Dark Academia & the Longing for Identity

On Slytherins and Sonnenrads

Universities once provided identities as well as educations. These identities were deeply rooted in particular places, layered with centuries of history, aesthetics, traditions, and the stable elites of particular peoples. As Gladstone said of Oxford: “It inculcated a reverence for what was ancient, and free, and great.”

There is a latent longing for the return of this elite world; a desire hidden below the surface of the consciousness of even the deeply progressive. Suppressed by liberal conditioning, it is being revealed in strange and spontaneous aesthetic movements, new identities, and collective dreams.

Sheila Metzner, The Passion of Rome: Fendi 1986

Here I turn to the emergent phenomenon of Dark Academia.