And we're returning. We sure hope you like the episodes investigating religious related subjects and conspiracies in the world of spirituality, because guess what, there's another one.
And do you like death all of it?
Like metals, You're like, wait, what are those?
Oh?
Hee lung is A is a band that I really like.
Their kind of paganis Oh my gosh, I remember you sent me one of those in right before recording an episode. Maybe it was this episode.
No, no, it was because I think this one, this one might be the one with just you two on it.
Oh maybe I think.
Oh, I don't know, call it's been a long time, but I do remember I probably mentioned on this there's a documentary called Before the Light Takes Us that addresses a lot of the things we talk about in this episode pertaining to Norway's black metal scene, a spate of church burnings that captivated the media in the nineteen nineties.
I distinctly remember a Spin magazine feature in the nineties when I was a kid, and I think I cut some of these pictures out and pace them on my wall of different Norwegian black metal singers, one of whom I forget the name, kept a severed crow head and a bag and he would sniff it at a time.
He would play.
Dad the former lead singer Mayhem possibly.
Yeah, you're almost entirely right why there was a whole feat because you wanted to smell that is fely mentally ill.
He wanted people to bury him before shows so he could smell like the grave.
And there is also a dramatized account of the story in the film Lords of Anarchy starring the Culcan that nobody talks.
About that much.
Kieran, I love Kieren.
It's the younger one, Rory. I want r third. There's a third Culkin.
Mcaulay will always the third heat.
You never see the third Culkin coming.
But anyway, movies apparently man, but I am interested in checking it out. But yeah, this is obviously a pretty interesting pet subject for all three of us, and it wraps into the larger phenomenon of the Satanic panic.
Oh yeah, the last thing, guys. Kieran Culkin was on SmartLess recently and it was one of the best episodes I've heard of.
He's one of the best interview He just is himself. I absolutely love that guy.
Yeah, did you know he didn't learn until after the fact that the other people in succession were actors doing a script.
Yeah, he was just there.
He just apparently.
Love that guy.
Hey, let's talk about some satanic black metal.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff. They don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Welcome back to the show.
My name is Nol, my name is Matt Had.
We had a stare off just as who is gonna start?
I really should have said, they call me Matt. Ben is in a location far away, and yet we can still feel his ever present.
Influence because it's ever present. That's his very nature. That's correct, omni present. He sort of hangs above us like some sort of cosmic cloud.
Again, his presence is known. We are here with special guest producer Seth He's out there, Seth Ory, He's doing his thing. Wait, I'm looking at him and I'm seeing hands moving. I can't tell what it is, but it looks intricate and awesome. Wow.
Can we give him a nickname? Seth Death, Seth Metal, Seth Metal. Yeah, you got it.
That's better Seth Metal Seth Super Producer Johnson. Is that okay? I're we allowed to divulge your last day on the show, all right? Cool? He said, it's fine, Seth Metal Superproducer Johnson. That is your new title and it will be forever more. Hey, we're gonna do a quick check in you guys because something extremely exciting is coming to us in the future, probably not next year, probably twenty twenty one. Matrix the Fourth is happening now.
It's called that the working title. Yeah, Matrix the Fourth Is that like a Highlander kind of situation?
Yeah? There can only be four?
Yeah, well, I mean, don't a lot of people discount two and three? Can't we just wipe the slate and make this two?
Oh? How I wish we could nol Yeah, are.
You one of those naysayers of two and three?
I'm not a naysayer so much as a close close You're right, it's close your eyes and like pretend it didn't happen, gotcha, And not necessarily because there are there are highlights, I should say in all three films.
But I just remember the guy on all the TVs, the kind of Wizard of Oz character.
Yeah, what was his name the Key Mask, No, the Key Masters, the Commissioner, the Commissioner, Yeah, yeah, no, the Architect Architect.
That was I was close. It was an official title of some sort.
But you guys is coming officially. We're gonna get more Neo, more Trinity, more everything.
Directed by Alone Washowski.
