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Notes -
There’s an aesthetic that I love and have pieced together from various media. I suppose it could just be Southern Gothic or Dark Romanticism, but I wonder if there’s more vocabulary I can use to describe it. It’s an aesthetic or mood or culture.
Some popular media that depicts its elements: the film Sleepy Hollow, the art of Edward Gorey, the book Series of Unfortunate Events, Edgar Allen Poe, Schopenhauer or Kant (but not seriously), Young Werther, Tim Burton animations, the animation Coraline, 00’s emo.
The elements:
A purely theatrical, symbolic, and fatalistic Christianity. It is not taken seriously, yet is done as a social ritual and respected. The ambiance of the church and the tragedy of Christ’s death are central, with essentially no optimism, but also no negativity — just acceptance. There’s an element of a complete resignation and even continual prediction of sin and death. There’s no room for theology, or even much preaching beyond the basics. There’s certainly sola fide, but not even much care about perfecting the faith. There’s just an inborn acceptance of the church as culture, and its tradition as culture, and Jesus’ death (if ever noted) is simply an analog of the inevitability of demise without avoidance. There is a social dimension, but it’s never forced, and it’s somewhat Anglo (“cold”).
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There’s a distaste for vanity and anything that can be construed as a flight from mortality. Yet there’s counterintuitively a maximal reverence for the human being and for the time on Earth as a once in eternity moment. There’s also great care for man’s vision and beholding of the significance and fleeting beauty of life, and eventual sickness and death. These are not in competition, but work together. Death is seen as an eternal home, and humans are like vampires that are briefly awoken from a coffin to spend a weekend among the living. Care is spent to ensure the mind is able to feel and experience and that thoughts are not used for distraction but to experience the pleasure of equanimity and purity. While there’s no care for glory or even over-learning, there is care for a person’s clean spirit and heart and his own drama.
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There’s magical thinking, especially of the negative variety. A belief, which is essentially theatrical and dramatic and enjoyed almost as performance, in demons and curses and bad spirits. These a person is to be kept pure from, yet the mind is totally vigilant to its influences — the mind is kept pure almost for the purposes of beholding horrors and death as a curiosity, but not quite.
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The drug of choice is opium, to feel deepest peace and disinterest. Stimulants are avoided, because of what purpose is doing more? Alcohol and cannabis would be unimportant, because why be blinded to the vision of life and death?
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Attention and beauty is found chiefly in drama, especially involving irrevocable loss. Not as a curiosity, but as a similitude to the essence of human life. Life as revolving around death. Life as purity, perceiving-ness, beholding-ness of all evil.
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There’s a great care for the Sublime. Oceans, storms, cliffs. A drug may be used to experience a pessimistic sublimity, but nothing optimistic.
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Attention is paid to manners, not as a means of showing one’s breeding, but as a means of ensuring every social moment is predictable and without confusion or unpredictability. There’s almost an appreciation for boredom as a similitude to deathly peace.
Upon writing this, sure, maybe it’s just dark/gothic romanticism. But is there more to explore here?
I think you'd enjoy this youtube channel. Dozens of hours of lectures that all have a similar "vibe" and I think it's similar to what you're describing.
You might also want to look into the "dark academia" aesthetic if you haven't already.
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