daydream believin'?

believers in aristasia pura?

If you’ve read the section about Aristasian lore, you know about Aristasia Pura, a little world where everyone is feminine. IRL Aristasians tried to create their own little IRL country based on it and the rich stories surrounding it.

They interacted with one another via Aristasian personae, and took on roles as teachers, shopkeepers, bartenders, etc. They did this both offline in London and elsewhere, and in online spaces like Second Life.

Did they believe Aristasia Pura was a real place? Surely not, right? Everyone who ever heard I was involved with Aristasia has asked me that. I can’t provide an adequate answer - it isn’t as if any kind of poll of beliefs was ever taken. Plus, different people came and went throughout this.

As you’ll see on this page, Aristasia went much further than your average micronation, RPG, or worldbuilding project. So what was going on? Here, we’ll look at some of the relevant history inside the movement.

Life Theatre: Life as a Game

Was it a LARP (live action roleplaying game), or freeform online roleplaying game? It could’ve been taken as such. For plenty of people, it no doubt was. Early Aristasian sites, which were my first point of contact, described Aristasia Pura as imaginary.

The "real Aristasia" - the one in which the marital conjugation of blondes and brunettes leads to the issue of tiny brunettes and blondes and trains run from Trent to Quirinelle - is certainly (at least from the perspective of our world) an imaginary place; but it is also the inspiration and the guiding image of another Aristasia, the one which does exist in this world and which is sometimes known as Aristasia-in-Telluria.

Aristasia-in-Telluria exists wherever two or three Aristasian girls are gathered together. It is a self-created world which rejects the ugliness of the late 20th century and adheres to the dress and values of the pre-Eclipse world.

This page addresses the question directly.

Notions like an actual really existing out there somewhere Aristasia Pura didn’t get pushed (much, nor overtly) on Aristasian websites until the late 2000s. It came up in private conversation (more on that later) and if you dug enough you’d find it, but it wasn’t a focus. Statements like the above were a fairly accurate depiction of the general attitude at that point.

In the early days, there was a bigger focus on roleplay, which they called life theater. This certainly was a thing IRL at Avenbridge School and the London Embassy. On the main Aristasian site, back in 2002, there was a forum called Girls’ Town. It wasn’t really a forum because you had to write in to post, and at the time, I was too shy.

Certain posts would be written in blue font. It was explained that this meant they were true life theatre as in they’d actually happened, typically in London at Aristasian events. Sometimes, these “blue text” posts featured mild incidents of discipline-yness (someone mentions they got a slap, etc). Not always, though. Here’s an example!

The above post talks about Avenbridge School, which was a small weekly gathering of Aristasians enacting, as you might expect, a school. It happened physically in London, and it definitely seemed to have been advertised as a roleplay or “life theatre” thing rather than something spiritual or involving other worlds.

Even online, that was given an emphasis. I really dug this idea of online life theatre, which shows up rather early.It was a bit like text-based roleplaying, which, even at fifteen, I’d done before. But there wasn’t really a plot. We were just interacting with each other. As friends, acquaintances, (frenemies, sometimes? heh), but in-character, in these Aristasian personae.

This was different than what I’d done before (D&D in middle school), and lots of fun. While I, personally, didn’t like the discipline stuff, by the time I really started interacting, most of that was gone, at least online. (Early Aristasian online roleplaying games did feature it, though, as you can see from this archive of the Avendale School roleplaying game.)

Also, I believe we can consider our demographics here, too? Remember that my own first exposure was due to my search for LGBTQ resources. I don’t want to sound like some kind of stereotype-pusher or whatever, but queer millennials like to immerse themselves in fiction, and (some of us) are good at rich worldbuilding.

In most cases, this went into things like D&D, Star Trek, and The Lord of the Rings, of course. Aristasia was there for weirdos like me who wandered off, I guess? In the early days, the mingling with (no mincing words) the fetish community no doubt helped garner interest. It was off-putting to me, but surely not others. There’s substantial overlap between the fetish community and nerdy stuff like fantasy worldbuilding, too.