Yeah, just Lana, that's okay. You think that's gonna be a right? Who knows?
Oh, I have a theory.
It's not.
It's very obvious theory. But you know, Keanu is like, it's the key anaisance right now. He is on fire blowing up the world with all these John Wick movies, doing his own stunts, you know, just running around shooting stuff, blowing things up all him and they're just like, you know what, people need another matrix.
That's right. Well, you know those movies are such an interesting comment on society, right, It's it's very much that science fiction commentary of the future thing. Sure, So I'm interested to see how it's manipulated or changed in some way.
I think I'm not as big of a matrix head as you are, but I will say I think it's a very important film because it did a really good job of sort of pushing more heady science fiction like Philip K. Dick kind of stuff into the forefront of you know, culture, and so I will forever be grateful for that. I think if it wasn't for the Matrix, we wouldn't have gotten things like Scanner Darkly and some be weirder franchises that wouldn't have happened. I'm having a
hard time identifying any others. Can you think of any.
Four Bears to the Matrix? No, not necessarily.
All I know is that it four bears came before.
Yeah, four bears I met. You can say a lot of.
Gosh, those are both the same word. What's the word for the thing that comes after.
The cascade of science fiction? Hard science fiction? Right, that's kind of what you're talking about. But the Matrix really did popularize this kind of more heady science fiction. You're right, and thank you for that, with Chowski's and Neo's and trinities and morephesis.
What are we doing today, We're not talking We're not doing a Matrix episode.
We're not talking about that today. We are officially exploring music music because the music soundtrack, thinking about the soundtrack of the Matrix. But anyway, okay, we'll get away from that, how music can affect us both individually and collectively. And you know, the three of us here today, both you and Seth and I have a very personal connect to music, and I thought we would start maybe by talking about that. How is music affected you, Neil?
Yeah, I mean I grew up playing violin, and I sang in the church choir and all that stuff, and it started kind of kind of like gave up violin in favor of the electric guitar and started being in rock bands, started doing early on kind of some metally type stuff actually, and then got more into like Smashing Pumpkins and indie rock, and then gradually graduated more towards like pavement and that kind of that kind of stuff. But I got definitely got my start in much heavier music for sure.
Nice see For me, I grew up playing drums in a praise band at a church, and that was all music was for me for years and years and years. And the connection that music had to religion was so so close, The two were so intertwined that it was difficult for me to even explore music outside of that because I was kind of stuck in this one place for so long at least mentally, but you know, as
your journey. I also found my way towards lots of other genres and ended up really enjoying some of the heavier things in life, including well, really classical heavy metal. I really doubt it all Like Bach. When I say classical heavy metal, I mean some of the classics from the sixties, seventies, eighties. I was really enjoying learning about Sabbath. Like some Sabbath, I very much did so. Again, today
we're talking about music. We're talking about how powerful and highly connective music can be.
Yeah, and the act of writing it, performing it. It is a conduit between human beings people working together to create music, and with that creation there is thought and intention sometimes behind the actual material. The act of listening to music connects people to those creators, and it's all this kind of giant web of interconnectedness, of sharing and ideas.
It almost can become its own kind of I don't know, religion might be a strong word, but it's definitely a way of identifying with lots of different people that share the same either values or the same kind of aesthetics that you do.
No, you're absolutely right, listening to music connects us the listener right to those those people who are creating it, to the you know, the instrument choices they're making, the words that they're saying. And in a lot of ways, it can also connect us to ourselves because music can help unlock or maybe enhance the way that we're really feeling, the way, you know, what we're really thinking, stuff that
we're not allowing out into the world openly. A lot of times music is that way to kind of have us connect back to ourselves. And you know, a lot of us get to choose the music that we hear. Of course, that isn't true for all people in all situations, but a lot of us get to decide which vibrations
and concepts stimulate our brains on a regular basis. Think about it, our iHeart and Pandora stations or Spotify and YouTube playlists, and these choices that we're making, they're all influenced by a ton of factors, including our location in the world, our background, you know, how we grew up, the prevailing culture or wherever that is, and almost an infinite number of other circumstances that lead to what we're listening to at any given moment, especially regularly.
