God

God functions less as a speaking character than as the central divine figure in the conflict the book describes between Christianity and Norwegian Black Metal. The movement’s opposition to Christian authority gives its Satanic and pagan imagery a shared point of reference: God represents the side it seeks to resist, while churches become the material symbols of that resistance.

God and the Christian Past

The book frames the confrontation through a long historical reversal. It evokes the Viking raids on Christian monasteries and presents the conversion of Europe as the eventual defeat of heathen resistance by the forces of God and Christ. The raiders, once subdued, are figured as dormant forces that may flare up again. In this framing, the Black Metal movement inherits an imagined unfinished conflict with Christianity, rather than opposing God only as an abstract theological idea.

A Faith Reversed, Not Disbelieved

The book distinguishes the early Norwegian Black Metal scene from international Satanic groups that treat Satan archetypically or symbolically. Its teenagers, by contrast, are described as believing Satan to be real and viewing the world as locked in a lasting struggle between good and evil. Their difference from fundamentalist Christians, in this account, is chiefly which side they choose. The irony is that their absolute commitment to this spiritual opposition makes them, in some respects, more sternly Christian in outlook than the average follower of the Church of Norway: they reject Christianity’s allegiance while retaining its intense sense of cosmic conflict.

God in Personal and Cultural Memory

Geezer Butler’s recollection of his Catholic upbringing supplies a contrasting account of belief and temptation. He describes having been religious as a child and becoming interested in Satan’s perspective after encountering black-magic magazines in London around 1966–67. Reading about different kinds of magic drew him further into the subject, but his experiments with Satanic imagery—including upside-down crosses, pictures of Satan, and painting his apartment black—were accompanied, he says, by a sense that horrible things were happening. He describes the threshold as a choice to follow that path and forget Jesus and God, and says he did not think he would take it. In this testimony, God remains part of the Christian moral world Butler was considering leaving, even as the book contrasts that personal hesitation with Black Metal’s more uncompromising spiritual polarity.