Satan

Satan occupies this account less as a character who acts in a plot than as a figure repeatedly made and remade by music, religious opposition, and the people who claim or reject his name. He begins as an emblem of music’s power to excite and unsettle; in the Norwegian Black Metal scene he becomes, for some, a real participant in an absolute struggle between good and evil. Later accounts recast Satanism as provocation or a temporary passage toward Germanic heathenism. The changes expose a persistent tension: Satan can stand for resistance to Christian authority, yet remain defined by the religious order he opposes.

Music, Religion, and Transgression

The book opens with music as a medium through which people might communicate with gods, whether imagined as angelic powers or forces from below. Music can soothe or awaken passions, and that capacity makes it an object of both spiritual use and social anxiety. Older European songs retained heathen, pre-Christian themes of magic and superstition; the Christian Church tried to displace them with hymns, but inherited traditions proved difficult to silence. In this framing, Satan is connected to music not simply as a subject in lyrics, but as a name for the unsettling possibility that song might loosen religious and social restraints.

That suspicion outlasts any one musical style. The book compares the fear attached to rebellious song with early twentieth-century anxieties about jazz, which critics imagined could unleash dangerous passions. Such reactions reveal how accusations of Satanic influence can express broader fears about music’s effect on listeners. The figure is therefore useful to both sides of the conflict: opponents invoke Satan to mark music as corrupting, while musicians and audiences may find in the same charge an attractive sign of forbidden freedom.

Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan supplies an important contrast to the later Norwegian scene. LaVey founded the Church on Walpurgisnacht in 1966 after work in such roles as carnival performer, police photographer, burlesque organ accompanist, and occultist. The account describes its principles as opposition to herd mentality and commitment to an anti-egalitarian ideal of human self-development, freed from Christian morality. This Satanism treats Satan less as a literal being than as an archetypal or symbolic figure. Its public visibility was amplified by media attention and by the 1968 release of a Satanic Mass recording. LaVey explained that the recording was intended in part to distinguish a Satanic Mass from a Black Mass, which he characterized as an inversion of Christian ritual, and to provide a forum for performance. Its eventual distribution and publicity made the record both an explanation of the Church’s practice and a vehicle for its message.

From Musical Image to Literal Adversary

Venom helped make Satanism a conspicuous part of heavy music’s public identity. Its early fans in the United States included people from the emerging Hardcore Punk scene, and its sound was described as unusually dirty and abrasive. The band’s pronounced Satanic imagery and lyrical blasphemy also offered an outlet to listeners raised in restrictive Christian settings. Whether the musicians privately practiced the rites suggested by their records was, for those listeners, beside the point: the image itself made room for defiance.

The book distinguishes that musical use of Satan from the beliefs attributed to early Norwegian Black Metal musicians. International organizations such as the Church of Satan could understand Satan symbolically; the Norwegian teenagers discussed here were reported to regard him as real. They framed the world as locked in an enduring contest between good and evil, changing the side they supported rather than abandoning the contest’s religious structure. The author argues that, in this respect, their outlook could be more sternly Christian than that of ordinary followers of the Norwegian State Church: Satan remained central, Hell mattered, and existence was organized around a stark moral opposition.

That contrast gains force from the account of religious life in Norway. A conservative theologian’s radio question in the late 1950s about where a person would go after dying unsettled an already active debate over Hell. Later, explicit discussion of Hell and Satan had become nearly taboo in church circles. Against that retreat, Helvete record shop placed Satan symbolically at the center of the emerging scene. The account draws an irony between a State Church reluctant to address the subject and a musical subculture that gave Satan vivid presence.

Publicity, Provocation, and Claims of Action

As anti-Christian crimes came to be associated with Black Metal, media attention expanded. A 1993 Kerrang! cover feature presented the Norwegian scene through images of Varg Vikernes holding knives, a burning church, and Emperor musicians in corpse paint and medieval-style clothing. Its sensational framing made Satanism, arson, and death the promised story, while much of the article relied on alleged statements by Vikernes and Øystein Aarseth. Their claims about a group called the Satanic Terrorists, an inner circle, and a larger body of followers were presented as claims in the article, not independently established facts. The distinction matters: Satan functioned both as an asserted religious allegiance and as an instrument in constructing a public identity for the scene.

