Product Description

"Goth Craft is a sexy and serious A-Z of dark culture's collective tribal identity. More than just a demented 'Preppy Handbook' for a different era, Goth Craft goes beyond  mere fashion, taking readers deep into the magical currents of this emerging subculture. Fascinating."
—Richard Metzger, host of Disinformation and editor of Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide To Magick & The Occult

Darkly Magickally Goth
When Paganism and Goth culture collide, prepare for a powerful blend of independent thought and magickal tranformation.

Learn how to channel dark emotions, express yourself magickally through the dark arts of clothing, hair, makeup, body modifications, and choose appropriate Goth music for ritual. Try some spellcasting on the dance floor.  Discover the workings of shadow magick, death energy, and blood magick.

Find out what draws us to the dark side.

"Don't let your assumptions fool you — Goth Craft is a lovingly written and carefully researched piece of work. It covers the intersection of Gothic subculture and Pagan spirituality from every conceivable angle, and manages to be both fun and eye-catching along
the way."
—Michelle Belanger, author of The Psychic Vampire Codex and editor of Vampires In Their Own Words

"An insightful, honest, and spiritual exploration of the intersection of Witchcraft and Goth."
—Christopher Penczak, author of the Temple of Witchcraft series

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #376033 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-01
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 316 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Many people associate Goth with either the Columbine massacre or Marilyn Manson. But Digitalis, a neo-pagan priest, provides readers an opportunity to expand their horizons about Goth culture by starting with the basics: What is a Goth? Digitalis not only provides a history of Goth culture, but also includes a cheeky, fun catalogue of Goth types (complete with corresponding photographs) that span the spectrum—from CorporateGoths and Fetishists to MopeyGoths and PerkyGoths. Goths are dark witches, Digitalis explains, who practice the magick of the Middle Path, the balanced path between light and dark that includes intense, sometimes unpleasant magickal workings, but should not be confused with black magic. The remainder of this handbook is devoted to witchcraft—from rituals to a glossary of tools—Goth-style. Digitalis also spends a good deal of time advising readers how to handle sadness, suicidal thoughts and frequent crying, even suggesting traditional therapy as a way through Dark Emotionalism. Perhaps most fun for the uninitiated is Digitalis's thorough guide to obtaining Goth style with advice on clothing, the all-important makeup and piercings, among other things. Primarily, Digitalis wants readers to understand that Contrary to popular belief, doom and gloom does not penetrate every aspect of Goth culture. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Raven Digitalis (Missoula, MT) is the author of Shadow Magick Compendium: Exploring Darker Aspects of Magickal Spirituality and Goth Craft: The Magickal Side of Dark Culture (Llewellyn). He is a Neopagan Priest and cofounder of the "disciplined eclectic" shadow magick tradition and training coven Opus Aima Obscuræ, and a radio and club DJ of Gothic and industrial music. Also trained in Georgian Witchcraft and Buddhist philosophy, Raven has been a Witch since 1999 and a Priest since 2003.

Raven holds a degree in anthropology from the University of Montana and is also an animal rights activist, black-and-white photographic artist, and is the co-owner of Twigs & Brews Herbs, specializing in bath salts, herbal blends, essential oils, and incenses. He has appeared on the cover of newWitch magazine, is a regular contributor to The Ninth Gate magazine, and has been featured on MTV News and the ‘X' Zone Radio program.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I

Goth

Pagan practice and the Gothic lifestyle are different for everyone. Each person gets something out of each lifestyle that others may not. I can say only so much about each without generalizing about the whole. These lifestyles carry a different message for each person, and it would be foolish to generalize about a movement as diverse as Goth or Pagan culture. However, there are a few points that must be conveyed in order to more easily classify and recognize aspects of each movement.

What's a Goth?

Alternative culture is the result of similar energy patterns coming together, kinship being found, and the disassociated once again becoming united. One of these alternaneocultures is the dark art, or "darksider," community, many of whose members consider themselves to be part of the modern Goth subculture.

The terms Goth and Gothic have been in use only since the 1970s to describe peobelonging to a particular subcultural faction. Goths can be described in a number of ways, but let's begin with the origins of the word itself.

Historical Goths

A tribe called the Goths originated in present-day Götland, Sweden, in the first cenBCE and later made their way through Europe, all the way to Spain. By the third century BCE, they split off into the Ostrogoths (eastern Goths) and Visigoths (western Goths). I will use the spelling "Gothick" to distinguish the historical tribal Goths from the nineteenth-century Romantics and modern Goths.

One Germanic tribe or another seemed to be constantly invading Rome. Integraoccurred between the Romans and the Germanic tribes over time. Though the two peoples were fighting, much of their cultures became intertwined through alliances, including the fostering of numerous sons and daughters. The Visigoths' infamous sackof Rome occurred in 410 CE.

