – and in Novaria tends to be that tempered with a certain amount of the Westrenne outlook.

Thus it is very close – in broadly analogous terms, not in cultural specifics, and of course excluding the various errors induced by the adoption of West-Tellurian rationalism – to the position of modern Japan.

_____

Note:

I was talking to Minami-chei about this rather old discussion and oddly enough I found an interesting sidelight on it the next day. Minami-chei said that the Korean expression for liking tea (or anything else) was exactly equivalent to the japanese, but that she (as a mother-tongue Korean speaker) had never thought of its literal meaning as I have portrayed it (although she agreed that this is the literal meaning).

Now I would not expect the literal meaning to be consciously uppermost in the mind of a modern-educated person from Japan or Korea, but I do suggest that it is in the deep structures of the traditional thought of Japanese and Koreans. I was interested, therefore, to read this in The Japanese Today by Professor Edwin Reischauer:

Now this is surely very interesting. The very grammatical term is used. The whole point of our tea sentence is that the tea is the active subject, taking the action of being-liked. And it is from this precise structure of life that the Westernising student wishes to escape. Japanese tends to relieve the individual of the burden of subjectivity, while Western languages – like the cultures – stress it as a positive value.

As a Novarian I am often told that I am, by West Tellurian standards “unnaturally passive”. I tend to wait to be led, although when I am sure of a principle I can be forceful and even unbending.

Some of this may be my age and my own nature, but I would say that Aristasians – and particularly Novarians tend to be “passive” in the sense of looking for the “right” thing to do and expecting a consensus of some sort. It doesn’t mean we are followers rather than leaders (we couldn’t all be could we?) but rather that in our natural habitat we live by a Norm, or thamë both in society as a whole and then reflectively in any group within it. There tends to be a “way things are done” rather than a “way I do things”.

One is either following that way or administering it – and if one is administering it one is still following it. Being a “passive subject” sounds negative from the Western – or the Westernised – Tellurian point of view. From a Novarian perspective it is reassuring. It is the surety of following the right way rather than having to invent a way for oneself that will probably be wrong. Ultimately, it is the sense of acting in harmony with the universe and its Creatrix rather than against it. Of treading the steps of the Cosmic Dance laid down from eternity rather than ambling in one’s own random fashion.

Miss Sakura begins by quoting a lengthy exchange:

I should like to set the scene by quoting a recent correspondence called “The Aristasian-Hindu Connection” on the “ask Miss Iris” pages:

Dear readers: Related to the previously published question (“AMI: Why stay in church?”) I am also bringing up yet another of the most commonly heard questions.

Dear Miss Iris: Often you mention or reference materials written by the so-called “Aristasian” sect when you discuss certain spiritual or theological matters. I am at loss of words for this. When I visited one of the “Aristasian” websites I saw many pictures of Hindu goddesses and uses of Hindu or Sanskrit words everywhere. Are you attempting to introduce Hindu polytheist/pantheist beliefs into Christianity? What you are doing is abhorrent, and borders on cultic. — Rachel, Washougal, Washington.

Dear Miss Rachel: I do not think the Aristasians are pleased by your characterization of them as a Hindu “cult.” Neither is your understanding of Hinduism as a polytheism correct. I would like to refer to an Aristasian religion FAQ page, which states as thus:

Q: Aristasians in Telluria use images of Dea from Tellurian sources, such as Hindu Devis or even the Virgin Mary. Why is this?

Most simply, because we cannot import images from Aristasia Pura! But actually there is more to it than that. Such images — particularly the Hindu ones — go back in an unbroken line to the original worship of the Mother as Absolute Deity. In Christianity, only the image remains (but the image is still very faithful) while the worship of Dea has been “theologised” out of existence. In Hinduism, while patriarchal myths have been woven about, say Sri Lakshmi, there are many within the tradition who still worship Her as Supreme Deity. Thus these are images in which the direct spiritual influence is still living (the same might be said about Kwan Yin bodhisattva, or the Tibetan Tara). We could use reproductions of more ancient images from prehistoric matriarchal times, and while this is not forbidden, it is generally considered that it is better to use images that are still connected by a living thread to the earliest tradition.

This having said, would I recommend the use of Hindu religious imagery or language in support of a feminine traditionalist religion? Not within the context of the contemporary North America. It is important to note that what you call the “Aristasian sect” is largely a British phenomenon, and unlike Americans, there is a healthy respect for Indian culture there thanks to Britain’s colonial past in India and also because of the large immigrant population there from India. This contrasts with our situation here in North America, in which anything that looks, sounds or smells Hindu are products of fringe cults or Westernized “new age” movements. Fortunately, America still remains to be the most religious nation on earth outside the Islamic theocracies, and religion plays an important role in our culture and social values. My opinion, therefore, is instead of looking elsewhere for a foreign religious tradition why not make the best of the heritage we already have in America, specifically Christianity (and to much extent, Judaism). This is why, unlike Aristasians, I refrain from borrowing much from Hinduism (I have no entitlement to exploit a religious tradition I know little about); instead you see me discussing in terms of Christian theology and hagiography.

This is another topic that may be of interest to those who are interested in Aristasian path (without any attempt at dissuading or discouraging anyone from so doing). In her comment to “Why stay in church,” Miss Sushuri stated:

“{i}have absolutely no sympathy or kindred-feeling with patriarchal traditions whatever. I can accept that they are right within their own “economy”. I can accept that you are more fortunate and perhaps more “valid” than I in being able to come to terms with them… I have not an atom of warmth toward patriarchal tradition in general and have least warmth of all toward the Abrahamic traditions. While I fully accept the quotation from Guénon about the necessity of Christianity for Western Telluria, I have no interest in, or love for, Western Telluria, and on a purely personal level, do not care whether it stands or falls. I certainly do not feel myself to be a part of it or of any patriarchal tradition… Equally I feel no attraction whatever to any form of “feminist” pseudo-cultus, all of which are not only part of the Western patriarchal culture but represent it in its final degeneracy. They have all the faults of West-Tellurian patriarchy with none of its virtues.”

Yet, it is impossible to fully liberate oneself from the “Tellurian traditions,” patriarchal or otherwise. Unfortunately even Hindu in present form is a highly patriarchal faith (think of blatant misogyny in India, in which women are treated as mere chattels), and there really is no existent “living tradition” that is entirely free of patriarchy. Much of Aristasian spirituality and practices today are indeed product of many streams of Tellurian traditions and traditionalists, and as much as one may hope that it is “straight from Aristasia Pura” as though they were brought to them by an extraterrestrial on a space ship, the reality is that there are heavy borrowing from Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on. This, of course, is not “wrong” — I believe that all traditions ultimately trace back to one single source, one single root, Tellurian or otherwise. But it would be dishonest to disclaim one’s connection to the Tellurian traditions.

In this spirit, I am not going to throw out the entire crate of apples just because a few — even the super-majority of it — apples are rotten and infested with patriarchal bugs. I would at least like to make my best effort at salvaging what is left of the Christian heritage, and (being an optimist) reform what is in my hands. I am in no way a radical reformer of Anabaptist or Puritan kind; I am more of a reformer along the line of John+ Wesley and ++Thomas Cranmer. To me, any meaningful reformation requires a preservation of continuity and precedence, or I would be inventing a new religion out of thin air and that would be meaningless.

- Miss Iris

Miss Sushuri said…

Rayati.

I think few comments need to be made here. As Miss Iris has said, Aristasia is not in any sense Hindu, neither is Aristasia (or Hinduism) polytheist or pantheist according to the Western understanding of those terms. It would be much truer to say that we are monotheists with a strong angelology. No orthodox tradition is polytheist in the sense of believing that there can be more than one Absolute, since this is a metaphysical and thealogical absurdity.

Miss Iris writes:

Yet, it is impossible to fully liberate oneself from the “Tellurian traditions,” patriarchal or otherwise. Unfortunately even Hindu in present form is a highly patriarchal faith (think of blatant misogyny in India, in which women are treated as mere chattels), and there really is no existent “living tradition” that is entirely free of patriarchy.

So many points are raised here! In the first place Aristasians have been the first to point out the patriarchal nature of the modern Hindu tradition. We see Hindu images of Dea as being images of the Universal, Primordial Mother God. We see (iconographically correct) Christian images of Our Lady Mary in the same way. The difference is that the Hindu images can come with a correct thealogical interpretation – that these are images of the One God. They can be doctrinally as well as iconographically sound, whereas (at least by the more usual understanding) Christian images cannot.

Christianity, while granting hyperdoulia to Our Lady Mary, denies Her latria because it denies that She is God. In this sense, Hinduism is capable of adopting a thealogically sound position (in Aristasian terms) whereas Christianity is not. This is to say nothing of the patriarchal nature of Hindu society. That is their affair. We are not Hindus.

Now Miss Iris says some rather strong words:

Much of Aristasian spirituality and practices today are indeed product of many streams of Tellurian traditions and traditionalists, and as much as one may hope that it is “straight from Aristasia Pura” as though they were brought to them by an extraterrestrial on a space ship, the reality is that there are heavy borrowing from Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on. This, of course, is not “wrong” — I believe that all traditions ultimately trace back to one single source, one single root, Tellurian or otherwise. But it would be dishonest to disclaim one’s connection to the Tellurian traditions.

Now a lot here depends upon what is meant by the term “connection”. Clearly Aristasian writers have used Hindu (and sometimes Christian and far-Eastern Tellurian) terms quite freely, and have used images from those traditions. We are not making any secret of that.

But what, exactly, is our “connection” supposed to be? In truth, there have been some efforts to forge a certain degree of spiritual “linking” between Tellurian images and “streams” and our faith. This was in pursuit of the practice of “pontification” – building bridges between our faith in Dea and its practice in Telluria, precisely so that we might have some spiritual “grounding” in Telluria.

In this sense, and in this sense only, it might be correct to speak of some form of “connection”, and we have certainly not tried to disclaim it. However we see “living tradition” solely as a conduit leading back to Our Mother God – we have no interest in the various patriarchal accretions which can only be obstacles between ourselves and Her.

Now if one wishes to see Aristasians purely as “Tellurian dissidents” that cannot be helped. It is a natural enough Outland view. But that is not how we see ourselves and it will give no clue as to why we are what we are and think as we do.