Yeah, and it really can become its own kind of microcosmic cultural experience. So many times over the year, specific cultural movements within music have been associated with violence with a particular eliciting a particular response, or at least sometimes
they're lumped in with that. Here are some examples across the world, from la to Paris, to New York City to Moscow, there have been several genres of hip hop that have lyrically addressed the violent circumstances facing communities and individuals.
Then if you travel down to Mexico, Central America, you'll encounter these things that are called narco corridos or drug ballads, and in these there are explorations of people living on the other side of the law, generally within the the realm of the drug trade. Now today's episode, again those are just two examples. There's been violence associated with music
across space and time. But in today's episode, we're heading over to northern Europe and we're gonna check out a place that's collectively known as Scandinavia, several different countries that are beautiful, sometimes frigid just in temperature. But again, you know, you can't let yourself be influenced by just what you see on television in the way a place like Norway is shown, because that is not everything within that country.
There are all kinds. There's so much diversity that occurs over there, both natural and human made.
Yeah, despite what you might see depicted in mass media, kind of lazy depictions of this region as being one particular thing. And today we're exploring some strange controversies, the conspiracies surrounding the Scandinavian metal scene, the spates of church burning, and allegations of Satanism.
That's right, Satanism. Every time we cover anything that touches on this. I don't know there's an error about the episode just coming into the studio. I was in here earlier when Seth came in, and I was almost not startled, but I was in my own world here researching this stuff alone, and uh got spooked. You spook yourself, not necessarily spooked, but it's it feels like I'm doing something wrong, if that makes sense, just by even studying a word like Satanism.
Well, I think a lot of that might have to do with your background.
I think it's all connected.
Of very Christian upbringing, and this is sort of like off limit stuff because at the end of the day, I mean, there's different flavors of Satanism. Right, there's you know, legitimate pagan kind of devil worship, and then there's Satanism as more of a form of protest or like a political movement.
Right.
Absolutely, So let's just before we get into too much of that, let's asked the quote, give the facts. Right, here are the facts. What is metal?
Oh? Metal like the genre?
Oh boy, Now let's talk about the material.
Okay, Yeah, so metal is pretty tough to define. There are a lot of reasons for that. Music critics over the years and historians. We try, we as in humans, try very hard to categorize things like this and specifically music, because we have industries like the radio industry, that in the record industry that want to put things into categories so that you can sell them and you can package them and you can talk about them in a certain way.
Metal is one of those things that is it's so spread out in what could be considered metal types of metal. But there are a few people who have gone through and said, Okay, this is how we are going to define this genre.
It's pretty cool. The term have you metal? I don't even know. This was first used in a way to describe music in the sixties in the song Bond to Be Work.
It's so weird to me that that was considered middle by Steppenwolf.
The name of the band sounds more metal than the actual song. Like, to me, that just sounds like old school rock and roll kind of you know, But there's a lyric specifically in that song that says.
Heavy metal thunder yeah, And that's according to you, Oh God, don't.
Actually oh right, we're big fans out No, we don't have I think we're okay.
And also according to Chad Bauer, the gentleman who was talking about Born to Be Wild, he notes that quote most considered groups like Black Sabbath, led Zeppelin in Deep Purple to be the first heavy metal bands.
I can totally get behind that, because, I mean, all of those bands take the tradition of kind of blues and like bar chords, but they kind of add a little chug to it and have these riffs that sort of have this like very shared aesthetic. Led Zeppelin, to me, I would argue, is maybe less metal than Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. Led Zeppelin's a little more like really leaning on the blues side of it a little bit
heavier and almost making their own kind of subgenre. But you know, these are the experts, so who are we to judge? From there? The concept evolved and branched off into an absurd number of subgenres and genres related to the sound. While associated with or influenced by metal, you
couldn't really describe them in that specific way. Today. For a fantastic look at the history of metal and its various genres, we highly recommend checking out this site from MI I T Yeah MIT in Boston and that was metal dot MIT.