The Goths were originally uncivilized heathens, meaning they did not live in a city and they had a similar god structure to that of the Norse and other Germanic tribes. Before the rise of the Church, they saw no separation between their ways and those of others. The Goths were one of the last European tribes to want to remain nomadic (traveling) rather than become citizens of a political empire.

The majority of the tribes that wished not to become part of the greater Roman political structure saw the system itself as a violation of their freedom, as those in Rorulership were believed to have the "mandate of the gods," particularly if a pure tribal bloodline was maintained. Every tribal culture that became a part of this political empire was absorbed, losing a great deal of its former culture. With the coming of each generation, more and more of the former tribal ways were lost, replaced by the greater government's unionized system. It is for this reason that so much animosity existed between the tribes and the city-states.

Nancy Kilpatrick, author of The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined, bethat modern Goth is facing a similar dilemma: the threat of absorption into the mainstream.

The Gothick people converted to Arian Christianity before being overtaken by the Græco-Roman Christians, even calling their way "Gothick Christianity." The Goths saw the Christ not as the world's one and only figure of salvation, but as a warrior, magician, and shaman.

Following a number of invasions and forced integrations by the Roman Catholics, Huns, and Muslims, the ancient cultures of the Goths became virtually extinguished.

The culture and its ideology survived only as an underground occult movement within persecuted and converted peoples, preserving the teachings of the Norse, the Gothick language (documented as early as 300 CE), and the adopted symbolism of the runes.

The Goths established secret traditions, greatly influencing nobility, but this unmovement largely remained exclusive to the lower classes. Further perseof the Goths fluctuated over time; either they had legitimate political power with royalty and were left alone, or they were too underground and unnoticed to be targeted. This impact can be seen even now, considering the number of currently existsurnames that are Gothick in origin. Even members of Spanish nobility are called gotos ("Goths") today.

Though the ancient Gothick tribes virtually vanished upon the Muslim invasion in 711 CE, some of their culture survived all the way up to the Renaissance, when its spirit was restored in painting, sculpture, and architecture, becoming the Gothic Removement.

The architectural style of the time differed from the common Græco-Roman idea of proper form, gaining the title "Gothic." Because the art and architecture were unique and quite eerie-definitely against the grain at the time-the term Gothic was used in a derogatory fashion. At that time, the term was negatively associated with the bardark, and uncultured.

Gothic architecture is characterized by its towering vertical appearance, pointed arches, curved doorways, large spires and columns, ribbed vaults, stained glass, flying buttresses, and, of course, gargoyles!

European Romanticism was the origin of the literary use of the word Gothic, which evoked a particular lugubrious style of literature. Darkly themed stories around that time period began to be associated with the reawakened Goth movement. The Gothic literary style addressed the mechanisms of fear and sexuality within the human psyche. At the time of the Gothic Renaissance, fear and superstition were stereotyped as being representative of old Gothick belief.

Authors over time (if I may jump around in history) who might be said to have had an influence on the resurrection of the Gothic(k) spirit both in the Gothic Renaisand the later nineteenth-century Romantic movement include Giordano Bruno, Morris Berman, Horace Walpole, William Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bram Stoker,...(Continues)

Customer Reviews

It has to be a hard subject to write about since it is so varied, but...
This book confuses me. At first, it seems to want to explain how some goths are pagan. Fine and good, but then, like other reviewers have said, the first 80 pages read like a field guide for those wanting to be goth. First, pick a type of goth you want to be and maybe you will even get one with the required music, so you don't have to think for yourself. Next, pick a religion or magic system. You picked GlamGoth Asatru. Congrats! Then again I am one of those older goths, oh-no. I'd be smack inbetween many catagories of goth: Faerie goth (because I like neofolk and I guess that's fairy), Romantigoth, Victorian Goth, Trad Goth, Casual goth and Sophistigoth, but wait I like industrial music too. That's the problem with these young whippersnapper gothlings...they all want to put you in a box. Why can't goth just be goth? I mean when I was in high school in the late 80's, we had punks and new wavers or ha ha, New Romantics. They were doing it to be anti-fashion, now it's a fashion, ta-duh. So now, you have to classify yourself under 100s of goth groups or subgroups, along with the music therein.

So what does paganism have to do with this? Yeah color me confused and I run my own Dark Paganism blog. I tend to use words like dark or goth to draw people in from the millions of hits on the internet they could get from just typing in pagan or goth. It gets you there faster and covers two bases. I am not sure if the people illustrated in this book are pagan. It seems so, but I am not really told.

