Lords of Chaos

by Michael Moynihan

  Per Bangsund is a respected Norwegian journalist, editor and publisher who has written extensively on Norwegian post-war radical right politics.

  PER BANGSUND

  WHY DO YOU THINK ANDERS LANGE WAS SO INTERESTED IN UFOS?

  I guess it’s easy to understand why people with extreme ideas about the purity and nobility of Nature easily fall for quasi-philosophies about the Universe and see UFOs as a manifestation of something “out there.” As far as I can remember, UFOs were not a big issue in Hundebladet. The fight against fluoridated water was far more important!

  The ALP would never really make the transition into mainstream politics. The year after establishing the party, Lange passed away. However, his legacy has been stronger than anyone could foresee, as the ALP later mutated into what became known as Fremskrittspartiet (The Progress Party), which grew huge in the 1980s as it rode on the same neo-conservative tidal wave that dumped Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher into office. In recent years, Fremskrittspartiet has become one of Norway’s biggest parliamentary presences, although by its very nature the party tends to bounce up and down in opinion polls.

  One figure who has followed the party from its inception to its present state is attorney Eivind Eckbo. He assumed the post as leader of the ALP when its founder passed away, and retained the position for six months afterward. He has also held posts for Fremskrittspartiet.

  EIVIND ECKBO

  HOW DID ANDERS LANGE’S PARTY WORK?

  The ALP was based more on coincidences than conscious action. It was really more of a protest movement than a party, but it grew the way it did because it struck a chord with many people. Anders Lange was a dynamic character; in his time with Fedrelandslaget in the 1930s he would drive his truck around the countryside holding political rallies. You can say what you want about Anders Lange, but he was the only Norwegian of the twentieth century to whip up a political party from nothing; all other new parties have been splinter factions of already-established parties.

  While UFOs hardly seem to have been a major point in Lange’s worldview, or that of the people that surrounded him, he remains a highly visible figure that certainly helped to introduce notions of extraterrestrial visits into radical political circles. Because the circle around Lange was very informal and political distinctions appear to have been secondary, some of the rebellious types who surrounded him later emerged as more moderate politicians, while others moved into nationalism and National Socialism.

  It is possible that Varg Vikernes may have arrived at his Aryans in Space theories on his own, but in light of the long-standing connection between UFOlogy and the Norwegian radical right, it is hard to imagine such a voracious and informed reader as Vikernes re-inventing the wheel—or, in this case, the saucer.

  Depending on which way the prison authorities decide to calculate the remainder of his sentence, Vikernes will be released from prison on August 22, 2005 or 2007. Vikernes claims to have taken the lengthy prison sentence well so far, joking that “time flies when you’re having fun,” and comparing his life to that of a monk or hermit who chooses isolation from outside distractions to better focus on his work and studies.

  When asked whether he now regrets having killed Øystein Aarseth, he sticks to his old explanation that it was a pre-emptive strike because Øystein had planned to kill him. “To regret killing Øystein would be to regret being alive,” he says.

  VARG VIKERNES

  DO YOU THINK THAT YOUR WORLDVIEW WOULD BE DIFFERENT IF YOU HAD NOT BEEN LOCKED UP?

  To be honest, I think I would have been dead if I wasn’t arrested. Let me put it like this: when the police caught me, I had 150 kilos of dynamite, and I was waiting to have some machine pistols delivered. I suppose it would have gone awry.

  IT WOULD APPEAR THAT EVERYTHING YOU SAY IS DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED TO WHAT ESTABLISHED SOCIETY STANDS FOR.

  We even count the weekdays differently, so it clashes there, too. But the purpose of all this isn’t to do contrary things to what society is doing. And it cannot be explained as youthful rebellion either—I’m too old for that. Unless you say that I’ve been in jail so long that I’m still mentally a teenager. For prison is a closed environment, and many people don’t develop when they socialize with junkies.

  resurge - 1. to rise again, as from death or from virtual extinction.

  resurgent. adj. rising or tending to rise again; reviving.

  atavism - 1. Biology. the reappearance in an individual of characteristics of some remote ancestor that have been absent in intervening generations. 2. reversion to an earlier type.

  —Random House Dictionary of the English Language 1

  ARCHETYPES ARE LIKE RIVERBEDS WHICH DRY UP WHEN THE WATER DESERTS THEM, BUT WHICH IT CAN FIND AGAIN AT ANY TIME.

  —C.G. JUNG, “WOTAN”2

  9

  RESURGENT ATAVISM: THE METAPHYSICS OF HEATHEN BLACK METAL

  A WAVE OF VIOLENCE ERUPTS ACROSS AN OTHERWISE TRANQUIL LANDSCAPE, a conservative but humanistic society which has always ensured that its citizens are well fed and finely educated. Whatever their future station in life, they can count on comfort, security, and all the other benefits of a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world... yet the young dream of murder, blood sacrifice, revenge.

