What is Gothic? The Historical and Philosophical Origins of Goth and Gothic Horror

the gothic immediately summons to mind a distinct set of aesthetic features ruined medieval structures gloomy Shadows lurking about rolling fog on the Moors the distant h of some nocturnal animal flickering illumination and a sense of the past immensely interjecting itself to Doom the present and it was perhaps FW maral's 1922 Masterpiece of German expressionism naratu that most enduringly captured the of the gothic on film so much so that much in the way of horror films as a genre are basically commentaries extensions and reimaginings of those Shadows reaching out to us the uncanny valley of nasar's

monstrous appearance are the impending sense of inescapable dread from Raven Loft to Castlevania Dracula to Frankenstein The Cure kyen mikla the gothic has flourished as an art genre and as a lifestyle but the gothic is a surprisingly recent aesthetic development it's hardly older than the United States of America in many respects but let's explore the philosophical foundations of the gothic and what is often considered its first true expression the aptly named second edition the castle of oronto a Gothic story a tell however that's almost considered unreadable by most today make sure to subscribe for weekly

Explorations and topics of esoteric history and if you'd like to support the work of providing evidence-backed free and accessible content like this I'd hope you consider out checking out my patreon and some of the merch that we have for sale on the channel if you're new to the study of esotericism and you want to get the lay of the land make sure to check out my study guide which is a directed study of the vast and interesting different domains in the study of Western as terorism and if you're interested in getting your hand on actual

historical books on the occult and the mystical check out my bookstore esoteric rare books you can find all those links in the description and in the pinned comment but now let's turn to the historical and philosophical foundations of the gothic and of goth I'm Dr Justin Sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and [Music] [Music] religion something like Tales of Horror have very probably existed long before civilization and will probably endure long after civilizations of memory serving probably as communal wisdom about the dangers lurking Beyond The Hearth and the

tribe but elements we recognize as horror appear as early in Civilization as The Descent of inana or The Descent of ishar to the underworld there we find her threatening to unleash hordes of the Living Dead to Feast upon the living if she's not allowed entrance into the kingdom of the dead of arishka call and nural of course once she's there she's stripped of all of her finery and hung lifeless on a nail Egyptian literature also reveals Tales of lonely ghosts bereft of the Comforts of their tombs in the afterlife in the Israelite literature contains a

chilling account of the bat o the necr mric at indor summoning the prophet Samuel from the dead only to provide news of Doom for King Saul all the classical elements of the ghost story appear in a recounting by plenty the younger classic haunting house story where the stoic philosopher athenodorus is beset by a ghost Bound in Chains shaking them in the night found to have been unjustly murdered the victim is eventually given a proper burial by the stoic philosopher and the haunting of the Athenian house comes to an end the European Middle Ages and early

modern period were nothing if not a demon Haunted World abounding in ghosts and demons and trolls and goblins and changelings and I've actually covered a wide range of these kinds of tales of ghosts and demons and monsters and other episodes so make sure to check out some of those and the links below but despite the persistent myth of a disenchanted mity mity isn't by no means disenchanted that has been thoroughly put to bed supernatural horror both real and artistic continues to Fascinate us but the goth represents a very specific very modern form of horror the

ghosts and demons of the Middle Ages despite their sometimes frightful appearance are practically cartoonish they're almost always brightly colored vibrantly clear they're even commonplace medieval ghosts also appear just kind of Jolly smiling in a form despite the fact that they're otherwise skeletal in nature the gothic is a distinct shift of post-enlightenment delight and the dark the irrational the emotional the ruined and the Mysterious but to understand the gothic especially as it emerges fully formed in literature in the 1764 castle of vanto we have to explore not just the shift in Aesthetics but also a shift

in the very philosophy of subjectivity and Consciousness itself while premodern philosophies of Mind had largely dealt with the structure and functioning of the mind or soul and its various faculties it would really be John Lock 1689 1690 an essay concerning human understanding that would dramatically shift philosophy of Mind away from peer analysises of structure and function to questions of Consciousness to questions of personality to question of personal identity and moreover to questions of subjectivity Paving the way for the radical phenomenological existential and even cognitive developments of more recent centuries but it would be lock for