Our perspective is very much Aristasian. We are not interested in “reforming” Telluria as a whole or any Tellurian tradition. Our sole allegiance is to our Motherland and to Dea.

Any credence we give to patriarchal traditions is because they are remnants of Universal Truth, not because they are patriarchal. Their patriarchal nature is only an obstacle placed before their Truth. It is only because of their Universality that they can have any value as pontifications.

We are the first to admit that our approach is completely useless for anyone looking for Tellurian “reform”. We are not concerned with it and have no interest in it. Our aim is to love and serve Our Mother God within a feminine nation.

Miss Sakura then comments:

Well I don’t think my position is much of a secret. I am a Filyana and will die a Filyana.

But let’s play Devil’s Advocate for a minute. Princess Mushroom said it is good to play Devil’s Advocate because we can test our position against the hardest arguments.

So, you know, I think a lot about my religion and I understand about the Filianist Controversy (see the third sub-heading here) and how it came about because of a desire not to be “inventing a religion out of thin air”, as Miss Iris puts it.

I believe that discussion is well resolved. There is very much Tellurian precedent and continuing practice of the worship of Dea as Supreme, Absolute, Sole and Almighty God.

If people want to see the Daughter Mythos as “poems” that enhance that traditional devotion, no Filyana has a problem with that.

It is true that we are not in an established religious tradition. But we need to ask what is meant by a continuous tradition? The Tellurian West currently has a conception of the world so utterly different from any traditional view that we may wonder if their understanding of Christianity bears much relation to that of traditional Christians.

Miss Iris as a priest and sometime Bishop of a rather wayward-seeming branch of the Catholic and Apostolic Church might well see the continuity lying in the validity of the Sacraments. Now various questions might be raised by other Christians bout the validity of an Apostolic Succession so far from “Established” norms, and others may wish to question the validity of those “norms” themselves – having strayed so far from Tradition. By no means all would accept the validity of a female priesthood.

So already we are in a quandary about who is “making up their religion”.

But even if we ignore all this and place our faith in the Sacraments, where does that leave all our non-Sacramental Protestants? Are they making up their religion? Or are they guaranteed by the Bible – despite an interpretation of it that mediaeval Christians might scarcely recognize.

And our Mormon friends? Are they meaningless?

In their case I would be hard pressed not to say that much of their religion is not “made up”, but I certainly cannot discount their faith because of that, or believe that their God is no God (despite the fact that they do not see Her quite as I believe they should).

So do we have to accept any and everything that calls itself “religion”? I for one do not accept most “New Age” and “Pagan” constructions. But even there I cannot say that they are not approaching God somehow – however misguidedly. That is for Her to judge, not I.

Tests I would tend to apply are those of devotion, humility and purity (which much New Agism does not pass) and of authentic traditional understanding (which much modern Christianity – both “mainstream” [ie liberal] and fundamentalist – does not pass). Our Filyani faith does pass these tests. I am not saying others are “meaningless” if they don’t, but they seem like very important tests.

To take another approach – I saw a book by Marina Warner, called Alone of all Her Sex. This book is about Our Lady Mary as the Christians see Her. Honoured Miss Warner argues that the “deification” of Our Lady Mary only made things worse for women, because they were considered fallen and degraded and Mary was the only pure “woman”.

I don’t want to get into arguments about whether she is right or wrong. And that is the point. I don’t have to. It is not my concern as an Aristasian to get embroiled in all the pushing and pulling over faith and its effect on femini and the patriarchal nature of cultures that worship Dea and whether the half-worship of Dea in the West is even more patriarchal than man-god worship.

Am I being told that for the sake of the highly uncertain advantages conferred by a claimed continuity of patriarchal religion with its fundamental bases (bases, I might say, that if they are valid at all, are valid because they go back toour religion) – I am compelled to plunge back into the ugliness chaos of late Telluria?

Am I really being asked to allow myself to be dragged into the mess and cruelty of the patriarchal world – which I have otherwise rejected – for the sake of religion?

There are many people that want to drag me back to their grubby “reality” on a thousand different pretexts.

But to tell me that is what my Dea wants of me?

Never.

Sushuri Madonna wrote

Oh well said Sakura-chei!

I so appreciated this post and your last one about language and purity. You are so forthright and strong about our Faith, and I remember when you were a teensy new girl that used to ask me questions (pride).

I just wanted to explain that thing I said about not feeling warm toward Abrahamic religions, because I feel it might be misunderstood. It is true that I have no personal warmth and could not imagine following one. They seem very alien and somehow heavy with masculinity and materiality. I recently spent time in an art gallery showing pictures from several centuries of Christian history and I came away feeling almost weighted down by the huge accretion of beards, crucifixions and general heaviness. It felt like a black hole of super-gravity. It seemed to me like a (literal) carnival of masculinity and gross materiality.

But having said that I must state that I feel no hostility whatever toward the religion. I feel much more comfortable in the Southern States of America where there is a general atmosphere of faith than I ever did in the grey, brainless, irreligious emptiness of the Yeekay.

It is not my faith and I think even trying to make it mine would give me the bends. But I respect it in a way that I cannot ever respect the smirking stupidity of irreligion or the callow glibness of New Agery.

However high the fences that separate faiths, they are nothing compared to the oceans that separate us from the faithless.

To which Lady Aquila Responds

Honoured Miss Sakura. Your reference to Mormons raises a perfectly fascinating point with regard to the question of “fantasy” in religion.

Mormonism contains, in my view, considerable elements of fantasy – not in the sense that vulgar atheists attribute the term to anything supernatural, but in the sense of wild imaginings of a purely human nature. Good old-fashioned balderdash. Taradiddles.

I have met Christians who see no distinction between this and Islam (which they see as being equally fabricated by the Prophet) and atheists who see no distinction between this and Christianity.

But I think most of us can see that there is a distinction between revelations of the Christian and Islamic order and the mid-romantic fancies of Mr. Smith Jr.

The question is, how far, if at all, does the fantastical nature of the origins of this teaching invalidate the devout faith of millions?

The question has become clouded to some extent by the emergence of a profoundly anti-traditional “New Age” movement which has led sensible people to even greater caution in these matters.

But I feel – and I believe many others will feel with me – that the oddities of the LDS Church, great as they may be, do not invalidate the path to God trodden by its sincere members. I am no expert on the Church, but I do not believe it incorporates fundamental spiritual flaws, such as the egoism, humanism, and snippets of half-digested and misplaced “scientism” inherent in New Agery.

I certainly do not place Filianism on a level with Mormonism.It does certainly not incorporate flights of pure fantasy. Some people see it as a sort of “feminised Christianity”, but that is mostly because they are unfamiliar with the tradition of the Sacrificial Saviour in its pre-Christian and feminine forms.

A direct Tellurian line of heritage does not exist for Filianism, and its modern doctrinal formulation is quite recent (about thirty years old, as far as we can tell).

As Miss Sakura says, no one is obliged to accept Filianism as Revealed Truth: at its “weakest” we may take it as a “poetic support” to Déanism – the simple worship of Our Mother God.

Filianism is by no means universal in the Motherland, and we do not know how things will fall out in Aristasia-in-Telluria. What we have found is that Filianism seems to work in Telluria. It provides a firm, yet flexible, thealogical structure; an emotionally satisfying and doctrinally lucid approach to Our Mother God.

As non-literalists, unaffected by the rationalist revolution (which profoundly influences almost all West tellurian thinking and controversy about religion), we are less concerned with whether filianism is the Sole Truth than with whether it is an adequate and proper way of seeing that Truth which can never be exhausted by any mythos or formulation.

And if to some people that reduces to “oh it is just a pretty story then” – well, provided they truly believe in Dea, we don’t mind. The One Thing Needful is the belief and worship of Our Mother god, the Sole Absolute and Creatrix of earth and Heaven.

I believe in the daughter as my Saviour. I do not think She is a “pretty story” though I accept that there are other ways of seeing the same Truth, both Déanist and patriarchal, many of which do not specifically incorporate a Saviour (which is only to say that they formulate Her differently).

But taking the worst-case, devil’s-advocate scenario – that Filianism is pure fantasy – it is certainly no more fantasy than Mormonism and no less capable of being a haven and refuge for genuinely devout souls on their way home to Dea.

I don’t take that devil’s-advocate view at all. I think the love of the Saviour is Universal and despite our lack of continuous tradition, we are of Her congregation.

But it is worthwhile to consider that even if we are wrong, we are still calling upon the One Mother who has said:

“None shall call upon Me and be lost”.

It is important to understand that rationalism is not itself rational. Rationalism cannot be derived from the reason. It is an arbitrary dogma. And yet it is upon this dogma that the outlook of the post 17th-century Western world has based itself.

There is an old story told by Sai Platina in Aristasia and also by the great Tellurian teacher Plato. It tells of people who lie chained in a cave so that they are always looking at the wall of the cave. On that wall they see shadows and they spend their lives watching those shadows. One day a maid breaks free from the cave and goes outside to see the real things that are casting shadows on the wall.

Now that cave is the material world, and the shadows are the material things we see about us. Every tradition teaches that the material things we see are the shadows or reflections of higher things. Everything on earth has an Archetype, which is its true and perfect Form, of which the material entity is only an imperfect shadow.

The world of shadows is also called the sensible world because the shadows are the material things that we perceive with our physical senses – we see and hear and touch them.

The real things seen by the maid who left the cave is called the intelligible world, because the Pure Forms, or Archetypes, are not seen with the physical eyes, but with the Single Eye of the Intellect. They are seen by great contemplatives and saints, and they are also told about in myths and sacred books.

Now suppose one of the people still chained in the cave said to the maid who had left the cave:

“You are lying, there is nothing outside this cave.”

“Why do you say that?” asks the maid who has left the cave.

“Because I have not seen it.” replies the rationalist.

That is precisely what the doctrine of rationalism consists of: the illogical and arrogant denial that anything exists outside the material world of the five senses. Has she any rational reason for denying what all tradition tells her to be true? She has not. She merely repeats: “I have not seen it, so it does not exist.”

