Observations concerning patient V. - Part II

I. Introduction

Marcel Griaule (1898 – 1956) was a French anthropologist, who was closely affiliated with Bataille's brand of Surrealism. Indirectly, he influenced the world view of one of the most infamous Black Metal musicians, Kristian "Varg" Vikernes, the man behind Burzum.

An unlikely lineage? Read on...


II. Marcel Griaule and Surrealism

For students of Surrealism, Marcel Griaule is best known as the leader of the 1931-1933 Dakar-Djibouti expedition.

Amongst the participants in the mission was the prominent French surrealist and ethnographer Michel Leiris, one of Georges Bataille's closest friends. Michel Leiris's wrote his 1934 book "L'Afrique Fantôme" about his personal experiences during the expedition, describing it as a failed attempt to flee western civilization and the life in big cities.

André Schaeffner, a musicologist, also participated in the expedition and made field recordings of African musicians. In 1929 he wrote in 'Documents', the Surrealist review that inspired this blog: "No object of musical sound or sound production, however primitive, however formless it may seem, shall be excluded from classification ... it is only on the condition that nothing of a people's musical life shall be deemed unworthy of examination that we can consider a general study of instrument making and scoring throughout history and the five continents".

But Marcel Griaule himself also was close to 'Documents'. He succeeded Michel Leiris as the editorial assistant of the review, functioning as the right hand of Bataille, who was at the time the magazine's editor. In 'Documents', Griaule published several articles: on Abyssinian totemism in 1929, on the legend of the Queen of Sheba and on the gunshot in 1930. Griaule also contributed to 'Documents' infamous anti-dictionary, writing entries on the evil eye, on Abyssinian games, on the spittle (all in 1929), on the treshold, on pottery and on Ju-Ju (all in 1930).


III. Marcel Griaule and the Dogon

During the Dakar-Djibouti expedition, Griaule studied the culture of the Dogon, a West-African people living in Mali and northern Burkina-Faso. Following the expedition, Griaule would study Dogon culture extensively for more than 25 years, becoming famous for a study on the meaning of masks in the complex mythology of the Dogon. The star Sirius plays an important role in certain initiatory cults of the Dogon, and in a footnote to a 1950 publication Griaule wrote that aspects of the 'secret knowledge' of these initiatory cults seemed to tally somewhat to then-current Western astronomical knowledge on Sirius. After his death in 1956, Griaule's pupil Germaine Dieterlen continued his work with the Dogon. In 1965, she published "Le Renard Pâle: La Mythe Cosmogonique: La Création du Monde" in which even more extensive claims were made about the astronomical knowledge of the Dogon, such as the fact that they were aware of Saturn having rings.

Of course, it would be erroneous to suppose that the Dogon's initiatory secret knowledge was age-old. Mythologies are not static systems: that some peoples have no written history, does not mean their culture does not develop. On the contrary, mythologies are dynamic, transforming over time, incorporating new meanings and absorbing new knowledge. It seems likely that the Dogon had given Western astronomical information a place is their cosmological system. This information may have reached them through education by missionaries or other contacts with westerners. Research by Wouter E. A. van Beek, a professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, suggests that Griaule himself may have inadvertently supplied the astronomical knowledge to the Dogon. Van Beek was unable to replicate Griaule's findings during extensive field studies among the Dogon. In a 1991 article in Current Anthropology called "Dogon Restudies. A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule" Van Beek suggests that Griaule had expertise in astronomy, and that his questioning of his Dogon informant may have been leading.

Here is a subtitled excerpt from the documentary "Dogons: Chronique d'une passion" in which Jean Rouch and Germaine Dieterlen remenisce about the work with Griaule and the Dogon cosmological controversy.



IV. The Dogon and ancient astronauts

The next step in our line of descent from Griaule to Kristian Vikernes is Robert Temple. Robert Temple based an 'ancient astronaut theory' on Griaule's and Dieterlen's findings. Wikipedia: "Ancient astronaut theories center around the proposal that the Earth has at some point in the distant past been visited by intelligent extraterrestrial beings, and that furthermore such contact is linked to either the origins of, or their developmental influence on, human cultures, technologies, and religion". In his 1976 book "The Sirius Mystery" Robert Temple theorized that the Dogon's supposed extra-ordinary astronomical knowledge was brought to the Dogon by visitors from outer space.

