storm clouds

The Storm Clouds

Please be mindful that this page focuses on disturbing parts of Aristasia’s history, including ties to fascist groups, abuse, and cult-like behavior. It will remain unfinished for quite some time. You are welcome to provide your own insights by contacting the webmistresses through one of the many methods here.

As a former (online) outer-circle participant, I do feel the impetus to dive deeper into what was wrong with Aristasia, even if it was hidden from me and many of us for utter decades. This is part of a larger attempt to make sense of my whole experience with Aristasia.

This page attempts to do just that, or at least some of it. It begins with the most obvious and general question, and then focuses on different issues that have become associated with the movement, in no particular order. Aside from the section I’ll eventually add at the bottom, these are all focused on confirmed aspects of Aristasia, splinter, and precursor groups.

These aren’t things that journalists made up. They may have been presented to me as such initially by some within the movement, and it is hard to say whether they believed it or not. These storms include connections to some extremely sketchy people and things, including the British National Party, as well as a court case involving abuse at St. Bride’s School for Adult Girls in the 1980s that ended in a conviction.

I will include instances where these issues intersected with my own experiences within Aristasia (circa 2000-2010, and online only) as much as I'm able given privacy (and legal) considerations. I'll often be contrasting my own experiences in Aristasia through venues such as Second Life with earlier on-the-ground Aristasian experiences, and giving a few thoughts on why things seemed to differ so much.

Please realize that this page is subject to (possibly, at this point, quite extreme) expansions as I learn more about Aristasia’s controversial past. I am also seeking more perspectives on these issues, particularly from people they affect more than me. If you're interested in helping, contact me.

Upcoming pages still to be completed include one called “But I Wanted to Aristasia…”. This will cover my brief and tentative thoughts on present-day Aristasian “subversive revival” attempts and noises about them - is that worth doing? Is it productive and safe?

Aristasia: A Cult?

Aristasia as a movement was way too dispersed and out of control to really be called a cult as such. Too many people, too many splinter groups, etc... Cults typically exert quite an extreme degree of control over members, and it’s usually much more uniform, I personally think. Certain people and groups within the movement had proven themselves quite toxic and untrustworthy, though. There were heavy cult-like aspects to certain eras of Aristasia that cannot be ignored, too. I can't say for sure if, for example St. Bride's School was a cult, since I wasn't there, but it is a definite possibility given what we nowadays know about it

On Tumblr, @Tellurian-in-Aristasia’s evaluation of Aristasia from a distance is worth looking at. While @Tellurian-in-Aristasia never participated in Aristasia directly, she’s putting on an intense display of research skills over there.

As someone who was somewhat closer to the movement in terms of participation, I’ll do my own evaluation here using the same scale. Keep in mind, I know far less about the history of the movement than @Tellurian-in-Aristasia. I was also only ever an online participant in the 2000s, when a lot of information about the movement's history was heavily distorted.

You might scoff and say “Hah! It’s utterly impossible to be in an online cult.” Well, it isn’t. Plenty of other groups have proven this, especially recently. Even most online cults will have an offline core, of course. This tends to give them at least some teeth in the real world, so to speak. And often, it can be hard for online participants to discern what’s going on offline, and vice versa.

The Twin Flames movement, things like Qanon… Heck, there’s even a whole completely unrelated online cult also using the name “Mother God;” apparently a documentary is being made about it on Netflix or something like that. I’ve seen minor cults pop up on Skype and Discord, and had friends get sucked into that kind of thing.

It was just as true in the 2000s as it is now. When you’re a person like me who had to escape into the internet at a young age, you are vulnerable to that kind of thing. I had many brushes with real internet cults. Many of the actual cults that tried to recruit me back then were specifically preying on minors, and using things like fandoms, roleplay, and neopaganism as a way of drawing kids in.

It’s hard to see Aristasia as quite so awful by comparison. We must, still, remind ourselves that my experiences were online, though. The tenor of it may have been markedly different than it was at, for example, the London Embassy. I definitely know my experiences were different than those experienced by girls involved in some Aristasian precursor groups like the Rhennish commune in Burtonport, and, of course, St. Bride’s School. Those, of course, were offline experiences.

This is a confusing subject, but I will explore it through the same lens that @Tellurian-in-Aristasia uses: the BITE model. This is an evaluation technique for groups in general, designed to identify cults and manipulation. Naturally, I won’t fully go through the entire scale, but will follow the “Cult Bingo” format she gave, with my own impressions. I will address those, as well as hers.

Before you read on, do note that my own perspective was never typical, and perhaps I have a different definition of “cult” than most, or am more tolerant of certain practices. I’m admittedly an occult practitioner. That kind of belief system has been part of my life in various ways since before I even found out about Aristasia, so it definitely colors my perspective on all this. As you’ll see, I judge things differently because of this.

This reflects what I saw through online Aristasia circa 2000-2010, primarily, and does not address the Rhennes, St. Bride’s, Romantia, or Chelouranya, none of which I had any direct involvement in. There’s evidence some of those were very cult-like.

Chanting

Chanting may have been part of Aristasia offline. I have no way of knowing. It was not practiced in any group setting online (ie, voice chats,) nor encouraged or even discussed much. Sometimes someone would post a link to a mantra. That was really all, so I can’t really say that chanting gets a mark on my bingo card.

Instill Guilt

I never felt guilty in Aristasia for not being racinated enough. This wasn’t pushed, at least not outside of existing Aristasian spaces. I wasn’t expected, for example, to have worn gloves and a hat to the dining hall at my university. I was most definitely expected to show up at the Embassy in Second Life (Virtualia) in Aristasian garb (vintage clothing or an approximation of it). Racination was not pressured, at least not for us visitors to the Embassy, the forums, and other parts of Aristasian elektraspace. That may have changed in the Chelouranyan era, but I wasn’t present for that.

No Happiness Outside of Group

I definitely agree with @Tellurian-in-Aristasia’s summation of this one. Aristasians, their precursor and successor groups, did strongly push the idea that the world outside of the racination that could be provided by them was misery. They called it the Pit (or, at times, Babylon) for a reason.

They described it in horrible terms. The book Children of the Void is called that because of this. The titular “Void” is the absence of nourishing culture due to the “collapse” of the 1960s. Aristasians, rejecting the poisonous culture of the post-1960s Pit, are children of this Void rather than of the Pit itself. That was the idea, in any case.

Early on, there were many Aristasia fanfics and short stories (wish-fulfillment fantasies, perhaps?) that I saw that played with this idea. In particular, many stories loved the trope of a girl who “escapes from the Pit” into Aristasia or some convenient Aristasia-like equivalent space.

In some stories, this isn’t a fun experience, but it’s always portrayed as magical and ultimately positive. For examples of this, see The Feminine Regime or A Maid's Duty in the Fiction section. This is extremely creepy and worrisome. In most of these stories, the transformation is only semi-consensual, sometimes involves smacks (that are supposedly for actual punishment, not sex play), and comes close to romanticizing brainwashing.

Forbid Critical Questions About Leader

I agree with this one, for the reasons @Tellurian-in-Aristasia has stated. I will say that it was much less an issue than I saw in other, comparable online groups, though. In some of the online groups I’ve seen (and even dallied in), a remark towards the leader would’ve prompted rounds of vicious bullying from everyone.

In Aristasia, a cross question at a leader-figure (or anyone, really, even me - you simply did not ask about people like that) would’ve felt more like the “does anyone think about dying?” scene in the Barbie movie - just mortifying enough to shut someone up, but not a prompt for abuse.

You probably wouldn’t have gotten an answer, and any answer you got would’ve been a form of “life theatre” anyways. When it came to matters of theology and Déanism itself, it was much easier to ask questions, even critical ones, but you wouldn’t, for example, ask someone for sources or where they’d learned what they were teaching - again, that information was not made readily available.