That is why rationalism is inherently irrational: and, frankly, naughty. A world based on the rationalist denial of higher Reality is like a group of naughty children who have got together to deny what all the grown ups tell them because they have not seen it for themselves and cannot bear that anyone should know better than them.

Miss Yuffie posted some pictures and asked some questions, particularly about this charming picture.

A topic of interest has been brewing inside myself, and I’m sure, many other of the younger Aristasians. Could there possibly be a red headed point of mind? One that escapes being either Blonde or Brunette? Am I the only one who has been inquiring this? Surely not, I’ve seen an article on this, correct?

Then, what is the general Aristasian opinion? Blonde and Brunette?

Princess Mushroom answered:

Quelles dessins adorables!

The “redhead question” has often been discussed. As is often the case with things Aristasian, one needs to consider the question under two aspects: Aristasia in Telluria and Aristasia Pura.

1: Aristasia Pura: There are two biological sexes, chelana and melini , commonly termed “blonde” and “brunette” because hair-colour is a secondary sexual characteristic, and chelani, even from darker-skinned Estrenne races, are always fair-haired, while melini are always dark haired.

There is no third sex. Girls with dark fox-red hair are melin, girls with pale coppery hair are chelan. Red hair is occasionally associated with hormonal imbalance that can make for traces of opposite-sex characteristics, but there is still no question that a girl is one sex or the other.

2 : Aristasia-in-Telluria: hair colour has absolutely no bearing on whether one is blonde or brunette. Most Aristasian blondes I know in physical life are actually raven-blondes.

Girls are still either blonde or brunette. Where a girl has characteristics in both sexes, she may, and often does, have a persona (or more than one) in each sex. Personae are regarded as separate individuals, and to a surprising extent often are.

Most girls are purely one sex and have all personae (if more than one) in that sex. They are called “plenary blondes” or “plenary brunettes”.

Girls who have personae in both sexes are called “ambis”. Most ambis actually turn out over time to be predominantly one sex or the other. There are a few truly ambiguous ambis, but they are in actuality very few.

Other considerations we may mention here:

3 : Aristasia-in-Virtualia : Avatars, whether full 3D moving ones as in Second Life grid or little pictures as here, should have hair-colour consonant with sex, as in Aristasia-in-Virtualia, our characters are true intemporphs. Ambis can of course have an extra avvie in the other sex with a different name and persona.

4: Pictures like the charming ones here are not usually drawn by Aristasians, and so hair-colour may not match sex. The picture above [which Miss Yuffie described as depicting "a blonde dressed as a brunette"] does look like a blonde to me, but hair-colour is not decisive.

When we use such pictures on our sites and such, we do try to keep the blondes fair and the brunettes dark, as we are trying to build an Intemorphic Virtuality. Quite correctly, faced with a picture like the one above, one would use a “cover story” like “this is a blonde dressed as a brunette” – which in this case does look very likely!

Queen Mayanna House represents a typical Aristasian establishment.

Queen Mayanna House is what is known as a Lay College. There are many of them in the West, and the main reason for their existence is the same as the reason for the many Brunettes’ Clubs and in recent times Blondes’ Clubs too as well as small residential hotels and pensions. In times past, and still in the East, when a maid was unmarried (as maids often are in Aristasia since the procreative need is rather smaller for such a long-lived and harm-resistant people) she stayed with her extended family or, if she were a magdalin, with the mistress to whom she was apprenticed. In the West, with the decline – though by no means death – of the guild- and apprentice-system and with so many of the more modern type of unmarried girl preferring to place some distance between themselves and their families, new places grew up in which such a girl might live.

To take a flat alone is not unheard of, but it is very rare. Aristasians have been rather disrespectfully described as pack-animals and it is true that individualism of the late-schizomorph kind has made little headway in the Motherland. Even if they move away from some of the more traditional ways of life, Aristasians require an in-group in which to live and move and have their being.

The Clubs create one such group. They often have particular activities associated with them such as fencing or poetry, and they may meet other like-minded clubs for contests, exchanges of ideas or joint exhibitions of work. Another is created by the Lay-Colleges, some of which have filial ties to the great Universities, others of which are simply small private establishments. As they are primarily living places, their courses of compulsory study are often small. Queen Mayanna House simply requires one essay or major poem per year as a condition of membership: but these essays and poems have often taken their place among the most admired literature in the Western World, for the Annual Opus (as it is called) stimulates the best efforts of some of the finest minds in Trent and Novaria.

Queen Mayanna is a daughter-house of Goldcrest College, Milchford University, and nearly all its members are Old Goldcrestiennes. This gives the college a somewhat cosmopolitan character as girls from all over the Western Empire, and some from the East go up to Milchford, and a few of them move on afterwards to Queen Mayanna House; so while the College has a largely South-Trentish and West-Novarian character, it does contain girls from many different lands.

From Lady Carleon Investigates: The Adventure of the Crystal Staff

Miss Sushuri Madonna wrote:
I have always adored kaleidoscopes and the way they create order out of chaos. I spoke to lhi Raya about them and here is some of what she taught me: Cosmos means “order” hence our word “cosmetic” because beauty=order (much to the chagrin of the anarcho-bongo). A kaleidoscope is literally a beautiful-form or beautiful-order scope (kalos=beautiful + eidos=form).

And the order, or beauty, is imposed by mirrors. What is a mirror metaphysically? One thinks of the Mirror of Wisdom, one of the traditional titles of Our Lady. The mirrors transform (perhaps illusorily, but then is not all manifestation in some sense illusion) the apparent randomness or chaos of insensate matter into the form and symmetry that we see wherever the hand of Dea has directly shaped Her creation, in the intelligent design of a flower, a snowflake, a crystal or a bird.

The kaleidoscope also gives the lie to the dreary, predictable anarcho-bongo who claims to prefer disorder to order and thinks assymetry is “more interesting” than symmetry. Not only knows she nothing of metaphysical truth; she knows nothing of her own real mind. For no one finds the random scattering of beads and scraps of cellophane in a kaleidoscope either interesting or beautiful until order and symmetry are imposed on them by the tiny daughters of the Mirror of Wisdom.

Lady Aquila further expounded:
Fascinating. The number 7 is made up of the earthly number 4 and the celestial number 3, so the Seven Great Janyati are sometimes called the three Celestials and the four Terrestrials (not much mentioned in Telluria because “Terrestrial” could be so easily misunderstood or over-literalised).

So often we see the four Terrestrials working together: the Way of Wisdom (Sai Mati), the Way of Love (Sai Sushuri), the Way of Works or ritual action (Sai Thame) and the Guardian of the Ways (Sai Vikhe).

In the Kaleidoscope we see Wisdom (Sai Mati), Order, or Harmony (Sai Thame) and Beauty (Sai Sushuri) in perfect accord. Are they not the three mirrors of the traditional kaleidoscope? But what of Sai Vikhe (A question the warrior will always ask)? Is she not the casing of the kaleidoscope that protects it from the outside influences that would disrupt its temenos or sacred enclosure?

Miss Sushuri Madonna replied:
What a wonderful explanation of Sai Vikhe’s role in this instance.

One sometimes wonders what is the function of Sai Vikhe under peaceful conditions (well, I do, being a shroom of very little brain), but this helps me see more clearly how the general principle of “protecting” may apply in many ways.

It also clarifies for me the widespread devotion to Sri Durga as a protecting mother – I am sure there must be a similar cultus of Sai Vikhe in the Motherland. As a child of Sai Sushuri, that had perhaps been a little obscure to me. But today – well, do you know how sometimes a light just turns on in one’s heart? That is what happened.

Thank you, my lady. I feel I have learned an important thing today.
______________________________
Here you can see how a kaleidoscope works to spin order out of disorder:
Kaleidoscope Toy

Miss Barbara admits:
I’m writing to prattle on about how utterly wonderful uniforms are. We all love a nurse in a crisp white uniform, and what blonde’s knees don’t tremble at the sight of an aviatrix in dress uniform or a sailor pette all decked out in her lovely white and blue? We know the joys of seeing pettes in uniforms, but have we ever stopped to think about why uniforms are so thrilling? I think it might be because when we see a girl in a uniform, we see first her archetype and her function, and then we notice the girl underneath, all the more attractive for being a bit hidden by these greater and grander things. We love those girls who give themselves over to their functions because we know that by doing so, they are helping build the civilization to which we belong. Though I personally don’t wear a nurse’s or sailor’s uniform, I do often think of my hat, gloves, makeup, and up-to-date clothes as my Aristasian uniform, which I wear very proudly, of course!

Caridwen asked:
I read: “The commonest “religious position” in Aristasia is that of Deanism – a broad worship of the mother. The Daughter-Mythos is debated. It is widely loved, but in most cases, the simple worship of the Mother is considered “safer” in the sense of being quite clearly founded [in Tellurian terms] and not an innovation that could be of human origin.”

Why is the Daughter-Mythos debated and considered to be possibly of human origin? I had thought, from reading the scriptures, that it was divinely given – is that not so?

Princess Mushroom answered:
As I understand it that is the core of the debate. The current text of the Daughter-Mythos is clearly [in Tellurian terms] of recent origin. It is about thirty years old.

Some people regard it as Divinely-inspired and as a revelation of the fullness of Deanic faith in a form suited to the current world-era. These are the people we call Filianists.

Others – a greater number – regard these stories as beautiful and valuable and as revealing the Mother in Her aspect of transmitting light to the world.

Others again would accept the Daughter-aspect of Dea in such figures as Kuan-Yin, the Regarder of the Cries of the World but would not see the Daughter-Mythos as having the same authority as a clearly Divinely-established tradition such as that of Kuan-Yin.

The story of the Daughter’s death and Her rescue from the Nether Regions by Her Mother has been regarded by some people as the most powerful and moving Resurrection story available in this world-era, and would take the view that whether or not it is Divinely inspired, it gives us a powerful experience of the true pre-patriarchal death-and-resurrection.

The differences between the various approaches are relatively subtle, since all of us love the same Mother.

Lady Aquila continued:
Her highness puts the matter very clearly. If we wish to speak of “Theological positions” I would identify broadly two:

1: The pure Filianist who takes the Daughter-mythos to be divinely inspired and a sort of revelation for our times.

2: The pure Deanist who rejects the sacrificial element and sees the Mother as pure joy, or else finds the Daughter-mythos too uncertain to place faith in.

