Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult

by Dayal Patterson

  “We have to remember that Christianity was a religion forced on the people of Norway,” commented Kristoffer “Garm” Rygg of Ulver in the 1994 documentary Det Svarte Alvor. “And as the sons of Odin we see it as our duty to take back that which once was ours.”

  “The Church has behaved so disgracefully, basely, and cruelly in Norway, it’s incredible,” Vikernes also commented in another black metal documentary, 1998’s Satan Rir Media. “When they talk about Satanism, when someone burns a church, they ought to look at themselves and all the sacred places they have burnt, and the ruins on top of which they have built their churches.”

  “As long as I can remember I have been well aware of my history, and been a critic of religion in general,” explains Jørn Inge Tunsberg, who was jailed for his part in the attack on Åsane. A past member of both Old Funeral, Amputation, and Immortal, he formed Hades in 1993, a band heavily inspired by Viking themes. “Back then, those actions were a fist in the face of Christianity, carried out in free will by each and [every] one of us! I believe there are more correct ways these days to protest against the Christianity in this world. But then again, I am still certain that the power to protest and provoke is very much alive in many of us, and it is important to stand [up] and protect yourself and your opinions at all times.”

  “Holmenkollen Chapel in Ashes,” Aftenposten newspaper, Norway, 1992. The church was burnt by Varg, Faust and Euronymous the night following the murder in Lillehammer.

  “I was once asked how I could think it was okay to burn churches once, and I tried to answer intellectually,” ponders Manheim, who, though not directly involved in the attacks, was certainly kept up to date with their progress. “You know, you destroy a public property, which was a symbol of power in society, and it’s just a church, it’s a building, so as a symbolic act I can understand it and even find reasons to do that. If a person asked would I do that, the answer is no, I wouldn’t. I have other expressions to do that, but I can understand the symbolism involved in burning churches. But you can argue that a lot of people who did [burn churches] didn’t have that intellectual interest in what they did, they just did it as being fans, they didn’t put much intelligence into it.

  “I would talk about these things with Øystein and we were totally aligned, it was a symbolic act. Okay, we could understand it, but then you went to prison. Why? It’s pointless and you don’t destroy an organization [that way] because what you burn is state property, so what you can be assured of is that it will be rebuilt. I remember one call when they were going to burn one of the Viking churches, Borgund stave church, which is, you know, a thousand years old. We had this discussion and I tried to explain this was stupid, this was culture, inheritance, why don’t you just go and burn some modern church that doesn’t mean anything to anyone? So I guess that’s the only time I reacted to the plans. Otherwise it was just, ‘Oh, okay do what you want, it’s not my thing.’” [The Borgund church was ultimately not burnt.]

  “We were never part of any criminal actions,” explains Ivar, speaking of his band Enslaved, another group with strong Viking themes. “But I can see their perspectives. I think it became ridiculous when people talked about ‘Satanic terrorism,’ because every church burning, without exception, happened when there were no people inside them, whereas terrorism is about finding the point where you can strike as many innocent people as possible, so that’s a major difference.”

  “I must admit I’m very happy I didn’t participate in those actions,” recalls Ivar’s longtime bandmate Grutle. “I mean, I understand the hatred toward Christianity, I have a strong hatred, it’s the most evil invention in the world. From a historical point of view I have no regrets about the church burnings, but you have to look a little further and think a little further. My family, even back to the Middle Ages, living in fear of the state and the state church, everyone had to work really hard, baptize their children, get married in the church … I come from the small place, so when you burn down a church, it is so closely connected to your family and the people around you for five hundred years, so it is not about religion. And burning a church … people get closer to the church.”

  Undoubtedly, there was more at work behind the arsons than simply an ideological opposition to the church. There was, for a start, a somewhat cultish atmosphere, wherein younger participants (most of those carrying out these activities were in their late teens) wished to be accepted within the scene by older members, such as Euronymous. And a culture had been created by charismatic individuals such as Dead, Euronymous, and Vikernes, that celebrated evil, hate, misanthropy, and Satanism.

  Interviews of the time saw bands attempting to break every taboo still standing, glorifying murder, torture, suicide, arson, and more, often tying this to an overtly spiritual, even supernatural, theme, with frequent references to the devil, spirits, hell, and the like. At the same time, music and art were being created that far surpassed what had come before—recordings whose timelessness has been proved by their enduring popularity. For those swept up in all this, the lines between everyday reality, art, ideology, and the glorious melodrama of black metal were blurred in what must have been an intoxicating mix.

  “All that stuff felt like a great backdrop for our music,” agrees Mortiis. “I think we all had this extremity sort of saturated into us. We were part desensitized, part too young to understand the magnitude of what we were starting. Every time I think about it, I think we were a lot closer to a Charles Manson scenario than any of us realized … a lot closer.”