This is why I do think plenty of Aristasians, either amongst the core group IRL or online visitors did just see this as a roleplaying game, online or live-action. Even in later (late-2000s) Aristasia, the Aristasia I took part in, roleplay seems to play a large part. Don’t get me wrong, though - this wasn’t typical 2000s online roleplaying, and definitely didn’t involve dice, official character sheets, or anything like that. It also wasn’t sexual, at least not that I experienced.

While in Second Life, we didn’t roleplay in the sense of developing a structured plot. We simply donned Aristasian personae and interacted with one another. The personae typically had a (often vague) backstory. We needed to know what area of Aristasia we were from, after all, to pick out our gorgeous Second Life clothing!

And we just spent time together, not even necessarily pretending to have lives in Aristasia Pura, but dipping ourselves into that worldview. To me, this was a sort of roleplay. It differed a great deal from Dungeons & Dragons and other games I’ve played, of course. I guess this is why it got dubbed “life theatre” by the Aristasians, rather than just “roleplay?”

Don’t get me wrong. The Aristasians did other, more regular 2000s-ish online roleplaying games, too. I didn’t participate, but I read some of them after the fact. The earliest ones were in the 1990s. Avendale School, a straightforward in-universe Aristasian school roleplay, got an (attempted) revival in the summer of 2008 on the main Aristasian Forums.

The games like that tended to do poorly. Chatting and “life theatre” was much more popular. The introduction to the Blue Camellia Club, an Aristasian website active at various points during the 2000s, talked a bit about this. The site noted that Aristasians seemed to prefer chatting to actual, structured roleplay.

It seems that Aristasians get on better with chatting than with role-playing.

Some people, of course, consider the whole of Aristasia as a form of role-play, which is true only in the sense that all of life is role-play. Aristasians seem to have enough of a job to live both a physical life and a virtual life (one or both of which may be Aristasian) without leading a let's-pretend life as well.

... Which is a slight pity as some of the storylines are very good.

The Blue Camellia Club on the subject of Aristasia as a roleplaying game, circa 2008-ish.

In my time with Aristasia I repeatedly heard life described as play. When you asked an Aristasian, “Is Aristasia Pura real, or is this just an elaborate roleplaying game?” that kind of response felt a bit like a non-answer on a practical level, however metaphysically-interesting the idea might be.

The Aristasians, in particular, regularly referred to the Hindu concept of Lila, or life as an act of play by the Divine (in their case, Déa laughing it into being, rather than Brahman doing his thing). I’m neither Hindu, nor Déanist. I probably know more about Déanism than Hinduism. To me, it seems likely many Hindus wouldn’t like the “feminized” Aristasian version of their concept, stripped of almost all context, but I’m not here to speak on behalf of them, so I’ll leave things at that.

That kind of linguistic appropriation aside, “life is a game” isn’t an unusual (or, to me, particularly troublesome) idea in philosophy and spirituality. It can be taken to awful places, or awesome places. It’s just one of those little ideas that can go either way or in-between.

For some people, it’s a vehicle for their own nihilism - it’s all a game, and nothing matters. For the Aristasians, it seemed like it was the extreme the opposite. Yes, Aristasia was a game but life was a game, and the game was a joyful act of a loving Mother God (Déa). With that came the idea that actual LARP, RPG, or “life theatre” experience could have spiritual implications, too.

Truth be told, "life theatre" is a wonderful concept, and I adore it. I just don't quite adore the Aristasian incarnation of it in particular. There's no reason it couldn't work in other forms, too, perhaps with superheroes, or talking wolves. But I digress.. Anyways...

Even as late as, well, a couple months prior to the start of this site, I came across this post on an Aristasia-related site suggesting LARP can be a spiritual experience. The same blogger also makes the argument that the Aristasian practice of a girl adopting many personae can, itself, be conducive to this:

A Tellurian form is imperfect, full of contradictions and contrasts, whereas Aristasians are intended to be purer, more refined in their nature and purpose.  Thus, a Tellurian vessel may hold several Aristasian souls of various natures. The Blue Camellia Club, Heartbook, Shining World, and other platforms were open to new participants, but they were NOT intended as simple public-facing spaces. A single vessel with multiple personae was not attempting to give outlanders any sort of impression; rather, they were allowing the many maids within them to manifest and interact freely and joyfully with other maids.  

