Inquisitive Outlander

A treasure trove of once lost media has been uncovered by Inquisitive Outlander here on Tumblr, which has lead to a strange side-quest. But first, a little lot of backstory: As I am sure you all have written down in your research notebooks, the Aristasian Preservation Project (or APP) popped into elektraspace sometime in 2013 when a group of Miss Martindale fans became disgruntled that the elegant Aristasia that they once loved seemed to be descending into anime and video game madness. They bought up the lapsed Aristasia.net domain name, dug deep into history and the Way Back Machine (bless them) and put all the Aristasian dirty laundry and sketchy endeavors that the new Aristasian movement was trying to hide up online. They also did, perhaps, one of the first thorough jobs of attempting to connect Aristasia with their past ventures, including Lux Madriana. Unfortunately, one site that they got some information from was never archived on the Way Back Machine, so we can't see exactly what that was all about, we can just speculate and see what they decided to quote. One of which is an incredibly strange statement about Lux Madriana (which also, importantly, held some clues about one of the non-Aristasian founders of Lux Madriana and a story of an excommunication that turned out to be quite true!)

This book has been a strange little mystery that has left a lot of us wondering. Why would a fictional book just so happen to have exactly the name Lux Madriana ? And it's about Madrians? It wouldn't be the first time that a fictional book mentioned Madrians, but all this drama about mysterious letters and police reports and false identities certainly is intriguing! Mr. Colin W. Field is probably over 100 years old by now, so he probably has no idea how to use Tumblr, and Tumblr doesn't work on the typewriter anyways, so we are probably safe to jump down this rabbit hole and go on this little side-quest. Now that all of that backstory is out of the way, the inquisitive outlander, Inquisitive-outlander, has gone through the effort to dig up this strangely titled book and scan it for us so we can all oogle it and wonder. You can view it here on the Internet Archive!

One of the strangest things about it is the little introduction about the mysterious author who seems to know a lot of strangely accurate things about Lux Madriana, including namedropping Madrian holidays, is this bizarre biography:

What an introduction! Miss Carminhow is a French pagan cave-ologist who lives with a lesbian polycule who seem to meet on occasion with a race of subterranean Amazons. This is fiction? Fact? It's honestly quite unclear, but we are assured that this story is believed to be real in France. The story that follows is one I haven't finished reading, because it's the type of story you would imagine to be self-published subterranean Amazon story, but I have stumbled across some strangeness skimming through it!

First of which is this page, which seems to just directly quote the The Coming Age, particularly the "Amazon Drispeal", which is something that seemed to later be rolled up in Mother-God style Filianism and doesn't seem to be an outlander word. It goes on to name drop some Madrian Holidays! I think it's quote clear that whoever wrote this, either Mr. Field or Miss Carminhow (assuming she is real) was a subscriber of The Coming Age, or at least had issue 15, because they also copy the Amazon March song straight from the inside cover. Is this the case of a honest-to-goodness Madrian attempting to write a fictional story and weave in what they learned about the faith into their own story? Is this someone who was attempting to legitimize their own alternate-matriarchal-occult-history because they believed what was written in The Coming Age? Is this someone who was just writing pure-fiction but wanted to do a little research to make it seem more real and picked up an Amazon history magazine that just so happened to be TCA #15 and accidentally did an "octorok eyeball"? If any of these were true, why did someone who seemed to mostly write local history research guides publish user Miss Carminhow's name? Was she a real (ly strange) person? Or was she a nom de plume so a man who wrote fairly mundane history research could also publish his stranger fantasies? If that is the case why did he seem to publish so many books under her name that seemed to be the same historical topics he also wrote under?

Was she an imagined author he could test the water with some stranger theories with? Tossing out odd little theories and claiming they were the theories of his French pagan lesbian cave-ologist friend's wacky ideas.

Oh, obviously.

It's all very strange! I would be quite surprised to find out that Miss Joanne Carminhow was a real person, but we do have some clues to finding her, or not.