by Darcey Steinke
Norway's Neo-Vikings are on a quest
to end Christ's reign on Earth. Along the way, they're burning medieval
churches, slaughtering their rivals, and playing Black Metal Till the dark gods
return. Darcey Steinke goes to hell and back.
The sky is blanketed by swollen,
gray clouds, Under this leaden bell jar, an hour outside Oslo in the Norwegian
Countryside, lie the remains of Holen Church - just the pink granite foundation
and several piles of charred pine. Among the fire's ruin, burnt pages from
hymnals fly around, chaotic as brown moths. Blacksmith-forged nails lie mingled
with the femurs and yiabiae of ministers buried a hundred years ago beneath the
church's floorboards. Burned to the ground last May, Holen is the most recent
catastrophe in Norway's ongoing national disaster: 22 churches, some dating to
medieval times, destroyed by arson over the last four years.
A little white-haired man kneels at
his wife's gravestone, one of the many that surround the site where the church
once stood. He is weeding the daisies and begonias as he prepares to leave
behind some cut roses in a mayonnaise jar. When I ask who did this , he shakes
his head and speaks in heavily accented English. "The Satanists" he
says wearily.
To the unsuspecting visitor, Norway
is a fairy-tale land of wooden gingerbread houses, lace curtains flapping out
of windows, blue glass bottles on the sills. Fir trees line the fjords, and
just about everyone is blonde, high cheek-boned, and cruelly beautiful. Oslo,
Norway's capital is overrun with pastel apartment buildings, and gift shops
selling troll dolls, replica Viking pendants, and Norwegian reindeer sweaters.
In a stone building downtown, a
lone, neatly dressed junkie out front leans into a nod, the only clue that one
of hell's many chambers looms six flights above. The band Mayhem used to
practice here, in a room framed by a puke-stained carpet below and swastika
flags tacked up overhead. Viking swords and Inverted Crosses hang from the
walls Hellhammer, the only surviving member of Mayhem, Norway's first
Black-Metal Band, pushes videos of Nosferatu and The Satanic Rites Of Dracula
out of the way so he can sink down into a Black Vinyl couch.
Norwegian Black Metal was born in
the late '80's, the product of a unholy union between death-metal churn and
Viking bloodlust. It melts speed metal's thrashing guitars with an ambient
subtext that shows up in everything from darkly symphonic synth to medieval
lute solos. The vocalists tend to sound like the poor little possessed girl in
The Exorcist, screeching and gurgling lyrics about evil powers, Satan, the
nighttime woods, trolls, and Norse Gods. Back then, the members of Mayhem lived
together in the Devil's House-black, with two lofty towers- in a tiny town
called Krakstad. "People there were very superstitious," Hellhammer
recalls, smiling. "When we went into a shop, all the old ladies would run
out. In Sunday School they told the children that our house belonged to the
devil."
Mayhem didn't do much to dispel
that notion. On stage, the lead singer, Dead, wore clothes that he'd buried in
the ground until they were rotten and filled with bugs. He was a tall,
extremely skinny young man with skin so white it was nearly blue. Even During
Rehearsals, Dead wore his "Corpse Paint"- white and black makeup
inspired by the plague. When he was performing, Dead inhaled from a plastic bag
holding a decayed raven. "He needed to get the stench of death before
every song," Hellhammer explains.
Dead, appropriately enough, was the
first to die. In 1991 he committed suicide with a shotgun blast to the head.
"It didn't really surprise me," says Hellhammer. "He was a
strange guy, always talking about BCarpathian castles and the Pophyrians and
how this life is only a dream." His suicide note read, simply,
"Excuse all the blood." Hellhammer and Euronymous, Mayhem's
Guitarist, found Dead dead-legs akimbo, his brain tissue and blood splattered
on the walls and sheets. Euronymous didn't seem to mind the mess at all. In
fact, says Hellhammer, "he took pieces of the brain and made a stew. He
put in ham, frozen vegetables, and paprika. He'd always said he wanted to eat
flesh, so he figured this was an easy way."
Hellhammer is dressed in the
official Black Metal uniform: boots, jeans, a leather jacket; all black. A
Thor's hammer pendant and a pentagram dangle around his neck, but he's more the
playful puck than the dark master. He reassures me that he didn't eat any of
the wicked stew- "I would have puked." A heartbeat later, he
sheepishly admits that he did make a necklace for himself out of skull
fragments he found between Dead's bloody sheets.
