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No sane person can hear the word "goth" and fail to envision another time and place, even if they don't know exactly what time and place that is. Words have power and, while on the face of it, goths of the new millennium have nothing to do with barbarians who lived over a thousand years ago, still, there might be a few similarities worth checking out.
The original Goths (capital "G") were Germanic tribes who, between the second and sixth centuries A.D. managed to do a lot of marauding. They loved to fight—apparently it was the ultimate experience—and, because somebody in Europe invented the stirrup around the second century, it gave one of those original Goths an idea: Horses could make not just an effective mode of transport and a larger-than-life pet, but the noble steed might be an excellent partner in battle when the terrain demanded something more than human feet, such as the plains of Eastern Europe and Russia. The Goths had speed but not numbers, and consequently were generally a nomadic people out of necessity.
These first Goths seemed to fall into two main groups, the Visigoths (visi = wisi = to the west) and the Ostrogoths (ostro = austro = to the east). The Visigoths took on the Roman Empire, fighting, losing, fighting, winning bits and pieces, and finally collaborating with the Romans against


the Huns. Eventually those Visigoths roamed to France and Spain and tried to dig roots there until the French kicked them out of their country. A bit more war and Islamic rule became the norm for a while in Spain, but ultimately the survival-oriented Visigoths headed for the hills.
Meanwhile, the Ostrogoths, with probably fewer options, aligned with the Huns under the infamous Attila. The Huns, too, battled the Romans and lost, and the Ostrogoths ended up in Italy by way of the Balkans. They managed pretty well there until the end of the sixth century, when the Roman emperor Justinian started an internal war based on a kind of centralized-power doctrine that destroyed Italy and saw the demise of the Ostrogoths.
Beyond all this, from designs of jewelry and weapons and other things, it's clear that the original Goths had a connection to the Celts, but what and how seem to be mostly lost in the mists of time.
Generally, the word "Goth" with a capital "G" was used in the past as a pejorative. It meant a person of no refinement. They were barbarians, at least to the then civilized world.
Which leads to the Gothic style of architecture that originated in France around the middle of the twelfth century. Some of the most sophisticated and elaborate Gothic cathedrals were designed and built there and are still standing. Carrying on for about two hundred more years, the style was eventually picked up in Germany and England.
Gothic architecture came about because the French were tired of Romanesque and Norman buildings—square structures with a couple of columns and a bit of design work on a peaked roof. Gothic architecture took the inside of the building and put it on the outside. It's like taking the skeleton—the structure that holds us up—and placing it on the outside of the body. Gothic architecture turned the normal inside out.
Curving arched doorways with deep embrasures, floral-design windows, ribbed vaulted ceilings: the effect is openness, airy and light, spiritual. Gothic cathedrals draw the eye upward, allowing ordinary people to leave the mundane world and visit the realm of the soul in a free-flow communication. Flying buttresses permitted taller interiors, which provided great acoustics for choirs and organ music; exquisitely ornamental gables, crockets and foils added panache; those astonishing cross-species gargoyles—a perfect metaphor bridging the sacred and the profane (well, profane might be a bit extreme, since gargoyles were, after all, cute water-
A Shortlist of Gothic Cathedrals
Chartres Cathedral: Chartres, France (good vibes)
Glastonbury Abbey: Somerset, England (especially the ruins)
Kbln Cathedral: Kbln (Cologne), Germany (massive cathedral)
Notre Dame: Paris, France (good 'goyles)
Saint Bavon Cathedraal: Ghent, Belgium (houses the famous 1432 Jan van Eyck painting of The Lamb of God)
Salisbury Cathedral: Salisbury, England (staid and stylish)
Westminster Abbey: London, England (1,000 years of history)
Whitby Abbey: Whitby England (vampires among us!)
Gargoyles, Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, France.
Photo by Hugues Leblanc

