Fashion Tastes Amongst Satanists

Fashion tastes help identify the public face of religious adherents, but also work sometimes as negative stereotypes. How do Satanic fashions of dress result from, or influence, adherents and the general public?

1. Satanic Fashions.

2. Black is Bad.

3. The Value of Black.

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Satanic Fashion

The High Priest of the Church of Satan, Peter Gilmore, explains that Satanists are free to "eat what they please, dress as they please, and generally follow whatever lifestyle suits them best"₂. The mass media and popluar culture portray Satanists as wearing certain clothes. In Rosemary's Baby the Satanic society wore expensive business suits and typical high-society attire, yet the gothic suicidal teens alluded to in popular culture seem the complete opposite.

It is worth examining some of the dress styles popularly found amongst Satanists. There are many valid objections to the systematic categorization of people's apperance, but what follows are what I think to be four pertinent Satanic stereotypes:

• The Professional: Probably the biggest proportion of long-term Satanists fall into the category of professionals. Smart and sharp dressers whether in businesswear, sportswear or tidy casuals, they embody confidence and capability.

• Punks and Rockers: Younger or older, the outlandish dress of these Satanists is aggressive, attention-grabbing, counter-cultural and rugged. Beneath the exterior can lay a computer programmer, technician, student or a waster: Only those who have genuie skills will remain a Satanist, the rest will deteriorate into normals or drunkards.

• Goths: Whether a traditional goth in layers of victorian-esque frills, a cyber goth in clubbing clothes, an 80s goth with big hair and a baggy Cure tshirt, goths vary from bookish philosophers through to technical workers in the sciences, computer industry or anywhere else.

• Casual Satanists are a large group who have never had (or who have abandoned) any notable sense of alternative fashion, and who are also not particularly well-dressed. They spend their energies and thoughts on things other than clothes (and why shouldn't they?). The Practicals!

Despite the disclaimers, a disproportionate quantity of Satanists wear black, and this warrants some investigation and explanation.

Black is Bad

Sociologists have studied the effects of "colour bias" on peoples' judgements of behaviour. Thomas Gilovich reports:

“A particularly interesting example of how our expectations can influence what we see involves people's negative associations to the color black and how they can influence the perceived aggressiveness of someone wearing black clothing. The "bad guys" have worn black hats since the invention of motion pictures, and psychological research has shown that film directors who employ this tactic are capitalizing on a very basic psychological phenomenon: Surveys conducted in a wide range of cultures reveal that black is seen as the colour of evil and death in virtually all corners of the world.

This negative association leads to several interesting results in the domain of professional sports. When my colleague Mark Frank and I asked a group of respondents to rate the appearance of professional football and hockey uniforms, they judged those that were at least half black to be the most "bad," "mean," and "aggressive" looking. These perceptions influence, in turn, how specific actions performed by black-uniformed teams are viewed. We showed groups of trained referees one of two videotapes of the same aggressive play in a football scrimmage, one with the aggressive team wearing white and one with it wearing black. The referees who saw the black-uniformed version rated the play as much more aggressive and more deserving of a penalty than those who saw the white-uniformed version. The referees "saw" what this common negative association led them to expect to see. As a result of this bias, it is not surprising to learn that teams that wear black uniforms in these two sports have been penalized significantly more than average during the last two decades.”

"How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life"
Thomas Gilovich (1991)₃

The cycle that develops is called a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is how it could happen. People have various different 'favourite colours' and ways of dressing, and some tend to wear black. As popular culture associates this with some negative traits, then, subconsciously, such people are treated slightly differently, as we have seen above in the sociological studies of black-clad sports teams. As a result of this slightly different treatment, the individual comes to behave differently. Part of their self-identity may come to include their being different. This pattern does not occur for other dress senses, because, other styles do not have the negative connotations of the colour black. Therefore the person may well solidify and exaggerate the black clothes they wear. The cycle continues and as they are increasingly separated from popular culture, others will assume they are into occult, secretive and countercultural activities. This stereotyping leads the person (perhaps even this occurs without external prompting) to actually be curious about such things. Ergo, you get a gradual stream of such dark dressing individuals that come to Satanism. Estimating from personal experience, one quarter of all Satanists arrive at their combination of religion and fashion sense through this particular cycle.

Goths and Satanists

Are all goths Satanists? Definately not. Most goths are not religious. I know Christian goths and pagan goths; I once went to a service in central London that specifically caters for goth Christians, where I talked to two Christian priests who were both goths. In conclusion, goths can be of any religion but are mostly unreligious.

The Value of Black

Black is not only a colour of the bad guys in films, it has other associations. It is a colour of sombreness, of seriousness and professionalism, of peace, serility, depth and simplicity. Black is the philosophical colour. If you wish to think deep, or to mourn the hopelessness of the masses of humanity, then you might find yourself drawn to a particular shade, and I predict that blue jeans and football t-shirts will not reflect the thoughtfulness inside, nor the will to power than manifests from the realisation that humanity could be so much better and closer to the truth than it is!