I started this project needing to write much, and then re-wrote and republished these mosts when inspired by the sensible words of a Lady of Cybele whilst indulging in a classically Russian fit of depressed paranoia on the eve of a very big and strange excursion of more than a month’s time overseas. Still, some important things have been written and I may hope they are read and understood with the meanings which I have desired to impart: Sometimes the understanding of my words seems much less clear to others, which I do so regret.
For the moment, then, the last point I would wish to make is in reference to the title. The Massagetae, the tribe of which Tomyris was Queen, defeated the Persian Army of Cyrus–and killed the Shah of Shahs who founded the Achaemenid Empire–with the open plains tactics which would characterize many of the peoples who had strong women in their numbers in the Central Asian plains. I, too, am of a heritage grown up in that region of the world, though a much later one, best exemplified thus:
And so it is finding myself with very, very few myths and legends of women that we can take pride in, that I find myself with the need to provide some for my daughters. That this accomplishment should be undertaken responsibility will necessarily mean the work of many decades, probably only culminating in my retirement. The subject is already clear–the Thassalocracy of the Minoans in which women appear to have been equal to men, and whose stories we will not know short of the translation of Linear A–but the mental maturity and time to commit to the effort will be a long time coming.
Until then, the stories of brave warrior Queens of old, and especially of Tomyris who dispatched Cyrus honourably for the rather treacherous provision of the Massagetae with strong drink (which t’would have been quite hopeless against these Cossack women!) are the legends in which we must take pride and teach to our daughters, and the myths we must discern from the older stories of the Goddesses, of India, the west, and all the world, before they were shackled by men or swamped under the tide of Christendom. In this little task, I am surely more confident, for the motivation of imparting wisdom in one’s young is a mercifully strong one, indeed.
On the Liberation of being Modest.
Now to consider a delicate, and more explicitly feminist, subject. There are traditionally in feminism two schools, as the professor of the sole Women’s Studies class I ever bothered to take kindly and wisely put it: Those who are against the sexual act, and those who are comfortable with it. But from thesis and antithesis comes, ideally, synthesis. Is it possible to find redeeming aspects to a view which straddles both these points? They are not precisely accurate, but they are a closer description than most of the divisions in the feminist movement, and it’s a valid enough starting point to consider the question of whether or not women derive power from concealing or revealing their bodies.
Well, perhaps. There is, of course, the reality–I am personally an intensely modest person, rarely finding it appropriate to venture outside in clothing which does not cover me to the neck, and prefering to actually dress; skirts, long dusters, brocaded blouses with silver buttons and these sorts of things. I do not have the wardrobe I’d prefer to be truly proper, the layers and endless accrutements which have to be made by hand, but I do frequently surprise people at school by changing between classes when I drop home for lunch, as something different usually seems appropriate for the afternoon over the morning. I shall leave it to Aristasians to critique the nature of modern public dress which leads me to such preferences and sentiments, though I warn that I do not agree with their opinions on language. We cannot ask soldiers, workers, sailors, and other sorts of professions to behave according to the strictures of high society, which is why we have social classes (or should have them), and class spheres, in which different things are appropriate according to setting, and these rules are enforced to create standards of etiquette appropriate to each circumstance. To use the most extreme circumstance: If one is trying to get an artillery caisson out of the mud whilst under a barrage of shrapnel, four letter words are likely quite appropriate.
This is however a slight tangent from the principle point, though modesty certainly involves comportment as well as dress. I have never cringed harder in my life than to hear someone, first berate another for an innocent mistake in a fine Japanese restaurant south of Seattle, and then hear the berated person reply with obscenities out of his embarassment at the error. The criticism was uncalled for in public (and the person being criticized should not have been so defensive, all things considered–but that is another point), and should have been handled after dinner; the language in public was utterly horrifying, especially in a place regularly frequented by the local Japanese community where decorum was at a considerable premium. I rather wished to flee, but that would have also been indecorous, by calling further attention to the altercation, so I had only to wait with my cheeks red until enough time had passed that I could excuse myself to the lady’s room and compose myself without it seeming out of sorts.