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THE GOTH BiBLE


spouts acting as eaves troughs)—hovered at the edge of roves, ready-to-pounce guardians of the spiritual. These cathedrals were all fine woodwork and stonework and took centuries to construct.
Gothic architecture begat Gothic furniture, since the more practical people of the day realized it would be nice to sit down once you got inside one of those palaces. Cathedrals had no seating back then. Palaces and institutions needed furnishings, so there was a ready market. Today you can still run across Gothic and imix-Gothic pieces, beautifully carved of fine old hardwoods, often with the classic Gothic arch. They sell at steep prices. The furniture, like the buildings it originally inhabited, speaks of the powerful kings and church leaders who imitated a powerful God who ruled through omnipotence.
Present-day goths with a small "g" appear at first to have nothing to do with those rampaging Goths of old, nor with Gothic architecture. The nomadic Goths of history more resembled modern-day Punks, at least to the collective eye—wild, crude, tribal. But today's goth did crawl grimly out of the punk realm in the mid-1970s. The exquisite architecture known as Gothic (named for those barbarian hordes because it was considered crude by mainstream standards of the day) did discretely emerge in the 1170s. There has to be a connection.
Goths form a lose-knit tribe, functioning, both visibly and invisibly, within the status quo. And while goths are not warriors, nor nomadic for the most part, no one can deny that goth is removed from the larger society in which it exists. Goths are often feared and shunned, usually viewed as sinister, unwholesome, something . . . well, crude by the polished plastic standards of the status quo. Today's goths dwell in their own realm out of necessity, much like the original Goths. Goths existed and goths exist by implied rules of order, values, and a language that sets them apart from the rest of the world.
The beautiful Gothic style of architecture appeals to goths because it is the world of the interior. The gothic soul is drawn to these exoskeletons. What is inside is revealed outside, creating a synchronicity of the inner and outer world—mystery and romance, set in a realm of shadows. Smacks of goth to me!
And like the original Goths, modern goth is under siege, constantly threatened with annihilation through absorption into the mainstream. The mainstream has a history of devouring what's edgy, co-opting the wild
You Might Be a goth hick if...
• Your casket is on cinder blocks in your driveway.
• You name your child after your dog, and they're both named "Enigma."
• You think Dolly Parton should be the lead singer for Switchblade Symphony.
• Your coffin is lined with a velvet Confederate flag.
• You smoke cloves in a corncob pipe.
• You dye your sheep black.
• Your bull's nose is pierced six times.
• Even your teeth are black.
• Your rooster crows at moonrise.
• You have spent your life perfecting black corn.
• Your coffin has a side-mounted spitoon.
• Your granny crochets your fishnets.
• Your favorite comic is Johnny the Homicidal Tractor.
• You have an Elvira pinup in your outhouse.
• You get up at 4 A.M. every morning to collect eggs from the raven coop.
• You and your pit bull share the spiked collar.

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DARKLIHGS WITH ATTITUDE

goth resurrecting.
Photo by Hugues Leblanc
and innovative then corrupting it through dilution in order to nourish itself. It's an animal thing, basic survival a la Darwin, and goth is a tribe struggling like an endangered species against extinction.
Goth has endured for three decades; it took three centuries to construct many cathedrals. It has not yet been overtaken as the Ostrogoths were by the ruling society chanting "You will be assimilated." Goth draws inspiration from those clever Visigoths: maintain a low profile, and keep the intangible treasures hidden.
One of the interesting things about the Gothic period of architecture is that out of it, women began to gain a better position in society. This was the age when minstrels crooned of courtly love, when a code of chivalry was formed, when wooing a lady became a skill and a man who played the flute was looked on as desirable. Even the Virgin Mary ascended to the fourth position in the former triumvirate of the Church. Ultimately this led, however slowly, to a consciousness on the part of society that women are indeed human and equal, and deserve to be treated as such. Over the last centuries—in fits and starts, but clearly ongoing at least since the Romantic poets—this way of thinking has been extended to apply not just to women, but to the feminine, energy and values that include the often suppressed feminine side of men, qualities most goth men are proud to own up to and will gladly nourish within themselves.
During the Gothic period, European cities became more settled. The roaming tribes wanted a home. Universities formed, and study led to such questions as: Just what sex is an angel? After all, Gothic artists had to depict them in cathedral windows, so the point became important. A period of stability and peace in the world led to the blossoming of the opportunity to create art and beauty and move humanity up a notch on the evolutionary scale.
Modern goths, being the enlightened visionaries they are, manage to reflect in every aspect of their lifestyle, from ideals through fashion, a blend of all human history: tribal, the beautiful Enlightenment, and the disaster of the Dark Ages. It is amazing, and often frightening to those outside trying to decipher goth, to see this melange of romance and death represented by individuals so poetically. Goth reflects the turmoil of human history, the injustices, the knowledge of our impending demise. To be goth is to be rejected by the mainstream, to be outside the collective. To be goth is to constantly be paranoid of being consumed by the culture at large.
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THE GOTH BIBLE