2022 Tumblr post speculating on the the now-vanished Aristasia.

I’d really like to interview the author of this post, and may well look into doing that. Taking on multiple personae was a huge aspect of Aristasia, but this idea of each as a separate soul I’d not heard before. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t part of their beliefs - maybe I just didn’t run into it?

Femmekin: The World Next Door

Additional context for this is provided by the section on Aristasia and otherkin.

Quite soon after I showed up in elektraspace (Aristasian forums), I heard rumors of beliefs in a “real” (as in, actually existing… somewhere) Aristasia Pura. It, like the Aristasian language, shows up early on in conversations. I was about fifteen at that point, and got really intrigued, I mean, obviously.

Later on, though, Aristasians came into contact with other groups online that were interested in how identity could intersect with things like other universes and past lives. These included otherkin - a small group of people who believe themselves, in some way, to be non-human.

For some, being otherkin means something like believing that they were a cat in a past life, and still carry that identity in some way. For others, though, it can be involve complex beliefs about other worlds and planes of existence. The rough idea of this fit well with the (existing?) concept of Aristasia Pura being a real place, populated by alien maidens.

There are many kinds of Aristasian in Telluria. Some are children of Telluria who dip their toes into the waters of Aristasia and a few eventually take the Full Plunge. But some are Purans who never were at home in Telluria. Some, like myself, were always very conscious of the Motherland. For others it was merely a vague uneasiness that became clearer as they grew up and eventually made sense upon encountering Aristasia.

But I know well that I was guided by daughters of the Motherland from the day I set foot on this strange world, and I know that others were too. And I know now that the Empire has finally taken a fully active part in guiding and directing Aristasia-in-Telluria. And I think that is why I am here and why others of us are here.

So I want to say two things. Please understand that Aristasia Pura is real, and that its daughters are looking after us; and if you are one of our lost sisters who never felt at home in Telluria and had even a small hint of the Motherland, please come home. You need us and we need you.

Things really got going around 2007, I guess, with posts like this one.

Aristasians were able to snag the username “otherkin” on wordpress.com. I’m surprised it wasn’t taken? They began posting about their own experiences as femmekin, a (hastily-coined but apt, IMHO) term for all-feminine intermorphic otherkin species like themselves.

Q. Are Aristasians Otherkin?

A. Otherkin are non-humans who in one way or another are incarnate in Telluria (earth). Exile Aristasians fit into this pattern. They belong to the Motherland, not to Telluria and believe that their origins are there. So logically you have to regard them as a subset of Otherkin.

Yes, Aristasians, or, at very least, Exile Aristasians are otherkin.

A lot of people (including most Aristasians) claim that Aristasians don’t recruit. I’m not sure whether that’s true, because they certainly tried sliding into related communities, including otherkin, who quickly found their posts. In these interactions, the idea of Aristasia Pura as a real place seemed to receive a clear endorsement. In particular, the notion of Exile Aristasians featured prominently. Who are these Exiles?

EXILE ARISTASIANS : Aristasians in Telluria who come from the Motherland (despite having been born in Telluria), who feel out of place and alien in Telluria and often have "memories" of the Motherlands. Exile Aristasians do not consider themselves to be schizomorphic women in spirit even though they are physically such in body. They are chelani or melini not merely by adoption but in essence.

What’s an Exile Aristasian? From this glossary (mirrored here)…

I’ve heard it suggested that the otherkin themselves inspired the Exile Aristasian concept. It can really look like that from the outside, but I disagree. It’s more likely that the otherkin just gave the Aristasians extra language to talk about something they (were) already (starting to) believe in. Perhaps bits of otherkin ideas filtered in, but the exchange likely wasn’t as great as you’d think. Again, likely just words for concepts exchanged.

Regardless, it was not well-received by existing otherkin communities, as is evidenced by the comments on the initial post on the femmekin blog. At the time, the otherkin community was known for being rather abrasive in and of itself. Still, over the years, some otherkin-adjacent people probably found Aristasia through this site. Later comments seem to suggest a bit of interest over the past decade, I guess.