Robert Temple's book was one of many books published in the 1970s which put forward ancient astronaut theories; the best known of these were the books of Erich von Däniken. These books were published in a period in the 1970s when fuzzy-headed thinking was very popular. Charles Berlitz's theories on the Bermuda Triangle sold 20 million copies, Fritjof Capra published the bestseller "The Tao of Physics" and gurus like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Sathya Sai Baba were gaining substantial popularity.

One may suppose that the idea that non-western societies were repositories of mysterious wisdom, fulfilled a vital function in the cultural life of the 1970s. The fascination with mysterious, non-western wisdom points towards the sacred, both the right-handed sacred (the accumulation of knowledge, asceticism, submission to spiritual authority figures) as well as the left-handed sacred (religious ecstasy as a 'high'; sacredness in opposition, if not rebellion to traditional sources of intellectual and spiritual authority: science and the Christian churches).


V. Viking fascist astronaut robots

As is detailed in Moynihan's and Søderlinds much-debated book "Lords of Chaos", Kristian "Varg" Vikernes, the man behind Burzum, has fashioned his very own ancient astronaut theory. Where Coil sing about "Egyptian Aztecs arriving from Norway", Vikernes dreams of fascist viking robots arriving in Norway - from Sirius. Vikernes puts forward the theory that Norse mythology finds it's origin in the arrival of extraterrestrial robots from Sirius which created the human race though genetic experimentation. Non-Aryan races, so Vikernes believes, are the result of failed experiments.

Like the fuzzy-headed theories from the 1970s, Vikernes's thought points towards the sacred, both of the righthanded variety (the accumulation of knowledge, asceticism, authoritarianism and - racist - taboos) and the lefthanded variety (rebellion, transgression, murder, madness).

And there we have our genealogical lineage: Vikernes's theories on astronauts from Sirius descend from those of Temple, which in turn descend from Griaule's ethnographic work. Of course, the parentage of Vikernes ideas is ironical. Griaule was an ethnographer who tirelessly worked to promote knowledge of the beauty of non-Western cultures - cultures deeply despised by Vikernes as non-Aryan. Griaule was active in Bataille's virulently anti-fascist circles, while Vikernes is an outspoken fascist. Griaule's thought fathered a strange, dangerous grandchild.



Post scriptum

Here is a documentary by Jean Rouche on the Dogon, shot during a 1950-1951 expedition with Griaule.






Here is a link to an interesting dissertation on exoticism, focusing amongst others on Leiris's "L'Afrique Fantôme".

Observations concerning patient V.

I

From Nietzsche's "The Gay Science" (transl. by Walter Kaufman):

"369. Our side by side. - Don't we have to admit to ourselves, us artists, that there is an uncanny difference within us between our taste and our creative power? They stand oddly side by side, separately, and each grows in it's own way. I mean, they have altogether different degrees and tempi of old, young, mature, mellow and rotten. (...) Consider a continually creative person, a "mother" type in the grand sense, one who knows and hears nothing anymore except about the pregnancies and deliveries of his spirit, one who simply lacks the time to reflect on himself and to make comparisons, one who no longer has any desire to assert his taste and who simply forgets it, without caring in the least whether it still stands, or lies, or falls - such a person might eventually produce works that far excel his own judgment, so that he utters stupidities about them and himself - utters them and believes them. This seems to me to be almost the norm among fertile artists - nobody knows a child less well than it's parents do - and it is true even in the case, to take a tremendous example, of the whole world of Greek art and poetry: it never "knew" what is did".

When I recently was browsing in Nietzsche's "most personal of all his books" and read this passage, I was immediately reminded of Kristian Vikernes, better known under his nom de plume Varg ("Wolf") Vikernes, the Black Metal musician behind Burzum.

If there's one artist who utters utter stupidities about his works, it is Kristian Vikernes. If there is one artist in whom a gap - or rather, light years of cold interstellar space - can be discerned between his creative power and his judgment, it is Kristian Vikernes. I'm referring especially to his political and religious judgments and tastes - to call these 'stupidities' is euphemistic - they are moronic as well as repulsive.

Kristian Vikernes's music, on the other hand, is brilliant. The music makes possible a rupture with everyday utilitarian life through anguish, through a dramatization of existence which can leave one at the limit of tears. His creations far excel his own judgment.

And that makes those creations very different from a band like, for example, Ukrainian white supremacist Black Metal band Drudkh. When listening to Drudkh, their bombastic, testosterone-swollen political judgements grab me by the throat, forestalling any pleasure in their music. There is not the slightest gap between their art and their tastes, they are identical. In this sense I completely sympathise with mr. Impostume's troubles with listening to this band.

