The Enlightenment heralded reason and progress, yet also spawned a world organised along increasingly rigid lines of technological development and economic gain. In the late 18th century, this “disenchantment” with the world triggered a reaction, a counter-movement and antidote to notions of progress, clarity, and globalisation. The goth subculture as we know it today was born in the 1980s, but its roots are much older. It is a lifestyle steeped in an undefined yearning for the dark side of life, deeply rooted in our material culture and especially omnipresent in our ways of looking and understanding. This book seeks the essence of goth by exploring and crossing its outer limits.