The Canon
To Save the Future, Hold Tight the Past
To define a new future, one must first understand the present; to understand the present, one must first understand the past. Such is education; such is history: a collective memory conveyed through lecture, story, ritual, whisper, artwork, warfare, song. The modern world has obfuscated these distinct cultures to fit all peoples into the homogenizing machinery of global industry. To restore the health and dignity of local cultures, then, Aurelia strives to re-introduce the youth to their own, unique ancestries, so that new authors of each culture might emerge to sing their next chapter and lead their People through night unto a new dawn.
Maintaining Beauty
From J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories”:
“The story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.
“It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things…yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination.
“If a story says 'he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below', the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen.”
Heritage as Education
Re-Embedding Art in Community
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Pillar I: Literary Arts
Aurelia seeks to provide free access to the Western literary canon for any curious soul, curating works from the public domain so that a clear picture might emerge as to what we were, are, and might one day be.
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Pillar II: Aesthetic Arts
Aurelia seeks to provide free access to the Western artistic canon for any curious soul, curating works from the public domain so that a clear picture might emerge as to what we were, are, and might one day be.
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Pillar III: Performative Arts
Aurelia seeks to provide free access to the musical canon for any curious soul, curating works from the public domain so that a clear picture might emerge as to what we were, are, and might one day be.