Whereas in other (online and offline) toxic group settings (cults, one might say, or just very bad), I saw verbal abuse, here, it was almost a sort of gaslighting. @Tellurian-in-Aristasia notes that "It’s very possible that whole people have been invented, for the purpose of deflecting questions about who really founded Aristasia." During my time in Aristasia, the usage of multiple personae by leadership (by everyone, really, including me), was so common, I can believe this completely. My research into the supposed "Oxford" era of Aristasia suggests this, as well.

It's one thing to invent a cute character for a video game like Second Life where girls are (told that they are) doing "life theatre"; it's quite another to engage in decades-long efforts clearly designed to create confusion as was clearly done.

Information Deliberately Withheld

@Tellurian-in-Aristasia probably doesn’t tick this box because she began researching the movement later on. In the early 2000s and throughout that decade, information was deliberately withheld.

We had no idea who had even actually founded this movement, nor hardly anything about the precursor organizations. This was, I’ll admit, in part because a lot of records hadn’t been digitized yet, but… the same people who had been there were still around and could easily have been clear with us.

I realize that “naming names” and invading the privacy of those involved early on is a no-go, and respect that. I do think that if one founds something like this, there’s a responsibility to at least be honest about how it all happened, and oftentimes, they were not. It was difficult for me to track down resources from precursor groups once they were digitized because we got very little accurate information about the history of the movement, and whole moments were erased from that.

I’ve mentioned several times on these pages that, when I was fourteen-ish, I chatted with some Aristasians (they thought I was twenty-five). They alluded to “bits of the old Aristasian language floating around,” but didn’t elaborate and acted as if they just didn't know.

Now, of course, as I’ve documented here, I’m sure said language comes from the Rhennish commune, a precursor group they never mentioned. Pretty sure the person I was speaking with knew that too, or at least had spoken to someone who did… but the information was withheld in favor of a more mysterious narrative.

Something like that (a conlang??) might seem a silly thing of me to fixate on for this particular section. It’s just one example, and the easiest one I can think of to explain.

Sexual Relationships Dictated

I never saw this in Aristasia. Older Aristasian material from the 1990s was drenched in stockings and upskirts, of course. Websites featuring these pushed the idea that they were “erotic,” but not overtly sexual, and meant to be subtle on purpose. Implied to be superior to vulgar pornography from “the Pit,” of course. They were judgmental about that sort of thing.

Later on, when I became more heavily involved, these things began to vanish. There were tensions whenever sex got mentioned in Aristasian spaces, which were supposed to be free from all but the mildest of eroticism by that point. Discourse did happen over this, particularly about posting some of the older stories and whether they were no longer appropriate for Aristasia. You can see an archived thread on Reddit where some “normal” folk are snarking at the Aristasians from afar over that.

This doesn’t, to me, qualify as sexual relationships dictated though, any more so than (for example) your average TTRPG banning sexual content. It was always implied that a pette might do what she wanted, but sexual matters ought be left at the door of the Aristasian Embassy, so to speak, whether they might be with mascûli (men) or other ladies. I do strongly remember that people who refused to do that, made sexual jokes or just talked about sex were ultimately asked to leave. I guess that’s comparable to banning someone from a forum?

Maisappho, in “My Issues with Aristasia,” does say that sex, and talk of it, and the concept in general, had become increasingly taboo in Aristasia prior to it becoming Chelouranya. At that point, I can’t say for sure if this box did deserve to be ticked, but here, I can only speak of my own experiences with Aristasia specifically, not the later Chelouranyan era.

I’ve heard it said that many of the Chelouranyans were, in fact, asexual. This isn’t something I’m interested in looking into or confirming. It is not my business. I just mention it because, if that’s the case, asexuals might indeed want a completely sexually-desaturated space for themselves to chill for a bit. Not all asexuals are sex-repulsed as I understand it, but some people are. I see nothing wrong with wanting that, too. Just some thoughts.

Toxic Positivity

I combine “Encourage only good and proper thoughts” and “Some emotions deemed evil” under this heading for convenience, and I tick both boxes personally, as does @Tellurian-in-Aristasia. I tick both for the same reasons she does. As she says, a lot of this wasn’t a huge facet until the late Aristasian era. Honestly, prior to maybe 2008, I maybe wouldn’t tick these boxes at all.

Prior to that, certain emotions (and emotional responses) were heavily discouraged in Aristasian spaces, but having those feelings in general wasn’t implied to be evil or wrong. Obviously, nobody likes things like hatred, jealousy, fear, etc, but they didn’t portray feeling them as wrong. You just didn’t bring them into Aristasia, and if you did, you were circumspect about admitting to them. This made direct communication difficult. I almost wouldn’t call it toxic positivity, bit I don’t have any other word for it?

It was utterly a unique experience. From the archives, I know that this aspect got emphasized much more later, by the time Aristasia had become Chelouranya and I had bounced. I still felt the beginnings of it, and it was part of why I slowly faded out of the group.

Instill Fear of Outside World

Fear of outside world? I surely understand why it might appear that this applies to Aristasia. I, however, disagree. The outside world was the Pit, and the Pit was a clownish place of yellow tennis balls and bifurcated garments. Something you pity, not fear, exactly. Something disgusting, but not scary.

Sure, it may occasionally include the “Forces of Darkness,” or “Foddies,” as they jokingly called them when they stole the Embassy car in London. But that didn’t make it any less ridiculous from an Aristasian perspective. When Miss Martindale said “there’s a war on,” it was in the same breath as complaining about tracksuits. Believe me, only a minority of Aristasians ever feared “the Pit” on more than an aesthetic level.

Don’t get me wrong. They (we?) did genuinely believe a metaphysical war was taking place, and that certain unrelated events might’ve been part of that. The idea, though, was that folks like the car thieves were hapless pawns in this, though - clowns, again, not the real threat, which was hidden in some otherworldly fashion.

Outsider vs. Insider Doctrines

This is a mild feature of many esoteric and occult circles I’ve been in, who will joke about “freaking the mundanes,” as will friends who are in the furry fandom, deep into other such games, etc.

The thing is, the Aristasians took it much further, and there was always the intimation that not only were we (well, when in our Aristasian personae) were better than them on a philosophical level, but also that they were pitiable.

We also regularly used the term bongo to describe these so-called “Pit-dwellers” who hadn’t escaped the horrors of modernity. This term sounds extremely racially-charged in some contexts, and once that clicked a bit, it felt weird, too. I really do doubt it was chosen for that reason, though.

It got applied to everyone outside of Aristasia, implicitly at the very least. One of the earliest posts about Second Life in Aristasia was talk about the “bongos” living near the Aristasian Embassy in the game itself, for example.

Furthermore, bongos or pit-dwellers got divided into three categories. That’s right. As bizarre and (yes) cult-like as it sounds, they divided those who were outside of (not simply merely opposed to the group into categories.

If you’d like to read (in fictional dialogue form, no less) a description of this, an excerpt from the book Children of the Void titled Bongo Typology: Or, It Takes All Types To Break a World got archived. I’ll give a short summary, though.

Because they’re warped by the very metaphysical nature of the late Age of Iron and post-1960s, modern lifestyle, non-Aristasians (again, called “bongos”) got called mutants. There existed three types of mutation, though:

• Type One mutants, who, usually older, lived as if the “Cultural Collapse” of the 1960s had never occurred. They generally absorbed some “Pit propaganda” and had enough of a modern mindset to survive in the post-1960s world, but weren’t overly-affected by it.
• Type Two mutants, who are what we’d consider normal, ordinary people for the latter-half of the twentieth century. They consume the proper amount of propaganda and entertainment and have, allegedly, bought into the “nihilism” and “individualism” etc of modernity.
• Type Three mutants, who tend to rebel against “The Pit” itself by becoming punks, alternative types, who did things like “piercing their eyelids” and other apparently awful trends. I suppose I fit well and truly into here if one must go by this typology, and I rather don’t mind it nowadays.