However most Aristasians, in my experience, do not feel the need for such strong “positions”. We place our certainty and trust in our Mother; we feel, both from tradition and in our hearts the validity of the Daughter-Principle, and we feel that the Daughter-Mythos expresses this very beautifully.

Like most traditional people who accept the Golden Legends of the saints or the “myths” associated with the Buddha (so much derided by the suburban rationalism of the modernist scholar), our primary reactions are loving and devotional rather than “critical” in the modern Western sense.

For we who call ourselves Deanists, the Mother will always be the centre of our faith and our hearts, but the drawing of doctrinal Lines of Exclusion is of no importance to us.

Let us leave that to the sectarianising and combative spirit of late Patriarchy (whether manifested in conflicting sects or scholarly scepticism). Surely it is all part of the unbalanced Vikhelic tendency with its continual urge to discord and separation.

Let us be united as sisters in the love of the Mother who created us all.

See also: Deanism at the Encyclopaedia Aristasiana

Raya Chancandre Aquitaine wrote:
One of the arithmetical symbolisms concerning the number seven is its representing the union of the spiritual number 3 and the material number 4.

According to this symbolism, the seven Janyatic Principles govern the elements as follows:

Sai Sushuri: Water
Sai Vikhe: Fire
Sai Thame: Earth
Sai Mati: Air

Aethyr, being the principle from which all four material elements derive, is governed by the three Janyatic Principle which, in this symbolism, represent the Spirit. The two Luminaries, the Sun and Moon, as we have often noted, are types of the Mother and Daughter, while Sai Rhave, the Dark Planet, represents according to this scheme, the Dark Mother who is unknowable to us and into whom the manifest cosmos will return at the end of time. Thus, from the point of view of material manifestation, She may be associated, like Sai Rhave, in a certain sense with old age and death, while from the spiritual perspective, She represents enlightenment and liberation from the Wheel of Werde.

So, we may continue our schematisation with:

Sai Raya }
Sai Candre } Aethyr
Sai Rhave }

See Also: The Seven Great Janyati

Jenilow is the major Arcadian city in the southern “panhandle” of that country. The city proper has a population of 821,350 (3326 est.) and boasts the historic Abileschen castle downtown. The city is laid out as though its streets form a giant wheel, with the castle at its centre. Jenilow is known for its festive procession in Maia, as well as for its textile and ceramic industries.

Jenilovian culture is distinct both from that of Upper Arcadia and from that of the surrounding nations. It has a curious technics – advanced almost to Novarian standards and yet highly Arcadian in style. It is also more Estrenne in feeling than most of Novaria (which is itself quite “Estrenne”, especially in the East of the country).

Those familiar with Jenilow say that certain pictures of Meiji era Japan are the closest Tellurian images to convey the cultural atmosphere of Jenilow. Obviously the comparison is only indicative and does not go beyond the visual impression, but it is still useful.

The current Mayor of Jenilow is Lady Maylana Rosemont. The Mayor, of course, administers the City of Jenilow and the Countess the County of Jenilow, of which the City is the County Town. Jenilow City is also the capital of the Archduchy of Jenilow, a huge “nation within a nation” that occupies most of the so-called “Jenilow peninsula” (it is not a true peninsula, of course, because it is surrounded not by water but by two non-Arcadian nations).

Jenilow Castle was originally the primary seat of the Archduchess of Jenilow – which it still is: it has long also been a triple seat of government, for it houses the council-chamber of the Countess of Jenilow and the chambers of the Mayor of Jenilow. All three dignitaries have extensive living quarters in the great building.

Castles were first built in early Imperial times. They were essentially fortified palaces, usually surrounded by large fortified enclosures. In those days the Outlander hordes still occasionally made incursions into the Eastern and Northern lands. One must also remember that certain classes of demon took on a far more physical form than has usually been the case in Telluria (the Great Demon in the Paper Peonies story is typical of this – and there were also demon armies).

The castle and its walled enclosure was a place where the puhrani (citizens) could retreat and be safe when danger threatened. Some cities were also walled for the same reason.

In later times and further west, the castle style of architecture, with turrets and other fortification-style features (in a more western style) was often adopted, for it had become a symbol of the Great Central Enclosure. On certain occasions the fortification could still provide a refuge against dark incursions, though its function was now largely symbolic.

Jenilow is 42 minutes by rail from Ladyton. The direct land-journey from Jenilow to Ladyton takes place almost entirely on Novarian soil and is not far short of a thousand miles (some suggest it may be more like 500 miles – distances are notoriously difficult to calculate between worlds). Clearly such a distance by train in such a time would be impossible anywhere in Arcadia (even including the Jenilow “peninsula” which is more technically advanced than the rest of that realm). However, the journey connects with the Royal Novarian Golden Arrow Line “super-bullet-express” which connects Southern Novaria with Ladyton and Novarayapurh.

These “super-bullet trains” are the only supersonic land-craft currently used in the Empire. Such speeds are considered unsafe for other land vehicles. The super-bullets are regarded as land-craft, although they are actually hover-trains and do not touch the ground while in operation. The “rails” are in fact force-guides rather than physical rails. At the speed they travel, the friction involved in wheeled locomotion would be unmanageable.

Miss Sushuri Madonna wondered:
We have often been told how the symbol of the Cross, and other related symbols, can be read either “vertically” or “horizontally” – that is, either with the vertical bar representing the Celestial Ray and the horizontal bar representing the outward expansion of a material universe, or with both bars representing expansion in four directions and the Centre representing the point of descent of the Spiritual dimension.

Akin to this, in the case of a flag, might we not say that while on one level the cross on the flag represents a symbol of centrality, on another the flagpole, which is vertical and unmoving, represents the spiritual Axis, while the flag, which blows in the wind and is constantly changing, represents the world of material flux and change?

Raya Chancandre Aquitaine confirmed:
Thank you for your interesting point, Miss Sushuri. You are quite correct. On one level while the flagstaff represents the Pillar of Light that “moveth not by the breadth of an hair” the flag represents the moving world of individuals and nations. We may also note that the flag may fly out in all directions of the compass according to the changing winds of the world, while the staff will always represent the Centre, in accordance with the words:

Earth moves, but Heaven is still. The rim revolves, but the Centre remains without motion. [The Clew of the Horse]

Some people say Asia Minor, where the West is closest to the East, is the true cradle of civilization. The remains of the earliest pre-patriarchal cities were discovered in Asia Minor. Catal Hoyuk (pictured left) is the most famous – and even Troy, which was thoroughly patriarchal, had the support of the Amazoni – the last gasp of Tellurian feminine civilization – against the super-patriarchal Greeks. Penthesilea, the Amazon Queen, was slain at Troy by Achilles at a time when the era of patriarchy was becoming firmly established. It had not always been so. In earlier and more glorious centuries the Amazoni had stormed and taken Athens itself.

Raya Chancandre Aquitaine comments:
The Near East is sometimes called the Cradle of Civilization, referring once to the early patriarchal Empires, and now that archaeologists know a little more, and rather grudgingly, to the feminine-centred city-states that are known to predate them in the same area.

However, traditional science tells us that:

a) Humanity is far older than the ten or so millennia involved in all this

b) Humanity has been in a state of decline since the beginning.

So even the earlier feminine-centred city states uncovered in Asia Minor go back no further than the late Age of Bronze, and still belong to the final fifth of the current World-Cycle. The Ages of Gold and Silver still lie far in the past and occupy a time far longer than the ages of Bronze and Iron (the current Age) put together.

How then can we accept these earliest known – but still relatively recent in terms of the entire Cycle – cities as the Cradle of Civilization?

In terms of materialistic science, we know very little of humanity before the Age of Bronze. We have enough evidence to make clear that these societies were feminine-centred and Deanic. They have left little other evidence of their culture, which allows the “evolutionist” school (which is really a “progressist” school, since serious Darwinism cannot allow of biological evolution over these comparatively short time-periods) to declare that these peoples were “primitive” and to compare them to modern tribal societies – which are, in fact, not “primitive” but decadent*.

What we know from Traditional science is firstly that our ancestresses were our superiors and secondly that they were less “consolidated” – less material. They saw things and beings we do not see (as the old tales make clear) and it is very likely that their main constructions were not on the material plane.

We know that there have been prohibitions, at various stages of Tellurian history, on developments that ritually enacted the descent into matter. Later, each of these prohibitions were lifted as the descent became inevitable and the arts in question were “released” to progressively consolidated ages as part of the necessary process of adaptation to the consolidating tendency of the Cycle.

Some of these prohibitions were:

Upon building in stone

Then upon building in hewn stone (even after this was lifted, some sacred edifices must still be of unhewn stone).

Upon the use of metals

Then upon the use of iron, the most consolidated of the metals, and the one belonging to Sai Vikhe, and being, in Telluria, ritually associated with the patriarchal order.

The word civilization, from civitas: city, means specifically city-culture. In late-Telluria it tends to be used as a term for culture in the absolute since non-city cultures are derogated.

The Sacred City is an important Bronze- and Iron-Age concept and it may well go back further. However, not all cultures are city-based. My personal belief is that there have always been city-based cultures (or something equivalent to them), but that their material element has become progressively greater (or, going backwards, progressively less).

Before building in stone became permissible, cities would have been of wood, and will have left no traces for the archaeologist – though statues of stone were made at that time and do remain. In the earliest times – in the Golden Age – they may well have had no physical support at all; maid’s contact with the material realm being peripheral at most and her real life taking place in realms to which modern humanity has all but lost access.

The feminine-centred cities known to archaeology are called “neolithic” or “new stone age” which conjures in the lay mind pictures of primitive brutality. In actuality, cities such as Hacilar in Asia Minor some eight millennia ago, where the statue of Dea is seen everywhere, had two-story buildings constructed around a central courtyard with balconies overlooking the courtyards and hearths upstairs and down.

Nonetheless, the term “new stone age” does have a meaning, since this was the age when building in hewn stone was permitted but the use of metals was still restricted.

So the term “cradle of civilization”, if taken in the very limited sense “cradle of lithoidal civilization”, could perhaps be accurate.