whom Consciousness Consciousness was the necessary and sufficient condition for personal identity and his analysis hinged on just what Consciousness was and just what Consciousness was conscious of this shift not just toward the subject but to the nature and moreover the experience of subjectivity itself represented a sea change a dramatic shift in all the Western philosophy of mind now of course this shift had already basically happened in literature this is more to the point of Hegel and the whole owl of manura always appearing too late that the character is of something like Hamlet and Shakespeare being

now widely recognized as the first character defined precisely by their subjectivity in all of its Proto existentialist glory and turmoil but hang on to shakespare hang on to Shakespeare he's going to matter way more in the story as we go but with that loan shift towards Consciousness towards subjectivity there was an explosion of British philosophical interests in the very experience of Consciousness especially as it was indexed toward sensation recall that while Block's entire first chapters on his essay were actually an assault on the cartisian idea of innate ideas that were all the rage on the

planets thus if what's to be in the mind must first be in the senses sort of radical Imperial I ISM studying sensation as process and experience must be foundational for any philosophy of mind and in the generation that follow just such studies blossomed often starting with the most basic Sensations especially Pleasure and Pain entire structures of human sensation Consciousness subjectivity even morality looking at you benm were erected around these basic pushes and pulls of the nerves of the human body and they experience and sensation of those studies that emerge particularly romantic interest in the experience

of beauty an experience often linked to human reproduction via sexuality with a consensus of that being the most fundamental of all pleasures emerged but in those explorations of sensation associated with beauty something strange even unsettling became clear there was something like a sensation of beauty associated with pleasure but but a kind of dark twin of beauty Beauty in a way but born out of pain out of Anguish describing the vast mountains of the Alps Joseph Addison would contend that their beauty was a kind of agreeable kind of horror that dark sensation was denoted as the

sublime and it would receive its most sustained early analysis in Edmond Burke 1756 a philosophical inquiry into the origins of ideas of the sublime and the Beautiful somehow a completely British named book Burke's analysis of course informed by previous philosophers and artist hinged on the mutually exclusive mutually exclusive origins of the sensation of beauty and of the Sublime Beauty emerges from pleasure it's linked with self-preservation via sexuality beauty is light delicate smoothly curving relatively small cute sweet fragrant serous graceful elegant symmetrical soft Lush in color with gradual variation and refinement you know Downtown Abbey Bridgeton

Vibes not not so the sublime unlike Beauty born from pleasure the sensation of the sublime was born from the tensing of our nerves within our bodies Our Eyes clenched our imaginations crushed under some horrible immensity the sublime was born from pain for Burke the passion associated with the sublime emerges from our contact with the overwhelming power of nature in pure astonishment with some degree of horror as he has it in the sensation of the sublime our mind is so over all that only the sublime fills our mind it throttles our reason it d drives us

as a Taskmaster it robs us of conscious thought and activity Burke then continues a blowby blow protop phenomenological analysis of the characteristics of the sublime creating a vertible checklist of the fundamental ingredients in the creation of the lighter Gothic aesthetic and as such here is a rare case where philosophy at some level truly does inform art the gothic at some level is the Buran Sublime willfully distilled into literature art music and film and thus the sublime is founded upon natural Terror uncontrolled fear born from the tremendous power which inspires just that passion the vastness of

a mountain the Blackness of a night the Titanic swelling of a sea and tumult a storm relentlessly bearing down with hail and rain and lightning and yet this this horrible magnitude is also met with terrible obscurity the sublime is just beyond our full ability to grasp it it hides in the dark and in the shadows and the gloomy pomp of the miltonian hell the inner darkness of Forgotten temples or Caverns deep within the Earth thus the sublime has its mirth in darkness Gloom confusion Mania and obscurity despite that obscurity the subl is terrible in its