  One of the most central characters in the development of this culture, and one of the few alive today, Vikernes himself has an interesting take on the situation, acknowledging how many were caught up in this culture but taking care to make a separation between the behavior and motives of those who initiated and those who followed. In a 2010 interview for Metal Hammer magazine, he explained this point to me in some detail:

  “Euronymous in particular didn’t want black metal to become a trend. When we saw—in 1992—that all the failures from the death metal scene all of a sudden wanted to play black metal instead, making black metal the new trend, we did everything we could to make black metal too extreme for everybody else. By doing so we imagined that we could scare large groups of posers away from black metal. So, we used imagery and a language so extreme no sensible human beings out there would in theory want anything to do with us. This worked fine, of course, only we didn’t realize that there are so many insanely stupid human beings out there, who still wanted to be ‘evil,’ and wanted to commit crimes to prove it to us, just to be accepted into our select group. Every time we saw that others still ‘liked us’ and wanted to become our ‘friends,’ we had to step up the madness, so to speak, and go even further to alienate ourselves from them.

  Out from the dark: Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth, the man who arguably did more than anyone to resurrect black metal and spread its influence around the world.

  “Because of this process, led by Euronymous from his shop, we ended up promoting pure insanity and stupidity, alias ‘evil,’ and those who wanted to join our select group burnt churches, desecrated graves and so forth, to be accepted. What you talk about is the followers’ point of view. They certainly were ‘caught up’ in this subculture, but we—Mayhem, Darkthrone, and Burzum—weren’t.”

  Whatever the motivations behind the acts, by 1992 the phenomenon of what was generally labeled “Satanic terrorism” was spreading through Norway like wildfire, often beyond any direct connection to Varg, Euronymous, or members of the “Inner Circle.” This was evident even in the early days of the church burnings, since one of the first churches to suffer was the Revheim Church, in the relative isolation of the city of Stavanger. The attackers were unconnected to the Oslo or Bergen scenes, but were certainly a part of the black metal culture, and later formed another important band, Gehenna. Elsewhere on the south coast of Norway in Kristiansand, another faction of anti-Christian metallers was also in existence, a group wh
o were later invited to visit Helvete and would become to some extent the “muscle” of some of the operations discussed in Oslo.

  “There was no ‘black metal’ scene in the beginning,” explains Terje Vik Schei, then a death metal musician, but one who would soon adopt the pseudonym Tchort (a Slavonic word for the devil) and join black metal acts Emperor, Satyricon, and Carpathian Forest. “We were a few kids who listened to alternative music and hated the Christians and had fights with them, we desecrated their churches and graves. The papers started to write about it and we were contacted by Euronymous, who wanted us to come to Oslo and meet with them. We learned that there were more people like us, that they labeled all of us ‘black metal’ and [thought we should] follow certain rules—no white sneakers,” he laughs, “We didn’t know or care about this when we first met, and their jaws dropped to the floor when they saw us arrive in sweat pants and white sneakers!”

  As Terje confirms, the Kristiansand scene was notably extreme even by the standards of the time, with members attacking Christians in the street with knives in the middle of the day. Going some way beyond mere anti-Christian ideology or even straightforward antisocial behavior, these activities were entrenched in a destructive Satanic culture similar to the one that had grown up in Oslo. Like Mortiis (whom he would replace in Emperor), Terje admits a certain “saturation” of extreme ideas. Even for Terje himself—no longer a Satanist and now married with children—this period is quite surreal to look back upon.

  “I have to force myself in order to recall these events,” he admits. “The actions were extreme, but so were we at that time. Living off human blood, decorating your flat with tombstones, animal carcasses, digging up graves and shit, does something to you, and what is considered extreme didn’t seem so extreme back then. Again, it was more about the atmosphere, the emotions and feelings and pushing our limits that led to stuff like animal sacrifice, drinking blood, etc. We didn’t see this as part of the music scene we now ‘belonged’ to, but as a part of the life situation we were experimenting with. We had some books and ideas on how rituals were performed, but we followed our own instincts—or lack of them—more than anything else. I remember that I passed out on the street on one occasion as I had been living off animal blood solely for quite some time.”

  Events in the Norwegian scene were about to take an even more dramatic turn. On August 21, 1992, Bård “Faust” Eithun, an eighteen-year-old drummer known for his work in Thorns and Emperor, was walking in Lillehammer’s newly finished Olympic Park, having traveled from Oslo where he had recently moved to visit his mother. In the park he met an inebriated stranger, one Magne Andreassen, an older homosexual man who reportedly approached Bård for sex and suggested they go to the woods together. Eithun agreed and walked a long way into the wood with Andreassen before attacking him with a penknife that he had in his back pocket, stabbing him several times in his stomach until he fell to his knees, then continuing to stab him in his face, neck, and back, a total of thirty-seven times in total, until he appeared dead. He left the scene, but on hearing sounds coming from the dying man he returned to kick him in the head to be sure he had been killed. He then departed and made his way to his mother’s house, where he washed off the blood and went to sleep.

  While he was accused of luring Andreassen into the woods in order to murder him—and indeed Eithun was quoted in several publications admitting that he had planned to kill the man from the point he agreed to enter the woods—the motivation for the killing is still somewhat unclear. In interviews given soon after his conviction, Eithun seemed to suggest that the murder was done more out of morbid curiosity than any personal reason. “It’s the kind of thing I’ve always dreamt about doing,” he commented in Petrified. In another zine, Goats of Pandemonium, he claimed, “I killed this man … just to see what it was like.”