Later, in 2009, as part of Sai Thamë College events in Second Life, an official document clarifies the school’s position (and, presumably, that of most core Aristasians) on the subject of Aristasia Pura, whether it’s real, and the notion of Exiled intermorphs.

I fully believe Aristasia Pura to exist. If by "imaginary" one means a thing created purely by and in our own minds, I cannot accept it. I know that Aristasia Pura is more than that.

It is a reality that many of us have seen and felt. There are girls among us who have always known they were not of the Tellurian world and who have memories and experiences of Aristasia Pura; some to whom Pura is more real than their lives in Telluria. Some who feel sure that they have come to Telluria purely to serve the Motherland

Document posted as part of Aristasia 101 at Sai Thamë College.

Another site from around this time, Encyclopaedia Aristasiana, details Exile Aristasians as a concept quite frankly and officially. It goes a little further than just the idea of “intermorphs reincarnated in Telluria,” though, and suggests that this is all part of a bigger plan by Aristasia itself.

Exile Aristasians often speak of being "stationed" on Telluria. Since Operation Bridgehead there has been an increasing sense that Aristasia-in-Telluria is part of a spiritual war in which feminine forces are attempting to redress a balance in Telluria which is a too-extreme masculine force in the universe: the very existence of a honorarily intemorphic State in the midst of late-patriarchal Telluria is held to perform a valuable function in the overall balance of psychic power. There may be more to it than this, but the Bridgehead authorities have intimated this much.

Thus, for an exile Aristasian, there is a sense of having been sent to Telluria to do a job and to serve the Motherland. No doubt her personal fate, or werde, has also brought her here, but to the extent that it is a negative fate, that is ameliorated by the chance to work for the Motherland and live in a far-flung colony that is still under the wing of our dear Empress.

Encyclopaedia Aristasiana, on Exile Aristasians.

While I don’t have a screenshot for it, one Aristasian who left after these kinds of ideas came to the forefront compared them to Scientology. I’d disagree. They have way more in common with starseed lore, a New Age concept. I won’t bore you with too many details on that, since this site is about Aristasia. It’s basically the idea of aliens incarnating on earth for pseudo-military operations to “rescue humanity” or whatever. Not exactly like the later Aristasians, who kept insisting that they weren’t going to get involved in “foreign quarrels” like regular politics, but a similar idea

Fish Remembering Water

“It’s a bit like a fish trying to remember being in water…” - Sushuri-Chei, private conversation, paraphrased, roughly occurring around 2009.

The idea of incarnate intermorphic aliens (“Exile Aristasians”) took center stage late in the 2000s and beyond. A lot of the “lore” (if it can be called that) concerning this concept got circulated privately. I initially wasn’t going to include such intimate portions as this, but I believe it ultimately harmless and edifying to discuss.

The core group held, as noted in many other places on this site, the keys to all of Aristasia Pura. It would not be untoward to say that they had final say about what was considered “canon” (a term I use here loosely). This tended to be true regardless of what anyone else recalled (or claimed to recall, or thought they recalled, or whatever) from a past life in Aristasia Pura.

I didn’t witness much (or any, really) major disagreements about matters of life in Pura, but it really did often seem like people would adapt to what the leadership and official sites published. Here’s the odd part. Wait for it. The leadership themselves were fond of actively admitting that they didn’t quite understand their own experiences with this, though. It was something they struggled to contextualize, too.

Sushuri-Chei, quoted above, was often called the “heart” of Aristasia-in-Telluria during this time period. She spoke to me in a manner that seemed quite plain and honest. I didn’t then get the impression that she was purposefully trying to manipulate or indoctrinate me, nor that she didn’t believe what she was saying. She explained that all these things - blondes, brunettes, Quirinelle, the Empress, Aristasia Pura itself as a whole, really - were merely our (her?) attempts to understand something she had once been so immersed in as to have never examined it.

Hence, she did, directly, describe herself (amongst other terms) as a “fish trying to remember being in water” when referencing her belief in past life memories, Aristasia Pura, and related concepts. If you were born, grew up, and existed for an entire lifetime entirely within such a different world, after all, you might not know how to explain it in earthly (Tellurian, they’d say) terms.