I guess this is hardly as dehumanizing as the way groups like (for example) the Church of Scientology or even (heck) some churches treat outsiders.

Still, it is dehumanizing in a way that a furry going around in a suit and talking about how he’s out to “freak the mundanes” wouldn’t be, and in my opinion, is definitely cult-like in that respect.

Control of Information

@Tellurian-in-Aristasia argues that, despite the Concentric Circles aspect of Aristasia, this wasn’t really part of it. That’s simply not true. People who were closer to the inner circles of Aristasia certainly knew much more than me about Aristasia’s origins, beliefs, trajectory, etc.

I know it’s on the cult bingo, but as someone who’s taken oaths and joined secret societies before, I can’t say I see “withholding information from low-level members” as a sign of a cult at all.

In Western esotericism, it’s common practice. For example, if you had been initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn alongside Aleister Crowley in Victorian London, you simply wouldn’t have been given certain study material before, say, reaching the grade of Adeptus Exemptus.

Nowadays, with the internet being what it is, many secret societies (including the aforementioned Golden Dawn, and Aleister Crowley’s own projects) have had their teachings leaked, but initiation often still involves an oath of secrecy from the uninitiated. Some still manage to protect their secrets, too.

The Aristasians may not have had formal initiations, but they did this, and not (just) in the normal way. Unfortunately, they did it with information that I’d expect to have seen upfront (such as where things like Déanism and the mythos originated to begin with). I now, having investigated the history of the precursor groups, can only assume this was intentional.

In the mid-20th century, many burgeoning occult groups and secret societies would claim an (usually only half-true, if that) mythic history and feed it to new initiates (even Wiccans did this). The Aristasians did something similar, despite their lack of complex structure. That’s not good nor justifiable.

Thus, I definitely tick this box, even if I don’t think information control in general is necessarily cult-like. It’s just that some information shouldn’t be subject to that kind of control. Aristasia definitely did that, sadly. It would’ve been one thing if they were to hide theological matters or other subjects of initiatory knowledge, but hiding the actual history of the group and often times very major details like that? Not good.

New Name and Identity

I tick this for the exact same reason @Tellurian-in-Aristasia does. I will simply quote, verbatim, her rationale, because mine’s exactly the same.

Creating a new identity was a central core of being Aristasian. If you decided to use your Tellurian name, you were at the very least encouraged to choose if you were a Blonde or a Brunette. Many Aristasians had many different names, identities, and even sexes.

@Tellurian-in-Aristasia

That said… just as was the case with the previous box… I don’t find this necessarily problematic. Most occult groups encourage new members to pick a name or “motto” as they join. Wiccan covens do this, as do groups like the aforementioned Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It’s just considered normal. I’m not, admittedly, part of many of these sorts of groups these days. I do know that a lot of them will turn Mike Johnstone into Ravenfyre Wolfwind or transform Karen Perry into Soror Lilith Asmodeous, though.

The Aristasians transforming girls into Miss Abigail Corinthian or whomever didn’t seem that weird in comparison, especially given the cute Second Life names. I wanted the name Corinthian so bad. It’s also worth noting that this personae concept was actually used to keep Aristasia separate from a girl’s outside life. You’re one person in Aristasia, yet someone else outside of it, and one won’t be judged for the actions of the other. That, at least, held back a lot of potential nastiness.

Still, is that a healthy solution to the problem? I haven’t got an answer for that. I tick this box, because it is, technically, true. Aristasia invited you to be someone else, and that was precisely the draw for many of us.

Distort Information to Make it Acceptable

There was a lot of information bending within Aristasia. Reading Aristasian musings often feels like it’s very obvious that they’re working backwards from whatever point they’re trying to make to make it fit around their world views. This ranges greatly from science denial (for there’s no belief in evolution in Aristasia) to their own history revision (They only ever got involved with all that Silly Monkey stuff to make money to fund their embassies, but also what they did wasn’t Silly Monkey stuff anyways, because, remember, what they did wasn’t sexual)

Ticking this one for the same reason as @Tellurian-in-Aristasia.

I agree here, immensely. The science denial wasn’t pushed quite as much as it might’ve appeared to an outsider, but their own personal historical revisionism was extreme, and it was only very recently that I’ve been able to sort out some very pertinent loose ends regarding what was really going on in the 1980s and 1990s.

Suffice to say, some of us were played from the beginning.

The real story of the movement’s past was just much stranger and more disturbing than what we were led to believe, obviously. I can’t say what I would’ve done back at the turn of the millennium had I known all the details, though. I would hope I’d have had sense enough to avoid the milieu entirely.

Now, historical revisionism is not unusual in esotericism or new religious movements. That’s not throwing shade on esotericism. It’s just that those kinds of confusing lies and gaslighting tend to be the typical form toxic behavior takes in those movements, at least on a large scale. This doesn’t make the Aristasian version of it typical though - they, of course, took things further than you’d think.

In the section about the Rhennish commune in Burtonport, I write about how they were, in a way, comparable to earlier neopagan groups like Wicca who had a sort of “fabricated backstory.” The Rhennes claimed to be an ancient, secret matriarchal tradition carried down privately in the British Isles. Wiccans, similarly, originally had a bizarre backstory about being a hidden tradition of Celtic pagans from ancient times.

From the beginning as Rhennes, this movement, like the earliest Wiccans, was telling an elaborate history that most must’ve known to be false, and continued to do so for decades. The Aristasians, though, unlike the Wiccans, tended to rewrite this history in order to erase whole (quite recent) eras (many of which painted them in a negative light). We thus see a motive beyond the typical “occult legitimacy” of established tradition sought by Wiccans and other alternative spiritual groups.

It’d have been one thing if their information distortion had been limited to revising ancient history with tales of Amazonian warriors. Still a problem, but not quite so bad comparably. It did, though, go much further.

Buddy System

This simply was not part of Aristasia as I experienced it. Romantic relationships, or pairings of that sort, were rare (or at least rarely apparent) amongst online Aristasians. As a blonde (mostly) I wasn’t expected to have “my brunette” or anyone of the sort. I really didn’t encounter any (publicly, acknowledged) couples at all in Aristasian spaces online, at least...

Platonic bonds were awfully strong in many instances. Girls formed makeshift families in elektraspace, and there were even rituals for those who wanted to formalize close friendships. To me, this seemed sweet, not creepy or anything. I think that when the BITE system refers to the “Buddy System,” it means something much different, a mechanism of emotional and social surveillance. We see this in fictional representations like television’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and in real-life cults, too, of course.

Communal households are a fixture of a lot of small spiritual communities and even just younger groups sharing similar ideologies. I don’t see that, by itself, as cult-like. The communal households formed by a lot of Aristasian precursor groups I would consider cult-like. I have no evidence either way regarding the nature of the Aristasian households themselves during the time I had contact with them. They, of course, posted mostly positive things, but that could mean anything, and I know that.

Race

I am white, myself, and I come from a very rural, isolated area, very conservative with strong hints of racism at times. However, my own family raised me properly in that fashion - I knew from a young age that racism and the kind of bigotry associated with it were wrong.

I may not have always understood the best way to combat them, but I wanted keenly to be antiracist, like many of us.

In the early 2000s, I asked, quite bluntly, of the Aristasian leadership figures (who, of course, were cycling through different names at the time), if they were meaning to exclude non-whites with (for example) the “blonde and brunette” terminology. It seemed a bit worrisome to me, at the time.

I had read some of their “Traditionalist” beliefs, but they made them sound more primitivist, more aesthetic rather than political, and I didn’t want to assume anything. I figured “Traditionalist” meant many things to many different people - it arguably did, and wasn’t quite as much of a dogwhistle back then. I also was awfully young.