  The Christian religion plays no great part in their lives, though its secular counterpart, the system of social democracy, offers them great opportunity. They reward such benefaction with a curse of fire, basking in the glory of destruction. Nothing excites more than the thought of chapel and vicarage ablaze, illuminating the womb of the night sky with darting flames, dancing and thrusting upward. The beauty is in ruins; a temple laid to waste becomes an aesthetic victory.

  Their law of the strong scorns pity as a four-letter word; they await the day it is banished from the dictionaries. They despise doctrines of humility. Christ’s Sermon on the Mount is even worse poison to their ears. War is their ideal, and they romanticize the grim glory of older epochs where it was a fact of life.

  Where is the source for such a river of animosity and primal urges? Did torrents of hatred arise simply from the amplification of a phonograph needle vibrating through the spiralled grooves of a Venom album? Is Black Metal music possessed of the inherent power to impregnate destructive messages into the minds of the impressionable, laying a fertile seed destined to sprout into deed? To an enlightened mind it would seem unlikely.

  If there is no clear, rational explanation for why Black Metal went to such hellish extremes, an investigation of the genre’s more irrational or visionary aspects is in order. The following two chapters investigate the metaphysical and spiritual underpinnings of Black Metal, and how they have manifested in the real world.

  Black Metal is primarily seen as a musical movement tied to Satanism, and the varying implications of this will be touched upon in Chapter 10. Many principal figures in Black Metal—Varg Vikernes especially—have also pledged a dedication to what they claim are heathen ideals. Scandinavia was one of the last European cultures to convert to Christianity. The explosion of Black Metal there warrants a look at possible correlations between ancient Norse heathenism and modern musical extremism.

  AORTA JOURNAL

  THE WILD HUNT DRAWS NIGH

  In one of many articles detailing his interpretations of Nordic heathen cosmology written from prison, Varg Vikernes elaborates at length on his fascination for the folklore of the Oskorei:

  The demonic-Odhinnic deathcult is one of the nuclei of Germanic volk-culture; connecting the living with the dead. Oskoreien—the “Ride of the Dead” during the Holy twelve or thirteen nights of Yule and at time of fasting—or Åsgardsreien (as it is also known) originate from the martial/mystical mystery-society of “Werewolf-warriors” selected and initiated after severe rules and regulations. Oskoreien/Åsgardsreien will be wearing black shields and warpaint on their bodies, symbolizing dæmonic/lycanthropic transformation... Such a so-called Varulv Orden [Werewolf Order] will rush forward at ni
ght with wonderful wildness.3

  Vikernes goes on to describe various permutations of this Odinic death cult, explaining that a ritual-initiation will lead to a higher spiritual state, culminating in a joint ascension with one’s ancestral spirits of something he calls the “Transcendental Pillar of Singularity”—also referred to in a Burzum song title. Before this is dismissed as nothing more than mindless verbiage on Vikernes’s behalf, it deserves a closer examination.

  NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGRAVING OF THE WILD HUNT

  After reading a number of similar texts by Varg Vikernes, the Austrian artist and occult researcher named Kadmon was inspired to investigate in detail what enigmatic connections might exist between the phenomena of modern Black Metal and the ancient myths of the Oskorei. The Oskorei is the Norse name for the legion of dead souls who are witnessed flying, en masse, across the night sky on certain occasions. They are rumored to sometimes swoop down from the dark heavens and whisk a living person away with them. This army of the dead is often led by Odin or another of the heathen deities. Throughout the centuries, there are many reports from people who claim to have experienced the terrifying phenomenon—they attest to having seen and heard the Oskorei with their own eyes and ears. The tales of the Oskorei also refer to real-life folk customs which were still prevalent a few hundred years ago in rural parts of Northern Europe. They normally occurred at Yule time, when groups of rowdy young men would ride by night in groups on horseback, often frightening the villagers with the sound and fury of their arrival. Folklorists have attempted to explain the legends in different ways. Kadmon’s essay on the Oskorei and Black Metal is reproduced as Appendix II. It is a fascinating comparison of details in the recorded folk tales of the Oskorei and uncanny similarities to many of the traits which are distinct facets of modern Black Metal—noise, corpsepaint, ghoulish appearances, the adoption of pseudonyms, high-pitched singing, and even arson. Kadmon discovers further correspondences with the old tradition of the haunting and costumed Perchten parades which still take place in Austrian towns on certain festival days. These winter folk traditions may have roots in the older worship of the Germanic winter/sky goddess Perchta. Today they comprise processions of both the benign or beautiful looking Perchten, as well as their sinister and demonically-masked counterparts the Schiachperchten.