Modesty in dress, however, is something important. It is also something which does not speak on sexuality. That is to say, that the anti-sex aspect of feminism is flawed because it assaults sexuality with a very broad brush. The sacrosanct of the female sexuality should be celebrated; erotica is not inappropriate, as the Greeks and Romans well understood, and the Hindi a thousand times moreso. Your body, as a Maid, is a powerful temple to the Goddess and should not be neglected as such; it is a place of power and in the sacred prostitution of old Mesopotamia and of more modern customs was recognized and, even in the Patriarchy, respected as such to at least some small measure. This power should be celebrated, and exercised according to the directions of the restrictions of your class and circumstance, to bring pleasure and joy and health to your partners, and in consort with men, the creation of new life. In the sexuality of a woman’s body is a supreme level of power that she ought be trained in both using and controlling, for liberation implies the power to engage in self-discipline, and slavery, subjugation, is the inability to discipline yourself, but rather to have your passions controlled from without!
The liberated woman certainly ought know control, and one of the foremost reasons for it is the way that the driving forces of the patriarchy will tend to pervert sexuality. Observe, for example, modern business clothes for women–they are whorish, without reservation–and they serve only to objectify working women. One wonders what the point of working is when so objectified, and the Honourable Secretary of State’s wearing of a pantsuit was a blessed relief, but only because it is better to wear even a dumpy Mao suit as in cultural revolution era China than to be restricted into a skirt which offers neither free movement for practicality nor any kind of modesty, which at once constrains the physical body… And shows it off to the consuming eyes of they who control you.
This does call, therefore, for a certain resumption of modesty, a fight against the idea of the “third wave” feminist that liberation will be had in dressing like men. Casual dress on similar standards to men, does nothing at all in terms of advancing women’s liberation when business dressing standards forbid it (and ignoring for the moment the debasement of modern casual dress for both males and females). Therefore, beyond seeking to dress modestly in casual dress, to refudiate the idea that the woman must be obscured into the modern casual clothes of the man, we may also seek to assault the sexual objectification of the woman in the business dress culture.
Here, we may indulge in imagining the dress of a truly proper and liberated businesswoman to be a skirt of length below the knees, either A-frame or with a suitable kick-pleat for free movement, with stockings covering the knees and heels of a half inch or inch at the very most, flat and stable for walking, to reject the idea that women must be limited to areas of business where customary formal business dress makes their presence impracticable. Ideally the business dress of a woman will serve an engineer in the field just as well as a secretary, with a few modifications (boots, for instance). The purse should be long-strapped and worn across the shoulder as this is a practical concession against theft, and it may well be carrying important identification cards in the modern secured workplace. An under-bodice or similar unribbed garment, demi-corset at most, might be well suitable for toning, with a button-up blouse modestly concealing the décollage, obviously, for work should be a professional place, and hair generally pulled back, but some free draping allowed to the sides, or else in a more typical style, and the blouse perhaps covered by a vest as well worked in below the long coat.
These general rules are but an indulgent description of an ideal which is intended to contrast the tight, short pencil-skirt, gauzy nylons, and high heels of the modern woman’s business suit, a request for you to imagine the differences. The woman so dressed can run, whereas the modern business suit does not permit it. The woman so dressed conceals her body in the workplace, where she is procuring money for her household.She is thus left with the freedom to choose her own dress on time which is her own, and to bring to work only that which she needs to accomplish her job in a competent fashion. One cannot say that women are liberated in the workplace until it is the norm for them to be able to wear exactly the same amount of concealing clothing as men wear, because they have even more reason for it, while still adhering to standards of beauty and elegance.
Who then could really say that dress codes changing in the past forty years have done anything positive at all for women, when the average Maid is still required to wear objectifying clothing to work? There is certainly power to be had in modesty in the right circumstance, in the same way that the raw power of female sexuality may be channeled into incredibly healthy and productive expressions in its own time as well. Truly of the Christian Bible the truest verse remains: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”. The leftist feminist literati at times seems to have done very little to address the continued sexual exploitation of the professional woman in modern corporate culture, and it is here that a stand against social convention could actually do some good.