Vikernes’s reported explanation of church arson gave the conflict a further reversal. He said that the aim was to support Christianity by burning churches, thereby making it stronger and eventually making war against it. The book treats this as revealing: the target was not only Christian belief, but what the speakers considered Christianity’s weakened contemporary condition and its abandonment of former severity. In this logic, an attack could be presented as a way to provoke the adversary into renewed strength. The language turns rebellion into a staged struggle in which Satan’s opposition remains dependent on the Christian institution it seeks to confront.

Later, Vikernes described early declarations of evil as deliberate provocation. He distinguished making a statement for the purpose of provoking people from speaking merely in order to provoke, and characterized the scene’s insistence on being evil as image-making. The book’s account thus holds two aspects together rather than collapsing one into the other: Satanic performance could be knowingly theatrical, while the earlier Norwegian outlook was also described as taking Satan and cosmic conflict seriously. Public statements could serve attention and self-mythologizing without proving that every claim about belief or action was literal.

Reinterpretation and Heathenism

Vikernes later recast the meaning of darkness through Burzum. He explained the name as a fictional word associated with night or darkness, set against the conventional association of light with goodness. Yet he also called Burzum the light of Odin, resolving the opposition by declaring darkness to be light. This is not simply a change of vocabulary: Satanic darkness becomes part of a new account in which Odin, rather than Satan, provides the affirmative religious reference.

Vikernes described a broader movement from Satanism toward Ásatrú and pan-Germanic heathenism. He presented his own earlier advocacy of Satanism as part of a path that could eventually lead people to heathenism, and argued that drawing attention to cultural heritage mattered more than personal acclaim. In his telling, Satanism could be a stage through which people passed rather than a final commitment. The account records this as his later interpretation, not as a universal progression for musicians or listeners.

Absurd’s account of its own development provides a related but distinct perspective. The band described its early imagery as combining Satanic or Luciferian inspiration with Germanic heathen material. Its representative linked Luciferian, Promethean, and Faustian ideas to the effort to overcome limitations, but argued that individual will needed to be directed toward an ethnic community rather than left to hedonism or ego. Absurd said its underlying orientation had not changed, while acknowledging development in its understanding; it also characterized its earlier treatment of classical Satanism as superficial and rejected the nihilistic glorification of violence and extermination as no longer exceptional or compelling. Satan thus becomes one element in a changing vocabulary of rebellion, rather than the settled center of the band’s later worldview.

A Figure Defined by Opposition

The book’s analysis of fire places Satan within a larger symbolic pattern. Prometheus is presented as the defiant figure who takes fire from the gods and gives it to humanity, an emblem of change and willful opposition. Surtr, by contrast, embodies fire’s destructive capacity to remove what is old so that something new may appear. Both are linked to rebellious energy, but destruction without renewal becomes nihilism. These figures clarify the account’s treatment of Satan: opposition can be creative or merely destructive, and the difference lies in what follows the act of resistance.

An appendix on Satanism in Norway sharpens the paradox. It describes the Norwegian church-burning Satanist as a distinctive local type, associated with music, belief in Satan, and attacks on churches. Its interpretation presents Satan as the individual who refuses to submit to a hypocritical society, while also arguing that Satan belongs to Christian religious history as the alternative figure within Christianity’s own theological system. On that reading, youthful Satanism may be an extreme Christian sect, reversing the religion’s moral values while remaining structurally attached to them. The argument does not erase the musicians’ sense of opposition; it shows how that opposition can depend on the system it repudiates.

Across the book, Satan therefore has no single stable identity. He is a musical provocation, a symbolic adversary in LaVey’s philosophy, a literal being for some early Norwegian Black Metal adherents, and a figure later displaced by Odin-centered heathenism. Media coverage magnified the name, while musicians used it variously as belief, image, and deliberate challenge. Its recurring force comes from that instability: Satan marks the boundary against which each speaker defines rebellion, even when the rebellion eventually seeks another god or cultural inheritance.