power and threatens to annihilate not only us and our Consciousness but but life itself it's the horrible power of unpredictable Vengeance from the gods the tremendous violence of the Divine as job is chastised toward the end of that book power with nothing of Reason nothing of care no mercy and no restraint and yet the sublime can also be sensed in the vastness of privation of emptiness of vacuity and of Silence solitary vast nothingness it is that vastness especially the vastness of infinity the vastness perhaps of Eternal Cosmic Gulf the streaming eternities of space and time

in which all human proportion becomes meaningless laughable even you get those Lovecraft Vibes yet barring such Infinity's vast structures including human structures can also Inspire the sublime for Burke magnificence rought in Stone from the megaliths of the especially primeval world to Mansions castles and churches all inspire a sense of grandeur magnificence of some other thing than us something larger than our individual smallness and relative unimportance the sense of the sublime is especially fired in witnessing such Grand structures destroyed witnessing their ruins that even such vast human architecture ultimately stands no chance against Decay time and

the historical violence of the convulsions of Revolution this is truly history as Horror in the mind of the human being light can also be Sublime but not the soft life of Illumination associated with beauty rather the random flickering of light and dark the violent appearance of lightning the sublime is always as hypnotic as it is dazzling orally the Sonic landscape of the sublime is one of intense variation vast Echoes In The Deep Thunder artillery raging storms but also the nocturnal sounds of creatures especially nocturnal Predators such as the owl the bat and the Wolf all

Inspire some sense of dread in US waiting for the dawn the temporality of the sublime is also staccato it is sudden unexpected unpredictable intermittent the sublime is the jump scare rendered into existential reality even the smell of the sublime may be drawn from ashes the stinch of blood the sensation of insects crawling about our skin the taste of bitter wormwood the smell of rotting food and flesh all in all the burky and Sublime is the dark dread sister of beauty born from pain an astonished horror now I know what all of y'all all of y'all

out there are saying but I take pleasure in a lot of that stuff that's just the kind of stuff in horror films that's pleasurable to me it's not born of any kind of pain that's because most of us have never actually experienced the sublime because civilization is mostly about insulating us from nature and thus the principal efficient cause of the sublime as an experience so what are we experiencing when we experience this sort of lovely though perverse pleasure and horror we're experiencing what Bert actually calls Delight this is the emotional arousal akin to the sublime

but stripped of any real power to actually harm us this pseudo Sublime is Terror defanged it's horror curated a painting of a mountain a monster on film a grave yard visit but with none of the real grief of actually mourning a loved one this is the no touch haunted house it's the sublime as a safe word and yet there is Delight in it we have to be honest there is mirth in this pseudo Sublime there's pleasure in something of the danger the horror the darkness and the Gloom over there on a screen on canvas and

that pleasure that Delight as bir as I think has correctly diagnosed and detailed it was already apparent to a small codra of poets and writers and artists around the mid 17th century but it would be horse Walpole 1764 castle of V tronto that would actually actionized the burky and Sublime self-consciously into a literary form as Gothic and the gothic horror we all know and love but while the Burk and Sublime is an essential element for the development of the gothic and Gothic car a few other outstanding elements are incredibly important essential as well the first

and foremost is the name for the aesthetic the gothic with the rise of the 15th century humanist the term goth and Gothic historically these were Germanic tribes which migrated West in the fourth and fifth centuries they were refugees from the invasions of the Huns the term Gothic became associated with the greatest of all nightmares in European history the destruction of the Roman Empire thus for the humanists of the 15th century the Goths and Gothic were responsible for basically the destruction of civilization and were associated with all the horrible things with that barbarity Darkness the Dark