A Defence of Spirituality
This is one of the greatest problems of modern society–spirituality. I consider myself to be rather deeply spiritual and a bit superstitious, though much less of the later, because spirituality is generally more compatible with philosophy and I try to honour spirits without holding in myself beliefs about various activities which directly contradict science, regarding matters of fortune and fate as the most important. This sort of detached spirituality is likely related to my profession of engineering. On the other hand, engineers, who I prefer to refer to as applied scientists, are the most religious of the scientific professions. I suspect this is a degree of self-selection; I chose engineering because I want to see my accomplishments before my eyes, because I want to have a constructive feeling most especially of contributing to the world in which my children live, and then of course due to the very practical fact that engineering professionals are the only people with really stable careers in the modern United States. Cascadia is alas subject to the whims of the US government–I am a Cascadian nationalist–and therefore cannot institute the worker protections it otherwise might be able to pursue. This means I chose the most stable career constantly because it allows me to protect and nurture children most effectively, and as an ardent feminist who desires only the love of women, I am by both practicality and pride driven to guarantee that I shall be able to raise daughters without the intervention of the hand of man.
Modern religion, however, is not something very conductive to spirituality. The temple to Mammon that we call the Mega-Church has overcome any kind of older traditions, and Vatican II gutted the ritual and ceremony of American Catholicism. I was, personally, raised in Russian Orthodoxy and the Orthodox tradition was an eye-opening exposure to a genuine spirituality which left me deeply at odds with my parents’ later meddling in protestantism, for long reasons I shall not relate, but mostly focused on exile politics and the stance of the ROCOR to the communist collaboration within the principle body of the Russian Orthodox Church. I could see the pointlessness of the protestant religious tradition even as a very young child, and my heart ached for the Marine tradition of the Theotokos (God-Bearer, for those increase numbers of disadvantaged to whom the modern schools have denied knowledge of the Greek Tongue), of that little remnant of female spirituality which protestantism crushes entirely which I was fortunate enough to spend the first few years of my thinking life with. My ultimate reaction to that dreadful hollowness of Protestantism was in adulthood a gyration between atheism and paganism which settled down to a comfortable acknowledgement of a distant sort of polytheistic paganism. I will trust that the Goddesses shall forgive me for the very cycle level of passion I have in my faith, and carry on thusly in life, confident that I have at least indeed been touched by the compassion of Her.
Few people in this country are so privileged. Modern American spirituality, and to a large extent that of the British Commonwealth and Europe as well, is a fundamentally bankrupt experience. This is far worse than the moral bankruptcy of the modern Russian Orthodox Church, as a creature of the state security apparatus of the Russian State. This is about the spiritual bankruptcy of western Christendom, because it is possible for a religious organization to be at once morally bankrupt and spiritually redemptive, or a moral voice and spiritually bankrupt. The Catholic Church mostly sustained the later position until the hammer-blows of the priestly paedophilia scandals of late. Protestantism shed any kind of connection with the spiritual almost from its creation. It has been the enabling engine of global capitalism ever since, and with more and more terrifying rapidity it has reached a point where it serves as nothing more than the temple order of a capitalist society.
It is this organisation of Jesus-promotes-wealth (which merely by reading the Bible is the most contemptible lie ever proclaimed in the entire Universe from here unto Domesday) which is the ultimate purveyor of spiritual bankruptcy. Gone, gone, is the sublime of the Pythia, of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, of even the divine wonder of old gold and jewel encrusted Icons of the Theotokos in the holy heights of the Hagia Sophia. Now we have a man, standing in a room which is often used as a basketball court on other days of the week, preaching a doctrine of adherence to a set of moral principles in which we are supposed to believe… Because God told us we ought. The redemptive power of spirituality is completely lost. The point of those rules–to enable the rituals of supernatural force which save and ennoble the human spirit–is missing, and thus any kind of validity to the pronounced doctrine has ceased to exist. One would indubitably gain a greater spiritual experience out of listening to Debussey playing Mussorgsky’s Great Gate of Kiev to a backdrop of still pictures of iconography, and it would even convey in emotions principles more conductive to Christian any any words that might be uttered by a protestant preacher.