Still, I felt like I needed to ask. After all, most of the time, here on Earth (er, “Telluria”), race plays the biggest role in hair color. The latter may be a secondary sexual characteristic in Aristasia Pura, but it isn’t here. I guess other people asked similar questions. Who can blame us?

Short essays got written about how it didn’t matter a girl’s race, because once she came to Aristasia, she was “purely Aristasian,” regardless of what she had been in Telluria, and “blonde and brunette” were just convenient earthly terms, not literal here and now. This was echoed repeatedly throughout the literature that appeared on Aristasian websites throughout my time with the group. One popular page listed common concerns people might have prior to “joining” Aristasia…

...I am not white/of mixed race.

We have had this question several times lately; and it does rather surprise us, and sadden us a little. Clearly those who dislike Aristasia — essentially, those who are horrified to find that a “women's movement” is not part of the liberal consensus, but is royalist, elitist and aristocratic — have done rather well at spattering us, in the eyes of some, with the “fascist” and “racialist” (they leave out the middle bit because they can't spell) mud that they throw at every one who disagrees with them.

It is certainly true that we laugh at the bongo “anti-racialist” industry . We also laugh at bongo “anti-homophobia” and at the “gay” industry in general. Does that mean we are heterosexual? We laugh at bongo “feminsm” and “wimmin's rights”. Does that mean we hate women? We have utter contempt for all the bongo social-engineering industries. And we are also an all-female mixed-race group that includes almost no heterosexuals. If that bothers Johnny Bongo — well good. We enjoy bothering Johnny Bongo.

Aristasians do not identify themselves with any Tellurian race or nation. Aristasia Pura is not only a different nation and a different race, but even a different species. And that is where our ultimate allegiances lie. The idea that we should have an exclusive commitment to one Tellurian race over others is absurd.

We have active Aristasians who are of English, American, Chinese, Jewish, African, Indian and various other origins. Naturally, the closer they are to the Inner Ring the more these origins are subsumed into being Pure Aristasian — and of course, Aristasia has its East and its West, its North and its South, its different ways and peoples. None of them are identical to Tellurian ones and all have certain resemblances.

Anyway, to return to the question, please take no notice of Johnny Bongo and his gormless stereotyping. Whatever your origins, if you are ready for Aristasia, Aristasia is ready for you!

“I want to be Aristasian, but…”, a well-known primer on joining Aristasia from the early 2000s, read similarly.

On the topic of race, to me, this really is just what I’d (now) consider Aristasia’s stock response to many things - “we’re hard to understand because we’re aliens,” in essence. It’s a thought-terminating cliché, which is not a good thing.

As you might guess from the above bongo was a term for any outsider, equivalent to wog in Scientology. A bongo might become an Aristasian given time, effort, interest and inclination, and there was much discussion of this process. Terms like “Johnny Bongo,” however, referred to individuals typifying what they saw as the worst of the modern world.

Apparently (and this I didn’t realize or know until many years later) bongo has racial connotations in certain other countries. I’m from America, and didn’t know this. I suspect it was just picked as (what the early Aristasians saw as) a “silly-sounding” word. Really, they ought to have known better, if there are, in fact, racist associations to the word.

Still, when they said that the terms blonde and brunette were not meant to exclude non-whites, and that they were longing to welcome women of all races, I accepted it. On a practical level, of course they were looking to embrace as many members as possible, given that the movement was so small at the time.

In later years, when the group began to move into Second Life, part of the stipulations (and yes, I do remember this being a rule of sorts) for participation was “proper” hair color to one’s gender. Blondes had to have blonde hair, even if they were people of color. As many people remember, most blondes who were non-white chose pure white hair for their avatars, often in elaborate braided styles.

At the time, I just accepted this. Why? I have no idea! Pure thoughtlessness, obstinate lack of understanding? In retrospect, it’s gross, I’d think we would all agree. True, Second Life was just a video game, but deciding that someone’s character must have certain (definitely racial) traits to join your part of the game? That’s more than rude, let’s be honest, especially coming from a group that’s already got so much (as they put it) “mud” on them about this.

As you might have already read on other pages here, the question of Aristasia Pura as a real place erupted sometime in the mid-2000s, at least publicly. Did that mean that the supposed real blondes of color in Pura really had that pure white hair, braids, etc? Did they, then, look so little like people of color in our world, by default, determined by their gender (blonde, in this case)?

Apparently so. Books like Goldenhead and the Silver Vixen (to me, anyways) seemed to have been widely-accepted as accurate, albeit fictional, depictions of Aristasia Pura, and they feature this. There is even a scene in the latter which references where a character from the Motherland meets a femin (female human, rather than intermorph) who happens to be Asian.

“Forgive me, my lady,” said the Captain, “but are all your people dark haired or is hair color quite random? Or has it some other significance than sex?” 

“There are genetic factors, honored Captain, but for practical purposes it is random, having no significance beyond the aesthetic. People who look like you, though—Estrennes, I mean—always have dark hair. Your white-haired Estrenne blondes look quite startling to us at first.” 

“It is true that I am from the east of my world, my lady—or at any rate my people come from there. My particular branch has its own nation in the West—but why do you call me Estrenne, as if I were from the east of this world or of yours?” 

“People who resemble you tend to gravitate to what is termed the east of a planet. It has to do with the nature of the directions. You are rising-sun people everywhere, while we are setting-sun people on any planet. You see, despite our differences, we all have much in common.” 

Matichei, Annalinde. The Flight of the Silver Vixen. Loc 1189 Sun Daughter Press. Kindle Edition.

There are other, much better and healthier ways that this could’ve been handled, as I’m sure you’ll realize. And no, it was not quite elaborated on what was meant by setting sun people, nor rising sun people, at least not to a degree that I, myself, was able to comprehend.

To reiterate, I’m white. I cannot say nor speculate how the women of color who did participate in Aristasian spaces online felt. They always pushed that all were welcome, and yes, I do know that women of color joined and participated. I hope the experiences they had were positive, but I’m quite clear that they may well have been awkward or worse.

I am open to any comments or dialogue about this, of course. I had always been taught within my own family that racism was wrong, though perhaps I didn’t often know how to best turn this into willed action.

Antisemitism

It is certainly true that we laugh at the bongo “anti-racialist” industry . We also laugh at bongo “anti-homophobia” and at the “gay” industry in general. Does that mean we are heterosexual? We laugh at bongo “feminsm” and “wimmin's rights”. Does that mean we hate women? We have utter contempt for all the bongo social-engineering industries. And we are also an all-female mixed-race group that includes almost no heterosexuals. If that bothers Johnny Bongo — well good. We enjoy bothering Johnny Bongo.

“I want to be Aristasian, but…”, a well-known primer on joining Aristasia from the early 2000s, quoted a second time for emphasis.

But wait, though - what was all that about an industry of social engineering of the liberal consensus to brainwash “Johnny Bongo” and all that? It sure sounds a little familiar. After all, antisemites have for years claimed that “the Jews” were running a racket doing just that, right? They used different names for it, calling this supposed evidence-free global conspiracy “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” right up until it got washed down into “cultural marxism.”

The idea is common, though, but often the fact that they’re even referring to “the Jews” requires a little digging to discover. Sometimes, yes, antisemites make their antisemitism very obvious - other times, they don’t. I didn’t realize that the talk of “cultural marxism” at universities in the 1990s had anything to do with antisemitism until long after I’d learned about it to begin with, of course.

Much later I knew someone who, upon being flung with the insult “cultural marxist” online, decided it must be a real concept. He adopted the term proudly for himself. Fortunately, others were able to explain that it was actually an antisemitic dogwhistle, but I’m sure not everyone realizes that, just like him.