Other than with Drudkh, the gap between Kristian Vikernes tastes and his creative powers is so large, so evident, that the enjoyment of his creations is relatively unhindered by his asinine opinions. If one is on the location of his creations, his opinions are out of sight - and for me, out of mind.

So how did this huge gap between Kristian Vikernes's tastes and his creations come about? The explanation Nietzsche provides - the artist is too busy creating to develop his tastes - is insufficient in Kristian Vikernes's case. After all, he hasn't put out any new material since 1999's "Hliðskjálf" album, so he has had plenty of time to develop his taste and judgment into a more mature direction, time he has apparently (mis-)used for other purposes.

So is there a more apt explanation?

As I've pointed out in previous posts, one should be wary of taking anything mr. Vikernes says about his past or himself at face value. Nonetheless, on Kristian Vikernes's website (which I must force myself to read, it's so unsavoury) we can perhaps find some pointers towards an explanation. He writes about himself: "(...) Varg is the prisoner, writing articles, like this one, to stay sane, but also to not let the false accusations and biased lie-propaganda stand unopposed. He is real, but only for as long as the siege lasts. If the lies stop coming from the media-scum, and if the so-called judicial system stops its out-of-touch-with-reality processes, he will cease to exist and fade away into oblivion. He is real only because he has to be. He is simply the wall that protects the sanity, honour and life of the real Varg Vikernes. Like the fortresses of Europe this wall was not built for fun, but because of necessity". So perhaps Kristian Vikernes's taste and judgement has stopped developing because of the mental pressure of his imprisonment, and because mass-media attention has preserved his taste and judgement in aspic. His tastes and opinions are that of a teenager. If only he could show the slightest sign of spiritual growth!


II

In Torstein Grude's 1998 "Satan Rir Media" documentary, there is a scene which must have been recorderd when Kristian Vikernes flat was searched, after he was arrested for the murder of Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth. It is in the first part, when Finn Bjørn Tønder, a crime reporter for the Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende, tells about his first encounter with Vikernes.

In the scene I noticed that there was a whole heap of "Ravenloft" adventure modules for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game lying on a bookcupboard. But not only that: Vikernes had also nailed some Ravenloft imagery to a wooden beam in the ceiling of his apartment, right next to an image of the Eye of Sauron. Wikipedia about the "Ravenloft" campaign setting:

"Ravenloft is a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. It is an alternate time-space existence called a "pocket dimension" with the name "the Demiplane of Dread", which consists of a collection of land pieces called "domains" brought together by a mysterious force known only as "The Dark Powers". Each domain is mystically ruled by a being called a "darklord", which is a person or monster who has committed an act or acts of evil so foul as to attract special attention from the Dark Powers. The darklords are imprisoned within the borders of their domains and cannot escape by any means, although most can seal their domain borders with a thought. Within their domains, the darklords are forever tormented by the objects of their desire (often the objects they committed their crimes to achieve), which the Dark Powers dangle before them like the fruits of Tantalus. Each darklord's desires and motivations differ; some desire love, others hunger for glorious victory, or one might envy the defeat and humiliation of their enemies like another rival darklord".

Doesn't this description recall the situation of Kristian Vikernes? Hasn't he committed acts of evil so foul as to attract special attention and be imprisoned? Isn't he not only literally imprisoned, but also imprisoned within the borders of his psychological domain (the domain of Burzum, Varg, Count Grishnack?), which he cannot escape by any means? If so, what fruit from the garden of Tantalus would Vikernes be seeking?

Even though Vikernes had a lot of roleplaying books, it is hard to imagine his as an apt player of role-playing games. After all, role-playing games are social games, in which a fictional problem must be solved through interaction and collaboration. A typical role-playing game unifies its participants into a single team, known as a "party", that plays as a group. Thus, role-playing games call for skills which Vikernes lacks. His mother about her son in "Lords of Chaos": "He never liked organized play or organized sports. He was very good at playing on his own, with a very rich imagination, but as soon as he had to adjust to others in kindergarten it didn't work so well".

So perhaps thát is the Tantalus fruit Vikernes is reaching for: the ability to live his life in communication with others, instead of a life which is completely turned in on itself and thereby impoverished. Can his Odinist nostalgia and his fascist tendencies signify an longing for a Gemeinschaft in the sociological sense of the word?