This made understanding these past lives difficult, apparently. It was, someone else mentioned to me, especially true when the person had left Pura (died, I suppose) as a child and reincarnated here. The latter was (seemingly) a common experience, resulting in the “plenary teenie” phenomenon; this was made explicit on numerous occasions.

Exiles and Otherkin

There have been (multiple, now!) people who have asked if anyone ever told me that I was an Exile Aristasian. There was a point in time when I would’ve loved to hear such an the idea, but the Aristasians were not in the business of convincing particular people of past lives. Many groups do that (examples include Scientology, of course, and smaller groups like the Seattle “Matrix” cult), but this one didn’t. They pushed the idea that femmekin and Exile Aristasians most certainly existed and that a person just might be one, but never tried to convince me or anyone else that we, specifically, met the criteria.

Plenty of us (as in, the group that popped in and out of the embassy on Second Life and other forums, too) did believe we’d had past lives in Aristasia Pura, or, at very least, entertained the idea of such. There were a certain number of pettes drawn to Aristasia for mystical reasons initially to begin with (including me, to a degree). I’ve mentioned numerous times that an early “hook” for me when I encountered Aristasians online was mentions of “bits of a mysterious old Aristasian language,” after all. The concept of a real Pura existing somewhere was exciting in a similar way.

I was a little older by the time Exile Aristasians entered the picture, and I was already no stranger to the concept of otherkin, having bounced around LiveJournal’s pagan communities a bit. I’d been, weirdly, waiting for the other Aristasians to notice otherkin. It just seemed obvious since they were already talking about Aristasia Pura being a real place. In the context of the messy LiveJournal milieu I was caught in, that clearly meant they were some sort of -kin, right?

Eventually, I discussed it with some others who were aware of the overlap and it slowly slipped into the open. There was a rather tense collision between the two communities. Read more about it here. I’ve said in the past (in other, worse venues and places I regret) that I might’ve been responsible for the usage of the word otherkin in Aristasia. Looking back with more perspective, I doubt that’s the truth - the two communities were going to meet either way.

I realize a massive majority of people reading this (probably almost all of you) are chuckling at the very concept of otherkin, therians, and such. Please realize, though, that it is a spiritual belief many people take quite seriously, and one that is often deeply misunderstood. I advise you to research it, what otherkin actually believe and who they are, before formulating knee-jerk judgements based on what you may have read on some kind of shock site. It’s true that some folks who use the term otherkin for themselves are of the type to draw you into a New Age mess, but that is, by and large, not true.

The Exile Aristasian concept excited about as many people as it drove away, as one might expect…

Believers?

Overall? Some Aristasians no doubt considered it merely a unique and elaborate roleplaying game. I spoke to one in particular during my time who definitely did and said as much to me.

Others, as you can see above, definitely did believe in a “real” Aristasia Pura in some sense.

I might’ve done a bad job of pointing out the dates on the above archived pages. If you notice them, though, you’ll see that a lot of the “it’s just an RPG!” stuff is slightly older. A lot of the “incarnate intermorph” suggestions show up in the late 2000s.

In particular, the “incarnate alien” idea kinda took center stage during the Chelouranya era as I understand it. I’d dropped out of the active community by then and mostly have archives (now) to go by.

Recently a number of our people have become scattered in Telluria, incarnate in human bodies. Our primary mission is to create a sanctuary for our people who often feel very lost in the harsh environment of a late-schizomorphic world. We are also open to exiles from other intemorphic worlds and also to those who are may be actual Tellurians or may be unsure (it can take a while to find out anyway). If the Motherland feels like home to you, you may find sanctuary under the flag of this Protectorate.

The main Chelouranyan website, introductory material from circa 2015.

In these writings, Aristasia is no longer Aristasia, of course - instead, it was referred to as the Nevcaeran Empire, and Chelouranya is the name of the Tellurian (earthly) outpost of that empire, described as a protectorate. This fits well with what we saw in that post from 2007, now doesn’t it?

Some people associated with Aristasia and related groups definitely believed Aristasia Pura was a real place; that I know for sure. I also knew some who certainly just saw it as a roleplaying game.