Additional thoughts

Here I note my additional thoughts on this whole "Aristasia"-"Filianism" phenomena. These are solely my own opinions based on what I know now and what I thought that I knew back then. Maybe what I think I "knew" aren't accurate, but that is to be expected of a secretive organization with a clear in-group and those outside that in-group.

WTF?!?!?!?!?????????

It is Labor Day, and I was poking through the interwebz. I came across a couple of online posts on Reddit and Tumblr saying that Cure Dolly or the Mushroom was "Priscilla Langridge." 

This was entirely unexpected (if really true) and came to me as a total surprise. 

Of course, in the bizarre world of "Aristasia," there was a concept of "life theatre." As in on-stage theatrical plays, one person can play multiple characters, and conversely, one character can be played by different actors. So I really do not know. But if this were true, Langridge would have been quite old when they were traveling in Japan as an "alien doll" (I assume they were about the same age group as Mary Guillermin). 

Another thing I read is that Langridge may be the true author of The Feminine Universe (under a nom de plume, Alice Lucy Trent). If this were true, I surmise that Lady Aquila was also Langridge, as the writing styles were quite similar. Again, this was not something I expected, as I always assumed Alice Lucy Trent and Langridge were two separate persons (and I used to think ALT was a pseudonym of the Raya at first). 

I am unsure if Langridge was played by multiple actors, or if (as many suggest) Langridge "was in fact a man." Unless this Langridge person was exceedingly "passable," people may have noticed when Langridge/Princess Mushroom/Sushuri Madonna was on their tour of the United States to meet some of the Bridgehead in-groupies (again, I was not one of them). Further, as far as I remember from the earlier blog posts of Cure Dolly's, they briefly lived in smaller Central Japan cities of Ichinomiya and Yokkaichi (near Nagoya) while studying Japanese. Those cities, and Japan in general, were not the kind of place that tolerated visibly gender non-conforming people (maybe this is changing of late, but still only in major metropolitan cities and still lagging far behind the Western world). I struggle to imagine how an elderly transsexual foreigner could survive in those towns.   

Aside from this, in discussing Langridge and their life history, it is also important to understand that they were a product of their time. If the allegation is true, the life of a transsexual in 1980s Great Britain and Ireland was vastly different from today's understanding of transgenderism. Indeed, "transgender" as a social construct did NOT even exist at the time.

Historically, the word "transgender" was coined by Charles Prince, a.k.a. Virginia Prince, the founder of the Society for the Second Self, as an euphemism for male heterosexual transvestites, the constituents of Prince's organization, at a time when cross-dressers were always conflated with gay men and drag queens. Prince was a controversial figure even then, but by the late 1990s, "transgender" became more of a catch-all term that encompassed both transsexuals and transvestites. Yet, this construct of "transgender" was merely a marriage of convenience solely for political purposes and shared political interests. Transsexuals did not socialize with transvestites or cross-dressers. So in the 1980s, in a deeply conservative rural Ireland, especially, they were expected to go from one "closet" to another "closet" as quickly as possible, without letting anyone know about their pasts. 

This also may explain why ALT took care to include a footnote on page 53 of The Feminine Universe book (in the 2010 edition; page number may differ in the 1997 edition) that appears to subtly signal Aristasia's acceptance of "male-to-female transsexuals" while simultaneously insisting that Aristasia only admitted "genuine females." I do not think this was hypocrisy or a double standard, if the historical and cultural contexts were properly understood (something most younger LGBTQ+ folks are likely unaware of). 

But again, I do not know the truth. This Labor Day surprise only confirms how much I was not allowed to know.

What I did not know

I applaud those who have done impressive jobs unearthing old primary source materials and organizing information to shed light on the secretive history of Filianism and associated movements. None of these people is getting paid to do this, and the topic is too niche to make it to any respectable scholarly journal of history, cultural anthropology, or religious studies. Yet, there are still many people who are simply intrigued by this madness.

I've learned a lot from their works. And I realize how little I knew, and more importantly, how little I was allowed to know. 