Ages if you've heard of that and violent decadence so too the Arts architecture philosophy religion and even the magic prior to the 15th century were considered by the humanists to be terrible Gothic reminders of all that was lost in the fall of Rome thus for a need for a rebirth a Renaissance of classical values literature Latin architecture religion and yeah even in Magic there was even a magical reform to reject the old Gothic Grim War demonic magic that they associated with Blackness darkness and while that kind of denigration of the Goths might have been fine

for the Italians other emergent Powers especially the English Trace their descendants directly back not to the Romans the Roman Britain but precisely to those refugees The Immigrant Anglo-Saxons the Engles and Saxons and the Judes and from yordanis in the 6th Century to wig reformers in the 18th the Goths were in much need of a makeover they needed some good oldfashioned revisionism not destructive but the vigorous northern European answer to Mediterranean decadence not Barbarian Warlords but egalitarian parliamentarians not the Destroyers of civilization but architects from the megalithic Stonehenge to the vast Cathedrals filled with Divine Light

not uneducated brutes but the ancient Druids were reimagined as philosophers and Proto scientists with the magic of their hieroglyphic runes this trend by the way continues all the way down to today with virile tattooed hunky Vikings made to be the corrective for the decadent Roman Christianity which is all mostly free of any actual pesky history but of course the rehabilitation of the Goths was decidedly mixed woven into this narrative was that of the Anglo-Saxons immigrating and fighting for liberty for liberty this was a mythology that Thomas Jefferson would actually even adopt in his 1774 a

summary view of the rights of British America which actually became a sort of first draft for the Declaration of Independence so this whole Gothic revisionism thing it's kind of baked into this country as well especially by the way Liberty against Roman tyranny in the form of the Catholic Church of course against the Catholic church and thus the Protestant Reformation was given a kind of Gothic sensibility but not only that the violent closure of the monasteries and the iconicism that took place primarily in northern Europe especially in England were given a pride of place in this

Gothic recuperation it wasn't enough to shatter statues and smash stained glass and burn those churches for the radical iconic class no they left the ruins of popery and Roman Superstition for all to Marvel at in dread now this all creates a kind of interesting historical Paradox that to this day the UK is littered with the ironic remains of medieval Gothic architecture in magnificent ruins destroyed precisely in the gothic Spirit of resisting the tyranny of the Roman Church of course we shouldn't expect any of this mythological revisionistic history to be rational or based on anything historical

in fact as so far as I can tell it's it's mostly just Vibes but this Reclamation and recuperation of all things Gothic especially by the wigs as opposed to the auster neoclassicism of the aristocratic Tories went more Beyond paradoxical myth making art filled with jaunts through ruined abies Gardens became filled with faux ruins called Follies and the Neo Gothic eventually became All the Rage in English architecture and as for Horatio Horus Walpole he was an early adopter maybe one of the earliest adopters of all things Gothic but also of the particular Delights in all things

Buran and Sublime and he was also the first minister of the wig party so he had a bunch of money to to do all that indeed after he purchased his home at chopped straw Hill and began to renovate it along what would now be recognized as something like neogothic style he would rename it Strawberry Hill along with additions of architectural elements that became known as the gothic style really Walpole innovated a lot of that stuff he also packed his home with stained glass pictures of saints old suits of armor antique swords and weapons animal hides

and and the like with wallpaper he had made to look like bare stone walls he even sought to make his home to be a kind of lived in living ruin something between an ancient Abbey a Cathedral and a castle that aesthetic the aesthetic he sought to generate with all this old armor and Gothic flare he termed Gloom Gloom a cross between gloomy and perhaps Gothic perhaps no doubt the precursor to what we now call the aesthetic of goth today I don't know it was like Joy Division but with harps of cords in wul this Gothic

palingenesis met with the berky and Delight of the sublime as wed unsurprisingly in a gloomy dream that dream would become the nucleus of the castle of at tronto a Gothic story first published on Christmas Eve 1764 as part of the English tradition of telling ghost stories that very night and it was an instant hit leaving readers astonished and getting an immediate second edition that following year the castle of at Tonto began a literary tradition that exploded in in the later 18th century especially among women writers and has continued unabated down to this day Gothic horror