Black Metal wasn't always so Black.
In the early '80's, British Bands like Venom considered themselves a musical
component of the horror entertainment industry, and they played out their role
as Satan's cheerleader's with an appropriate sense of camp. But something
happened when Black Metal crossed the North Sea. For Norwegian Black Metal
bands, it's more than just a stage act: They are committed Satanists fighting
to get Christianity out of Norway, and bring back Ancient Pagan ways. They
advocate the revival of ancient Viking practices, for instance, and engaging in
blood feuds and revenge killings. Other bands quickly joined Mayhem on the
Black-Metal scene, including Darkthrone, Immortal, Enslaved, Burzum and
Emperor. Each has put out several records on small labels like Head Not Found
and Euronymous' own Deathlike Silence.
Euronymous was the fat spider in
the Black-Metal web, more interested in being evil than depressed like Dead. He
told Hellhammer he had no feelings; pain, he said, was the same as pleasure for
him. In corpse paint, Euronymous resembled a demonic mesh of Divine and Bela
Lugosi-stout, with long black hair, a pointy devil's beard, and a mustache
waxed so the tips curled around like a pig's tail. His interest chemicals led
him to build an elaborate laboratory in the basement of the black house, filled
with beakers and glass distilling tubes, Bunsen burners and vaporous acids. He
usually went around in a black cape, but in the lab he wore a white
scientists's coat, with gold buttons and a high collar. He spent hours down
there laughing maniacally and mixing illegal chemicals together. An explosion
once caused one of his potions to spill onto his hand. "It flamed up like
a torch," Hellhammer remembers. "Even underwater it just kept burning."
In the early '90's, Euronymous also
owned Hell, a record store in Oslo that served as the Bat cave for the
Black-Metal movement. Members of the self-proclaimed Inner Circle crashed on
mattresses in the basement, moist and dark like a dungeon. Parties at Hell were
legendary: huge, chaotic, candle lit affairs, where devotees wore corpse paint,
black capes, and replicas of Viking gear. Many cut themselves with knives and
broken bottles; particularly inspired groups would go out to desecrate
graveyards, knock down stones, and spray paint pentagrams and the number 666.
Hellhammer remembers people shooting guns into the side wallls; one guy
hammered a nail into his own skull. Euronymous would beat himself with a
bullwhip, causing blood to soak through his shirt in crimson stripes.
From his base at Hell, Euronymous
became a leader of the scene. He often expressed hope that Black Metal would
incite young people to violence; conceiving methods of torture, he held lengthy
lectures on how the pain would scare the victims. "It was an exciting
period," says Samoth, the guitarist for Emperor. "We all hung out and
talked about our hatred for Christianity and how to get the Viking religion
back." All of the Inner Circle dispised Christianity's glorification of
weakness, it's sympathy for the sick and needy. So the Circle devised the idea
of setting fire to the pride and glory of Norway- it's beloved wooden churches.
That would remind the people of Norway that they were all still the children of
Odin.
Fantoft Church was built by Nordic
wood craftsmen in the early medieval era. On it's elaborately carved columns,
the scaly tails of dragons interlocked with snakes and flesh vines. It stood
strong from the 12th Century until it burned to the ground on June 6, 1992.
Another fire claimed Holmenkollen
Chapel, the church King Harald V and the royal family attended. Others soon
followed. In September, Samoth proudly "joined history by burning down a
church." His Black-Metal colleague Count Grisnackh, who had already
participated in the fires at Holmenkollen and Fantoft, went with him to
incinerate Skjold Church in Rogaland. Samoth describes the experience as being
almost holy. "There was a small door under the alter where we poured
several gallons of gasoline, threw a match, and then ran back to the car."
The pair drove all night to get back to Oslo and Hell. "There was a
strange feeling in the car," Samoth tells me in his soft voice, his long,
dark hair almost obscuring his features. "It was stormy, thundering and
raining. We were on a narrow country road with no light except our high
beams."
Count Grishnackh, the sole member
of the band Burzum, has blue eyes that burn as fiercely as heat lighting; a
hairline scar runs down the side of his mouth. Dressed as a Viking dandy in boots,
cloaks, and Nordic breastplates and pendants, he's cold and intense, his
emotions and actions based more on ideology than anything inside his heart.
