Aristasia is the post-1980s name of a group which, in slightly different form, was earlier known as The Romantics and The Olympians. It was started in the English university city of Oxford in the late 1960s by a female academic who used the name of “Hester StClare.” StClare was born in the 1920s; other details of her career are unknown. A Traditionalist, in the late 1960s she began to gather a group of younger women, mostly Oxford students, who were dismayed by the “cultural collapse” of that decade. They took Guénon one stage further: worse even than modernity was the “inverted society,” the postmodern, contemporary era produced by the cultural collapse of the 1960s, an event often referred to by Aristasians as “the Eclipse.” Inverted society — often referred to as “the Pit” — stands in much the same relation to modernity as modernity stood to tradition, argued “Alice Trent,” StClare’s most important follower. […]
StClare, like Evola (though without any direct debt to him), added gender to Traditionalism. Evola was distinctly “masculinist,” to the extent that his “absolute individual” was threatened with feminization as a result of modernity; Aristasia took the opposite line, that woman was threatened with masculinization. In Aristasian cosmology, the first age was not the age of the brahmin (as it had been for Guénon) but the age of the goddess. The rise of male deities and of a male-dominated society were the consequences of the earliest stages of decline. Modernity brought the triumph in the public sphere of “material and quantitative” male characteristics (aggression, warfare, and technical sciences) over “spiritual and qualitative” female characteristics — essentially “the principle of harmony or bonding.” This was an early instance of inversion, since the female characteristics are inherently superior to the male ones, and the female is properly “the primary or fundamental sex.” The final stage of decline — the Pit — brought “the ultimate triumph of patriarchy,” normally described in the Pit as the general acceptance of feminist views. With the Eclipse, “the Masculine Principle has come to dominate the culture entirely, extirpating femininity even from the heart of women herself.”
The Aristasian elite, then, is entirely female, and not only female but “feminine.” It also excludes men in order to avoid the risk of a return to the domination of women by men, which was a product of decline, not a characteristic of primordial tradition. Further, it endorses a variety of Evola’s apoliteia (though it does not use the term). […]
In addition to excluding the Pit from their lives as much as possible, Aristasians attempt to recreate for themselves an environment corresponding to one preceding the Eclipse. Since “truly traditional … images … are too far from the everyday workings of our present consciousness,” the era chosen for re-creation is the one immediately preceding the current one—the 1920s to 1950s. Aristasia, in addition to being the name of a Traditionalist group, is also a form of virtual reality (though Aristasians do not call it such, since they exclude neologisms as they exclude everything else characteristic of the Pit). Various aspects of pre-Eclipse life are painstakingly re-created in Aristasians’ houses — 1950s restaurants, 1940s clubs, 1930s homes. Aristasians dress in the clothes of their chosen decade, use the equipment and utensils of that decade, if possible drive the automobiles of that decade, and even watch the movies of that decade. This behavior is advanced as an alternative to the standard spiritual way of “sainthood” or “spiritual transcendence,” for which only a few have the vocation.
[…] Aristasian Traditionalism is presented more seriously in Trent’s book The Feminine Universe. This book, aimed at the general reader, deals, for example, with Nietzsche before Guénon, and uses historical arguments with some skill. Aristasianism has also received some coverage in the British press and on television.
At the end of the twentieth century Aristasia consisted of some 40 fulltime, dedicated Aristasians, along with many part-time followers. Most Aristasians were in their 20s or 30s, with some older and a few younger; the most frequent occupation was “some connection to academia.” Almost all these Aristasians were in Britain — Aristasianism failed to find any significant following in America, perhaps because of cultural differences. Aristasia is permeated by the quirky humor characteristic of its Oxonian birthplace, where the expression of deeply held convictions is rarely free of an element of jest, and where no joke can be safely assumed not to conceal a very serious point.
[…]
The role that lesbianism plays within Aristasia is unclear, if only because in the era before the Eclipse such things were not talked about and so Aristasians will not willingly talk about them either, but “intimate relations with men” are not encouraged. The practice of submission, however, can (just about) be seen as being in line with more mainstream Traditionalist spirituality — the Sufi submits to his shaykh, and Trent is not wrong in her view that “submission to a higher power … is the very essence of spirituality,” though one might wish to distinguish different varieties of submission. Similarly, the separatism of the Aristasian community echoes the separatism of the Sufi order.
– Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2004), pp. 216-9