III

I use Vikernes's Christian name instead of his wolfish nom de plume. Why? It is more than an attempt to irritate Vikernes the fascist: it is first of all an attempt to demythologize him, as well as to bring out the "Sméagol" personality in this "Gollum" character. Vikernes should be able to appreciate this - he is a big Lord Of The Rings fan, after all. Did you also notice how he - like Gollum - describes himself in the third person? He should have used the name "Count Gollum" instead of "Count Grishnack"!

Three From Front 242 - circa 1983

Front 242 - "Operating Tracks" - from the "Geography" album




Front 242 - " U Men" - from the "Geography" album




Front 242 - "Controversy Between" - from the "Endless Riddance" album

Front 242-Controversy Between
Uploaded by adiis

Three From Godflesh

Godflesh - "Christbait Rising"




Godflesh - "Mothra"




Godflesh - "Crush My Soul"





The last video is directed by none other than Andres Serrano, of "Piss Christ" notoriety.

MZ. 412 - Burning The Temple Of God

"It is better to devastate a church than to close it down".

Marcel Proust, "La Mort des cathedrales" ~ Le Figaro, August 16th 1904

I

The magnum opus of Marcel Proust, "Á La Recherche Du Temps Perdu" begins with an image of a church - that of Combray. Proust wanted to construct his oeuvre like a cathedral; and this he intended to show by calling parts of it "Apse", "Window" and "Narthex". He thus likened the work of a writer to a architect, organizing the least parts of the text into an interdependent whole. Both Proust's text and the cathedral are the products of a synthetic spirit, binding together diverse domains of knowledge into a coherent edifice. Panofsky: "The classical cathedral, in its imagery, seeks to embody the totality of Christian knowledge, theological, natural, and historical, by putting everything in its place and by suppressing whatever no longer found a place". For Proust, the cathedrals of France were not only the most beautiful monuments of French art, but also the only works of art which still lived a life of completeness ("...leur vie intégrale...").

However, in 1904, French Socialist parliamentarian Aristide Briand drafted legislation concerning the strict separation of church and state, which was informed by strong anti-clerical sentiments. Briand's legislation declared all religious buildings property of the state and local governments. This threatened to close down many churches, turning them into casinos, banks, museums or conference centres.

This offended Proust's aesthetic ideals so strongly, that he preferred the destruction of the churches over their submission to strictly utilitarian ends. Rather than making the artistic heritage of religion into a tool for production, rather than subordinating churches to utility, churches should be devastated, sacrificed to nothingness, torched.


II

On June 6th 1992, Fantoft Stavkirke, a medieval wooden church near Bergen, Norway, was torched. It burned to the ground.

The church, of the type known as "stave churches", was built around 1150. Between 1100 and 1300 some 1,000 stave churches were built in Norway. Today only 28 remain. The stave churches were built as palisade constructions; thus, their architecture is based on that of fortifications. Their rich ornamentation mixes Christian design with Viking motifs, interweaving theological, natural, and historical imagery into a synthetic whole. The oldest stave church, which is very well preserved, is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List of most valuable cultural memorials in the world.

Why? Why was this stout and beautiful place of worship burned to the ground? Why did other churches follow? Why Holmenkollen Chapel, the church King Harald V and the royal family attended? Why Skjold Church in Vindafjord? Why Åsane Church in Bergen? Why many others?

We will never know. That it is well known who was responsible for the destruction of these cultural treasures - Count Grishnack, Samoth and other Norwegian teenage Black Metal adepts - does not help us any further. In literature, "the author is dead". The same goes for the arsonists: they are dead too. Not in the literal sense, of course. They are dead in the sense that we will never be able to reconstruct the meaning that the crime had for the perpetrators at the time it was committed. This meaning is hidden behind time's curtain.

The motives Varg Vikernes ('Count Grishnack'), acquitted but in all probability responsible for the arson of Fantoft Stavkirke, put forward, illustrate this point. In an interview with Michael Moynihan for the controversial book "Lords Of Chaos" he stated his (hypothetical) motive as follows, without admitting that he was guilty:

"I am not going to say that I burnt any churches. But let me put it this way: There was one person who started it. I was not found guilty of burning the Fantoft stave church, but anyways, that was what triggered the whole thing. That was the 6th of June and everyone linked it to Satanism. (...) What everyone overlooked was that on the 6th June, year 793, in Lindesfarne in Britain was the site of the first known Viking raid in history, with Vikings from Hordaland, which is my county." He also stated "They [the Christians] desecrated our graves, our burial mounds, so it's revenge". In another text: "For each devastated graveyard, one heathen grave is avenged, for each ten churches burnt to ashes, one heathen Hof is avenged, for each ten priests or Freemasons assassinated, one heathen is avenged".