This all was very confusing as a young teen, more evidence I shouldn’t have been on those sites lying about my age. They were saying they didn’t accept racism, nor (obviously) homophobia, but laughed at the industry that was against those things, calling them social engineering (by whom and for what purpose?).

Industry, to me (at the time at least) conjured up images of big business and wealth, which are, well, clear elements of social control. Raised on a diet of dystopian literature, as a teenager, I was willing to at least tacitly listen to this idea. People with money really were top-down cultural engineers of the rest of us.

They did it through propaganda, of course. How the antiracist movement (which, let’s be honest, rich folks often fought against) benefited the wealthy was left unclear, though…

If any explanation got offered (and I cannot find one archived!) it was something about these movements being a strategy to encourage divisiveness.

It does now, to me, sound like an antisemitic dogwhistle, as I’m sure it does to many others reading this. The idea of a (presumed, here) secret group of wealthy controllers engineering the rest of us into “liberalism?” We’ve all heard it before, and typically, people are merely a few words away from blaming “the Jews.”

And yet? There was also the vague sense that “Johnny Bongo” and his brainwashing had an otherworldly origin, though. While the sites almost never make mention of this, in private many would talk of “currents in the aethyr.” In some instances, this could be referring to events that occurred synchronously, demonstrating the connection of all things in the “bigger picture.”

Since they believed history was “winding down like a clock” into an “age of Quarrels,” this manifested psychically in daily life. This included things like the aforementioned strife and division (as well as wars and tons of other things).

It seems to me that the group drew a lot from authors who were quite racist, antisemitic, and otherwise unsavory. Yet, it seems that, rather awkwardly, their own sheer devotion to otherworldly mystique caused them to interpret these ideas slightly differently. Instead of the usual targets (“the Jews,” various other minorities in the West), our adversaries were but hapless pawns of the natural seasons of history, and included, well… most people (“Johnny Bongos”).

At the time, I didn’t know much about antisemitic conspiracy theories, and it’s still something to learn about and be mindful of, especially right now. I’m currently researching this, and other aspects of the situation, in more detail, obviously, so expect updates, and all are welcome to contact me with their comments.

Magic and Blood Libel

There has been some speculation (by me, and even other people) that the text-based video game, Jack the Ripper (published by St. Bride’s) might actually be about antisemitic blood libel conspiracy theories. The latter takes many, many forms, ranging from those mentioned in the Wikipedia article, to claims of modern-day Illuminati sacrifices, to David Icke-like notions of the Jewish people working for lizards (no joke).

Usually, the idea is that Jewish people, in some way, must use the blood of the innocent in diabolical rituals for… some purpose or the other. It’s never made very clear, and usually varies depending on the conspiracy theorist. Nowadays, sometimes they claim the Jews are harvesting their “life force,” or something they made up called “loosh,” which is generated by suffering. In other contexts, they claim they’re doing elaborate procedures during these rituals to harvest something called adrenochrome (a real substance) from the brains of children. Adrenochrome, needless to say, lacks all the properties conspiracy theorists claim it has.

St. Bride’s School published Jack the Ripper in the 1980s. It caused a great degree of controversy, but apparently most of this was because of its supposedly “gory” graphics; I can find no early news reports linking it to that kind of ideology. Still… if you’ve played the game (I haven’t) or watched some of the playthroughs (I have), you know that the villain is revealed to be part of a secret society that must kill women publicly in order to complete diabolical rituals to degrade humanity.

Coming from your average author or game publisher, this really wouldn’t be that worrisome? Secret societies just make… interesting villains. And heroes, too, mind you. It’s not as if shows like LonelyGirl15 and movies like Rosemary’s Baby don’t have similar tropes. The thing is, those weren’t made by people who ultimately had demonstrable ties to fascists. The very fact that Jack the Ripper comes from the St. Bride’s crowd means we think about it a bit more critically.

It references Freud, Darwin, and Marx as primary antagonistic entities (long story). This would indeed track with what a lot of today’s conspiracy theorists loathe, but then it stops short, going in other directions. It does seem to be drinking from the same cup as many ultra-reactionary ideologies, though. If the game had somehow jumped into a narrative about blood libel and the Elders of Zion or something, I would’ve been shocked. One must admit it wouldn’t have broken the flow of the storyline terribly much, though - as I said, with or without the antisemitism, these things contain similar elements.

It is worth noting that this was the 1980s, in Britain. The Brits, as far as I’ve been able to tell, didn’t have quite the Satanic Panic (a rehash of blood libel) us Americans did in the 1980s about things like secret societies and magic. Still, Britain has a rich history of weird (and sometimes bigoted) occult tropes to draw from. It also has (of course) a complex network of actual occult traditions. Aristasia cribs from many of them, and most go back centuries further than Aristasia. As I hope to discuss a bit on this page later, the Aristasians, though, (after a point) had a “thing” about magic and the ceremonial sort especially, too. Sorcerers repeatedly appear as antagonists in their (later) media.

Fascism

Some people on Discord and elsewhere have suggested I’m not giving enough attention to these awful cryptofascist aspects. This criticism is completely valid, sad to say. It's unintentional, though. I lack the understanding to grasp some nuances. I missed many dogwhistles initially, for example. I've gained some political literacy over the years but still have a long way to go. You are always free to contact me. I can't handle leftist infighting and won't respond to accusatory messages as simply I don't know how.

I did not, when I initially encountered Aristasia, detect fascism. A sort of deep-rooted philosophical traditionalism, yes. I realize now that the phrase itself is a bit silly because “tradition” will always be a pointless moving target.

A few years into my visits to elektraspace, I ended up in a Humanities class at my small high school. It was taught by an odd older woman who made it clear to me at one point that she did not believe in democracy. I asked her what alternative she would have preferred, and she said she preferred something like Plato’s fabled Republic.

She turned out to be obsessed with Platonism, and this was infectious (largely because, despite her age of sixty, I had a huge pash for her). I read a lot of Plato’s work after that, understanding very little in all likelihood. I also read secondary sources (which I understood better). I recognized Platonic thought exactly depicted within books like The Feminine Universe and other Aristasian works.

To me, this was an unequivocal Good Thing. I loved Plato! Screw democracy! I would’ve adored waking up in the Republic, even as the lowest of the low, honest! So my fourteen-year-old self actually believed, or blustered about online, at least. Didn’t really see the implications of this. It would’ve been slightly more annoying, I guess, if I’d managed to make it through Atlas Shrugged and went in that direction; at least the Plato thing was unique.

That said, I also ran across essays with titles like “Lavender, NOT Pink!”, posted in Aristasian-adjacent spaces. I could never be sure who posted these, but this one, remembering back, was the work of an American without ties to the Embassy. By being “lavender, NOT pink,” she meant queer women embracing a traditional (whatever that meant) mindset, and rejecting Marxism in particular. It talked about how it was a mistake for the LGBTQ rights movement to ever mingle with leftism, and that it was a pity future generations would assume they needed to be leftist to be a proper queer.

I’d read in my (local, rural) textbooks that communists were bad, pretty much the worst idea ever , and they wanted us all dead, though, so that seemed to track. I’d even heard (and this was a somewhat ) that the Nazis (as National Socialists) had been communists of a sort. So yes, they all hated us, they were evil, wanted us dead, etc…

I wasn’t (at the time) quite sure what was meant by cultural Marxism (a phrase dropped on sites adjacent to Aristasia) as opposed to the normal variety of communist, but it surely was all awful, right? I’d seen documentaries about North Korea and I’d been told enough times, it was all the same, right? Right?

I had access to the internet throughout this, of course. I may have been a teenager in the beginning, but it would not have been hard for me to give myself at least some political awareness beyond that. I didn’t do that. Later, in college, I was served a cornucopia of options for learning about just that… but I just majored in Partying, with a minor in Pointless Drama. I had the options to learn, but I didn’t make much of an effort. I hope to remedy this lack of political literacy.