  SCHIACHPERCHTEN MONSTER FROM AORTA JOURNAL

  Certain general connotations and correlations of the Oskorei legends are significant. The phenomenon appears particularly potent in Norway, although it has manifested in all the Scandinavian lands in differing forms. In German folklore, stories of the Oskorei correspond directly to the “Wild Hunt,” also termed “Wotan’s Host.” Wotan (alternately spelled Wodan) is the continental German title for Odin, Varg Vikernes’s “patron deity,” thus he might feel an obvious affinity to the stories of the Oskorei due to their “demonic-Odhinnic deathcult” connection, as he terms it. In a number of the legends, the spirits of the Oskorei take on a sinister air, and are treated as if demons. Crosses are employed, à la Dracula, to ward them off. Aschehoug and Gyldendal’s Store Norske Leksikon (The Large Norse Encyclopedia) states the name Oskorei can be interpreted as “the terrible ride,” and describes it in detail:

  There were often fights and killings at those places Oskoreia stopped. They could drink the yule ale and eat the food, but also carry people away if they were out in the dark. One could protect against the ride by gesturing in the shape of a cross or by throwing oneself to the ground with the arms stretched out like a cross. The best way was to place a cross above all the doors. Steel above the stalls was effective as well. The Oskorei was probably regarded as a riding company of dead people, perhaps those who deserved neither Heaven nor Hell. One must take into account the midwinter darkness and the common belief that the dead return at yuletide.4

  THE LURE AND LORE OF ARCHETYPES

  Given the dark, ghoulish, and quasi-diabolical nature of the Oskorei, it is not surprising that Vikernes and others in the Black Metal scene might develop a visceral fascination for it. Images of the frenzied hunt across the night sky were not unfamiliar to the music scene; the cover of Bathory’s first “Viking” album, Blood Fire Death, features a haunting depiction of the Oskorei in action. The remarkable development is how so many of the minute details of the legends would inadvertently or coincidentally resurface in unique traits of the Norwegian Black Metal adherents. This behavior had already become prominent years before the scene acquired its current attraction toward Nordic mythological themes, and before Vikernes ever began writing commentaries on such topics.

  When Norwegian Black Metal sparked its initial flurries of mainstream publicity, it was generally portrayed as a neo-fascistic or despotic strain of Satanism. At the same time, there were always elements present which harkened back to the Viking age, or at least displayed a superficial identification with Viking strength and barbarism. The basis for such attitudes was rarely explained with any degree of depth until recently, when previously peripheral elements became driving forces for many of the bands and personalities.

  Varg Vikernes is today the most overt of all the heathen advocates within Black Metal, but he is far from alone in his interests and sources of inspiration. Many of the “Satanic” bands even evince a strong fascination for native folklore and tradition, seeing them as vital allegories which represent primal energies within man. This type of viewpoint is expressed well by Erik Lancelot of the band Ulver:

  The theme of Ulver has always been the exploration of the dark sides of Norwegian folklore, which is strongly tied to the close relationship our ancestors had to the forests, mountains, and sea. The dark side of our folklore therefore has a different outlook from the traditional Satanism using cosmic symbolism from Hebraic mythology, but the essence remains the same: the “demons” represent the violent, ruthless forces feared and disclaimed by ordinary men, but without whom the world would lose the impetus which is the fundamental basis of evolution.

  Our use of old Norwegian imagery is not an end in itself, but rather a manner to symbolize our own thoughts with pictures close to our own traditions. ... We believe that the underlying, metaphysical source of life is essentially what “white light” religions have regarded as “evil” because it is ruthlessly and aggressively vital, untamed by any restrictions lest they be the morals imposed by “reason” or “culture” in order to subjugate the expansion of force.5

  FOREST ENGRAVING FROM A NORWEGIAN BOOK OF FOLKTALES

  Varg Vikernes speaks of Burzum as a resurrection of primordial forces. In explaining his justification for the church burnings he states it was to “Show Odin to the people and Odin will be lit in their souls,” imbuing his actions with an atavistic motive.6 When asked of his attitude toward the Norse gods in an interview with Descent magazine, Varg elaborated:

  They’re not “gods,” but Áses. They’re the archetypes of the Northern race. Thus within me. They’re the names we gave to what once was, during what once was so that our posterity should never forget. Alas, only a few of us remember, and we always will. I will never forsake my forefathers, my nature, or myself. And truly this is what heathendom is—our nature.

  We all learn about the Christian interpretation of heathendom, making it “mythology.” More and more are waking up from the sleep of idiocy and following their nature. By showing my interpretation to the people, I light the heathen fire in their souls. It’s inevitable, because they are our archetypes. Odin wins.7

  Varg’s statements may sound irrational, but they are not unique. The renowned psychologist Carl Gustav Jung developed his own theories of the collective unconscious, which may manifest in different groups of people based on the archaic archetypes of their culture. He explains this in terms of “primordial images” in his 1928 work Two Essays on Analytical Psychology:

  There are present in every individual, besides his personal memories, the great “primordial” images, as Jacob Burckhardt once aptly called them, the inherited powers of human imagination as it was
from time immemorial. The fact of this inheritance explains the truly amazing phenomena that certain motifs from myths and legends repeat themselves ... It also explains why it is that our mental patients can reproduce exactly the same images and associations that are known to us from the old texts.