If it is intended to mean that earlier cultures were not civilizations in the strictest sense, it is almost undoubtedly wrong. If it is intended to imply that those earlier cultures were “uncivilized” in the modern understanding of the term, or even “less civilized”, or even “not more civilized”, then it is completely erroneous.

“The cradle of the lesser civilization of the current world-era” is something of a mouthful. But it is much nearer to the truth.

On a bright and sultry moonlit even, somewhere in the old Southlands of Novarya, two creatures (were they blondes or were they little mushroom-creatures?) walked far later than they really should have done. They came to a running stream beside a rocky cliff, and from somewhere, perhaps from a cave in the cliff, echoed haunting voices singing wordlessly the tune of the old Novaryani lullaby known as “Khindri”. We are privileged to have a brief record in sound of that memorable evening (since attached to a kinnie scene):

Undines in South Novarya

Were they the undines – the water-elementals – told of from of old, singing to sleep, perhaps, some human blonde-child or brunette-child stolen from her mothers on such a night as this?

We shall never know, for the listeners, shivering unaccountably despite the humid heat of that southern night, stole swiftly and silently back to their home.

Perhaps you will listen and decide for yourself.

Miss B* raised a fascinating question:
In Alice Lucy Trent’s The Feminine Universe, a key Aristasian study text, the first chapter, entitled “The Image of the Cosmos”, begins with a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche: “The total nature of the world is…..to all eternity chaos, not in the sense that necessity is lacking, but in that order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom and whatever other human aesthetic notions we may have are lacking…..Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these…..neither does it know any laws. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities. There is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress….. Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”

A “species of the dead”, eh? I know I am not very good in the mornings, but I object to being called a “species of the dead”! What the blazes is old Fred driving at with that particular line of thought? (Oh dear, I fear that I am sounding rather like my sister, Eve! She came home for a weekend visit, and perhaps some of her “banter” has been left lurking) What I mean to say is, how can it be that “the living being is a species of the dead”? and why “a very rare species”? Also, what does Miss Trent intend in opening her book with such a quotation? The subtitle to The Feminine Universe is “An Exposition of the Ancient Wisdom from the Primordial Feminine Perspective”. So how does Herr Nietzsche lead in to such themes? I suppose one clear answer is to get through the entire chapter and see the full picture.

Miss Serendra Serelique replied:
To begin with, those unfamiliar with the chapter being discussed may find it here. As you will see, the quotation with which it opens is put forward not as an example of the Aristasian philosophy, but of its opposite. The point being made is that while this outlook may seem stark and brutal, it is logically the same as the popular “scientistic” (as opposed to scientific) view of the universe put inculcated by the schools and mass-media of Telluria and believed by most people.

What we have to consider here is the particular expression used by Nietzsche: “Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”

This is the culmination of a series of statements denying that the universe possesses order, harmony or intelligence — a denial that is perfectly logical, and indeed necessary, if one adheres to the view that the universe is simply an accidental phenomenon — a chance falling-together of atoms and molecules — rather than a manifestation of a higher or spiritual principle. And let us note that these two views are the only two possible. There is no middle ground between them. Nietzsche’s view may sound extreme, but it is not extreme. It is only a statement in very plain and frank language of what the materialist or accidentalist view of the universe really involves.

And let us further note that this materialist or accidentalist view, while it is utterly predominant in the thought-world of modern Telluria, is a very isolated and strange one. It has never been conceived of in any continent but Europe, and not in Europe before the seventeenth century. Every other people, every other civilisation, has adhered to some form of Essentialism. That is, to the belief that the manifest universe is the creation or reflection or emanation of a spiritual Principle, whether that Principle be called God or the Tao, Brahman or Atman.

And even though such a view has its roots in the seventeenth-century “enlightenment” (a curious name if ever there was one!) it did not become fully formed or even fully possible until Nietzsche’s time — that is, the later nineteenth century. So Nietzsche is considering a new phenomenon; a new view of the world: a view so appalling that Nietzsche expresses his reaction to it thus:

Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns… Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time?

He is not opposed to this view. He is promoting it. But he is expressing it in all the starkness of its real implications. Miss Trent notes later in the book that while Nietzsche is expounding a radically anti-traditional view he is doing so in terms of traditional symbolism. Everywhere the Sun symbolises the Spirit or the Divine. Again and again in tradition we find the Great Chain which connects all beings and runs from Heaven (the Sun, the Spirit) to earth. Nietzsche talks of the modern accidentalist philosophy in terms of breaking the Chain and losing the light and warmth of the Sun.

So on to this enigmatic statement: The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species. On the face of it, that is not so terribly mysterious. If life itself (according to a certain rather tendentious extension of Darwinian theory, which made total accidentalism theoretically possible for the first time) is the mere falling-together of carbon and hydrogen molecules under certain freak circumstances — if life, in other words, derives purely and solely from dead matter, then we may say that the living being is a species of the dead. A very rare one because only by the most extraordinary set of coinciding chances can this “life” be produced at all.

This, clearly enough, is what Nietzsche means; but what a peculiar and very telling way of expressing it. As in the Sun and Chain passage above, the entire background to this anti-traditional exposition is Tradition itself. The living being is a species of the dead: why? Because Life in the sense that Tradition has always understood it — the Divine Spark, the Breath of Spirit — is absent.

By a curious and very profound use of Language, Nietzsche reveals that in his heart he knows that the accidentalist view of life, the falling-together of bits and pieces of dead matter, is not actually life at all. Such a life, if it were (as he believes is to be) the nature of living beings, would not really be life at all, but only a species of the dead.

Today is dedicated to Sai Rayanna, also known as the Sun-Daughter.

Before our Era the greatest civilisation in Sai Herthe was that of the great Southern Continent, which was submerged at the end of the Age of Bronze. In the early part of the Age of Iron there was some continuation of that civilisation.

Attacks upon the world of maids by demonic forces increased during this period and the greatest force of defence against them was the Chenti, a civilisation-in-arms dedicated to Sai Vikhë and tracing its lineage back to the Old World.

However, in the Battle of Noonday Night, the Chenti were defeated by the demon-barbarians, and their great Princess Caran was slain, along with most of her people. Her sword, given to her ancestors by Sai Vikhe herself, was broken — a sign of the final destruction of the Chenti.

Caran, with her dying breath, charged that the pieces of the sword should be preserved and given to the One who was worthy to re-forge and wield them.

After many adventures, the shattered sword came to the city of Caire and its Princess Rayanna, the young earth-born daughter of Sai Raya, who re-forged the sword and took it into battle to defeat the demonic hordes and their terrible ruler.

By this act she won the allegiance of all the Rayins of the world, and her city of Caire, far in the East, became the capital of the new civilisation.

All subsequent Empires are the continuation of this one, including the present Westrenne Empire, and all Aristasian Empresses are descended from Sai Rayanna, the incarnate Sun.

See Also:
The Imperial Anthem, which tells the story of Sai Rayanna
The Warrior Queen, which compares Sai Rayanna to Durga

Miss Barbara asked:
Your esteemed correspondent uses the word “Sucrescent” to describe the colour of the milky pink Gamebaby Advance. I have looked this word up in two dictionaries and cannot find it. Is it an Aristasian word? And what does it mean?

This was the reply:
Sucrescent is an Aristasian word. It is a little hard to translate exactly as it implies a world of thought which is somewhat unusual to the modern Tellurian mind. All that in just describing a colour!

Essentially Sucrescent means “Pertaining to the Angel (or Genia) Sucri (Sushuri)”. Sucri corresponds to the Tellurian planet and goddess Venus (Aphrodite). Both the colour pink and milk are things that correspond to Sucri, so milky pink is particularly Sucrescent.

It may seem a little strange to bring angels or deities into everyday conversation about things like games machines, but it should be understood that everything in the world is shaped by divine essences and that the seven Great Geniae are among the most salient of these essences. To see things in terms of them is natural to an Aristasian and is not considered to be profaning the sacred, but rather making sacred the things of daily life. More correctly, seeing the sacred that is already in them.

Some will ask – Is a lightgame machine inherently sacred? We should reply – did the inventor of the lightgame machine invent the colour pink? Can anyone invent a colour? No. The colours were there before we entered world. We can only use the colours that Dea has created and they will mean what they meant when She created them unless we pervert their meanings. Of colours this is clearly true, but it is also true of everything else. We cannot create forms. Forms are inherent in the Universe and before that in the Intelligence that shapes the Universe. We can only work with the forms that are – combine and manipulate them, but not create them.

Thus a story or a game or an artefact, if it is true to Form and does not pervert it, will always reflect Divine reality. The Zelda stories, which tell of high princesses and noble adventurers and the eternal conflict of good and evil are a case in point.

The word Vikhelic is another word of the same kind. It means “Pertaining to the Angel Vikhe”. Vikhe is equivalent to the Tellurian planet and god Mars (though, of course, she is feminine), and the term “Vikhelic arts” is precisely equivalent to the Tellurian term “martial arts” – though the divine origins of the word “martial” are largely forgotten in modern Telluria.

The rulers of the Aristasian nations are their respective Queens who are advised by non-elected advisors, somewhat the equivalent of senior civil servants – that is professional managers of State who help the Queen to do what she wants to do.

The job of the Queen, as titular and political Head of State, is essentially to facilitate the Dance of the Cosmos as it is reflected in the microcosm of her nation – not to change the steps, either according to her own ideas or to the latest fashions. Obviously certain changes must sometimes be made in adaptation to changing conditions, but these are rarely controversial and always tactful. It is the essence of the State to be literally stately. That is what Princesses are trained for from the earliest age.

There are parliaments in most nations, but these are of much less importance than in Telluria. They debate certain subjects and make formal recommendations to the Queen which are usually acted upon, though this is entirely at the Royal discretion. Again these recommendations are rarely controversial.

Most parliaments do not have general elections, but a representative is elected when required – when one resigns or dies. In many cases, though, a representative will serve for a certain limited period such as five years, but it is not usual that all places should be elected at once. The limitation is more because the duty of service is seen as one that should have some term than to limit the power of a member or faction. Though some keen parliamentarians stand for re-election again and again. The job is not too arduous as most parliaments convene only a few times a year.