Courtesy of Fred Berger

The mainstream does not understand goth, and it never will. At best it is envious. At worst, it tries to destroy what is unknowable. And yet goth remains, and grows.
than tbou
Morpheus, one of the former co-owners of the long-time Toronto goth shop Siren, once said in a television interview: "We goths are a gentle people." True. But even the dark side has a shadow.
Anyone born in a competitive society is bound to be competitive — some more, some less. There are goths — not all of whom are faux goths — who have a large stake in being as goth as they can be. To these ubergoths, the way others perceive them matters greatly. Thinking about it, it makes sense. While goths tend to be individualistic and feel rejected by the mainstream, at the same time the urgency to belong to a tribe and stave off suicidal alienation means that trying to "fit" can take precedence over other drives.
Being gother than thou is usually an activity reserved for the young. Around the age of thirty years, an uncanny transformation seems to take place in the psyche. Not for nothing did the hippies warn, "Don't trust anyone over thirty!" Every decade of existence brings new changes, new directions. By the time someone reaches the beginning of the middle segment of their life on this planet, they have hopefully gotten over a few of the basic insecurities that plagued them in their youth, often exacerbated by a family and community that reflected values not wholly their own.
Not every goth wears black. Not every goth can be .identified visually as goth. Goth is an amorphic grouping with only the most obvious identification markers distinguishable to those who are not goth, e.g., fashion and music. But as in every grouping, loose or tightly knit, there are always a few fragile souls who have an enormous stake in being the most, the best, top of the pile, to the detriment of others. Sometimes they are unsure of their status. Other times it's ambition and a desire for total attention. And for some, it's a confusion because they can't quite see what being goth is about, and they desire so much to belong but aren't exactly sure they do.
In gothland, that gother-than-thou attitude is not uncommon. In fact, it's so prevalent that the online magazine /forum gothic.net offered rolls of
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DARKLiriGS WiTH ATTITUDE

Goth Points one could buy, little stickers to be given out to friends and strangers—the more you got, the gother you became. The Corruption is an online role-playing game where players win Goth Points. Who says goths don't have a sense of humor?!
R. Hunter Gough, owner of Savant Garde Entertainment, concocted the card game Gother Than Thou. "The whole idea of 'goth points' and being 'Gother Than Thou,' " he says, "had been around for years before I decided to make the card game, and I'd done some tinkering with card games before, so I decided that the three most important factors in 'living la vida gothic' were goth points, money, and keeping oneself right on the brink of being horribly ill. When I got evicted [from my apartment] because my iibergoth roommate at the time had been spending the five months' worth of rent money I'd been giving him at Hot Topic and who knows where else, I decided that one of the primary sources of money in a Gother Than Thou card game would have to be a 'Gullible Roommate,' and the idea grew from there."
Gother Than Thou is a satire of the gothic lifestyle. To win, a player must accumulate twenty goth points while giving his or her opponents cards that subtract points. For instance, the "Genital Piercing" card gives the player who holds it six goth points, but takes away six money points. That card also gives the player two sickness points—not good! If a player gets five sickness points, he or she swoons, and must discard their Fate deck (as in "what Fate has in store for you"). The images are photographs of goths enacting the "Crying Yourself to Sleep" card, or the "Dire Fashion Blunder" card, or images of nongoths, for example the "Visit From Mom" card.
As with most small business ventures, Gother Than Thou was developed with help. "My ex-girlfriend took many of the early pictures, including the cover image, the card back image, and [the card] 'Fun With Eyeliner.' My roommate at the time, Megan Jones, was out of a job, so I put her to work boxing up 2,000 decks of Gother while she sat and watched daytime TV and tapes ofFraggle Rock. She still hasn't quite recovered."
Although the man behind the game declares he was never goth beyond a phase in college, "About sixty-five percent of our customers are goths. The game has equal appeal with goths, wannabe goths, former goths, and goth haters. Gother Than Thou owes some of its