Life kicks you around, and you realize these things aren’t abstract games played by men in suits, but quite dire.

Though they’re pretty nascent, I should give you an idea of my own political views for transparency’s sake. It’s a matter of supreme irony, because the symbol for the newer girls within Aristasia was a white rose, but the political symbol that resonates with me the most now is a red rose. I know I won’t get exactly what I want this November, but hopefully I won’t get Project 2025. I will be voting, and for the lesser of two.

A World of Whimsy?

While writing about Romantia in particular, something major clicked for me about Aristasia, its relationship to fascism, and other extremist political movements. To explain this, though, we’ve got to take a detour away from Aristasia, forward, to the 2020s and places like the chans, the worst of Reddit, and Twitter.

Your stereotypical Reddit troll or channer online makes copious use of irony and their own brand of “humor” to deflect attention from what are often very real fascist views. Many visitors to this site already know how dogwhistles work, and that plays a role, but isn’t quite the same thing. Here, we’re talking about layers and layers of dogwhistles, some of which are in fact, innocuous in many contexts. There’s a huge emphasis on humor and irony, too. Thrown together, they make a fashy mess, though. If you call that out, it can be difficult to articulate why you’re calling it out, because there’s so many small, seemingly insignificant details coming together to show the full picture. This makes you look too sensitive, too weird, too crazy if you do. They were, after all, only joking, you sensitive snowflake!

This sounds like a far cry from Aristasia, despite any fascist references, right? I myself spent a great deal of time on the chans, albeit in the less-politicized, hobby-centric corners, and it didn’t feel much like Aristasia. It felt much colder, much crueler, much more unsafe for me, both as a woman and as someone who’s just… outré. It actually made me miss Aristasia. When the channers (occultists, mostly) found out about my relationship with Aristasia, they thought it was “Tumblr feminist headmate bullshit” and wanted to “troll” them, something that (I believe) was narrowly avoided. Why, then, would I compare those people to the Aristasians?

Simply put? They used a very similar tactic to hide their true politics, or, at very least, their political associations. It creates layers that the reader (or at very least, the interlocutor) must sort through before they can actually contend with the actual views. And many of these layers are extremely bizarre and disarming in both scenarios. Aristasia just takes a different approach.

Instead of Pepe, we get the Poppitops (those comics of cute little ladies) alongside the group’s pro-Apartheid Romantian essays. Instead of obviously mean-spirited jokes (that we shouldn’t take seriously) we’re given whimsical verbiage that sounds friendly and fun, costumes, colorful cartoons, etc. Aristasia even invites you to become a different person on a level that being an “anon” on the chans or Reddit or wherever does not.

The concept of “life theatre” and personae got heavily weaponized to add even more layers to this situation. Not only does one have to sort through what’s actually being said, but also who’s actually saying it, who they are in medias res, and how that relates to the situation. And you can’t deny that the use of many, many different names helped hide (legal, at least) identities, something that can be used for all kinds of purposes.

It, like the jokes the channers build, forms a thick layer around the real political aspects of the movement. Even if you can see through all the fanciful pudding, it gives layers of plausible deniability.

Instead of quips about how we’re all “sensitive snowflakes” who can’t take jokes, we get a friendly pat and a “you just don’t understand because you’re just a silly bongo!” assurance. This sounds, to untrained ears, a lot kinder than anything the channers would’ve cooked up, and is harder to see through for that reason. It’s a wonder it isn’t used as a tactic by the right more frequently.

I do want to say that I would still feel safer amongst (some of) the “younger” Aristasians than around any of the channers, but that’s beside the point. These things exist in a nuanced spectrum, and part of it might just be because I’m a woman, preferring feminine-coded spaces. Neither space is healthy, ultimately.

Did I mention that the tone is catching, too? I’m not quite sure how to explain this. It may have only been a factor for me because I was so horribly young when I found Aristasia, but I doubt it. It was hard not to adopt a weird, cute, cheery vintage style of writing in Aristasian spaces. You may have noticed that this is how I write here sometimes. It kicks in when I’m thinking about Aristasia. Over periods of mere months when newcomers arrived, I saw this, too. Since many of us didn’t realize quite how far Aristasia’s connection to things like fascism went, we weren’t doing it for that reason, but it no doubt helped with the process.

There’s nothing bad about being whimsical, hyperfeminine, cheery, or even adopting vintage verbiage. Those things can be very fun. Plenty of other people here on neocities (my hosting platform of choice) engage in that kind of thing, too. I feel at home with it, which might be why I enjoyed Aristasia years ago. This is similar to the channer situation again. Irony and shock value aren’t, in and of themselves, necessarily bad tactics when forming your comedy routine if you know how to set boundaries for yourself and are actually clever and genuinely funny. The channers aren’t, and they’re merely using those things for obfuscation in most instances.

I’m also not even saying that “life theatre” and personae are necessarily a problem, either. I do firmly believe that the concept of expressing oneself in that way can be compatible with radical authenticity, and it’s something worth exploring. In Aristasia, these things took a backseat to obfuscation, though, at least early on...

Not. British. Enough. For This.

There were sites, ancillary to Aristasia but possibly produced by those within or close to the Embassy in London, which criticized Britain (or, as they called it, the Yeek, a shortening of “UK”) in acidic tones. I barely remember lots of it, skimmed, and likely absorbed little anyways. Some of it even seemed sensible to me at the time, if only because I lacked context about things like how Britain operates as a country (ie, knowledge about things like accents, their associations, etc), what a “council estate” is and what it means when one lives there, etc…

There were, as Emily Louise notes in the second part of her livestream series on Aristasia, claims that British (sorry, English) students were being bullied for “posh” accents. They did claim more and more people spoke with a “cockney” voice, and were judge-y towards those who didn’t. I had no frame of reference for this. I assumed it was a bit like being bullied for being a bookworm, and it seemed like something that might really happen.

When they joked about wanting the “civilize the city” from the chavs, for example, I didn’t detect much classism (or “social racism” as Wikipedia calls it). It just seemed like a whimsical gag. I didn’t realize that the word chav alone is laced with (somewhat) such implications. The term really only sunk in years later when I actually met more and more British people, who explained it in detail. These kind of nuances got missed online back in the day especially.

These are only two examples of how I (and probably a ton of the girls involved) was simply not British enough to track with what they were saying, in retrospect. I should have done more research. I didn’t do “due diligence” by any stretch of the imagination, even for a teenager. I just kind of assumed that British culture was at least comparable enough to America for me to instinctively grasp it.

I also assumed that British Fascism and racism would be recognizable to me. This really wasn’t the case, and it was a naïve assumption. In some cases, it's true - British fash similar iconography to American fascists, even borrowing some (the picture of John Hutchyns Tyndall shows this), but were, when they wanted, able to fly below the radar of many silly yankees, I think.

As you'll see from the subsequent news clippings, during the 1990s, a prominent Aristasian in one of her personae kept up a correspondence with a man named John Hutchyns Tyndall. I suspect that name might've been tacitly familiar to some Brits in that time period, but wasn't to younger-me in the 2000s.

He was a founder of the mid-20th century British National Front and ultimate leader of the British National Party for many years. Prior to the 1960s, he openly used words like Nazi to identify himself, and only switched to calling himself something of a British nationalist for PR reasons, it seems.

His beliefs, toned down later in life, at least in public, were of "unashamed white supremacism" and "of real manhood and real womanhood". He sought a Britain from which black people and Asians would be "humanely but compulsorily repatriated" and where able-bodied people would feel the "stiff breeze of compulsion to work". He announced, as recently as 1990, that he could not stand the sight of women wearing trousers in public. He explained his political credo in The Authoritarian State (1962).

The Guardian, on Tyndall's 2005 death.