Dot e du.
It gives you a really cool kind of like what do you say, like an interconnected kind of like chart that tracks the evolution of metal.
Right, it's awesome, it's heavy metal, it's MIT heavy metal one oh one, and it says shattering ear drums since two thousand and six. And if you read through this, it's fantastic. It gets into so many details. If you really want to, you know, learn about that. There's got to be a music show out there that you can listen to that's gonna go over all this stuff, or just go to this website cause it's a fantastic reed. Today we're just you know, we're gonna drill down a
little bit further, just into one specific genre of metal. Again. We talked about Scandinavian black metal, and that's really where we're gonna remain for the rest of the episode. So go learn about metal if you wish, come back, and then we'll continue. We'll be right here. See, I told you we were here the whole time.
We never really leave.
Hey, Seth, just checking in. How how are you feeling about our discussion of metal thus far? Do you want to bring up the trytone or the Devil's integer, the Devil's chord change. I forget exactly what it's called. This is like the flatted fifth. Oh man, you guys, familiar flatted fifth.
Sounds pretty evil?
Well it again, it is. It does sound evil, and it was it was coined the I think it was the Devil's Oh. I can't remember exactly. I didn't actually write this down. This is me pulling from old, old, old knowledge that's deep in my head somewhere. It's a musical interval, let's see, composed of three adjacent hole tones. I don't really know what that means. I just know that one of them is a flatted fifth of the three.
And this actually is this contained in metal music.
Yeah, Black Sabbath in particular. If you go to that MIT site we were talking about, it talks about them using this to great effect because it's it almost feels like a note that shouldn't be there. If you're writing a traditional song with chord changes that are in the same key or something, this flatted fifth is almost it's eerie almost, or it throws you off a little.
Sort of like the blue note and blues or jazz. It's the thing that makes it kind of sad. This is the thing that makes it kind of evil. Metal thrown up my horns when I say that. So yeah, making no mistake though. What we're talking about is Scandinavia,
which is ground zero for heavy metal. In twenty thirteen, the Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bilt tweeted quote Finland and Sweden seem to be the global leaders in metal bands, along with a map sourced from CIA dot gov a metalarchives dot com showing just how many metal bands originate in Sweden, Finland and Norway. This is very important to remember for later and people have actually studied Swedish and Finnish in an attempt to better understand some of their favorite metal bands.
Oh yeah, very much so. And you guys, we need to take a quick break. Then we'll get right back in and keep this rabbit hole going. And we're back talking the Scandinavian black metal. Now, according to the metal blog Invisible Oranges sounds interesting, right, it's by Cosmo Lee. The popularity of metal in any given region can be arguably reducible to a few factors. Now, there's a researcher that was consulted here named Donald McGuire, and he wrote
a paper called Determinants of the Production of Heavy Metal Music. Now, this guy, he went deep. He explored fifty five different factors and found that the number of heavy metal that is produced in any given area depends on seven things. Are you ready for these? And seth, I'm gonna be looking to you to see if you agree with any of these, because it's it doesn't seem real to me, But there's some sand to this. Number one, the percentage of the population that is Catholic.
The percentage of the population with zero religion.
Okay, so those are two interesting, possibly opposing things. Number three, the latitude of the country.
Whether the country has a Scandinavian legal history.
Number four, the number of years that that country was under Marxist.
Rule, and the number of the population that are males between the ages of fifteen and twenty four.
And finally the number of concert halls per one million persons.
So this isn't a perfect system by any stretch of imagination, but attracts with what we know about Scandinavian history, demographics, and culture. And you can read the full analysis over there at Invisible Oranges as well as the paper published in Metal Music Studies.