While I was still a practicing adherent of the Filianic sect and an active participant in the Operation Bridgehead, I knew nothing of Lux Madriana. When the Aristasian leadership decided to release only a small portion of its scriptures online, I was not told that there were other texts. It was only after my curiosity took me to web searches that I found that these texts Aristasia uploaded to its website were only small parts of a much larger work belonging to Lux Madriana. Then no one satisfactorily explained to me why the Aristasian "Authorized Version" had a slightly different text than Lux Madriana's. It was only after more people noticed the discrepancy that "Mother God dot Con" (MGC) issued a statement about LM. 

I had no idea that what would later be the Aristasians were, in fact, excommunicated from Lux Madriana as heretics, and that their antics led the larger LM community to "go underground." All I heard was that Lux Madriana was somehow an impure spinoff that incorporated New Age and occult elements (and allowing men!) into Filianism and therefore corrupted it. And that LM (Madrian Literature Circle) introduced additional texts that were not authorized by the "original" leaders of the faith. At no time did Aristasia admit its origin in LM, nor that its founders deviated from the beliefs and norms of LM, and were expelled.

A resurgence of activity at MGC?

Did I have that much of an influence in "Bridgehead-era Aristasia"?

Lately, I get the impression that some online personalities seem to think that I was a very influential figure in the "Bridgehead-era Aristasia," so much so that I had somehow contributed to a "schism." This is not so. 

Although I was one of the earliest participants in the Aristasian expressions in Second Life, I was never part of their in-group. In fact, that was part of my ongoing frustration at the time. There seemed to be an in-group that basically dictated everything, perhaps some of whom were not on Second Life at all. But again, with people using multiple pseudonyms in the world of Aristasia, only God knows.

I was critical of how the pre-Bridgehead Aristasia created public spectacles and distractions from itself through its commercialization of BDSM and LARPing. Equally, I became increasingly critical of how the "new" Aristasia watered down itself through its co-opting and misappropriation of Japanese anime and kawaii subcultures. For a movement that (at the time) appeared to me that be rooted in serious philosophical foundations, I felt that the in-group was doing itself a massive disservice. 

But again, I had really no influence or clout in how this Aristasian enterprise was run, and after a while, they grew tired of me, so I was clearly being ostracized as early as late 2006. It was around the same time I became more of a public outside critic of Aristasia and Chelouranya.

A big part of the difficulty in understanding all these Aristasian phenomena is that observers make a lot of speculations, and those speculations then become accepted "facts" down the road. 

The "Eclipse"

According to the common Aristasian folklore, the world entered a period of "Eclipse" in the mid-1960s, at which the "bongo" replaced the civilization, and the Queen's English (or, the received pronunciation) was replaced by the "Estuary dialect" (or, as they called it, the "Rivermouth"). 

To them, these are signs of hyper-patriarchy gone wild. The Eclipse, according to the philosophers of Aristasia, was the late stage of the Tamasic era in which masculinity reigned supreme and destroyed all that was good, true, and beautiful. 

In retrospect, this was outright farcical, and I cannot believe I fell for this!

What happened in the 1960s? Some of the greatest advancements in women's rights and gay rights. If anything, the 1960s saw an era in which men began embracing effeminacy: long hair, hippies, rock stars dressed in more androgynous clothes, and a conscious shift in culture in which traditional manhood became no longer the ideal society aspired to. Since then, over the course of half a century, males in the industrialized nations have constantly become emasculated, while traditional manliness has been condemned as "toxic masculinity." That's hardly a triumph of patriarchy or masculinity!

Oh, and the hardcore Aristasians also believed that the Eclipse would end around 2050, at which point, slavery and the caste system would also be reinstated (though their prediction may not be all so far off)! These people could not be taken seriously, and I am ashamed that I was duped into this.  

Bending reality

Can an online subculture distort reality so much that its participants believe in anything, including an entirely false worldview and even the fictitious perceptions of who they are? An interesting article in UnHerd takes the case of Aristasia and argues that, over 50 years ago, Aristasia (and its prior iterations) started something today's society contends with: a constructed bubble of false or distorted reality. 

All this has become too common in our modern world. From QAnon to manosphere, from alt-right to contemporary gender ideology extremism, what may have been in the previous generation innocent and unobtrusive cybersects have become sources of major social, cultural, and political conflicts today. We live in this "post-truth" generation in which there appears to be no shared consensus of reality, and as a result, we have become intensely polarized, no longer capable of finding the middle ground or sensible compromise.