  Similar comments suggested this was not a hate crime, though an interview in Spin indicated that Andreassen’s homosexuality may have had some impact. “I just very calmly decided to end this man’s life,” Eithun remarked, “Maybe my subconscious was telling me that because he was gay I had that right.” Though the courts would find him guilty of murder, in recent years some of his peers have suggested an alternative theory, arguing that Eithun may have considered himself under attack, his statements in the press about a cold slaying being motivated by a desire to keep in line with the scene’s strict mentality.

  “I have heard some explanations from Bård on what triggered it,” ponders Necrobutcher, “and if those things are correct, this guy hassled him .. maybe tried to attack him sexually. Say you walk down the street and a homo tries to fuck you in your ass, what would you do if you had a knife in your pocket? Would you stab the guy? Probably, yes. Maybe, if you’re just eighteen years old, would you stab him more than one time? Maybe you would panic and just stab him ’til the guy let go of your hair and fell down … the only thing I know is what he said, but maybe he followed the guy himself, wanted to kill him, planned it, he just didn’t like his face and waited until he was in the park and attacked him. But knowing this guy I really doubt that. If it was self-defense, I think it was a good thing—if it was cold-blooded murder, that I don’t like.”

  The following day, Eithun headed back to Oslo and went to Helvete to meet with Euronymous and Vikernes. Explaining that he planned to turn himself in to police, he was dissuaded by Euronymous and Vikernes. Instead, that night the three traveled to the city’s Holmenkollen Chapel and burnt it to the ground, heading up a mountain to properly view the spectacle. News of the murder spread quickly within Norway’s tight scene, and Manheim—who supports the self-defense theory—reveals that Euronymous called him to talk about it even before Holmenkollen was torched.

  “I tried to say, Helvete is two hundred meters from the main police station, so the thing to do now if the story is correct, which I believe it is, is go over there and report yourself ’cos that’s the sensible thing to do. But Øystein was excited, he found this [murder] very thrilling … So they went and burnt Holmenkollen Chapel and to me that was the most stupid thing to do… What I knew about the story it was a self-defense case, I talked to him about it later and he seems honest about it. How would you answer [in interviews] if you were constantly asked [about it] and were also a world-famous character in black metal history? … He didn’t go to Oslo immediately, he was shaky if I was told the correct story from Øystein. It was a bad thing that he went down to Øystein, who laughed about it and thought it was fantastic. He should have gone to someone who could actually have sat down, thought about it and tried to find a good way to talk to the police about it. He probably would have spent less years in prison if that was the case.”

  While there were up to fifty people in the Norwegian black metal scene who knew exactly who was involved in the various crimes being committed, the police remained clueless for a time. Almost as soon as 1993 began, however, events occurred that would bring the house of cards built by the Inner Circle crashing down around them.

  It began in January, when Vikernes gave an interview to two young writers who hoped to sell their story to the newspaper Bergens Tidende. While the story didn’t make it into the newspaper, it caught the eye of Finn Bjørn Tønder, a crime journalist at the paper. Tønder’s interest was piqued because Vikernes was quoted as saying he had been involved in the church burnings. Although the police didn’t agree with him, Tønder had suspected the burnings were the work of Satanists ever since learning from police investigating the Fantoft church arson that a dead animal had been found on the church’s steps. After contacting the two aspiring writers, Tønder arranged with Vikernes that he and a photographer would come along with them to the musician’s flat in order to do a piece for the paper.

  The resulting interview described a young man living in an apartment with covered windows and Nazi and Satanic-related decor, the photos at the time also showing a large amount of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing material. The overall impression was of a living space that wou
ld probably seem slightly less outlandish to anyone who’d seen a typical teenage metal fan’s bedroom than it seems to have been to Tønder. Similarly, the interview itself was not unlike the interviews given to sympathetic fanzines, full of bold statements and dramatically callous boasts. However, Tønder urged the Burzum mainman to support his claims with details that could be verified with the police.

  Some claim that in doing so, he provided specifics that linked the crimes directly to the Norwegian black metal scene. Firstly, Vikernes reportedly explained that, for symbolic reasons, a rabbit had been decapitated and left on the steps of the church at Fantoft, something only someone involved with the crime could know, as it had not been reported in the press. Secondly, he allegedly mentioned that a gay man had been knifed at the Lillehammer Olympic Park, a crime that until that point had not been linked to the black metal scene at all. The very afternoon the article was printed Vikernes was arrested, thanks to dialogue between Tønder and the police.

  “That was the point where a lot of shit happened,” reflects Necrobutcher, “’cos he cleaned up a lot of the loose ends that the cops had, and of course that was not cool. But it would have happened sooner or later. One [person] can keep a secret, maybe two, but [when] some more people find out who was responsible for killing those people, setting those fires or doing the vandalism or whatever … it would have come to light, but of course not in that dramatic way. He was nineteen years old and thought it would be a good promotion for the album.”