It is in this environment that Gentlemen of Letters and Sciences rightfully proclaim that religion is unnecessary, that we have no need for it, that it is a false and harmful doctrine which holds back society. All of this is true about modern western Christendom, and not in a single way false, at least, when applied specifically to that peculiar doctrine. And indeed, where is Domesday? The End Times were never supposed to be something terrifying, and were something that Christendom dwelt extensively on as an escape from a flawed world. It was imperfect, but it was spiritual. Now, however, the doctrine assures that tithing and obeying these moral commandments will result in wealth and prosperity on this earth, which is a service to the modern corporate culture. Once, Christendom promised only torment and death on this Earth, while holding forth the banner of hope, of spiritual power and redemption, in the eternal award of the Initiates to the Faith. Now, the power of the beauty of Iconography, of the sacred mysteries, of the chanting of priests and swinging of censers which was shared with the worship of the Goddess at Ephesus, is no more, and we listen to the pronouncements of the Chief Officer of the Country Club in how a few ancient doctrines, ripped from their spiritual foundings, shall provide for us on Earth and provide some sort of spiritual award reduced to a vague feeling of happiness and watered down from an understanding of the transcendence of the human spirit.
In this sort of world, it is only perfectly fair that atheism prospers, and that I support the propounders of the atheist doctrines, for when this hollow brand of religion which does nothing for its adherents slews away like rotten flesh, we may hope that a more genuine spirituality will take root in its place! This replacement, which can only grow when the ground has healed from the false beliefs of modern protestantism, in all the panoply and confusion and grandeur of how such systems operate in practice, would be nonetheless fully able to communicate spirituality to the people through art. For as Schopenhauer realized in the mysticism of the Buddhist east and customs of India, and expounded as filtered through the philosophical lens, art is the only way for the common person to reach enlightenment. Art was the business of the ancient church, and of the faiths of the mystery cults and the Mother Goddesses. Art was the connection of enlightenment with the common person, and the conduit through which their spirituality could fill the fundamental psychological void of the human existence: That we are both self-aware and mortal.
Until then, we must support the atheists, for they till the sod under, so that we might hope that in their wake, seeds of a new and genuine spirituality founded in the old knowledge and comfort of the Mother Goddesses may take root in the West and make good some of the psychological damage caused by the absence of any nurturing promise against this terrible realization of chronologically limited self-awareness. Their interests and mine furthermore may very well not diverge within my lifetime, so my beliefs become a matter for family, and rationalism as something to propound, for the most part, in public, because the typical person listening will need to have the poisoned seed of the protestant faith tilled out of the heart before the love of the Goddess might grow there, and I am not so flattered with my own certainty in life as to proclaim a necessity of belief in the divine feminine as a requisite for the receipt of its redemptive power. This may thus be the rather complex summary of my feelings on the subject of religion, spirituality, and the modern atheist movement to which so many of my dearest friends and confidantes adhere.
Whispers of the Divine Matriarchy: The Kerala System
This, then, will be a brief initial explanation of the subject of the Indian State of Kerala which I intend to return to on repeated occasions if possible, for it is an interesting and very relevant one. A brief disclaimer: I am slightly biased toward Kerala (but then again, all charming works of literature have a hint of bias in their objective analysis, and I am arrogant enough to try and be charming) because of personal religious fervour, which likes much the worship of the Naga in this variant of Hinduism, as snake-worship is a fundamental part of the pre-Indo-Aryan religions of many parts of Europe, and shows that even the heartlands of the Aryans had this custom in days past, which makes the universalism of the deities all the more poignant. Finding solace in the spirituality of a region is at least somewhat important and does provide me that tint of bias.
Kerala is a state corresponding to the region known until recently as the Malabar Coast of the Deccan. Islam came here by trading and not by conquest as it did to northern India from the heights of Afghanistan and Persia, and Christianity was introduced in the Roman times, for Kerala contained the great Roman trading ports of India, which likely had quarters directly controlled by the Romans, and before them also saw a Hellenistic Greek presence. It is a land of many unusual things. The first of these is an exceptionally favourable GINI coefficient. Kerala is poor, and wealth is extremely evenly distributed. This should not be a particular surprise, as GINI coefficients are most favourable in undeveloped nations and Asian states, for the most part, though this is not completely true.