Vikernes's statements do not hold up to scrutiny. It is not only that the Lindisfarne Viking raid did not occur on the 6th of June, but on the 8th. Furthermore, Fantoft Stavkirke had been moved from it's original location in 1883, so it did not anymore "occupy" the place on a heathen Hof. A more fundamental issue with the statements is that in June 1992, Vikernes had not yet "converted" to the Odinist fascism he is currently preaching. Only after being ostracized from the black metal community, Vikernes announced that he was no longer a Black Metal Satanist, but rather a Odinist fascist. In the statements on the Fantoft burning, he is inscribing a meaning into it that it could not have had at the time.

The burning churches are a text which “...consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation" (Barthes).

So what is there to do but to give meaning to the crime ourselves, as the audience of the fires? After all: "The unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination” (Barthes again).

As a spectator of the fires, seeing them from the perspective of this blog's concerns, I'd like to turn to Georges Bataille's essay in "La Litterature Et Le Mal' on Jules Michelet's 'La Sorcière' to see if that essay can illuminate the path to that destination - the essay as torch light, as a madman's lantern in the bright morning hours.

In the essay, Bataille posits that the popular development of the Black Mass at the end of the Middle Ages may have corresponded to the decline of the Church. In those time, the intense sacrality of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross was diminished as the Church only served the most conservative cares - like work and the maintenance of life. The Church became too mundane - not awe-inspiring, not frightening enough to be perceived as sacred. The popularity of Black Sabbath points towards an attempt to regain this lost intensity of the sacred. For Christianity, not only God was sacred. Satan too belonged to the world of the sacred, embodying the negative, left handed or transgressive elements of sacrality. More than being merely parasitic on Christianity, Satanism audaciously went "one step beyond", by sacrificing the sacrifice of Jesus. The Satanic sacrifice consists in establishing a means of communication between a Satanic sacred world and the profane world through the mediation of a victim, that is of a thing that in the course of the ceremony is destroyed. In this case, a concept - the sacrifice of Jesus - is destroyed, sacrificed by means of defilement.

So how was the situation in Norway in the early nineteen nineties?

Norway had a State religion; paragraph 2 of the Norwegian Constitution says that “the Lutheran-Evangelical faith is the religion of the state”. Nearly 83% of Norwegians are formally members of the State Church. The Church is closely intertwined with the political life of Norway. Prof. Stensvold: "Throughout the 20th century, the political parties in power have, without exception, used the state church as a political tool and used it as a reservoir and transmitter of a set of (Norwegian) ideals, values and worldview. So far, this has been a surprisingly fertile collaboration for both. Church leaders have willingly supported state legislation". The political life of Norway after the second world war was dominated by social democracy. The Norwegian Labour Party had been part of the Norwegian government almost continuously since 1927. Social democracy's biggest success was the creation of the welfare state, which provides comfort and material security for its citizens. Thus, welfare and religion were brought together by the Norwegian State.

So perhaps the Norwegian State Church became too committed to a life of comfort, impoverishing the sense of the sacred, making the sacred anaemic, unable to inspire enthusiasm, ecstasy. What Proust feared would be the result of Briand's legislation, happened in Norway: churches were submitted to strictly utilitarian ends, becoming a branch office of the welfare state, somewhat like a State bank, a museum, a government conference centre. The result? Norway is a society with one of the highest scores on the secularization scale, Norwegian normative Protestantism is in crisis, and priests have lost their former authority.

And like Bataille's medieval peasantry, the youth of Norway, which was disenchanted by the Church, turned to Satan to experience something awe-inspiring in celebrating the Eternal Exile's feast: the Black Mass. And like Marcel Proust, they preferred torched churches to churches whose "...life of completeness..." had drained away. In a sense, setting fire to the Fantoft Stavkirke, the Holmenkollen Chapel, the Skjold Church and the Åsane Church represented a defilement, a malefic sacrifice of the sacrificed God.


III

The burning of churches had a galvanizing impact on the early-nineties metal scene. The holocaust (in the original sense of the word) of these places of worship gave rise to enormous media attention - see the "Satan Rir Media" post - and conferred a charismatic aura on the Black Metal genre. Through the attention of the mass media, the genre exerted a tremendous fascination on Metal musicians, and many started to play in the style pioneered by Mayhem, Burzum, Satyricon and Emperor. Indirectly, the church burnings brought about a renewal and rejuvenation of Metal. And not only Metal was affected by the crimes of the Black Metal inner circle - the force of it's attraction extended to other musical genres as well, more specifically to electronic music genres. "Black Ambient" and "Black Industrial" came into being.