Really interesting, right, So if we break some of this stuff down, if you have a percentage of a population that identifies at least as Catholic, then another significant portion of a population that identifies as having no religion, you can see how there could be some people at odds there when you throw in the latitude of the country at least. This is what I'm inferring, is that you're bringing in how warm generally and how humid the climate
is in any given country. And also you know, depending on the elevation and in the area where people are located. I wonder if elevation, I wonder if you should have put elevation in there somewhere. That would have been fascinating. But you know, then the other ideas of just literally saying does it have a Scandinavian legal history fascinating, And then the whole Marxist rule thing, I don't know. I want to learn more about that, so I'm going to
go back and read some more about that later. But for now, let's just keep going on here because we've pretty much established what metal is a little bit at least, and we also know that metal itself, several versions of it, is supremely popular within the Scandinavian countries that we mentioned above, you know, Sweden, Finland, Norway.
Yet in the States, the US and abroad, it's always kind of had a bit of a controversial image, right. So during the Great the Satanic Panic in the US, heavy metal music, along with dungeons and dragons, were both sided its contributing factors and everything from violent assaults like
the murder the child murders at robin Hood Hill. Yeah, those guys were all metal fans, and they were sort of railroaded because of that that fact alone, and you know, was implied that because they listened to heavy metal music, they were participating in some sort of satanic rituals, which brings us to another factor, the rise of devil worshiping, or the perceived rise of devil worshiping during that period, and property damage and more.
And it's crazy there because things range from annoyances like property damage and riff raff coming around here listening to their heavy metal music and messing up my garbage cans to literally murder. That's that's at least the perceived stuff going on here from portions of the US population. And just to add to all that stuff, anything culturally that becomes a little bit popular that is contrary to some of the what I guess what the powers that be
would wish the established culture would be. I don't know if that even tracks is making sense to anyone listening out there. But anytime something is a little outside of the regular thing, especially when it comes to religions in or the popular religions in an established area, it can be viewed I think that it's seen as anti establishment, and a lot of times these movements are meant specifically
to be anti establishment or anti norm I guess. Now in Scandinavia, particularly in Norway, there is a genre that we've kind of mentioned here called black metal, and this in particular was cited as the cause of an intense anti Christian terrorist campaign. That's right, an anti Christian terrorism campaign, and black metal was cited as being a part of a conspiracy to protest the country's dominant religion through the act of literally burning down the most sacred sites of
people's faith in Norway churches. Now here's a big question was this true. Was black metal truly to blame for this conspiracy to burn down churches across Norway. We're gonna explore that, and we're gonna talk about reasons that it may have just been a little bit of propaganda at the hands of media in the vicinity in Norway to fight back against some anti establishment movements. But we're gonna
find out. So let's move forward. Here's where it gets crazy right here, right here, all right, I'm ready for it. I feel like I just set up all that stuff as in, like we're gonna find out, we're gonna do this, We're gonna we're gonna check into it. Well, guess what, we already researched it. We're in here recording it right now, and it's absolutely true that black metal itself in some way had to do with this conspiracy to burn down churches in Norway.
Between nineteen ninety two and nineteen ninety six, no less than fifty successful or attempted church burnings were attributed to musicians and fans of the black metal scene in Norway. So CNN describes black metal in this way, and this is very very good description. Black metal is a subgenre of heavy metal music that typically takes on anti Christian, satanic, and paganistic themes. Black metal songs typically have a fast tempo they called blast beats and featuring the feature shrieking.
I've always refer to them as kind of witchy vocals like like that, yeah, yeah, and also heavily distorted guitars, more so than just like your metal zone pedal, you know. Yeah, any guitarists out there, a lot of the audience might remember the boss metal zone. Yes, classic metal good distortion. It's more of a wall of It's an absolute, distrustioning wall of distortion, like like static almost like it's almost
bordering on atonal. But then there are shreddy rifts and lead licks and everything like that, and unconventional song structures so lots of weird time signatures, tempo changes, things like that, and some of the big bands in that scene that the term black metal actually comes from, the British group Venom. It was one of the most influential black metal bands, and there were other acts like Bathory, Mayhem, Barzoom, Immortal Emperor, and my personal favorite Gorgoroth, whose lead singer plays a
big part in some of these stories. So it's important to note that these acts of church burning or vandalism, property damage, what have you, they could be actually considered acts of domestic terrorism with one unified aim, and that is to protest the very existence or you know, the hegemony the kind of dominance of Christianity in Scandinavia, a country that was founded on a pagan or Odinist kind of set of beliefs and then sort of taken over
by Christian Christian beliefs, and these churches very much represent that hegemony in that kind of you know, other force, that kind of zen and maybe steers the history of this part of the world away from their more you know, kind of the Viking type roots.