What is interesting is what has been accomplished with so little wealth. Here is a society of traditional crops, without even genetically modified organisms (of which I shall conduct a defence on a later date), for their introduction has been sporadic and opposed in India. A land of immense rainfall, it is certainly an ideal habitation for humanity, but the same is true of Cascadia, Kamchatka, Chile, or France, a natural breadbasket which would sate any desires of a Physiocrat, and on the Physiocratic school of Economics we shall also return shortly. Kerala’s points of interest lay in the accomplishment of the people:
Allow us to consider Kerala’s own pride, first.
Literacy rate for women: 87.86%
Number of districts with a favourable (more females than males) sex ratio: 13 out of 14. — a serious issue in modern India.
Female life expectancy: 74 years.
Number of deliveries under institutional care: +90%
Infant mortality rate: Half the Indian national average.
And an interesting note:
“WORK PARTICIPATION
Though Kerala rank top in women’s literacy rate and education, the work participation sex-ratio shows a deviation. There are only 345 female workers per 1000 male workers which is lower than the national average (1991). The work Participation rate for women in 1991 was only 15.85 while that of men was 47.58 which is about three times that of women. This in turn indicate that women’s share of earned income” in the state is only 12% . The above fact leaves the note that the higher rate of literacy/education among women is not a sufficient condition for gender equality in work. Along with low work participation, rates of unemployment and gender differentials in the labium market persist across the society.”
This is interesting because it references a recently published article on the Netherlands I shall reproduce here to help make a point:
Women in the Netherlands work less and love it. (as a paraphrase of the article title.)
This point, which I shall undertake to develop in a further post based on this article alone, however, shows that workforce participation is not necessarily an aim of women even in a very liberal, open society with plenty of rights for women and opportunities. We shall dare to say that the nature of women favours security over ambition, and if security can be provided at less effort it will be accepted, but this is a brief abstract of a thesis which would require much effort, very tangential to Kerala, to develop, so please understand the limitations of the assertion for now, though it must be observed that again Kerala shares the traits of a developed western nation without the expenditure of resources or political system of one.
In short the position of women in Kerala is much superiour to that in the rest of India, and indeed to that in most of the world. The life expectancy of women in Kerala is a full six years greater than that of women, the educational levels are similar, and workforce participation runs at roughly similar rates to the Netherlands, which is a significant indication of how two very different societies, but both with high female literacy and social participation, will tend to have relatively low involvement of women in the workforce. This coincides with further metrics: End of life care, for example, is better than it many industrialized countries in Kerala. And how we treat our dying and our dead is very, very fundamental to the overall human condition.
People in Kerala have the resources to be as happy as those in the west based on their health metrics, and they lack the stressors of artificial western life which lead to the great unhappiness which plagues frankly most of us, especially intellectuals, and leads to the pandemic of false use of medication for supposed mental ills which would be regarded as a normal range of expression in a non-standardized society, and much less pronounced due to the relative happiness of people in regions like Kerala or Bhutan over the industrial world.
The first and most important part of the data is that Kerala is the closest thing the world has ever seen to a modern Matriarchy. Ruled until Indian independence by long lines of Queens both openly and as effective powers to the throne, the Princely States which made up Kerala were traditionally ruled by the Nairs and Bunts, forward castes which practiced a matrilineal system of inheiritance. Worshipping the snakes of the Earth and organized on matrilineal lines with a history of strong Queens, the land of Kerala comes as close as anyone could ask for in a matriarchal society in modern Earth, and the immense success of women in Kerala relative to the rest of India must be ascribed to this fact. The culture had harmonious and more equal relations between the sexes in which women were actually respected as rulers and the creators of each generation, whose wisdom raised children and whose wombs determined inheiritance. Though imperfect, it is still something to be lauded as how a society can be organized. Maternal morality rate being a source of particular pride (in how low it is relative to the rest of India) continues to reflect the position of women in Kerala as being fundamentally different than in most of the rest of the world.
The British, in perhaps their greatest intellectual crime in India, succeeded in largely destroying the old matrilineal inheiritance systems for the Nairs, though they remain with the Bunts, and then the arrogance of Nehru and his followers finished off the old Royal families, but that does not stop Kerala from being largely a success, and a sustainable success, at that. The legacy of the culture outlives the old customs of ruling, though, in the same way the legacy of traditional patriarchy serves to reinforce modern and less overt patriarchy by subverting women into its structure through force of tradition (the intellectual, activist conservative woman of modern America will often be single, very well educated, and successful. She is liberated. Many of her sisters, however, remain bound into traditional notions of womanhood which serve to enslave women as a system of more traditional patriarchy society. They are the likes of Phyllis Schyfly rather than Michelle Malkin).