I mean, the author being a bit young himself, has the huge task of merging a whole subculture into another one and trying to come out with an unified philosophy of sorts. A philosophy he constantly has to put "some but not all" into, which is nice because then I can't dislike him. Even his name is sort of funny, but he justifies it proudly. Moxie. He gets one of the stars explaining how to take angry emotions and make them positive. Some goths have had bad childhoods, some but not all. It is nice to have someone explain this in a way that is transformative. So there's a star for that. Do you want a silver or black star?

Not to Nickpick, but I do think it is so funny when the author puts down people who think Siouxsie and the Banshees are "Sushi and The Banshees" (a totally made up and not that funny joke) only to spell Siouxsie's name wrong a few pages later. Now that's funny! And then, the author says NotGoths listen to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, yet point out goths listen to them too. I know the goth clubs in Southern California play both. This probably mattered more to me when I was in my 20's or was less into neofolk, maybe neofolk's balancing me out.

Anyway, on to Gothic Makeup styles. No, no, don't come up with your own style, this book will tell you how to do it so you don't have to! I do disagree with other's comments on here that the piercing chart is silly because I have read gemstone books which tell you that piercing your ears and wearing certain stones will help you with this or that. I won't be on him for that.

I'll give him the other star for the elemental part where he lists music along with the other traits of the element. Amusing. I am not sure how much I believe it, but it's an original idea. The sex, drugs and rock and roll chapter is funny to me. I guess if you are goth, you gotta be into SM too. Ok, I know a lot of people like this and have been to their parties, so count me in as well, I guess. The author is probably smart enough to know if people are open minded enough to be gothic or pagan, or both, then sexual openness isn't that far behind.

Oh yeah, what's up with this naming Gothic, Gothick? It's a bit much. As far as I can see, only about 50 pages or so of this volume can be used as Gothic Magick, which is a hell of a lot more than other Gothic Wicca books I have read. There are some pages on death work and blood work, the author seems to know what is going on in history for the most part. It really isn't anything you couldn't get if you read something by Leilah Wendell as far as the death work goes. But then the tool section is just the same Wiccan tools with no gothick-ness added. Raven does pick out a lot of magick from different sources, like the lemon magic part of the Aradia. I'd rather see him do his own thing though, since his original ideas, like the element music stuff, is rather good. Not great, but good.

I guess if you were 21 and just getting into a club scene and wanted to have a style guide to goth coupled with a spiritual guide to your religion if you happened to be pagan or a magician, this would be the only book you would need. It covers everything, almost too much. It is too cut and dried, this is Ubergoth, this is Babydoll, etc. But to me, it's a hard subject to write about without getting criticized for it. I don't think people who are in the goth scene or over 25, especially if they are well read, will get much out of it. At that age, you have experience in clubs and with others of like mind and that experience explains it to you.

If you are over 30, you are probably an Ubergoth and don't get what the kids like. So don't even try. It's pretty though, give it that and it's funny that all the goths made sure to get their photo credits, because that is what is important these days. Kidding. It's surely more sophisticated than anything I've read from Konstantinos or Brenda Knight, in regards to the goth pagan scene in general, which is saying a lot since Raven is a lot younger than either of them. It's refreshing in one sense, but annoying in the other.

I am bumping this up to 3 stars because I forgot he had part of a chapter devoted to "giving thanks", which I felt is very overlooked in modern pagan books, be it gothic or not. It always seems like books call down god and goddesses, spirits or what have you, ask for something, but then, once it is given, the ritual caster never gives anything back. I mean, you should give offerings BEFORE you ask for something, but at least this book steps in the right direction there.

I look forward to reading this man's work 10 years down the road.

Fabulous book
Goth Craft is a wonderful book; insightful and funny, providing a great window on a world I knew little to nothing about. It is not just for Goths, either. Raven Digitalis has wise and unique way of looking at the world. I eagerly await his next book.

Deborah Blake, Author of Circle, Coven & Grove: A Year of Magickal Practice (Llewellyn, 2007)

First of it's Kind!
I myself am not goth, but I am a Neo-Pagan witch.

Essentially this book successfully fulfills the following goals:

1) To effectively describe, define, explain, and provide a window into Goth and Goth culture.

2)To effectively describe, explain, define, and provide a window into various branches of Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft as well as their cultures.

3) To dispel the common misconception that all goths are pagans/witches or that all witches/pagans are goth. Digitalis also dispels misconceptions that exist about each camp individually.

4) Effectively explain and provide a window into the population that truly does exemplify the intersection of these two cultures and important information regarding the integration of the two.


Digitalis has garnered much unfounded criticism from 'old schoolers' and 'traditionalists' for his cutting edge approaches and willingness to write about controversial topics. However, I think a person should retain an open mind and read this book for themselves. Digitalis is one of the minds that will carry on the Craft for future generations, assuring it's growth and continuance. The next generation is upon us. I must say I myself am proud to be a part of it as well!