A am a bit of a messy archiver, and have some copy & pasted Aristasian writings that I have simply forgot to include the source of! This particular piece, on the History of Aristasia, is labeled in my file as being from January 2005, so it is most likely a Heartbook conversation. I don't believe it has any particularly new information, and what information it does has, is quite obviously twisted around a bit, but it is interesting nonetheless. This is a forum response from Miss Annalinde herself, to a pette curious about the history of Aristasia and where Filianism (although it is not named as such) fits within it. When I find the archived source, I will edit with the link. Edit: I quickly found the link, it is from the archive of the Aristasian Spirituality Yahoo Group.
Dear Carola,
Forgive the delay in replying. Our ordinator network has been experiencing problems for the last few days.
So many questions are raised by all this!
First let us consider Aristasian religion. To do this we have to understand something of how Aristasia-in-Telluria has developed.
It began in the 1970s and it is often said that the impetus came from the realisation that the cultural collapse of the 1960s (which came to be called the Eclipse) was not a temporary social aberration but was at least semi-permanent. A society was being created based on utterly false principles - moral, aesthetic and spiritual. The Western world had long been guided by false philosophies, and moral (that is to say, not ordinary immorality which exists at all times, but a denial or inversion of morality) and aesthetic corruption had affected sections of the intelligentsia since early in the 20th century, but in the 1960s it began to affect the lives of the entire population, creating a radically false, inverted or Tamasic society.
This necessitated secession: the creation of a society - or societies - that separated themselves from the all-pervasive corruption of the society created by the Eclipse (which came to be called the Pit). The society of earlier decades of the 20th century was used as a model, not from a desire to “live in the past”, but from a belief that - to use a small parable - when one becomes lost in a forest one should retrace one’s steps to the point at which one became lost and continue on from there.
This could have been done in various ways. There could have been a mixed group of men and women. A few such groups have been attempted, but never with much success. Aristasia has always been favourable to such attempts while not wishing to abandon the integrity of Aristasia itself.
Aristasia was all-female for two reasons. First that men (governed by the planet Mars) tend toward discord and find it very hard to organise when there is no forcible centre of authority. Male groupings tend to be dogged by arguments, splits and schisms.
The second reason was simply that the founders wanted an all-female group. Having been deprived by the Eclipse of a legitimate social order, they felt free to create their own order in the form they preferred. And they preferred an all-feminine world. As do we.
Some would also put forward a third reason. They would suggest that as patriarchy reaches its apogee, attempting to suppress femininity even in women themselves, a counter-movement, a feminine collegia is a necessary corrective. Many early Aristasians went even further and argued that they were helping to embody a re-entry of the feminine spiritual principle into the hyper-patriarchal and spiritually moribund Western world.
There have been various approaches to religion and spirituality in Aristasia, from those who really took little interest in the subject to those who, particularly in the 70s and 80s of the last century, developed a very comprehensive religious practice and thealogy. You have mentioned the Collyridians, who are named from their practice of offering cakes or bread to Our Lady - a practice clearly similar to that of the Hebrew women at the time of Jeremiah who offered honey-cakes to the Queen of Heaven, and of course of the practice of offering prasada to Sri Lakshmi or other Hindu forms of Our Lady.
For many Aristasians, the offering of honey cakes became a central act of worship and even developed a liturgical form. Some even developed a Mythos of the Mother and Daughter with a highly developed thealogy. At the time there were a number of Aristasians and quasi-Aristasians about the Aristasian District and University of Milchford, and a few other centres, and this culta gained considerable impetus. After a time, it was called into question on the grounds that, in Telluria, it was not founded on any legitimate tradition. Its followers held that it was inspired and was a legitimate re-emergence of a matriarchal faith for our times.
This is the point, in masculine organisations, where splits and schisms tend to take place. Aristasia dealt with it rather differently, and in its own whimsical way. Those who adhered to the full religion of the Mother and Daughter continued to do so. Those who did not regarded it as something from Aristasia Pura that was not appropriate for Aristasia-in-Telluria. The two “factions” lived in peace. The thirteen-month Calendar of the Mother and Daughter religion is regarded as the Old Aristasian Calendar.
This is all a bit of a rationalistic way of putting it, and understates the extent to which Aristasia Pura is a reality to us. But that is a matter for another occasion.
Over the following decades things have settled. The full religion seems no longer to be practiced. Everyone is agreed that God is our Mother, whether she is a “spiritual person” or not. The seven Planetary Principles or Janyati are universally accepted by Aristasians as something very close to the original feminine statement of that part of the Western tradition as well as something fully Aristasian.
The continuing development of Aristasian devotion is a vital matter. Most would agree that Aristasian Religion in its fullest form went a little too far in creating a “tradition”. Most would also agree that it did a lot of very good philosophical and theological work to which we are indebted. What precisely will be the next steps in development we are not yet sure. That is why this group takes as its premise a very simple bhakti devotion to the Mother upon which everyone can wholeheartedly agree.
But it does not have to stop there. Aristasia has always been open to different approaches and perspectives. For such a young movement, we have a rich history of spiritual, philosophical and devotional development.
The great danger of “new religious movements” in the West is that they will base themselves upon, or at least be influenced by the philosophical errors of the Rajasic era, and now of the Tamasic. The various modernistic cults of the New Age Movement are perfect examples what happens under such influences. With such a book as The Feminine Universe in our hands we should certainly be able to avoid these errors.
Claims of a continuing tradition are, in our view rather dubious. What sort of a tradition in any case? An initiatic one with a chain of initiation going back to - to what? So many questions are raised without satisfactory answers.
What has happened, we feel, is that the Archetypes of the Worship of the Mother are abiding realities and so manifest themselves whenever the “ground” is ready for them. The Collyridians may have had a direct chain of tradition going back to the Hebrew women of Jeremiah’s time, or there may be a form of worship that, like a living thing, is always there, ready to break through when the “concrete” of patriarchy cracks a little.
I should be very interested to hear your views on this matter, as also those of Miss Marianne Trent. And, of course, the rest of the group!
May Our Lady bless you,
Annalinde