I'd heard rumors about Aristasians getting mail from him, and, back then, I barely knew who he was. Some people even said it had been for prurient reasons, at least on his end. I really had no idea, but it was brushed off as "they sent fan mail and magazines," and also as, "this man is an onlooker" if anything.

You'll see, though, that later, some of the news articles and even the magazines clippings by these people have been digitized nowadays. They paint a very different picture, one where a long-term (more than a year, seemingly) correspondence between the two parties occurred, as did an exchange of their magazines and sharing articles.

Iconography: PLEASE be OFFENDED

In Telluria there have been many conjectures about the nature of this flag, including some rather outlandish ones from the fascists-under-the-bed brigade associating it with neo-fascist movements in the Pit. One encyclopaedia that ought really to know better identifies the Flag's charge as the Cross of Odin — as if a feminine nation whose religious affiliation is to the Supreme Mother would be paying homage, in its Imperial Flag, to a male god. The same source terms our use of the Flag "surreptitious" because it does not appear on the front page until one touches a link! This borders on paranoia. In the first place, if we want to say something we say it without fear or favour toward received bongo opinions. In the second place, if we were trying to hide something, we could probably hide it a little better than that.

It is scarcely necessary to say that Aristasia has no patriarchal political connexions and regards all Pit-politics with equal contempt. Our critiques of such politics appear in various places and we shall not reiterate them here.*

What is worthwhile is to give Aristasians and friends of Aristasia a little insight into the real meaning of our Imperial Flag. In the first place, as is well known, the Fora, often known in Telluria as the Celtic Cross, is actually found in almost all world cultures. It is one of the primary symbols, along with the cross itself, the circle, the sun-symbol of a circle with a dot at the centre and so forth.

To begin understanding the Fora, we must first understand a little about the cross itself. The cross is a symbol that predates Christianity by tens of millennia and is found all over the world. When it stands alone (as in the Kadorian insignia depicted on the shield above), the primary reference is to the World-Axis: the ray of Divine Light that penetrates every plane of being. When the Divine Ray strikes the waters of manifestation, a world is born. In pictures such as that to the right, Dea Herself stands in the position of the World Axis, and where Her feet touch the waters, the Lotus of the World blossoms forth.

We got this explanation in defense of its usage, very briefly.

This was good enough for me as a high schooler. What I knew about (essentially) occult iconography was rather limited to that which I’d picked up from “Magic 101” books from Barnes and Noble, and my school’s own paltry humanities classes.

In retrospect, it seems awfully defensive.

Why not lead with the symbol’s actual iconography, for example, if it’s so universal, perennial, and decidedly non-fascist? To be quite honest now, though. I’d argue a cross encircled is a basic iconographic fixture for humans, if only because it’s easy to draw. It does show up in a lot of cultures, but often has very different connotations between them. You can’t argue that all cultures share the same metaphysical symbolism - they plainly do not.

And wanting to shock “Johnny Bongo” by using fascist-but-not-really-we-swear symbols sounds really familiar today, doesn’t it? I know it reminds me of some of the (decidedly male, if I must be honest) folks I run into on Reddit and other places who try to make shock value their entire personality. “Are you offended? I don’t care if I’ve offended you but uhh, are you? Offended I mean? Please tell me I’ve offended you, I desperately need to offend somebody so that I can lecture them about how sensitive they are…”

Typically, those folks are usually either actual fascists already, or somewhere on the pipeline towards it. A lot of the time, they do/say those things as a way of signaling to others their actual beliefs, in the guise of a joke. You can often get a fellow who posts “ironic” Kekistan Pepe memes to seriously rant about the “JQ” and “white genocide” in private simply by typing “whoa, tell me more” several times at them with a burner account. Those sort are neither smart nor as subtle as they think.

By the time of Operation Bridgehead? The flag image and runes were removed and replaced with the more well-known Aristasian Solar Standard - an obvious attempt to shed the association for one reason or another, either way. It’s likely that if they really wanted to attract girls of “all races” as they claimed in documents like “I want to be Aristasian, but…”, they probably didn’t want to risk putting anyone off.

Whitewashing the Past

I mentioned that it’s easy to get fash to babble at you if you just type a few words every now and then. I have seen it done on Reddit and other places. Back when I was involved in Aristasia, I was typing “whoa, tell me more” a lot, and I never heard anything directly from them that was particularly 1488-ish, nothing that signaled to me that they might’ve had a genuine interest in real-life fascism.

The issue though? They weren’t exactly textwalling at me like those fellows from Reddit posting the Pepe memes would’ve done. They, especially those within the London Embassy or close to it, tended to be extremely coy about the group’s history and details of how exactly Aristasia-in-Telluria was operating. This might be why I was given the impression this was a much larger enterprise than it (now) seems to have been.

I think this was, primarily, the result of years of “life theatre” taken to extremes. Secondarily, though, it might’ve been an engineered effort to distance the group’s online incarnation from its past fascist associations, with the removal of the flag, the symbols…

There were though, still rumors of one of their guests or members, former or otherwise, having potentially received fan mail or corresponding with the British National Party. A lot of the print (and, especially, television) news stories about this had not widely been digitized, though. We (as in, newer online members) weren’t aware initially, for example, that this correspondence was more than “fan mail” or a mailing list, but quite extensive, and involved central figures within the group.

But what about the neo-Nazi literature and the correspondence with John Tyndall? Could it be that there is rather more to Miss M than the quaintly anachronistic schoolmarm portrayed by the media? "It is true that one of the girls associated with us was in contact with Mr Tyndall," she said, overlooking the fact that his fan mail was specifically addressed to her, "but l personally have no interest in fascism." She then rather spoilt the effect by adding that she had "no interest in democracy", or in "any masculine political movement"

Well, they don't come much more masculine than the BNP, as Irish football fans learned to their cost a couple of weeks ago. In one of his letters, Tyndall wrote that "I admire and respect what you are doing to the point of fascination." Perhaps he should send his unruly followers round to her house for six of the best.”

From “The Tortured Past of Miss Martindale,” Francis Wheen, The Guardian, March of 1995.

I (and I am very certain this was true of other online Aristasians too) certainly didn’t know Miss Martindale and the earlier Aristasian groups (namely, the Romantia era) had published things like The English Magazine, and the Reactionary Review. You can read all (archived, anyways) issues of these easily - I made some lists, one for The English Magazine, and will post one for the rest as soon as I can.

These magazines were political mouthpieces for bizarre material, much of which is, well… racist (much more so that one might expect of typical England from said era). It was only recently in fact, that such publications came on my radar.

Her protestations of innocence seem rather unconvincing now that I have read some of the journals she publishes. One of them, the Reactionary Review, includes an attack on the Race Relations Act and "the multi-racial society". which "compel the poor to live surrounded by Negro ghettos". In The English Magazine, meanwhile, she complains that television companies often "censor" pictures of football crowds at international matches while the national anthem is being sung, depriving viewers of the noble spectacle of "a solid phalanx of arms raised in the imperial Roman salute" -- the sort Hitler did so much to popularise.

Miss Martindale says that she Inhabits a "magical kingdom" which exists "out of time". Out of mind, too, I'd say.

More from Francis Wheen in 1995.

That salute, however much one wants to call it “Roman,” has become a fascist symbol (much like the swastika). It’s associated with Nazism, and yes, racism. Trying to redeem it next to rants about multi-racial societies doesn’t really work. Anyone can see that. Had I read it prior to my involvement, Francis Wheen’s (quoted above) article alone would’ve put me off the movement entirely, and this would’ve been the case for most online Aristasians, I’d wager.

At the time of my initial discovery of Aristasia, though, all this had been pushed aside, wiped away, and wasn’t apparent in the online spaces I found myself. The so-called “Iron Cross” and rune matter was one thing, surely, but I didn’t run across these “Roman salutes” or the sheer 1488 tripe I’m seeing in these earlier printings. In fact, if you’ve read the above section on race, the awkward, often tasteless but well-meaning-ish approach described there was typical of what I witnessed in the 2000s, mostly from girls who might not have been the core group - it is hard to say.