Grishnackh believes the Inner Circle has every right to use flames and machine
guns to accomplish its ends- after all, didn't Norway's Christian forefathers
destroy pagan idols and chop off the heads of heathens?
Pouring gasoline along the walls of
Fantoft's tarred wood, the Count flicked several matches into the golden
puddles. As he walked away, he turned, and the sight of the flames licking up
toward the tower to the cross made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
He shivered.
After the Count was questioned by
police-and appeared in every Norwegian newspaper in full Viking
regalia-Euronymous predicted that Grishnackh would soon do something even
grander to get his face in the papers. He didn't realize he was forecasting his
own death. Less than two months later, Euronymous' body was found in his
apartment. Grishnackh was charged with his murder.
The Count's presence at his trial
was just as outrageous as the testimony: He wore his hair in pigtails, and
laughed continuously throughout the proceedings. But the facts of the case are
undeniably chilling. On August 10, 1993, the Count and Snorre, the leader of
the band Blackthorn, drove six hours across Norway, from Bergen to Oslo. The
Count carried a copy of a record contact, intended to be the pretext for his
visit to Euronymous' apartment.
Possible ways to kill Euronymous
had been thoroughly discussed. The Count wanted to fell Euronymous with an ax,
but then decided it would look stupid to lug an ax around a neighborhood full
of apartment buildings. Another plan was to get Euronymous to demonstrate
something on his computer, then stab him in the neck while he was sitting with
his back turned. The Count ended up carrying a primitive arsenal- three knives
strapped to his body; an ax, a bayonet, and a baseball bat were stashed in the
trunk of his car.
Euronymous answered the door
wearing only his underwear; according to the Count, he looked weak and tired.
The two began to argue, and Euronymous turned and walked toward the kitchen.
The Count drew his knife and followed. Snorre was waiting on the stairs when he
heard Euronymous scream for help. The door flew open and Euronymous ran at him,
blood streaming in rivulets down his face and shoulders. An autopsy found he
had suffered 23 stab wounds- two to the head, five to the neck, and 16 to the
back.
On the ride back to Bergen,
Grishnackh and Snorre stopped at a lake. The Count took off his clothes and
washed blood out of his hair and off his hands and face. He cleaned his knife
and tied his bloody clothes around a rock, and let them sink into the water.
But he was still exhausted and worried. He'd left the contract in the
apartment, signed with that day's date, and he had forgot to wear his gloves.
He didn't even know if Euronymous was alive or dead.
The next day, Grishnackh was
strangely emboldened. In an almost unimaginable act of hubris, he strutted into
the Voices of Wonder Records office in Oslo, dressed like a Viking warrior,
with breast- and arm-plates and spiked leather gloves, and showed off his
knife. Meanwhile, the police rounded up and questioned more than a hundred
Black Metallers. The scene that had always been so secretive was suddenly
riddled with stool pigeons. People ratted out one another; some even called
anonymously to tell what they knew. Police heard about the Inner Circle feud
and soon discovered that the bloody fingerprints smearing the contact belonged
to the Count.
Everyone in the Black Metal Scene
tells the same story; that they were baptized but never attended church, that
their parents didn't believe in God. Required religion classes in school were
"boring" and "bogus." Teachers made you memorize prayers no
one believed. This attitude is nothing new; Norway's relationship with
Christianity has always been ambivalent. In 995 A.D., Olaf I Tryggvason brought
Christianity, along with plundered gold and silver, to Norway's shores. On gaining
power he ruthlessly enforced the new faith onto the Norwegian people by burning
down pagan temples and offering subjects a choice between baptism and death.
The Lutheran reformation in 1537,
while not as bloody, was equally chaotic. Lutheran ministers sent up from
Germany didn't speak the Norse language, and many were disreputable characters
prone to some disputes over tithes, embezzlement, even rape. Yet Lutheranism is
a somber religion known for its pietistic followers and plain alters. Its main
doctrines hold that it is one's relationship to God, rather than tithes or good
works that will secure a passport into heaven. This leaves Lutherans in an
existential spot, standing alone without the comfort of saints or incense
before a stern Germanic God. In Norway, the Lutheran church is a part of the
state- the government holds the purse strings and appoints bishops, and King
Harald is its official head. Still, only three percent attend church on Sundays
or consider themselves active participants.
