Resurgent Atavism

Resurgent Atavism names the book’s inquiry into how an older religious and folkloric inheritance might seem to rise again in modern Black Metal. It joins two meanings: the return of something thought to have receded, and the reappearance of traits associated with a remote past. The concept helps explain why Norse gods, ancestral landscapes, and stories of the dead could become more than decorative references for musicians and listeners. But the book does not establish that ancient belief directly caused modern extremism. It asks whether a cultural revival, an archetypal response, or some combination of the two can illuminate the scene’s turn toward heathen themes and its real-world violence.

From borrowed Satanism to ancestral myth

The framework begins with a change in musical and imaginative focus. Early Bathory drew on black magic and Satanism in the manner of Venom, with the theatrical intensity of youthful rebellion. Across The Return... and Under the Sign of the Black Mark, the music became slower and more elaborate, and its subject matter more ambiguous. Blood Fire Death, released in 1988, marked a decisive turn: its cover replaced the earlier horror imagery with a painting of the Wild Hunt, a host of airborne riders associated with Scandinavian and Teutonic folklore. The album’s music matched that change in scale, joining raw aggression to more orchestrated songs and clearer vocals.

The opening instrumental evokes Odin riding across the heavens; the closing title song invokes Northern gods and ancestors. Bathory had moved from a Satanism the book describes as childish and foreign to a mythic inheritance presented as belonging to its own forebears. That shift matters to the concept because it makes the past a source of contemporary identity, not merely a set of frightening images. The book identifies this turn toward ancestral archetypes as a lasting influence on Black Metal.

Hammerheart, Bathory’s 1990 follow-up, deepened the exploration by approaching its material from a more personal perspective. It imagined the outlook of a practitioner of Ásatrú in the Viking Age. The book describes Ásatrú as a modern term for the revival and reconstruction of pre-Christian Norse and Teutonic religious beliefs, and notes that some adherents regard Christianity as an alien faith imposed on their ancestors. Bathory was not the only Swedish band to advocate a return to Ásatrú, but the account says it had the greatest impact through its actions. In this context, resurgent atavism describes not simply a musical fashion but a claim that inherited religion and identity can be recovered in the present.

Scene, style, and inherited images

The book locates Black Metal’s defining elements in belief and outlook as well as sound. It describes a scene without a fixed rulebook, whose boundaries and attitudes changed under the influence of prominent personalities. Mayhem, led by Euronymous, became a central Norwegian example. The band’s early image was initially ordinary underground attire; Euronymous later adopted corpse paint, which became a recognizable feature of Norwegian Black Metal. By mid-1991, Darkthrone, Burzum, Immortal, Thorns, Enslaved, Arcturus, and later Emperor were in contact with him, and he planned to release much of their music through Deathlike Silence Productions.

The store around which Euronymous gathered musicians and acquaintances functioned as a place of acceptance and hierarchy. Ihsahn recalled that trust and seriousness in one’s views helped determine who was accepted, and that newcomers showed deference to Euronymous and older members. These details place the scene’s rhetoric of inherited identity within a particular social setting: an underground network organized by access, reputation, appearance, and shared attitudes, not by a single formal doctrine. The book also emphasizes that Black Metal’s interest in heathen themes developed without evidence that the scene was directed by established Ásatrú organizations.

The Wild Hunt supplies a bridge between that modern scene and older folklore. The book notes that Bathory’s Blood Fire Death had already made the image of the riders familiar to Black Metal audiences before the scene’s Nordic mythological focus became prominent. It then compares details of Wild Hunt traditions with traits among Norwegian Black Metal adherents, while stressing that the parallels do not by themselves demonstrate historical transmission or supernatural influence. The comparison is offered as a reason to investigate how inherited imagery might recur, not as proof that the musicians consciously modeled themselves on a particular legend.

Archetypes and the limits of explanation

The concept becomes explicitly theoretical in the book’s discussion of Carl Gustav Jung. Jung argued that modern people might be seized by archetypes rather than consciously deciding to revive an ancient worldview. In his 1936 essay Wotan, he interpreted the National Socialist movement as a mass possession by the old Germanic god of storm and frenzy. The book presents this account as controversial, and uses it as a possible analogy for thinking about the renewed force of heathen images—not as a settled explanation of Black Metal or a claim that the two movements are equivalent.

The question is especially difficult because the musicians did not all come from cities. Kadmon’s account characterized Black Metal as urban, but the book qualifies that description: several musicians came from small villages, and Varg Vikernes emphasized his rural origins outside Bergen. Bands and musicians also returned repeatedly to images of Norwegian forests, snow, and countryside. A video for Burzum’s song Darkness, co-directed by Vikernes from prison through written instructions, consisted of landscape and carved-stone imagery rather than a plot. Such examples make place and inherited image part of the discussion, while leaving unresolved whether they indicate an archetypal resurgence, conscious cultural construction, or both.

Vikernes gave the concept its most direct personal expression. He presented Burzum as a return of primordial forces and described the church burnings as a way of awakening Odin in people. In his account, the Norse gods were archetypes belonging to the Northern race, and heathendom expressed an inherited nature rather than an external mythology. This rhetoric turns an interpretation of the past into a claim about identity and action. The book records the claim as Vikernes’s justification; it does not treat it as evidence that the actions objectively restored an ancient religion.

A folkloric tale collected by Kjetil A. Flatin in 1930 closes the inquiry with an unsettling resemblance. In the story, men fight during a Christmas gathering; after one is left dead, the Wild Hunt arrives, takes him, and leaves a burning torch behind. The book places the tale beside the later deeds associated with Grishnackh, Euronymous, and the fires around them, calling attention to its possible allegorical resonance more than sixty years after its collection. Its force lies in the echo, not in proof of prediction: the old story provides a pattern through which later events can be read, while the connection remains interpretive.

Revival without a single movement

Resurgent atavism also helps distinguish Black Metal from organized religious revival. In Norway and Sweden, heathen groups including Draupnir and Bifrost held regular gatherings and practiced symbolic sacrifice; Draupnir had been recognized by the Norwegian government as a legitimate religious organization. The book is explicit that there was no specific connection between these practitioners and the Black Metal scene. Public assumptions of a link harmed the religious groups, while Vikernes’s frequent public declarations made it harder for them to dispel the association.

At the same time, a broader shift within Black Metal was visible: some bands replaced direct references to the Devil with allusions to old gods, and Norse religious themes became central to groups such as Burzum and Enslaved. That convergence did not make the scene, the organized Ásatrú groups, and every person drawn to heathenism one unified movement. The concept’s enduring value is therefore double-edged. It gives the book a way to examine how inherited symbols can return with new force, but also demands care about who is making that claim, what social work the past performs, and where resemblance ends and evidence begins.