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DoctorJ said:
Lucifer is a pretty decent guy. he just gets a bad rap.

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kadakuda said:
as much as i try and be open minded and not generalize, i think that if you see a kid in the "goth" getup it isnt anywhere near a goth.  gothism usd to be  HUGE religion, and would probably be teh major one today if christianity didnt rise.

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Hmm...

I don?t exactly know what "gothism" is as a religious movement, but my understanding of Goth is that it evolved as a stylistic splinter of the late Punk movement around the early eighties with bands such as Bauhaus, and certain proto-goth aspects of the seventies; examples of which could be seen in Alice Cooper, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and even David Bowie, which all seemed to share revivalist interest the aesthetic of old RKO and Hammer horror films.

It largely seemed to an aesthetic embrace of the dark/black look brought about by Punk, and morphed from a fascination from black leather to latex and eventually into ruffles and lace. The subject matter seems to be rather romanticist and centered around gothic horror, whose roots can be traced back to the various romanticist writers and artists of the 18-19th centuries.

It seems, to me, to be a perfectly acceptable style for adoption by a youth culture, out of the multitude of styles now available for young people to adopt in a largely pluralist society. In other words, to each his/her own.

I?ve never thought of it as having strong and organized religious connections, although I?m sure the various individuals and groups who adopt it as a style have a wide variety of personal and ever-shifting religious beliefs. And, I?m not really up on the current goth scene as it is practiced in high schools, so it may have changed, and become some sort of big organized religious thing, but I tend to doubt it.

It seems to me to be a stylistic movement, with certain interests in the gothic nature of romanticist art and literature of the past, with a touch of recycling from movies and television from the past century. I think this is extremely evident among the cosplay kids in Japan; where goth has become a highly-refined fashion sub-industry. These kids study the "Gothic & Lolita Bible" religiously (it?s a fashion guide/magazine NOT a religious text), and dawn the latest goth outfits to hang out in Harajuku to be seen and photographed.

I actually find goth to be one of the more interesting, imaginative, and nuanced, fashion trends out there, among the youth, and I always have, ever since some of my friends started following the punk thing in the late seventies. I?ve always appreciated it as a spectator, and an artist who is interested in good visuals.



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Anyways, on the satanist thing, which is what attracted me to this thread. I can remember all the media-hype surrounding alleged satanic ritual abuse in day-care centers and elsewhere in this country back in the eighties. It was the most amazing thing. There were dozens of major trials in which people were accused of ritual satanic abuse of children, and much media-hype about how all our kids were practicing satanism. It was really an off-the-hook level of mass-media hysteria.

I can remember one summer, shortly after I moved to Boise, Idaho, back in the late eighties, when the big running story on the local news all summer was about how domestic cats were mysteriously disappearing because the city?s teenagers where sacrificing them to the devil. The local news was just convinced that all the kids were satanists.

They even made a big thing about finding a miniature stonehenge-like circle of rocks in the foothills, and about how this was built by teenage satanists (actually, it was built by some friends of mine who were art students). Interestingly enough, one night I saw a news story about how it turned out to be coyotes in the foothills that were nabbing the cats, because of changes in the local food-chain brought about by a recent drouth where bringing the coyotes down from the foothills looking for food. Hell, any old farmer could have told them that. The important thing was, it was NOT teenage satanists stealing the cats.

It should be noted that, typical of the media, it was a very small retraction after a long hot summer of pure media-fueled hysteria. I found the whole thing quite amusing...

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kadakuda said:
thats halarious.  cats go missing here and we figure its coons, cougars, or good ol? Wiley.

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It was the times. They were pretty darned goofy, and that was what originally attracted my attention to this thread, "Satanism in the 80s." I had forgotten all about all that goofy stuff until I saw the thread title. Even though, I think NorthernSoul was referring to commercial heavy-metal marketing, and not media-fueled witch-hunts.

I seem to recollect, that for a few years, you couldn?t turn on the news without hearing stories about trials involving satanic ritual abuse; usually the ultimate victims were the hapless owners of some day-care facility at the sharp end of the public hysteria stick.

The interesting thing about those "witch-hunts," of the media-saturated late-twentieth-century, was not that they were driven by superstitious fundamentalist christians -- although, I?m sure they had a hand in it -- but that they were mostly driven by practitioners of the new religion of "social science." The accusers were largely social workers, hypno-therapists, psychologists, criminologists, et cetera, and of course modern journalists run amok like Geraldo Rivera -- so called educated people -- the new priests of the post-darwin order.

The human being is a linguistic entity, a story teller, and as such we are always sitting around the glow of the campfire (or the television) creating mythologies to make sense out of that which we don?t understand. This is all well and good, but at some point, things always tend to go horribly wrong...

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Regarding "gothism," I?m not much of a religious scholar, but I can?t find any record of a historical religion called "gothism." Are you speaking of the religious practices of certain first-millennial euro/germanic-tribes such as the visigoths and ostrogoths?

I think our contemporary use of the word ?"gothic" (from which "goth," as a stylistic label, is derived) largely stems from a style of european architecture employing a pointed arch, and often used in the construction of cathedrals in the middle-ages. After the european renaissance, the romantic movements in painting and literature adopted an interest in decaying gothic architecture as a response to neoclassicism. The romanticists, as a personality type, are generally more interested in organic decay (symbolized by gothic ruins), the mysteries of the universe, sublimity, and the resulting emotional rush of contemplating and mythologizing such things, than in the attempts to dominate and control nature, like the neoclassicists who strive to make order out of chaos.

These romanticist movements in literature and art, from the 18-19th centuries, were largely responsible for the creation of the "gothic horror" genre in literature; whose semiotics later re-appeared in the movies, television, and pulp literature, which fed the imaginations of many adolescents during the twentieth century, until it started to appear in music and fashion; ultimately, culminating in the "Goth"-style as an offshoot of the punk-style in the late-seventies/early-eighties.

It?s largely just a bunch of kids wanting to return to the aesthetic sensibilities of Byron, Shelly, E. A. Poe, the Pre-Raphaelites, et cetera; not entirely a bad goal from my personal aesthetic perspective -- being more of a romanticist, than a classicist, at heart.

There may be a "goth" religion, but I really can?t find it under that label. Unless, it is simply the historic religious practices of the visigoths, et al.


"The Ruins of Eldena Monastery," ca. 1801, Casper David Friedrich (Romantic painter)

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Papaver said:
I actually find goth to be one of the more interesting, imaginative, and nuanced, fashion trends out there, among the youth, and I always have, ever since some of my friends started following the punk thing in the late seventies. I've always appreciated it as a spectator, and an artist who is interested in good visuals.

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I think I definitely will agree here. I mean, whatever the motivations of the people appearing in this fashion, at least there is more creativity and expression than just buying the latest Abercrombie and Fitch shirt with the newest, "funny" saying or logo.... etc. etc. etc.... *shrugs*


Peace.