See Also: “Politics in Aristasia” at the Encyclopaedia Aristasiana

Miss Amalya Corinthian wondered:
In Telluria, some names are considered mascul, and others femin. Is this a schizomorphic practice, or do Aristasians consider some names more blonde/brunette than others? I was thinking about it, and it seems that way, at least to me, but only with certain names, so this is likely a lot more fluid than its Tellurian counterpart.

Raya Chancandre Aquitaine answered:
You are exactly right. In the matter of names, Aristasia is more fluid. In Telluria nearly all names are definitely mascul or femin, just as nearly all clothes (at least traditionally) are so. In Aristasia there are some names that would normally be for blondes and others for brunettes, but the majority are usable for either sex. In The Princess and the Captain, Antala is definitely a brunette name, as is Claralin. Clarala is a more likely blonde form. Sushuri is almost always a blonde name. Thamë/Thamla is usually brunette.

Sometimes this may be a local or temporary phenomenon – for example if a famous person has held a particular name, children named after her will tend to be of the same sex that she is.

Aristasia is also more fluid in the matter of clothes, although many brunettes will shy off “very blonde” clothes. Some blondes, however, consider it cute to dress in styles that seem quite brunette.

In some parts of the East there are clothes that may only be worn by a particular sex, but such places will also tend to have rules (or at least strong customs) as to which clothes may be worn by particular ages and Estates too.

Starting on the Path of Devotion could not be easier. Our Celestial Mother, like every mother, is always ready to accept the love of Her children.

It is good if you have a picture or a statue of Her. It should be one that you find attractive. One that speaks to you of Her love and beauty. It might be a picture of Mahalakshmi, or a statue of Mother Mary. It might be a picture of Kwan Yin. You might wish to feel the protection of Dea in her mighty form as Sri Durga. Whatever form you love, choose that. Then you can look upon Her form when you talk to Her.

It is traditional also to bring Her gifts. Light candles before Her; burn a little incense. Once you have your picture or statue of Her and have placed some candles and perhaps an incense burner before it, you already have your first Shrine. If you can, it is nice to bring fresh flowers to the shrine and offer them to Dea.

These are very simple things, but simple love always pleases our Mother. Say good morning to Her when you arise and bid Her goodnight when you go to bed. These are the elementary courtesies that a child pays to her mother. It is also considered proper in many circles to bow when you approach Her image or when you pass it.

Another common practice is to offer food to Her before eating it. This is something like saying a simple grace, but the difference is that instead of merely thanking Her for Her bounty, we are giving the food to Her. It is said that she consumes the true essence of the food and that we eat Her leavings, which is the material part of the food. But by Her eating it, the food is blessed and we ourselves taste something of its true essence, which our worldly tongues are unable to do.

These are some simple practices that will start you on the Path of Devotion. If they become part of your life, you will be a devotee of Dea.

Full article: Devotion to God the Mother

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.

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 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 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.

Princess Peach is the Nintendo heroine who, though frequently kidnapped in her early life, has survived to become an active, adventurous and sporting princess. She is most Aristasians’ preference when playing light games. But is she a blonde or a brunette?

Miss Lindie reports:
Princess Peach is assuredly a blonde and always has been. Her hair seems to vary from light red to pale lemon – whether from nature or choice we cannot say. But it is true there are some enigmas in her history. In Nippon, she was always called Peach, however in the West there were various changes. In the original Donkey Kong the girl was Pauline – not royal and probably only a distant relation to Peach. Once the Princess arrived in the West, she was at first called Princess Toadstool. The name Peach only became fully current in the 3D era. Also there were some games in which the Princess was Daisy, an auburn brunette.

This is not really as confusing as it sounds. We now know that Princess Peach’s full name is Princess Peach Toadstool, while in Mario Tennis, the Princesses Peach and Daisy are shown to be two separate characters who can play doubles together or compete with one another. This should not be confusing to an Aristasian. Princess Daisy is Princess Peach’s brunette cousin who has at times in true Aristasian Life Theatre tradition enacted the role of her royal relative. She is in fact the ruler of another realm.

Both girls, though entitled Princess, are in fact rulers in their own right. Another curious fact is that while Princess Peach is human in form, her subjects are all Mushroom People, like Kinopio. This raises the question of marriage. It would clearly be impossible for Princess Peach to marry one of her subjects. The anarchic Tellurian argument that royal personages “are just like other people and could marry anybody” would hardly cut much ice in the Mushroom Realm. The Princess must clearly marry another royal personage of her own – um – shape. Since royal marriages are often in the family, her brunette cousin Daisy might even be a possibility, uniting two illustrious realms in time-honoured fashion.

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.

Anita here again, pettes, with a little disquisition on satin, which no one has ever said is a completely innocent fabric! Chiffon and lace connote fragility, daintiness, vulnerability, but satin … well satin is what is known as a sensuous fabric, both to wear and to behold, and nowhere is satin more sensuously used than in Trent.

Now, satin is a special type of weave, one that has more warps than fillings on its surface, which is what causes its sheen. It can be woven from silk, rayon or even cotton. Silk satin is the finest and most expensive, although rayon satin is almost as good. Because of its reflective properties, satin makes a girl look larger than she is, so it is worn to greatest advantage by very slim pettes.

Satin did not really come into its own as the fabric for elegant evening wear until Mlle. Madelaine Vionnet of Western Vintesse invented the bias cut. Bias cut fabrics are cut across the grain, you see, which allows a garment to fall in a smooth, flowing vertical drape, and to be rather easily manipulated into clingy, slinky gowns of transcendent grace and elegance. Bias cutting is relatively wasteful of fabric, however, as a pattern must be laid diagonally across the bolt, but it produces garments that are so deliciously fluid that pettes are willing to pay a bit extra.

Take the stunning black ciré satin gown above, as worn by Ursula Jeans in Noelle Coward’s latest film, Cavalcade, which has just been released and is showing right now in local theaters all over Trent. The low, revealing bodice clings enticingly, as does the skirt down to the knees, where it is released into glistening folds which drape to the feet and spread over the floor. Daringly black and ultra-slinky, modesty is maintained by a delicate bow of tiny diamonds applied to the decolletage, echoed by the jewels on the bracelets and on the scarlet red feathered fan.

To the right is Mary Lou Dix in a rather plain gown of pale lavender bias-cut satin. Its lines are almost severely simple and classic, yet its impact is in no way lessened thereby. On the contrary, the gown’s utter simplicity displays Miss Dix’s perfect figure without interposing the least distraction.

But bias-cut satin drapes so beautifully that even when the design is complex and unusual, a woman’s figure cannot be easily concealed.

Look at Miss Carole Lombard in this close-fitting evening gown of black satin. The skirt appears twisted in a large, draped bow just above the knees, trailing off into a narrow train, echoed by a twisted halter held in place about neck and shoulders by a large diamond clip. At the risk of trying your patience, dearest pettes, let me finally show you Miss Lombard in the same dress, now covered with an unusual three-quarter-length cape of black satin, broadly banded in black monkey fur which falls outward in sprays.

Once again, girls, the quiet, self-possessed air of these women is not at all unusual in Trent. You will easily find see it in studio stills from the province such as these. You won’t find any blank stares, nor any hint of hostile or indifferent alienation either, as I understand is quite common among models in the place called the Pit: Trentish women are always connected to everything around them not despite, but because of their self-possession.

Lady Aquila wrote:
The Aristasian salute touches either the left shoulder or the left side of the chest (there are many variants on the salute – not random – each military or other group using it will have its own strictly-observed form). Nonetheless the reference is to the heart (which is on the left side) and to the shoulder or arm (which is the instrument of action).

That the (relatively late) Tellurian salute should touch the head, which is the centre of lunar reason, which in turn is the focus of the rationalist revolution which ushered in the rajasic age in West Telluria, does not seem insignificant.

The salute to the head is known in Aristasia as are some other salutes used in different places and circumstances. The salute to the head generally has the effect of being jauntier and less formal than the standard salute, though there are a few contexts in which it is officially used. It has been used in pictures on the Aristasia Friends site largely because it is more readily recognised by newcomers than the standard Aristasian salute.

Miss Carola wrote:
I got a vision of a beautiful place in Elektraspace, with gorgeous and sentimental pictures of Dea. A place where Devotional practices like chanting are explained and also a basic and easy to understand philosophy. It is so beautiful and created with so much love, that the hearts of the visitors rejoice. Can we make this possible? I believe many travellers in this dry and hostile desert of the pit, will be glad to rest and refresh in such an oasis.

Miss Annalinde replied:
Interestingly, we have been thinking about just such a place. I think there should be a “library” there for the more serious philosophy as we have been discussing it. But for most people it is not necessary to go into such depth. As you say, the philosophy should be expressed as simply as possible, with the facility for any one who wishes to go more deeply into it.

Devotion should be the main theme of the site, and as you say, it should be an oasis for the thirsty soul, with beautiful pictures of Dea and simply-explained devotional practices, as well, perhaps, as some important texts.

I hope our discussions here are preparing us and leading up to the creation of such a place.

This discussion occurred about three years ago at the Aristasian Spirtuality Group, and may have contributed to the eventual creation of the Chapel of Our Mother God last year.

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.

Novaria is a very beautiful southern nation. Her southern coastline is on the Bay of Doves and in the north the mighty river Thamëaut runs through her on its way to Trent. There are many beautiful lakes such as the great Ushasti.

Two languages are spoken in Novaria: Westrenne (which is very like our English) and Raihiralan Cairenne. Most Westrenne-speaking Novarians speak with a Raihiralan accent even if they do not speak Raihiralan. The nation has very strong ancestral ties with the East, and in many ways is the most traditional of the Western nations. It is also, however, by far the most technically advanced. One will find there many things from family skyjets to personal force-fields (‘auries’) with temperature control, allowing blondes to walk abroad even in the harsh mountain winters in light and fashionable clothes from the south.

Novarian towns include Novarayapurh or Nevrayapurh (New Rayapurh), the capital, and Westeringsea, across the river from Goldhaven, on the Trent border. Ladyton, the capital of the Celestial Empire, is situated at the intersection of Trent, Vintesse and Novaria.

