Killing of Øystein Aarseth (Euronymous)

The killing of Øystein Aarseth appears in this passage only as a point of reference in Varg Vikernes’s recollection of events beforehand. Its significance here lies in Vikernes’s account of how he challenged Aarseth’s professed Satanism and in the book’s framing of their mutual escalation; the passage does not describe the killing itself or establish why it happened.

Retrospective Context

The surrounding account resists assigning the sudden intensification of the pair’s public Satanic postures to Vikernes alone. It notes that Aarseth’s interviews from the period also placed him on a similar track, and suggests that the two charismatic figures encouraged one another. Vikernes, however, claimed a particular role in provoking Aarseth. This distinction matters: the passage presents mutual escalation as the book’s interpretation and Vikernes’s claim of influence as a retrospective account, not as independently verified fact.

Vikernes’s Account of Provocation

Vikernes recalled that he and the Oslo circle joked about Satanism. He said he treated Satanism as an inversion of Christianity and challenged Aarseth to demonstrate that he genuinely followed such a position. In Vikernes’s telling, Aarseth was not serious at first but responded to the challenge and followed his reasoning. The account thus casts their shared posture not simply as a settled belief, but as something intensified through provocation and performance between them.

Allegations and Evidentiary Limits

Vikernes also introduced a secondhand allegation about Aarseth’s private life, saying that a man who had travelled with him to Oslo weeks before the killing reported searching Aarseth’s drawers. Vikernes used this hearsay, along with derogatory claims about Aarseth’s sexuality, to portray him as repellent and to say that the group wanted no association with him. The passage does not corroborate those allegations; they remain part of Vikernes’s hostile retrospective portrayal, not established facts about Aarseth or an explanation for the killing. No circumstances of the killing itself are provided here.