had arrived the novela takes the form of a pseudo transation from a 13th century medieval telling of the tale a concede that Walpole would eventually abandon in the second edition however he makes his influences very clear it is medieval romance Shakespeare and the burky and Sublime oh yeah I told you that uh bill would make a real appearance Bill Shakespeare as I've mentioned before developed the world of Hamlet and Hamlet has gone down as something of the first instance of modern subjectivity all Broody and existential but the world that Shakespeare created for the globe was

just one chalk full of murder and Intrigue Antiquity ponderous graveyards barely lit by by torches ghosts fairies witches Sorcerers love and of course Doom pounds and pounds of TR tragedy without any doubt Shakespeare plays a strong hand in the development of what become the protog gothic but it be walpole's intentional deployment of the berky and Sublime in a nearly textbook fashion frankly that would see the genre created in the castle of Tonto now I hate to disappoint you but I'm I'm not going to summarize it because you should you should go read it and summaries

on the internet just become an excuse not to read things and we don't do that here so read it but to suffice to say you get everything in this Nolla you get fantasmagoria dreamlike catastrophes yes there is a giant helmet that falls from the sky maybe even from the Moon demented passion secret passageways a haunted castle replete with paintings that come to life and move around demented love triangles and transgressive desires all set within the constant Gloom sometimes pitch black darkness raging storms and melodrama as thick as it comes all in the end of a

Titanic ruin to everything foretold in an ancient prophecy but pacing is frantic there's actually even an absence of quotation marks to intentionally drive on the sense of Fury in the narrative the fates of castles and kings are all at stake the plot reverses in upon itself over and over like a good soap opera and the claustrophobic Castle Abbey secret passageways and CPS all become a vast character unto themselves and a top all of that virtually every horror movie Trope is born in the castle of V Tonto from the jump scare to sudden gusts of wind

that blow out the one candle that she has in the darkness the rampaging demented father of The Shining the cries of nocturnal beasts the dark and stormy night the decrepit ancient haunted house the near ruined Castle lit only by torches and candles the Horrible Secret and of course the Doom that none can escape it's all forged by Walpole in the castle of at Tonto and it's not surprising that the book spawned an entire genre an entire lifestyle frankly going into 10 further additions by the end of the 18th century but um is it worth reading

in his introduction to the Oxford World Classics Edition Nick groom describes the book as wking modern readers as ludicrous and unreadable and I've read a good many reviews online after I read it and there's basically Universal agreement that it's um kind of hard to get through and to be honest I can't say that I found it terribly compelling as a read though I'm also the kind of person that enjoys reading the selan and I've repeatedly failed to read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings I mean I still get 150 page in and I'm

like why are they still walking around in the Shire and who's Tom bomo what at any R I do think that any horror film any goth anyone interested in the occult should give Burks a philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the Beautiful You should give it a read for his analysis of the opposition of the beautiful and the sublime also I should say that you philosophy folks I see you back there looking in the back Burke's empirical analysis of the sublime was on K's Hit List K the Assassin K's

hit list in the third critique so it's kind of necessary reading for y'all too me too then after you've read Burke do your best to make it through the castle of at tronto it's not that long all things told it's six long chapters and in fact use Burke's list of the aspects of the sublime as like a like a bingo card or or a drinking game to keep you going to keep you reading it and no you should not do that you will end up blackout drunk that thing is too too damn Gothic but there's

something rewarding to get out the Phil opical foundations of a genre of an entire genre the genre of Gothic horror that so many of us know and love and experience the first expression of that genre despite the fact that it you know might not have aged all that well we're not all Black Sabbath in the end and if nothing else you can just go find in them the tools to um to up your Gloom game we all need to up our Gloom game so you can go full metagoth with Burke and Walpole as your spiritual

ancestors more on the gothic more on the development of this kind of sense of horror at the level of philosophy itself but I'm Dr Justin Sledge and thank you for watching esoterica where we explore the Arcane and history philosophy and religion [Music] [Music]