Kerala, on one-seventieth (1/70th!) of the income of the United States, has nearly identical health outcomes and education, and more happiness. This is a brilliant rejection of the idea that humanity must suffer a Malthusian collapse through overpopulation. It also disproves the idea that capital is necessary in any great quantity for a happy and prosperous society. This returns us to the ideas of the Physiocrats, those laudable philosophers of economy of the grand era of the Ancien Régime. The Doctrine of the Physiocrats held primarily that working of the land–that actual productive work (i.e., of farms and to a lesser extent mining and fishing) were the only actual forms of wealth to be generated. We may regard this assertion proudly as true, using Kerala as an example of how it is true, for in Kerala the agricultural produce remains still the main source of economic development, and yet all actual needs of the people are successfully met. This suggests in the most strong of terms that development of capital in excession of that found in Kerala is actually unnecessary for the human condition, and is based on speculation and not actual productive wealth.
This, then, is the principle argument for the Kerala model: It is sustainable, and nothing more is necessary, so we should we seek more when it provides us with nothing truly beneficial in any kind of rigorous, scientific analysis of available data metrics which measure the happiness, health, and cultural development of humans? We find there to be a very limited need to press beyond Kerala, and find the idea that much of modern technology could not have been developed in the Kerala system to be rather false.
States with relatively concentrated industrial facilities and capabilities have been considered great powers in the past–Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire, for instance–and were able to sustain that concentrated industry, enough for the business of state with an appropriate level of diffusion through society, despite having essentially agricultural existence for the average person. To combine the technological upper-class veneer required for the functions of an organized State with the human social development of Kerala is to make a nation. This furthermore addresses in and of itself the primary criticism of the Kerala model.
That criticism is that approximately 30% of the people in the state are reliant on some form of cash allowances from outside of Kerala, known as remittances. But the people working for remittances make a true pittance, working usually for on the order of 1.00 USD an hour–or much less, only some of which they can send back to their families. Most importantly, however, Kerala has an extremely poorly developed industry, which is good, as modern multinational corporations would destroy the Keralan model if allowed to take root in Kerala. But it is not good in general, for the industry which, for example, sustained the Army of the Tsars, could be used to good effect in Kerala–to provide the industrial veneer required to more effectively distribute wealth through the families (modern transportation networks, for instance, are crucial in the prevention of famine, a fact of life in premodern society). This is where the loss of the Royal families hurts the most; they are bound to the land, their blood is of it, it is their investment and their glory. They are naturally going to invest their resources into it–and into defending it.
The maintenance of the industrial structure that would have been funded by an active and involved Royal family would have provided the additional GDP that remittances in the global economy are instead forced to provide before the states of Kerala were denied an independent development under their traditional and matriarchalist form of government. And this, then, is why Royal Families are good: They tend to keep the investment, in their traditional expression of power and wealth (the consideration of the debasement of modern royalty in Europe is another matter), within their holdings, their own lands. They are tied by blood, honour, and tradition to their soil of their foremothers, and their wealth is therefore much, much more likely to be effectively reinvested in the provision of those people with jobs and livelihoods than could ever be expected from the shiftless capitalist interested only in accumulating wealth, especially when he is a foreigner and bound to the patriarchal ideology of exploitation and dominance. And so, the great flaw of the Kerala model indeed came about only because of the destruction of the Matriarchist-Matrilineal traditional governing structure within Kerala State.
How is it possible to be both conservative and feminist? I am rather snarky, and the title could be answered with “easily” or “creatively” and both would be true. However that is not what I am here to talk about. No, but rather conservative feminism is best called such because it seeks to conserve many positive aspects of older, more traditional society which supported the functioning of women, while rejecting and opposing patriarchy, and further especially opposing the social consequences of modernism which were it not for the efforts of the feminist movement would have served purely to benefit men.
