The Flag of the Empress

The personal Standard of the Celestial Empress is pictured to the right. This is also the flag of the Westrenne Imperial capital, Ladyton, where the Empress has her seat. By extension it is regarded as the Flag of the Empire itself and is often used as such in the Motherland.

Before Operation Bridgehead, which involved the official recognition of Aristasia-in-Telluria as a protectorate of the Empire, this flag, whose charge is the Fora or Circle-Cross was often used by Tellurian Aristasians as their symbol.

At Bridgehead, the use of the Solar Standard, pictured below, was officially granted to Aristasia-in-Telluria and is now used as the primary flag of all adopted Aristasians in Telluria

Actually there are many different Aristasian flags — flags for each nation as well as other imperial insignia. You may read about the nine main flags of Aristasia here and about the Solar Imperial Standard which is the other primary Imperial flag and the main flag of Aristasia-in-Telluria here. In this small essay we wish to explain the meaning of (and dispel a few silly misconceptions concerning) the Flag of the Empress.

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.

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 the Empress's noble 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 Arcadian Flag depicted to the right), 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.

Actually, there are worlds both above and below our own universe of material manifestation, and the cross depicts the World Axis passing through a particular world or state of being. In some versions of the cross, like that on the escutcheon of Avenbridge, Quirinelle, shown to the left, the vertical axis passes through more than one horizontal "arm", depicting not only the existence of multiple planes of being, but the familiar traditional concept of the World-Axis as a bridge between our current state and a superior state or heaven-world. In related symbology, Dea is praised as the Barque of Swift Crossing (see the Angelic Hymn to Dea) another way of expressing Her salvific activity as the Means of Passage from our present state to a higher state.

Looked at in its simple form, the cross is clearly a "vertical" symbol. However, there is also a "horizontal" aspect to this symbolism. It is expressed in such primal symbols as the wheel and such solar symbols as the circle with a dot at its centre. In these it is the Centre that represents the Divine, while the circumference represents the surface. The spokes of the wheel represent here the radiance of the Spirit. The outward direction (away from the Spirit) taking the same significance as the downward in the vertical symbolism.

The Fora, as depicted on the Imperial Flag, is clearly an example of this horizontal form of symbolism. The word fora itself means Fundamental or Primary. It depicts the radiance of the Centre into the four directions of space, and thus, on the macrocosmic level, of the manifestation of the world. However, the Fora is here specifically a national symbol. Thus, on the microcosmic level, the centre would represent the Empress — the human ancestress of the Sun — and the rays her rule extending in the four directions of space. The circle represents on one level the entire Empire, with the rays of protection extending beyond it to defend against all hostile forces beyond the borders. On another level it may represent the walled enclosure of the sacred Imperial City while the extension of the cross represents the influence and rule of the Empress beyond her Sacred Enclosure.**

In either case, we must understand that this is not merely a fanciful allegorical or poetic interpretation of the Fora, but a direct extension of its primordial metaphysical meaning. From the traditional point of view, earthly power is legitimate only insofar as it is the direct and unbroken extension of spiritual authority.

As with the wheel (the symbol most directly related to the Fora) we must be aware that while the Centre represents the Spirit from our earthly point of view — the point where the lotus (or rose) feet of the Mother touch the earth — an axis (or axle) is also to be understood passing through that Centre through which, in the Imperial application, the Empress herself is connected to Heaven to which she must be wholly obedient; for such is the very foundation (fora) of her rule.

One more point about the Imperial Flag should be considered, and that is its colours. The three primary colours, red yellow and blue, represent the three primary tendencies of matter: the three gunas. Since the flag represents all worldly manifestation and authority, it is proper that its colours should represent the process of manifestation itself. However, this colour symbolism, that of the three primary colours (with the ambiguity of yellow also representing gold), depicts the three gunas in a particular aspect. More usually they are depicted as white (for sattwa) red (for rajas) and black (for tamas). In that perspective only red is truly a colour, and is, in a sense, the essence of all colour, representing the "outwardness" of the world along the horizontal axis, while white represents the purity of the superior states and black the tenebrous character of the lower states.

However, the primary colours, yellow (for sattwa) red (for rajas) and blue (for tamas) show the gunas from a perspective that, rather than concentrating upon the nature of sattwa and tamas as pointers to states beyond this world, and therefore as almost "moral" indicators, focuses on their free interplay as world-creators: as the elements of the creative play (lila) of Dea and of Her divine Maya or creative power.

The fundamental superiority of sattwa is not forgotten for yellow represents light and gold among the three, but here it is very much among the three rather than above the other two, for this is a horizontal perspective, depicting the creative fecundity and play of the world. The Imperial Flag is a symbol of the beauty and vitality of the manifest world, but also a symbol that shows its absolute dependence on the Centre, whether that Centre be seen as Dea Herself or as her servant the Empress.

This is the real meaning of the Holy Flag of the Celestial Empress, beside which the tawdry conjectures of late-patriarchal journalists seem, we think you will agree, rather trivial.

NOTES

* The great (non-Aristasian) traditionalist scholar, Ananda Coomaraswamy, has summed up the traditional attitude to the three twentieth-century Western ideologies (Democracy, Communism and Fascism) in the following words:

A democracy is a government of all by a majority of proletarians; a soviet, a government by a small group of proletarians; and a dictatorship, a government by a single proletarian. In a traditional and unanimous society there is a government by a hereditary aristocracy, the function of which is to maintain an existing order, based on eternal principles, rather than to impose the views or arbitrary will (in the most technical sense of the word, a tyrannical will) of any "party" or "interest".

Aristasia is a traditional and unanimous society and, as we explain in this essay, her Flag is the symbol precisely of this governance by eternal principles. Thus the Flag itself implies the complete rejection of fascism along with the other twentieth-century proletarian ideologies.

** It is told that when a traditional Sacred Queen from Ireland visited Elizabeth the First with a flotilla of small ships in attendance, she slept holding the ends of long ribbons that joined her to the ships in symbol of the rays or threads that constantly connected her, as the Solar Representative, to her subjects. Such a symbolism, though archaic, would not have been entirely incomprehensible to Elizabethans as it would to moderns. Even the most modern of Aristasians, however, have such symbol-systems at the root of their thinking.