Miss Violet Viola considers numbers:
Measurements as “cold numbers with an abstract unit” are indeed a Rationalistic behaviour. Measurements before this period were less “numerical” and had a lot to do with the essence of things. Length measurements for the Romans and ancient populations were “arms” and “steps”. Liquid measurements were “amphors”. These measurement units were somehow “tangible”, not “abstract”. The metre was established in 1791, in the period of the Rationalistic revolution, and its meaning or reason is something abstract, while the yard is more linked to the tangible physical reality.

Aristasia is a world where things have a deeper link between themselves. The so-called (for and by Tellurians) “invisible world” is not so invisible in Aristasia. There is a relationship between things, between everything.

Lady Aquila expands on these ideas:

The French Revolution, with its aggressive and regicidal this-worldly rationalism, forced the metric system first on France and then on most of Europe. It was a system deliberately conceived to eradicate the “superstitious” (read spiritual and traditional) nature of real measurements.

Traditional Geometry was passed to patriarchal Europe, from much more ancient sources, by Pythagoras and Plato, both of whom were fully aware of its higher significance: a significance still expounded (though rarely understood) by the teachers of the surviving symbolic system of Freemasonry – one of the last West-Tellurian examples of a true traditional generation-to-generation transmission of doctrine.

Your picture of Geometria is very significant. Geo-metria means earth-measurement. And while the earth is strongly represented with its mountains, trees and rivers, Geometria does not touch it. Indeed her lower parts – the legs and feet which would connect her to the physical earth – are missing. She floats in a cloud, signifying spiritual or angelic quality, and yet she inscribes the fundamental shapes on which all earthly things are based.

Contemplating her image, we learn something of the apparent contradiction between true and false measurement.

True, traditional measurement seems on the surface much more concrete. Its terms relate to feet, paces and thumbs – and yet it is based in the higher principles of being.

False, rationalistic, measurement seems purely abstract. Its names mean nothing but “measure” plus fractional numbers. And yet is is bound wholly to the visible world and is entirely ignorant of every trace of higher significance.

Also see The Image of the Cosmos and Aristasian Standards

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.

Miss Norma, our Kadorian fashion expert, declares:
Today we must take up a fashion matter I have flagrantly neglected: hair styles! (I do tend to get carried away with millinery matters, but then, I can’t help myself, hats are so grand!) Hair style has become more important now than ever, because for the first time in almost a decade there is a sea-change in the offing. The flowing shoulder-length styles of Eastern Kadoria, with their smooth, neatly contained masses of hair, sometimes further defined by a hairnet, are now giving way to light, fresh, shorter, almost fluffy styles from Western Kadoria – a brand-new look! If you want to be turned into the prettiest girl at Miss Barbara’s party, you might consider booking an appointment this afternoon at your local coiffeuse to try out one of these new hair-do’s.

As shown in this photo, the future for short hair is a gentle winging away from the face. Hair is cut two-and-a-half to three inches all over the head and scalloped upwards into soft feminine waves at the sides. This is an easy and versatile style, which takes almost no time to care for, so it is ideal for a pette-on-the-go. Bracelet of pearls, pink Italian coral and gold, with buttons and earrings to match.

But you long-haired pettes needn’t despair, Western Kadoria has something for you, too, which might make you the prettiest one at the party! The new fashion for longer hair lies in silken-smooth, close-to-the-head arrangements highlighted (and held in place) by veiling, combs, jewels or flowers. This pette wears smooth bangs with low waves brushing back to a cluster of curls held in place with ribbon and combs. (Glistening locks, courtesy of regular shampooing, of course!) Note the lovely little bouquet of bachlorette’s buttons at the shoulder!

Last is a more traditional Western Kadorie style for hair of middle length. Again, sides are scalloped upwards in soft, close-to-the-head waves. Here a yard of 15-inch mauve veiling goes over the head and ties in back. Hold in place with pretty hatpins. Nice on dancing dates, but I would not wear this style to a party where there is any hope, er, I mean danger of rough brunettes – one might be a target! Stay on the qui vive,, pettes, brunettes can be powerfully moved by hairstyles, and I have heard quite a bit about Miss Barbara’s cocktail parties!!

Lady Aquila wrote:
In Aristasia, as in all traditional cultures, the body is seen as microcosmos – the cosmos in miniature, with the interconnexions between the Great Body of the world, the small body of an individual maid and the body as a general, as opposed to an individual, phenomenon being a fundamental element in our understanding of each.

The heart is the Solar centre in maid, as the Sun is in the cosmos (the chest, by extension, refers to the heart, and also to the lungs, which are the source of breath - another aspect of the spirit – re-spir-ation is from the same word as spiritus).

The head is the lunar centre – so the light of reason is the reflected light of the solar Intellect, whose home in maid is the heart.

To touch first the forehead and then the chest is an in-gathering gesture, bringing exterior things (represented by the head) back to their true centre in the heart. It can be made in significance of receiving a teaching or a reprimand, thus it can also be a sign of humility. It can be made to acknowledge and centre ourselves in the Higher reality, or to show respect – gathering oneself in from the fragmented and peripheral world of the head to the still and Essential world of the heart.

Although in late western Telluria the heart has been taken as a (very loose) symbol for the emotions (so “heart vs head” means “reason vs emotion”), in Aristasia this is not the case. The heart is the centre of the Spirit, and thus of Pure Intellect. It is also the centre of Pure Love – first Divine Love and then its true reflection in human love. But it is not the centre of emotional impulses and passions. That is the stomach.

There is also an inverse form of this gesture, touching first the chest and then the forehead, and then opening the hand in a “giving” or “indicating” gesture. This is the “outward” gesture and is one of generosity. It might, for example, be used when inviting someone into one’s house. Its implication is “from my innermost being, through my exterior faculties, to you”.

Readers may be interested in a fragment of Old Aristasian literature that has recently come to light. It appears to be from a blank-verse drama concerning the Novacairen Princess Ithelia. Whether it is a translation of an older text or was originally written in Westrenne is not known, and, frustratingly, the subject of the conversation does not come to light.

Ithelia was a famous queen of Novacaire. This story is clearly set in her youth, when her mother, Ehrejene was still on the throne. While the story remains unclear, the piece provides us with a pleasing example of this style of rhetorical verse and gives a strong flavour of the ancient Aristasian East particularly in its powerful assimilation of the royal maidens to the sun and moon, which, we must understand, would have been for the writer far more than a mere literary simile.

The only points of elucidation that are really necessary is that “Rayin” (pronounced as one syllable) is the old term for “Queen”, and a Rani is a schoolmistress.

Ehrejene: Welcome thee Daughter, and enter thee close to our presence,
Speak freely the words that thy heart has engaged thee to say.

Itheleia: What is to say, shining Sun, that is not said already?
Or what words of mine can recolour the hue of thy heart?

Ehrejene: Speak you again, good my child, of these wearisome matters?
Wherefore come you nigh the great throne but to trouble me thus?
Are they not settled and done, O most radiant Daughter?
And wherefore should the Child seek to colour the heart of the Rayin?
Should not the heart of the Rayin be steadfast and unchanging?
Should it not weather the storm-winds, withstand the high flood?
Alter not in its bearing by even the breadth of a finger?
Alter not though a Child may weep tears that shall call forth her own?

Itheleia: All you say is most true, O most royal and radiant Mother.
For the words of the Rayin are like Scripture writ down in a book,
And whoso shall alter the book hath forsaken the pathway,
The pathway that leadeth the soul into radiant light.

Ehrejene: What is there more to be said, O most wise among childer?
All I should teach thee is by thee already beknown.
Go then thy ways and let peace ever cradle thy spirit,
Thy turbulent spirit that troubles herself without cause.
Go then thy ways, or yet better, remain with thy mother,
With thy Mother that loveth thee near; and disturb not the Rayin.

Itheleia: To my Mother most lief will I fly, like a bird at the even;
Like a bird that is young and whose small wings do tire from long flight;
Like a bird that hath held herself up on the wind’s mighty stairway,
Hath held herself up by a strength she doth scarcely possess.
To my Mother most lief will I come when my long flight is ended,
And that it were ended betimes doth my heart most desire,
Yet desireth in vain, for still must I bear myself upward,
Ever up must I climb to the radiant feet of the Rayin.

Ehrejene: O, Ithelie, my Child-

Itheleia: no, I pray thee, break not my flight’s rhythm,
For it cometh not easy, this scaling the wind’s subtle thread;
Neither call me thy Child, for I speak to thee not as a Daughter:
I speak to thee now as a Princess may speak to the Rayin.
O, most far-raying Sun, ’tis the Moon that has enter’d thy presence,
Who would tell thee of what she hath seen by her own lesser light.
For the words of the Rayin are like Scripture inscrib’d on a tablet,
And whoso shall change the least jot of them, surely she sins,
All these things know I well, and it needeth no Rani to teach me
For the Scripture is sure and eternal-but not so the Scribe.
The Scribe is a right goodly maid that is true to her calling,
Yet her finger may slip: and the light, may it not fail her eye?
And the Rayin, at the last, is a Scribe; and the words she declaimeth,
Are they not copied from those that are written on high?

Miss Alice Trent wrote:
The 28-day lunar month is a solar-year-in-miniature with four weeks (a week being one cycle of the seven Great Janyati) each representing a season – the Full- and Dark-moon weeks representing Summer and Winter respectively and the Crescent and Decrescent half-moon weeks representing Spring and Autumn respectively.

Miss Gillian asked:
Since the month is like a little year, would I be right in guessing that the day is also, with the morning as spring, afternoon as summer, evening as autumn and night as winter?

And am I also right in guessing that Easter and the direction East are related words?

Miss Alice Trent answered:
You are absolutely right, Miss Gillian. The day does correspond to the year in just the way you suggest, which is why Eostre was the goddess of Spring and dawn. As one would expect, midnight is the Winter solstice and noon the Summer solstice, while sunrise is the Spring equinox and sunset the Autumn equinox. Interestingly the “equinoxes” of the day only fall precisely into the cross-formation of the year (i.e. equidistant between the “solstices”) on the year’s own equinoxes.

“East” and “Easter” are related words as well as related concepts, as also are “Vesper” (evening) and “West”.

