Tuesday, May 20, 2008

The Atavistic Soul Rises Once More


OG Synchromystic Ben Fairhall blogged recently about Goths and Pagans reviving the Medieval ritual of the Morris dance. Of course The Independent is going to mock this phenomenon, because the smartass colleges its writers go to teach nothing about how culture really works.


One of the great appeals of Post-Punk and pre-Goth bands like Killing Joke and Siouxsie and the Banshees for me was how they brought to fruition vague, atavistic threads of British culture I had sensed in say, the Hammer horror films or Clockwork Orange. 

Christianity, Imperialism and the Industrial Revolution changed the character of Britain, which in Roman days had very much been the Wild West frontier of the Empire. Its strange lure for wandering conquerors like the Danes or the Normans seemed to instill a combative nature in the people of the British Isles, which coupled with the collision of the indigenous Druidic worldview with the corporate Church fostered a distinct witchy vibe that was never really snuffed out.


So we've looked at the Edinburgh fire festivals in the past, and the Solstice reveries at Stonehenge are pretty well established. Hell, the Church of England is run by a Druid, for Christ's sake. I would say to look for more of this kind of thing in the future, particularly in England. 

The Goth subculture is one of the few surviving indigenous pop culture movements to emerge from the UK, so I wouldn't be surprised if it married itself to these kinds of old traditions and sparked an entirely new counterculture there. 

Certainly the comics of Alan Moore, Bryan Talbot and Jamie Delano (among many others) have been on the cutting edge of this for some time. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see this all start to play itself out in the streets.