It's interesting to see it as almost cultural vengeance against that kind of thing or you know, taking back the power of the history in some way. It certainly doesn't excuse the acts in any way, but it is interesting to see it in that light. So let's jump to the the documentary Satan Rear Media. Satan Rides the Media, okay, and in it, prominent members of Norway's black metal scene are asked.
Satan rear media means in English, Satan rides the media. I got it.
That's not like abtitle. Apologies, Yeah, I should have specified that. Yeah, yeah, it's we would call it here and Nolan, I would
call it Satan rides of the media. So they take the Norway's black metal scene and they ask a bunch of people about these instances of church arson and inside it there's a guitarist named Jorn Ing Tunsberg and he was convicted for a church arson and he answers or at least considers this question by saying, quote, the reason behind burning asy church was that Norway is always so moral Christian morals, rules and regulations are always religious. The
more Christian, the more you hate it. You understand that Norway should not be Christian, as in, you understand who he's speaking to. You understand that Norway should not be Christian and then he says, and that is the reason for burning asan church. It's asan e church. The point is very symbolic really, so it kind of gets to what we're talking about. It's a reaction to something that they view as improper.
So this other fellow named Varg Vikerns, who was imprisoned for charges including the murder of a fellow black metal musician named Eronymus. Uronymous was in a band called Mayhem and Vickers was in a band called Barzoom. He was also imprisoned for the charges of burning down three churches and the attempted arson of a fourth. So this is how he responds to this notion of what Christianity means to him as a native Norwegian quote, the church has
behaved so disgracefully, basely and cruelly in Norway. It's incredible when they talk about Satanism. When someone burns a church, they ought to look to themselves and remember all the sacred places they have burnt, they being the Christians, and ruins on top of which they have built their churches.
Wow. Again, that whole thing just feels like metal lyrics. They have a point there, right, when you think about the Crusades, you think about the things that the most popular religions in the world have done as a large group. Certainly isn't to vilify any of the individuals, right, but as institutions over time, for hundreds and hundreds of years, many of them have don and some fairly horrific things. So if you look to other documentaries and interviews, you'll
hear black metal musicians offer similar things. As a gentleman named call gaa Hl his realname is Christian ivand Espittal, he's the guy that's in Gorgorath, That's the dude. That's the dude, and in Metal a Headbanger's Journey. This dude unapologetically expresses his supportive church burnings, and it's kind of unsettling because he also expresses his desire to see more church burnings. Let's just burn them all. And here's his quote.
He says, church burnings and all of these things are, of course things that I support one percent, and it should have been done much more and will be done much more in the future. We have to remove every trace from what Christianity and the Semitic roots have to offer this world. Satanism is freedom for the individual to
grow and to become superman. Every man who is born to be king, because king, every man who was born to be a slave doesn't know Satan whoa You kind of get a pretty serious sense that he is literally anti Semitic because he's talking about how the Semitic roots and you know, religion and culture are inherently a bad thing.
And he's kind of espousing some like almost nichean kind of like the same things that Hitler would have talked about as far as like, you know, becoming the superman, and there is very much a kind of Aryan flair to what he's saying.
Yeah, well, and here in you know, we've had several examples here at this point of people either supporting or at least lending a tiny bit of support to these church burnings that were occurring in Norway in Scandinavia, and it's easy to maybe think, oh, well, then everybody in the black metal scene has this view the black metal as a genre, as a music and as a culture means that it's anti all of this stuff in church burnings.