I am left wondering what happened between the publication of things like The Reactionary Review and sites like “I want to be Aristasian, but…”, Virtualia, and ultimately Chelouranya going online. I can’t overly speculate here on the differences between what I see in these older publications and what I saw in the 2000s.

Beholden to the Empress

When I was part of Aristasia, the focus was mostly on “life theatre” and Aristasia Pura. The political system of Aristasia Pura, of course, appeared monarchical primarily. I hope I explained that as well as possible on the page about Pura itself. It’s a storybook monarchy.

It’s awkward to have to discuss another world’s politics to understand an IRL group’s views, but here we are. I wouldn’t call Aristasia Pura (the Celestial Empire, whatever one chooses to call it) a fascist or tyrannical regime, but it had plenty of unsavory elements that would’ve fit in swimmingly in many such societies, such as bonded servants, and yes, the notorious canings.

I can only call it non-tyrannical insofar as these were portrayed almost universally positively. Pains were taken to show it as if it was all natural, normal, healthy, and accepted. The maidservants were happy. The mistresses were happy, etc. Even narratives about Aristasia in the real world (ie, Children of the Void), had this. Most of the books portraying those bonded servants involve them ultimately thanking their mistresses profusely for "rescuing" them from the "Pit" of modernity. Of course, this was all in fiction, roleplay, video games and forums. It didn’t extend into our real lives, and therefore it only took place online, or in that otherworld of harmonious intermorphic maidens unlike ourselves.

This wasn’t a healthy perspective, I now realize - Aristasia wasn’t Game of Thrones, after all - they portrayed Pura as a (somewhat) ideal society to which one might actually be beholden ultimately. I’d admit that of I woke up in, say, the Martindale-era version of Aristasia Pura, with canings, manacles, and District Governesses and such, I’d become a lone wolf terrorist, probably...

Winks and Shrugs

Aristasia has a well-documented history of fascist ties. It’s disingenuous to pretend that these things either didn’t happen, were misunderstandings, or were insignificant, when they kept appearing. They weren’t penpals with John Tyndall for no reason, nor did they publish right wing mouthpieces like The Reactionary Review and The English Magazine without some alignment of values between key players.

It would be one thing if the group had said something more than an (ironic, we swear!) wink and shrug when addressing the past fascist associations, or simply been upfront about them, but they weren’t. That caused a great deal of (to say the least) confusion for me and many other girls.

The iconography changes on the sites might’ve been done to attract multiracial members and move away from that neoreactionary association. Movements (particularly very, very small ones trying to look larger, like Aristasia) can shift trajectory sometimes - I've seen it elsewhere, too. Did the latter happen with Aristasia? The group was, in the 2000s, definitely multiracial, and somewhat more inclusive than we saw with Romantia and previous incarnations. “Multiracial” doesn’t automagically equal “consciously inclusive, safe, wonderful, antiracist” though - another thing to keep in mind when thinking about a movement like Aristasia.

I’m decidedly not one of those people who believes that engaging with right wing types is always a bad idea or unproductive. It’s true that we need to do our best to identify and critique harmful ideologies like fascism, but we also need to leave room for their adherents to deradicalize themselves and broaden their perspectives.

In retrospect I saw a certain (very vague) deradicalization with Aristasia during my time there. I didn’t get much of a sense of perspectives broadening much, though. I saw the introduction of more and more anime-focused orientalism, (more on that later). For some reason, this only made the group more insular. For many outsiders, Aristasia grew even more obtuse and insular after things like Operation Bridgehead and the removal of fascist symbols. The right wing ties got buried deeper and deeper under layers and layers of anime and escapism (a word someone like me doesn’t use lightly).

A Note on Mother God

Some folks online throughout the past fifteen years especially have argued that the Aristasians were directly playing into antisemitic conspiracy theories through their patently false beliefs about history, which rely heavily on the notion of degenerative cycles. There is also the intimation that in the most degenerative phases of these cycles, the warm, loving God the Mother is usurped by cruel patriarchal deities.

It is wholly true that (especially) nowadays, some folks amidst the New Age alt right milieu make similar claims. As part of this, though, they claim that the patriarchal takeover was a direct conspiracy by- wait for it - Jews. Yes, specifically the Jews. I’ve heard those types outright claim that Christianity was a Jewish conspiracy to usurp whatever “Golden Age” came before the present (presumed) Age of Quarrels.

Many of the more New Age sort argue that humans are “made for” Goddess worship or just some nebulous other religious form. This is often randomly polytheistic, “shamanic,” Folkish heathenism - it varies and usually they give a total oversimplification of what the terms entail. Sometimes they, like the Aristasians even claim that while the West has fallen into chaos, nations in Asia remain traditionally sane. This isn’t always the case because plenty of these alt right sort are (covertly or otherwise) Sinophobic, too, but some do.

That said… this isn’t a ubiquitous feature of the whole “ancient matriarchies” pseudohistory. Some do heavily advocate the ancient matriarchy idea and rope it with antisemitism and more - you can’t deny that. I argued with some of that sort online. Still, “fascist” is not a term I can honestly apply to the majority of believers in an ancient matriarchy, particularly within the wider pagan community.

They were annoying, often, especially when they refused to be corrected or even pick up a Ronald Hutton book. Most of them were either stubborn holdouts who read too much Silver Ravenwolf in the 1990s, or just incredibly new to alternative spirituality. Others deeply wanted to believe in this mother goddess concept as such, and didn’t understand that a prehistory wasn’t a prerequisite. They weren’t cryptofascists, nor particularly on a slope to becoming one.

Anyways, I’ve plans for a different page (or section, unsure) on how Aristasia borrows from the work of a man named Eduard Gerhard. He heavily pushed the idea that early civilizations were matriarchal and worshiped a Mother God, mostly based on the preponderance of feminine iconography found in digs. That’s, as many have realized since, not much of a reason. There’s no evidence of early cultural hegemony, let alone matriarchy as a universal system.

Later “scholars” like Margaret Murray added onto this with tales of surviving secret traditions, ultimately filtering into modern neopaganism, other present day alternative spiritual movements, and things like Aristasia. By the 1990s, the idea of a Paleolithic Great Goddess Cult had become a common pagan talking point, and often went unchallenged. I’m compelled to assume good faith when I see someone spouting it. Again, most of them tend to be annoying within the pagan community, but hardly (by and large) fascists, nor driving in that direction. Part of assuming good faith means attempting to explain the truth, though, which is complicated.

I give people (who might’ve been raised on, as I said, Silver Ravenwolf and Margaret Murray) the benefit of the doubt. It’s possible to hold that kind of (false) belief without any ill will or (intentional) bigotry. I try to correct the information when I see it, with gentleness. If it’s paired with obvious alt right rhetoric, the story’s quite different, of course, but - I assume good faith initially.

While the Aristasians obviously predate the later ubiquity of things like Wicca, they still absorbed the earlier ideas. It would surprise me if someone involved in Rhennes hadn’t read Margaret Murray’s works, for example. If it weren’t for other, more disturbing aspects of Aristasia as a whole, the “Great Goddess” pseudohistory wouldn’t be quite so worrisome. In need of correction, yes, but not nearly as troubling.

(Quite a) few more sections to follow...

This page will, as noted at the beginning, remain unfinished for quite some time. Future topics it will address include expansion on the above and related topics. I'll discuss orientalism within the movement which, unlike the right-wing stuff, seemed much more tenacious. There'll be a section on escapism and how that relates to things like building/believing in imaginary worlds - is it ever healthy? Thank you for perusing this page, which addresses such a difficult topic in an amateur way. Consider contacting me via any number of these methods.