How Filianism/Deanism and "Aristasia" might be a form of gender ideology in a traditionalist costume

Deanism is often mistaken for Dianic Wicca, but they cannot be more different. While they both can be said to be a faction of the amorphous "women's spirituality" movement that emerged around the same era, at their roots, they are diametrically opposed to each other. 

Dianic Wicca, and other women-only forms of Neo-Paganism more broadly, root themselves in the embodied female experiences, especially around the menstrual cycles and, in some cases, embodied sexual experiences. In contrast, Deanism (and by extension, Filianism and "Aristasia"), believes that femininity is not an embodied state but is a metaphysical state. Hence, the Filianic longer catechism posits that "all souls are feminine souls" and that even men have "feminine souls." 

There is a striking similarity between the concept of "Aristasian diaspora" (that is, members of the "Aristasia-in-Telluria" might be stranded souls from Aristasia Pura that are temporarily trapped in their "flesh avatars" and therefore the Operation Bridgehead -- and subsequently, Chelouranya -- existed to "assist" or "protect" such souls) and the classical transsexual narratives. 

Notably, in the "tellurian" manifestation of Aristasia (for example, in Second Life, or at any of the Aristasian houses), their "genders" -- blondes (chelana) and brunettes (melini) -- were wholly detached from one's physical reality. That is, one could have jet-black hair and be a "blonde," or, likewise, a platinum blonde or a redhead might be a "brunette." This was a matter of one's personality and temperament, unrelated to her actual hair color.

Whereas Dianic Wicca is about empowerment of women through radical self-acceptance, Filianism/Deanism/Aristasia is about dissociation from one's body and self-denial in favor of upholding otherworldly fantasies (here is another similarity with Scientology, too, which believes that human souls were kidnapped from another planet and dumped onto a Hawaiian volcano). 

Thus, Aristasia may have started a prototypal form of gender ideology half a century before it became part of the mainstream political discourse in the West. 

Goddess worship as a trauma coping mechanism

Téa Nicolae writes in her article, "The Western revival of Goddess Worship," published in Feminist Theology (2023), that the modern Western women created the Goddess Movement (and creating a deity in their own images) largely as a response to their collective sexual trauma, from which a "sexual healing is difficult to achieve in the context of Abrahamic religions, and, in response, unconsciously or purposely, Western women have been forced to create their own religion, moulded on a female God that can mirror their mental processes." 

Thus, unsurprisingly, many Goddess communities eschew male participation, opting for a "sacred" women-only space. Needless to say, in the 21st century, this has caused a lot of consternation among transgender activists. Perhaps, AMAB trans folks also experienced their own variations of sexual trauma under patriarchy, thus seeking healing from that trauma is about as natural as the females' desires for the same. Yet, I do not think that the types of experienced trauma are the same, and therefore, the paths to healing also would be different. And the AMAB trans people bring years or decades of privileged socialization and entitled attitudes (albeit subconsciously, perhaps), which require years of conscious unlearning and reparation before they can successfully integrate into such communities (if that is even possible at all in less than 10 years, realistically speaking).  

Personally, I would advocate an end to all sex-segregated environments in favor of a radical equality and abolition of sexist gender norms in secular, civil spaces (which would liberate males as well as females), but that would probably not happen for a few more generations. In the meantime, the freedom of association ought to be respected, particularly in the context of faith-based association and bona fide religious activities, and differences should be celebrated instead of hidden. While I do not call for an across-the-board exclusion of AMAB trans people from all women-only spaces, I would like to encourage them to create their own spaces and communities to celebrate their differences instead of what is really a form of assimilationism. The truth of the matter is, in women-only communities, they are either going to have to hide a lot of who they are and their own needs, or end up dominating the groups and the conversations, and create a lot of resentment and hostilities (even if the women would not say that to them in their faces). In any case, trans inclusion in women-only spaces still fails to include nonbinary folks, a growing demographic.  

Beautifully said

I am aware that he is Catholic, but listen to what he has to say. Beautifully said.