Simen Midgaard

Simen Midgaard was a freelance writer with a master’s degree in the humanities and a former leader of the Oslo branch of Ordo Templi Orientis. In the book, he brings that experience to bear on Norwegian Black Metal without treating its Satanic imagery as evidence of a deep or coherent inheritance. His central argument shifts attention from occult lineage to the public stories that preceded the scene: sensational newspaper exposés, he suggests, helped supply young people with an identity they could adopt and perform.

Background and public role

Midgaard founded the Oslo branch of Ordo Templi Orientis, the occult order associated with Aleister Crowley, in 1984 and resigned from its leadership in 1993. His connection to the order was therefore institutional as well as intellectual, but the book does not present him as a spokesman for the Black Metal scene. It introduces him instead as an outside observer whose background gave him grounds to discuss Satanism while allowing him to distinguish its different forms.

His familiarity with the musicians grew partly through journalism. While interviewing Ihsahn of Emperor for Morgenbladet, Norway’s cultural newspaper, Midgaard encountered the scene directly. He also wrote an essay on Black Metal Satanism for the paper; the book includes an English translation as Appendix III. The editors present his contribution as a considered alternative to tabloid scandal and to the Norwegian Church’s more general denunciations of Satanism among young people.

Press coverage and the emergence of youth Satanism

Midgaard saw little evidence that Norwegian Black Metal Satanism had a substantial inheritance from an established religious tradition. He instead connected the rise of youth Satanism to a supposed “revelation” of Satanists in Ordo Templi Orientis, publicized in Dagbladet through stories about cannibalism, child sacrifice, and other lurid allegations. He regarded that exposé campaign as unfounded and said it targeted both the order and imagined Satanists. In his account, a policeman named Kobbhaug initiated the campaign around 1990 or 1991.

The timing mattered to his explanation: the press coverage preceded the point at which Black Metal began to cohere as a viable music genre in Norway. Midgaard proposed that the resulting public image could have helped shape the attitudes that followed. The book notes that other observers arrived at similar theories, but presents his as an interpretation rather than proof of a single cause. His argument makes media attention part of the scene’s context: the reports did not merely describe a pre-existing, settled Satanic tradition; they circulated a sensational image that young people could take up.

This emphasis also explains why the book places his commentary against the tabloids’ accounts of Black Metal. Those accounts could turn disparate claims and incidents into a sweeping picture of a Satanic threat. Midgaard’s approach asks how such a picture was produced and what precedents it offered to the people later associated with the scene. The distinction is not between saying that nothing happened and accepting every alarming report; it is between examining specific conduct and assuming that the conduct expresses one coherent religious inheritance.

Different forms of Satanism

Midgaard’s account resists treating Satanism in the scene as uniform. He described Ihsahn as an intellectual, civilized, and creative Satanist, oriented toward romantic Gothic aesthetics rather than primarily toward hostility to Christianity. In his reading, that kind of Satanism was a revolt against what he saw as ugly features of the modern world. This characterization gives the scene an internal distinction: Satanic language could serve an aesthetic or creative stance, not only an anti-Christian one.

He traced the connection between Satanism and paganism more narrowly to their shared opposition to Christianity. Midgaard also doubted that Black Metal musicians generally understood the heathen worldview they evoked. The distinction is important to his analysis: an affinity produced by rejecting Christianity does not, by itself, establish a deep understanding of pagan belief. He allowed that paganism could create a romantic affinity with nationalism, while questioning how much the musicians knew about nationalism as an idea.

The problem of Satan in an anti-Christian worldview

Midgaard’s sharpest conceptual question concerned Satan’s place in a movement opposed to Judeo-Christianity. Satan, he reasoned, belongs to that religious world; if the aim is to discard it consistently, Satan may have to be discarded too. He compared Satan’s role in a revolution against Christianity to Trotsky’s: a useful figure within a struggle whose eventual success could make that figure unnecessary. The comparison frames Satan not as an eternal foundation for anti-Christian identity but as a potentially temporary, mediating symbol.

That argument connects his account of early, medieval-style Satanism with the later turn toward paganism and a darkened interest in nature. Midgaard did not present the shift as evidence that the musicians had arrived at a coherent heathen doctrine. Rather, it exposed a tension in the symbolism: Satan is meaningful in relation to Christianity, while a thorough rejection of Christianity could undercut the very figure used to express that rejection. His commentary thus treats the scene’s changing imagery as an unresolved intellectual problem, not a simple progression from one settled belief system to another.

Encounter with the police

Midgaard also described his own response when police came to his home after the church burnings. He did not open the door when he saw them, and said that he likewise had no interest in speaking with them when they approached friends. He explained his refusal as a matter of principle: he did not allow officials into his home and regarded them as another tribe. The episode documents his distrust of official contact, but the book does not establish that he was involved in the crimes or that the police visit was evidence of such involvement. It complements his broader skepticism toward the public construction of Satanism by showing that he kept both the authorities and the scene at a distance in different ways.