They would view church burnings as a good thing. But you have to remember that doesn't mean just because we have three or four doesn't mean that the whole thing is monolithic. It doesn't mean that all the musicians and fans support this practice, but it is, you know, something in the wheelhouse of what we were wanting to explore when we set out to do this episode, which is, can music itself or the culture surrounding and music influence us and influence our actions? And when I say us,
I mean everybody. Anybody could it. And at least it appears in this way that the shared outlook or in motivation for a lot of this type of music does seem to be steering at least quite a few of the people involved in it in a certain direction. But again, if you tried to say all of black metal is doing this at all times, it would be like saying
all fans of hit pop or whatever. Anyone who's ever attempted to freestyle of Verse are one hundred percent on board with drive by shootings, which is like one of the stupid stupidest things you could say. And I feel dumber for even mentioning. It.
Don't feel that way, Matt, but it needed to be said.
It's an equivalency.
Yeah, And furthermore, it seems that the supporters of church bringings are themselves not a unite in front in the first place. Some folks like Var Vickerns seem to argue in favor of what they see as a culture war. In his blog post, Vicarans argues that the conflict between pre Christian Norway and modern Christianity is similar to the fear and conflict between some modern Europeans and Islamic culture.
Should also be noted that the core of vickerns beliefs are rooted in racial ideology, which is also seems to very much be the case for Gaul.
Yeah, you definitely see the echoes there. Now, there are others involved with this stuff who are not a part of the black metal scene, lone actors outside of Norway who may simply be disaffected, isolated people. Overwhelmingly the people who took part in this were young men, and perhaps they were just seeking an outlet for some inner rage, some personal conflict, some conflict that they see as a
wider thing. But it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what we've been speaking about prior to this.
So it follows then that the original waves of church burnings were based on this kind of religious fanaticism, the idea that pre existing Norse mythological beliefs were the true creed of the region, and that Christianity had to be uprooted and driven from the land in its entirety. So the association with a Christian Satan therefore doesn't make a
whole lot of sense in that context, right. Why would a religious fanatic commit an act of violence in the name of a supernatural being that his or her actual religion doesn't even acknowledge.
That is pretty weird, right, We were talking about that a little bit off, Mike, Just how in order to truly believe in some kind of religious satanism you would have to essentially take the or be a Christian but just an anti Christian, rather than have another view. It's really strange.
So denying the idea of Christianity would also make it where you would have to deny the existence of Christian Satan or a Lucifer. So there'd be no reason whatsoever in this frame of thought for Satan to exist, much less to be supported by physical acts of violence. Fun fact, how much of a cultural supremacist is Vickarans Well? He actually refers to Christianity as a quote immigrant religion.
How racist is he?
He constantly complains that the character based on him in the fictional film Lords of Chaos is a quote fat Jew. This guy is kind of a hot garbage person.
That is unfortunate that that person has those beliefs and says those thinks. Okay, so we're gonna take another quick word from our sponsor, and then we're gonna come back with our conclusions and what we've found here. We're back.
So the question remains how much of the satanism that's extolled in Black Metal, at least at the time that the church burnings were happening, was genuine, how much of it was ideological, or how much of it was true theistic satanism that we've talked about before on the show, and how much of it was more or less window dressing or pr meant to provoke and garner attention. Because remember,
these are musicians. They have bands, they have obligations a lot of times to sell a certain number of records, and you need to get your name out there. This is certainly one way to do it, but you could also wind up in jail, which would probably be a bad call. But we do know that there were true believers in the Scandinavian black metal scene. Uronymous this guy that we've talked about earlier. He was often credited as one of the primary founders of the actual Satanic movement.
He described himself as a theistic Satanist.
