That’s what the Church is doing; they just try to isolate the Satanists and say it’s not serious, it’s just violence and brutality, it’s just revenge they’re after. They don’t define them as part of their own tradition, and I do. We have to listen to what they’re saying.
THE FACT THAT THEY’VE KILLED SOMEONE DOESN’T COMPROMISE WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY?
How many Christian people have killed for the beliefs of their own religion? Killing people is an extremely human thing and doesn’t exclude them from being sincere and having a message. The Baader-Meinhof [German terrorist group] has a message which I think we should take seriously—although they did dreadful things. Doing criminal things and killing people doesn’t exclude you from having an opinion that is important.
WHAT’S THEIR REAL MESSAGE?
My motivation is to understand what they’re saying, and to take that message seriously. The violence in Satanism is not particular in any way, it’s not more severe than other violence in this society, and maybe it’s less if you compare it with football hooligans or whatever. The Satanists have a religious message, and that is the interesting thing, that they have something to say to our religious tradition and they are definitely saying it. Being violent in a religious tradition is not a very strange thing—it’s normal in that context. The Satanists are killing each other—many have been doing that in the Christian tradition for thousands of years. They’re only killing people when they disagree with them, there’s nothing new about it. It’s historically unaware to look upon this as something specific and “Satanic,” the fact they are killing each other when they have a conflict among themselves.
Look at the church fires. If their primary motive was just violence, they would burn the church down when there was a funeral or a baptism there, if they really wanted to make hell for people and show that violence is the most important thing. Why burn it in the middle of the night? Of course it’s dark, but in many parts of Norway it’s dark in the daytime too. So they could burn a church in the north of Norway on a Sunday and still get the aesthetic side of it, and kill a hundred people at the same time by blocking the doors and burning it up. Why don’t they do that? Because violence isn’t the basic message. It’s extremely obvious to me.
When we look at pictures of the bands, they look very violent. I think some of that is just the visual trappings of violence more than the actual thing. Are these really violent people going around? I don’t think so; I think they’re quite normal, when it comes to being violent people or not. It’s part of the cult to make a violent statement, to visually show off something violent, but it’s not a violent culture as I see it.
WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT NORWEGIAN SATANISM?
There is Satanism and occultism in a lot of places in this world, but the reason why the Norwegian Satanism has become so strong and interesting compared to other countries is because it has been so intense. There is sense of a Satanism here that is very judgmental. You have this LaVey sort of thing with enjoying life, but at its best Norwegian Satanism is the total opposite of that. It’s an aesthetic movement with strong beliefs not to enjoy life, but only to dedicate yourself to destroying the church and Christianity. As Ihsahn was talking about, destroy it because it’s weak, because it doesn’t have a right to live anymore, because it’s just good to everybody. It doesn’t have the power to judge anymore. It’s just some sort of social-democratic Christianity, and these people despise that kind of weakness. Satanism in Norway has become strong because it’s a despotic form of Satanism, but that is also why it’s going to fade so fast—because people are not able to live like that for a very long period of time. Also our Christian tradition is moving away from this more despotic side.
HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE SATANISM?
Satanism in its basis is a protest against civilization as such, whether you consider it the Greek or Christian civilization. It is against the fact that you have moral laws: how you should be, what you can’t do, that you can’t kill people, that you are supposed to be nice to people that are different from you, etc.
The Satanists say—to put it brutally—that we are animals. The animal culture is the most important one, and we are losing that part of us. This is broad in the culture today, with the “wild women,” etc., this whole thing of going back to nature. Being part of nature instead of spirit or morals is very strong now.
I think Satanism has been an expression of that, and was one of the earliest things to do so. If you hate somebody, kill them. Just do it, there’s nothing immoral about that. Animals do that. If you hate somebody there’s no reason against doing that.
ISN’T THAT STRIVING TOWARD NATURE AKIN TO THE HEATHEN RELIGION?
The interesting thing about the old Nordic religion is that the current justice system in Norway comes from there. They had written laws, meeting places, judges. Everybody thinks that these people were just living out in nature, but it was just another religious system, with laws, with civilization in a different manner.
This dark aspect of human nature—to kill someone if you don’t like them, to rape someone if you feel like it and to not feel bad about it—goes back much further and is older than the Nordic religion, definitely. They didn’t accept that. They built societies and civilizations on different standards, but the ideal was the same that you have to respect the collective norms and laws of society.
Satanism says something totally different: do what you like to do, don’t ask anybody else what they think about it. Just do what you think is right. That is something different, and if they try to mix that with Nordic traditions, that is very unhistorical—and it becomes extremely explosive because you can take the violent aspects of the Nordic tradition and legitimize it through this new thing. You legitimize it through the symbols of that time, which is totally incorrect, and then use it in our time as an expression of extreme individualism.