Miranda, chatting at the Cocktail Bar:
I introduced Rosie and Trudy to my Mommies, and of course they loved them both, R. and T. loved Blonde and Brunette Mommy, that is, because, well, who wouldn’t? My Mommies are just swell, the keenest any girl ever had. Everybody thinks so, even those rough brunettes down at school. Put big, ol’, “thinks she so impressive” Rhonda around my Brunette Mommy and Rhonda almost turns practically blonde. Because, you see, my Brunette Mommy is quite stern and strict. She always says Dea made her that way to prepare her for a “Life with Blondes,” like it’s one of the musical shows we all put on each fall at school. She says her life could be a musical show, what with a blonde wife (of course!), three blonde daughters (me and my two little sisters), an office filled with blonde employees, and the any number of blonde friends I bring home with me each day. But Brunette Mommy knows how to handle a blonde, and she is so stern that she rarely ever has to get very, um, determined to keep her blondes all soft, yielding, and sweetly blonde (for nothing is more unbecoming than a blonde who is trying to act like a brunette!).

And Blonde Mommy, well everyone adores her. She is the sweetest, most lovely, kindest, and softest mommy a girl could have. She always has time to play with her girls, to run around with us in the garden or play badminton in the back yard. She is so intelligent too, knows more than I ever will. You can always ask Blonde Mommy a question, and she’ll know the answer! She actually prepared at the university to be a professor, but even with all of her intelligence, she knew that the home life was more suited to her temperament than the academic life, so she is here with us. She is just so peachy. Do you know that she thinks only one birthday a year is not nearly enough for her little girls, so she throws each of us a half birthday party six months after our real birthday. She gets the half birthday girl half of a card, half of a cake and little silly gifts, all cut in half! Well, that’s the kind of mommies I have, so you can see why Trudy and Rosie were thrilled to meet them.

More from the Cocktail Bar

One way to Dea is the path of love, in contrast to the path of light (of knowledge or intellectual contemplation). There are certain groups in the motherland called the Sucrishi who lay much emphasis on chanting and a child-like simplicity in devotion.

Cuivahya wrote:
Do you know the word Sucrishi? It is an Aristasian word. It means “following the path of love”. It is like the Hindu bhakti. In the Motherland there are many approaches to Dea. There are great and complicated rituals. There are  studies and meditations and austerities. But the simplest way of all is the Sucrishi way, the Way of Love. And that way is open to everyone, no matter how far she may be from the Golden Temple of Rayapurh.

The Mother cannot resist your love, because no mother can resist the love of her child. Love is the straight way, the direct way, the perfect way to Dea.

So, perhaps you will say: “I do not know if I love Dea. I do not even know Her.”

Oh, yes, you know Her. She is your Mother. She made you. She is the deepest thing that you know. When all else is blown aside by the winds of time and impermanence, She is the thing that remains.

Ask the Mother to come to you as a perfect love for Her. For it is by Her Power that you will love Her. It is Her Love with which you will love Her, for She is the source of all love. Just ask Her, and She will come, for a mother never refuses her child’s cry. You may feel Her or you may not. Something very instant and obvious may happen, or it may take a long time – even years. But if you have asked Her, She has come. She has come now. How She comes, She will decide, and Her decision will be right.

As this year started on a Friday, it is ruled by Sai Sushuri. This is an edited version of the article on the janya from The Seven Great Janyati.

Sai Sushuri rules every kind of love, as well as beauty. At its root, all love is Divine Love, just as all beauty is Divine Beauty. It is the love of Dea for Her creation, the love of the soul for Dea and of Her creatures for one another. Just as beauty is the beauty of Dea, so love is the love of Dea. When we love Her, we do so with Her own love; hence the prayer to Dea to “Come into us as a perfect love for Thee”.

The Sushuric principle is often taken as the opposite of the Vikhelic. From another perspective, however, the true opposite of the Vikhelic principle is the Sushuri-Thamic. Love, beauty, order and harmony are closely woven together. Under normal circumstances, vikhë too is part of this harmony. Only in the Age of Iron, when the Vikhelic influence becomes disproportionate, is opposition between the principles noticeable (this is natural, since opposition itself is Vikhelic).

In Telluria, the polarity of femininity and masculinity is a polarity between the Sushuric and Vikhelic principles. In Aristasia the polarity between blonde and brunette is between the Sushuric and Thamic principles, which may be seen as a polarity between love and duty or between mercy and severity. However, the true principle of severity is that of Sai Rhavë, and we may see (to borrow a Quabbalistic expression) Sai Sushuri as the Pillar of Mercy and Sai Rhavë as the Pillar of Severity, with Sai Thamë as the central pillar, holding the two in balance.

In terms of spiritual paths, Sai Sushuri rules the Path of Love (or bhakti marga), and thus has a special significance for the Age of Iron. It is not a coincidence that bhakti is recommended as the most natural path for the Age of Iron and that the Sushuric principle is the opposite of the Vikhelic.

Sai Sushuri governs love at every level, from individual love and the love of family to a society bound together by concord and goodwill rather than by competition and the clash of parties and interests. Ultimately all these loves flow from and depend upon the love of the Mother. That love is the spiritual foundation of Aristasia.

Culverine the first (March 21st) is the first day of the New Year. Whether you call it New Year or Easter depends on how Filianic you are. It is, of course both.

Easter is one of the most fundamental names of Dea as bringer of Spring and Dawn. In Telluria the name derives directly from Teutonic Eostre (goddess of spring and dawn) who is the same as Greek Eos, Sanskrit Ushas, Semitic Ishtar/Esther. In the Hellenic and Indian traditions, Eos/Ushas was among the most important aspects of Dea worshipped before the masculinised pantheons came into being.

For Filianists Easter is the Resurrection of the Daughter. For Deanists the emphasis falls more on the creation of the world – the New Year being a microcosm of the Historical Cycle, and the Historical Cycle itself being a microcosm of the Day of Time – that is, the entire course of Cosmic Manifestation.

In either perspective Easter/New Year is a time of rebirth and revitalisation. As the resurrected Daughter walks over the barren earth, flowers grow at Her every step and the world becomes fruitful again.

The last day of the year is the 28th of Moura (18th March). For Filianists this is the day of the Daughter’s death. Non-Filianic Deanists usually regard it as the day of the “Inbreathing of Time” when the universe comes to an end and is breathed back into the Dark (i.e. unseen) Mother. As always this is primarily a matter of perspective rather than a “disagreement”. Non-Filianic Deanists are normally happy to attend Filianic Services and vice versa.

After the last day comes the Hiatus. In the Tellurian Calendar this leap year it is March the 19th and 20th but in the Aristasian calendar it has no date, for the Hiatus is outside the year. It represents the Night of Time. During it Filianists veil all statues and pictures of Dea. Very traditional Aristasians reduce all activity to a minimum on Hiatus, and it is generally considered ill advised for anyone to begin any important project or activity at this time.

Also see:
The Last Day of the Year

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.

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.

Miss Amalya Corinthian asked:
Having just finished reading the latest installment of The Princess and the Captain, I would like very much to reproduce the elegant curlicues with which the blondes and brunettes on the unfamiliar planet adorned their eyes. The problem is, I don’t want it to look terribly unnatural. I’ve tried a bit with eyeliner, but that seems to clump together too much. Any ideas? I want it to be really subtle, but elegant and feminine.

Princess Mushroom replied:
What sort of eyeliner do you use? In my view the best eyeliner for all purposes, but certainly the only type for “temple-style” eyes as described in The Princess and the Captain is liquid eyeliner.

I wear liquid eyeliner almost every day of my life. Girls sometimes ask how I manage to get it on so neatly. Actually it is not very hard. Anyone who knows me will confirm that I am an absolute g’doinker in the handicraft department. If I can do it, you can – believe me. Just set aside a little time – and some cleansing pads – for practice and you will soon be doing it beautifully.

I have never gone in for curlicues, but I do use a long extended stroke beyond the lower-lid lining which might be called “modified temple-style”.

People may differ on this but my personal experience leads me to say make sure you get liquid eyeliner with a brush. I have tried various brands (including some very expensive ones) that use pointy felt-tip-type applicators and I simply cannot manage them. A brush puts on the liner neatly without disturbing the skin (which causes smudges).

It does not need to be an expensive brand. The one I use most of the time comes at two shillings from a local street market. It is cheap, strikingly black, easy to apply and I love it to pieces.

Good luck!

Here is the passage which inspired Miss Corinthian:
Almost instinctively, raiAntala fell into step with the three youngsters as they marched to the café. It was down a cobbled side-street — a curious place with tinted windows and a pink-and-pale-blue neon sign. The design of everything was strange, and yet it reminded raiAntala of a dozen coffee bars she had haunted in Quirinelle. The strong rhythmic beat of the music that could be heard several doors away was very unlike Quirrie rock and roll, and yet had a certain decided kinship to it.

They entered a darkish room filled with a curious scented smoke. Tables and chairs in gleaming chrome were occupied by groups of brunettes, often dressed in black and with hair swept off their faces and rolled up into a coif with a spray of hair stiffened to stand up like a plume. Among blondes the fashion seemed to be for various shades of a pink lip-enamel lined with red. Among both sexes, heavy “temple-style” eyeliner seemed to be in fashion, often with cute curlicues emerging from the corners. Several customers were in school uniforms and were more conservatively coiffed and painted.

You can start reading The Princess and the Captain here.

At the Aristasia Diaries, Miss Adele Poppy posed everyone some searching questions including this one: If you had $80,000,000 what would be the first 5 things you would do?

Here is Sushurichan’s thoughtful answer:
Such a large sum of money would require careful planning. It could make Aristasia-in-Telluria a much stronger deployment. A lot of it would be spent on making far more people aware of the Motherland and on installations. I am no strategist, but here are things I would think of doing:

1. Make and publicise a full-length fictional kinema powerfully conveying Aristasia and its glory and beauty. One that no true daughter of the motherland could see without realising that this WAS her home.
2. Establish settlements in different parts of the world where Aristasians could live in together in Telluria.
3. Endow several worthy pettes to work full-time for Aristasia instead of needing to work for survival.
4. Establish a real-life College where pettes can learn to be Aristasians and which will be a refuge.
5. Establish businesses that Aristasians can run so that the $80,000,000 will be replenished. At the rate we will be deploying it, it will need to be.

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.

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