Exactly in an interview by Asa Lafenpera for Kill Yourself magazine charmingly titled magazine, Uronymous put his beliefs in this way quote, I believe in a horned devil, a personified Satan. In my opinion, all the other forms of Satanism are bullsh I hate that some people think up idiotic ways of making eternal peace in the world and dare to call it Satanism like so many do. Satanism comes from
religious Christianity, and therefore it shall stay. I'm a religious person and I will fight those who misuse his name. People are not supposed to believe in themselves and be individuals, be individualists. Rather, they are supposed to obey, to be the slaves of religion. I think he's being tongue in cheek here. I don't I know.
It seems like.
A smart alec.
It seems like so much of it is just a commentary, it's cultural commentary. But again, in a way, these are these are artists, right, These are people who are massively creative when they when they make music, when they you know, decide what their band's gonna look like, what the stage is gonna be like, what the album cover is gonna look like. It certainly isn't hard to imagine that there's also some creativity happening here when you're speaking with a
magazine such as this. But you know, to this day, long after Uronymous is murder, remember this was a whole other thing, right by varg Vickerns. Yeah, people argue about how much of his image Uronymous, how much of it was sincere, and how much of it was truly attention seeking or you know, posturing or again kind of an act on purpose to be a part of the stage show and a part of the version of himself that exists within his music.
And yet none of this stuff, none of these realizations are gonna unburn any churches.
So there it is.
There was in fact, an active conspiracy to burn churches in Norway in the nineteen nineth But however coordinated these attacks might have seemed outsiders, the reality is they were motivated by a number of different, at times completely contradictory reasons.
Right, Yeah, you're talking about religious fanaticism led some people to set fire. Others appeared to be attention seeking. They seem to be displaying provocative behavior on purpose for a different reason.
Yes, some acceptance seeking or proving themselves to be part of a group of isolated loners, which is really interesting to write, I'm part of this group of isolated people. Well it's the counterintuitive, right.
Yeah, but again it makes sense in another way. And you know they're also cultural and ideological and sometimes racial supremacists that were in play there, as we saw at the end. But as for a true you know, shadow of Satanism that's looming over Scandinavia, we still have to ask ourselves in the end how much was true satanism on the part of the individuals involved. There were some, but we can't prove much more than that. How much of this whole thing was influenced by the media coverage,
by a bit of hysteria. I mean, there are a lot of churches burning around in a fairly short period of time. That could be pretty scary, and it would also cause people to turn on their TVs and watch a news station and buy newspapers.
Yeah, and how many of these incidents were just attempts to get attention. More than twenty years later, these questions kind of still remain, and.
I don't know how we're truly gonna get rid of all of them, but we do know there's more to look at here, and perhaps we'll continue down this rabbit hole a little bit, you know, at a later date, but for now, we're gonna leave it at that. Churches were burned, for sure, and enough people within the black metal scene in Norway and the rest of Scandinavia, enough people seem to be in on it and happy about.
It, yeah, willing to talk about it. There's a really interesting documentary called Before the Light Takes Us that is about all of this stuff. Really interesting, goes into great detail about the feud between bar Zoom and Mayhem and that murder and how that kind of fed into this scene and a lot of the kind of I don't know, for lack of a better term, identity politics behind this stuff, because it was these kind of factions about like who could be more evil and who, you know, was more
a true believer. But even within that there is a lot of posturing. And I mean, you know, these we haven't even talked about this. These these black metal artists, they wear corpse paint and I have a very which is white makeup and you know kind of runny black eye like liners around their eyes, sort of looking almost like a king diamond that that the artist or whatever
or like sting the wrestler. Yeah, I have a very distinct memory of a really great article because a lot of this happened when I was a kid who was in Spin magazine and an interviewed a handful of like kind of like big figures in the Scandinavian black metal scene. And I remember one of them like had a decaying crow that he kept in a bag and every time he would like perform, he would like sniff the decaying crow in the bag so that he had the set
the smell of death in his nostrils. So, I mean, there's definitely a drive among some of these folks to be very authentic and to absolutely i don't know, for lack of a better term, practice what they preached, and some of that involved burning down churches.
Yeah, and sniff and crows. That is just that's a way to win me over.
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts.
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