That struck me when I was talking to Ihsahn, the symbols he was using of three or four-thousand-year-old Eastern symbols of different religions, and at the same to say that it’s only Norway for me and only the Nordic religion that counts. It’s not rational on that point at all. It doesn’t relate to history as something rational—you just use it.
WHAT DO THINK THE MESSAGE OF SOMEONE LIKE VIKERNES IS?
I should say that I don’t look upon Vikernes as being the most representative of the Satanists in Norway. He is a very special personality; he is not a conformist in any way. If he was a supporter of a football club he wouldn’t wear the same clothing as they do, he would always want to be individualistic toward any trend.
It would be dangerous to define Vikernes as simply a Norwegian Satanist, because I don’t think he is that. He has become a leader or a spokesperson because of his extreme individualism and because he’s so strange as a person. He could be that kind of a leader to very, very many different groups. For him being a Satanist, I think that just may be the most extreme thing going down, to some extent. I would question whether Satanism actually is important for Vikernes.
The leaders are moving in a new direction. The basic Satanism is about to leave and change. I think they will be moving more towards classical occultic things, magic, and so on. There you have the weakness of this movement: you have strong leaders, reflective kinds of people, and they couldn’t stay Satanists for twenty or thirty years. For a reflective person that’s an impossibility. It is very natural that it moves on.
DO YOU THINK VIKERNES IS TRUTHFUL CLAIMING THAT THERE WAS A WHOLE STRATEGY BEHIND THE CHURCH BURNINGS?
I think he’s bragging about his own influence. I don’t think he has been that conscious about his own purpose. That’s an advanced thought which he comes up with afterwards to justify his own intentions. Any intellectual will do that, any person with the ability to reason does that with their own history, because you have the extremely strong need as a thinking person to make meaning of what you have done, and feel that it leads forward to the point where you are standing now. It’s an interesting statement, but I
wouldn’t trust it and I think in five years he will say something different about it again.
VIKERNES HAS NOW TAKEN UP A MILITANT ADVOCACY OF HEATHENISM AS HIS CAUSE.
I think Vikernes has been analyzing our times and thinking, what can we do to achieve something? But I also think that over the years he will find out that for us to go back to the heathen religion is very, very unrealistic. It’s not going to happen if you look at the religious aspect of it. We’re not going to go back to that kind of religious ritual. That is not going to happen.
They have had a very romantic notion about the extremely individualistic aspects of it—and what that does to our society—which is absolutely not accurate. What it’s leading to, as I see it, is just the legitimizing of violence, lawlessness, immoral acts of any kind, and that is going to affect our culture, because a lot of movements and people think it’s good to break the foundation of our society. They are capable of achieving some of that because there are many forces in our time that want to break down Christianity. The Norwegian Labor Party has been doing it for forty years, it’s nothing new! It’s just accelerating. That is what they are going to achieve, to break down culture, but they are not going to get back any of the heathen religion or rituals or anything else that they want to have.
HAS THERE BEEN ANY WIDESPREAD REVIVAL OF INTEREST IN HEATHENISM?
There is general interest in the Nordic religion which has been growing rapidly here over the last five years. Now we have amusement parks with whole areas devoted to just the Norwegian old religion. That’s a big movement in the spiritual life of Norway, much bigger than Satanism.
THE HEATHEN IDEAS OF VIKERNES ARE TIED IN WITH QUITE A STRONG RACIAL BELIEF AS WELL.
Racism, and to legitimize racism, is becoming a big issue in our culture today—definitely the Satanists are doing that too. What they actually do is say it’s okay to hate, it’s a good thing, a natural thing, to hate. That is true, it is natural for human beings to hate.
If you look at Yugoslavia or wherever a war is going down, if you emphasize and legitimize hatred, then you get the brutal aspects of human life, like ethnic cleansing. When you legitimize hatred, then you get killing. You get people not helping each other. It’s rather simple in that way.
They look upon it that we have been false, by saying we can be good or moral. They look upon that as being untruthful to human nature, and that’s correct. The whole Christian project of civilization tries to say that human nature has to be put a little bit to the side—we can’t build civilization if we just base it on human nature. We have to say that human nature is something bad; it’s not just good things. The effect of Satanism today, to legitimize people being evil, to legitimize people hating each other—that cannot and will not help anything. That can’t be good. I understand the motivations for it and the psychological aspects of it, but if they understood anything about the effects of what they are doing, they would stop doing it very fast. It’s because they are naive about the effects of that mentality. I think to legitimize hatred is the most dangerous thing human beings can do, if you look at Hitler or someone similar. That’s what he said—“It’s okay to hate.” It’s okay to hate Jews. And the Serbs say it’s okay to hate the Muslims. When you say that it’s okay to hate someone, then you step over a borderline in your own psyche and everybody knows what happens afterward. It’s not good. I think Satanism in that aspect is definitely evil in any society.