And this finally brings me to the intended subject of this post: MZ. 412's album "Burning The Temple Of God".

The Swede Henrik "Nordvargr" Björkk (often credited as Kremator - another fire reference) created Maschinenzimmer 412 in 1989. The band changed its name to MZ.412 with the 1995 release of "Burning The Temple Of God"; and it also changed it's image to one of black leather, long hair and corpse paint. Not only did the record's name refer to the church burnings, it's cover art featured a photograph of Fantoft Stavkirk in flames. The album is regarded as the very first "Black Industrial" album, organizing Industrial Noise, Ritual Ambient and Black Metal into a coherent whole. It was put out on the Cold Meat Industry record label, which specializes in Industrial Ambient from Scandinavia.

Putting the burning of a Christian temples center stage, focusing on strategies against ecclesiastical architecture, raises certain expectations about the music: one is led to expect radically destructured music, disjointed and charred compositions, fissures of orchestration, scorched arrangements, incongruities, interruptions, and breaks.

Nothing could be further from the truth: "Burning The Temple Of God" contains highly structured electronic music. Even if the sounds are harsh, abrasive, noisy, they are strictly sequenced. Sequencers were the software with which electronic music was made in the mid-nineteennineties; and a sequence is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as ‘the following of one thing after another; a set of things belonging next to each other in a particular order’; the Industrial, Black Metal and Ambient sounds are organized in relationship to each other according to a constant measure. The musical structures are decorated with samples from horror films, which present a panoply of Satanic occultism: the sounds of ritual magick, daemonic possession, exorcism and witchcraft trials.

MZ. 412's music on this album is architectural, even monumental in nature. It is not so much a cathedral in flames as an inverted cathedral, inverted as the Satanic cross; it is not so much a burnt Mass as a Black Mass. To paraphrase Coil's Jhonn Balance: it is a Black Temple for a Black Pope in Black Rome. Evil, majestic, intimidating.

So is MZ. 412's music a closed system? Is whatever no longer finds a place suppressed? No. A specific sample, placed at the beginning of the sixth track called "Submit And Obey", is an opening which provides some fresh air, an escape route from the Satanic edifice. In the sample, a young woman with an English accent and an incredulous, sarcastic tone speaks the following words:

"I told them we eat babies and drink piss. I told them we watch corpses being raped by dogs and shit on the host. I told them a goat with a prick of hot iron comes out of the trees and will all kiss its rump by the light of living children buried in excrement up to their necks with their heads on fire. And they believe it! Every word! They cross themselves with every new abomination and thank the Lord for bringing this poor monster into the light of His redemption".

Though scornful of Christianity, these sentences also point to the fact that the Satanic crimes of the Black Metal inner circle were the last word. "The mythical man is dead, leaving us his final message - a black laugh".


IV

Burning churches is a thing of the past; a crime which now can only have a impoverished and nostalgic meaning. Georges Bataille in 'Literature And Evil': "I do not believe this type of provocation will ever lose its power of seduction, but the effect of seduction is subordinated to the interest of a purely external success, to preference for a deception which can be immediately appreciated. The servility of this type of quest for success is the same in the author and the reader. Each one, author and reader, avoids the pangs, the annihilation of sovereign communication. They both limit themselves to the prestige of success".





Post scriptum

The first to paragraphs of this post are heavily indebted to Denis Hollier's "Against Architecture. The Writings Of Georges Bataille" - a book with a burning cathedral on it's cover, the Cathedral of Reims in flames after being bombarded by the German armed forces on September 19th, 1914.

Interviews with Nordvargr can be found here and here and here.
An interview with MZ. 412 member Drakhon can be found here.

A beautiful post on churches, pilgrimages and apocalypse, can be found on the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive blog (link).

Apparently, the Fantoft church, which was torched by Varg Vikernes but rebuilt, has become a place of pilgrimage for Black Metal adepts, much to the dismay of the churchgoers (link).

An excellent interview from the Observer with Mayhem's Necro Butcher, penned by Chris Campion, provides much information about the Dream Time of Scandinavian Black Metal (link).

Another long piece on Norwegian Black Metal (link).

Here is a link to the Unholy Black Cult website, a web museum for Black Metal.

Man Ray - Marcel Proust On His Deathbed

Via the J. Paul Getty Museum, a 1922 photo by Man Ray.