Conservative feminism has nothing to do with supporters of Sara Palin, nothing to do with the modern American conceptualization of the conservative. It is indeed a decisive rejection of this. We may better call it National-Syndicalist feminist were it not for the negative connotations of that term in the sense of the old regime of the Francoists in Spain. Monarchist or Primitivist may be a better appellation. Still, conservative is the most accurate, and merely perverted by present society. Another, more ‘politically correct’ terms would be Kerala Feminism, and to the subject of Kerala, the Kerala way, and the Indian social compact I will doubtless return many times. Still, as far as modern societies go the metrics for Kerala provide a reasonable guide on creating a happy and sustainable society, and thus the justification for such attention.
What you will not find here, therefore, is a worship of modern democratic capitalism, a rapidly failing ideology and the latest of the many ideologies of the past 200 years, created in an attempt to harness the energies of modernism, which has proved unworthy of the challenge of managing a society. Nor will you, however, find any patience with socialism, an equally bankrupt product of recent society. What we are interested in developing is a feminist critique of the modern world from the practical perspective of the maternal-authoritarian; in short, a defence of the wise rule of the crone and of the traditionalist, even in patriarchal societies, view of the State or Nation as an extended family of which the monarch is father–save that from a feminist perspective we take this to be a depiction of the ideal state (which will never be achieved in the modern era, as there is no interest here in utopia, but serves as a standard by which other governments ought be judged) to be the state with Queen as Mother, with traditional communal rules–the fueros of the Habsburg government in Spain–restraining the power of the government, and therefore a rejection of the one-size-fits-all approach of modern capitalist democracy, the idea of innate egalitarianism, and other things which have led to a society in which individual uniqueness and spiritual development have been crushed.
The belief in a particular spiritual directive is abjurred from with the utmost vigour here, however. These principles are intended to be generally applicable, and I will ultimately take the time to refute the Pauline view of Christianity as a service to those sisters who hold true to the redeeming message of the Christ, as the Christian religion is not inherently opposed to feminism (and indeed requires no hilarious modern contrivances such as the black Jesus or female Jesus to work, either, but may be grounded purely in historical consideration). The correctness of any kind of doctrine as well as the actual existence of a spiritual realm may be ignored; the health of civilizations is determined by spirituality even if no deities or spirits exist, due to the fundamental nature of the human psyche, and that is enough for me to remain the proponent of such things, though personally I am religiously devoted to a supreme Mother Goddess generally, and to the Warrior-Mother Great Lady Durga in particular.
Beyond this, however, simple commentary on world events can prove very constructive, and this is what I shall endeavour to provide as much as possible. In this I reasonably expect to be brought under two fires, to use the old parlance, for many of my views are horrifying equally to the modern conservative and the modern leftist, and doubtless some of them are dreadful to other feminists. They are however grounded in the spiritual view of the world, and a profound respect of traditional, which I will tend to show within the limits of my skill is better serving of human existence than our present condition in the western world, and therefore must be spoken.
And as a final note, I would deeply welcome any Aristasian sisters as readers in this re-launch. I do not consider myself an Aristasian, but only because I am a romantic fool enough to think I might be able to do something about the world, and, in the old blood of my family, enough of a cossack woman to be frowning and shaking my head at the main point of critique I have with Aristasian, that of the Victorian modesty draping their moral code (though I am quite modest in my own way). The Victorian era itself was a product of the industrial processes which led to the crisis of modern society, and the sacred erotic should be celebrated… Nor should mere language be used as a determinant of decency. The rough-hewed people of the world will always have different and looser mores than the fine ladies of a high society, and this should be respected and cherished, for nothing is universally applicable, neither within societies nor betwixt them, so long as human uniqueness remains. Preserving that uniqueness, then, from the conformal obsessions of an egalitarian society, would be my fondest aspiration.
That said, one should not think that just because a society contains a hierarchy that it is hierarchal. This may seem a trite absurdity, but there is a difference between one’s fated, goddess-given role in the social order and someone holding absolute status and power over another. Christianity’s one great virtue is to preach that all souls are equal; and this I fervently believe. The Shepherdess and the Queen are, in the Divine of things, equal. But the charity and communal impulses of a goddess-oriented monarchist State which this would inspire in principle were purged from Christendom by the existence of the Patriarchy, having originally been offered by the grand promises of the bible through the influence that the cult of Isis provided upon early Christianity.