You have to believe that society as such is something very stupid which we should get away from as soon as possible, to think that Satanism can be constructive in any way. It can’t be because it’s not a collective thought at all. It doesn’t have any concern for anything but itself... it’s even worse than America!
ARE THESE SATANISTS IRREDEEMABLE?
I think in a Christian context, I would say that these Satanists are committing sins, that they do sinful actions, but I don’t look upon them completely as sinners. In our culture you have a strong tradition of condemning people, and when they are condemned, then they’re finished—they’re out. They don’t have a chance—it’s not like Catholicism when you can be forgiven for what you’ve done. If you are declared a “Satanist” or “Nazi” in Norway, then you are that for the rest of your life, there’s not a question about it. You will be condemned for the rest of your life. I hate that aspect of our culture, I really think it’s a bad thing, because if we don’t have an opening for forgiveness it becomes very alien to me.
I would say that’s the Church to some extent, but the Satanists do it too, in the way that they condemn people and don’t give them a second chance. That is not a Christian thing. Christianity is forgiveness and mercy, as I look upon it, based on Christian thinking. That you do one thing, but you have a second chance, a third chance, a fourth chance... That’s why I look upon Satanism this way, that there are sinful actions, but there is room for forgiveness within the Church, or there should be room for forgiveness for these people and their sinful actions.
I think that’s very important, the Christian foundation of looking upon them as humans and also people we should listen to instead of just saying these are shitty guys and let’s just freeze them out.
CAN YOU ELABORATE MORE ON THE SPECIFIC REACTION TOWARD THEM BY THE CHURCH AND THE MEDIA?
The Church was definitely shocked and didn’t expect anything like this to happen at all. When it happened, and they found out that there were Satanists behind it, they just condemned it right away and were starting to talk about the Devil, that we must be aware the Devil is always lurking in this world and that he looks for new members all the time, and that this is an act of the Devil. That was the basic Christian reaction from the Bishops.
I think in society when something like that happens it’s a very good opportunity for the media. They like it because they can start a lasting soap opera with strong characters, and these Satanic groups. The media embraced it to a certain extent, and made it really big in Norway. Of course it was big, but I would say that the media capitalized on it, because it was something extreme, new, and specifically Norwegian. For them to sell newspapers, they treat it as extremely as possible. Very early on the media started to define them as total extremists, the same way they might look upon the neo-Nazi movement. They defined them as that right away; then they had them there and they can look upon them like animals doing strange things, and they can report it like something that is very different from the rest of our society. I think it’s untrue to view them that way, but that is the mechanism that the media and society make, because it’s a shock for them. They don’t understand where the Satanists are coming from, they don’t understand what they want, and then they isolate them as a group. But of course that doesn’t help them in any way—it has the opposite effect, that many youngsters find it a taboo and it becomes extremely interesting.
They are resourceful people, many of them—Vikernes is a good example of that, Ihsahn is also an example. Black Metal is not like the neo-Nazis, either, who have a kind of magnetic effect on the weak people, the outsiders. It’s not like that.
WHY DOES BLACK METAL ATTRACT THESE MORE RESOURCEFUL TYPES OF YOUTH?
I think there is a culture in Norway around the collective dream of society. Everything is a collective dream, which is quite reminiscent of the foundation of communism. I think in Ihsahn’s case he didn’t like this at all.
This is something that’s important—individualism in Norway has been held down. That has happened. If you are different in school, or very good for example, or very intelligent, that becomes a problem for you. We don’t accept people with exceptional gifts or anything like that. In England or the U.S., you have schools for these kind of youngsters, you send them somewhere else, and say, “You are different, go over there.” We don’t have that. Everything is supposed to fit in, in a classroom of twenty-five or thirty people. If you are too weak or too healthy, or if you’re too good, you’re supposed to shut up. It’s mediocrity.
Satanism then, for these
people, starts as a purpose against this pattern. It’s the exceptional people who actually feel this the most! People with great resources and intellectual strength who actually feel that the system has been holding them down. They’ve been oppressed because they have special gifts, and that’s true. We have been doing that. We don’t like people like that in Norway. That’s one important aspect in Norwegian society, and because of that when it boils over it becomes very extreme because the hatred toward the mediocrity is so strong that when it breaks free then the results are that much more extreme.
Then they run into what we have with nature. We have a very special relationship to nature, a very close one. And during the Christian period this thing with nature has been suppressed—nature is not good, nature is “evil,” so to speak. Norwegians interact with nature and are very closely connected to it, just due to the way the country itself is formed. So they go to nature and start to get these kinds of powerful emotions and relationships.
Lords of Chaos Page 29