"The Satanists are right to
target the hypocrisy of Norway's spiritual life," says Trond Viggo
Torgerson, Norway's commissioner for children's rights. "It's a very
discouraging time in our country. Everyday life is dull and consumer
orientated. Most people would rather have a McDonald's in their community than
a church." Torgersen hopes the fires will serve as a wake-up call, a plea
from young people for more spiritual passion. But when I speak to Bishop
Andreas Aarflot, and ask if the fires might be directed at the state church's
bureaucratic temperament and lack of vitality, he responds with blunt anger.
"These fires have not really affected the religious community. We do not
consider them a challenge of any kind."
At the seminary in Majorstua,
Professor Tormod Engelsviken shakes his head "There is something so
medieval about all this- pagans versus Christians, both sides so literal in
their interpretations." He believes that Norwegians want religion, but
that there exists a spiritual void. "These Viking ideas of blood revenge,
of maintaining honor, of meaningless violence...." The professor sits
back, in front his shelves of theology books. "You must remember that the
Vikings were quite taken with Christianity. Those violent men were transformed
by the message of the New Testament- the idea of humility, of forgiveness, of
the overwhelming power of love."
While out tea steeps, Nebelhexa and
I carry out mugs to her back porch. We sit near a big basket of drying mint
leaves, not far from a rabbit pen and some chickens. Arcane, her black
greyhound, settles regally beside her. Nebelhexa tells me that she has been
involved with Crowleyan magic, chaos magic, even Anton LaVey's Church Of Satan.
"The services are like Christian services but backwards. Nude women are
used as alters, and they have orgies and stomp on blessed communion wafers.
It's silly, really." she adds, tucking a long red hair behind her triply
pierced earlobe. She eventually left the church, fed up with its members'
materialism. "All of them kept urging me to work for a big corporation, to
become a yuppie."
She met Samoth, her husband, while
Emperor was opening for Cradle Of Filth during a European tour. A friend asked
her to dress up like a dominatrix in black leather corset and boots. "I'd
come on stage and whip the lead singer," Nebelhexa laughs. "It was
loads of fun." Their romance quickly flowered. At midnight on the winter
solstice last year, Nebelhexa, in a long, red-velvet dress, and Samoth, in his
Viking fur coat and Thor's Hammer pendant, hiked up a snowy mountain near his
parents' house. Finding a spot surrounded by trees, Samoth used his ritual
heathen knife to cut Nebelhexa's palm, and then she his. "We held them
together and our mingled blood dripped on the white snow." They made promises
to the mighty sky father and all the tree spirits, then exchanged rings that
were engraved with the Norwegian words for Thor Helps.
Nebelhexa prefer her own magic to
any organized religion. She creates potions using herbs, bones, feathers, and
sexual fluids, casting spells to protect her loved ones, and defending herself
from enemies. Recently she's been collecting roots and weaving them together in
an effort to hold together her relationship with her husband, who's serving a
two-year sentence for arson. "Magic is closer to the body- you create your
own harmony. It's not like Christianity, where you beg to some god."
When I bring up the church fires
and Samoth's involvement in them, she appears embarrassed. She's anxious to
impress on me that her husband was strongly influenced by Count Grishnackh.
"The Count is a good talker. He would tell Samoth that by burning down
churches they'd drive the Christians back to the Middle East and become
kings." Another of Grishnackh's plans, she says, was to rape (King
Harald's Sister) Princess Astrid, get her pregnant, and take over the throne.
Nebelhexa shakes her head. "It's a very naive way of thinking but you have
to excuse it, because Samoth was just 17. What can you expect from boys that
don't like their society?" Arcane rises up to growl at a squirrel that's
leapt on the porch. Nebelhexa tells me how all her friends think she's crazy to
get involved with a Satanist who burned down a church. "But they don't know
him. They can't understand that my husband is an honorable Viking man."
I'd been warned by Faust that his
prison was high-security, one of the strictest in Norway, but the flowers and
expansive green lawns surrounding the building make it look more like a mental
hospital. Like everything in Norway, the prison is clean and pretty. A cheerful
female guard walks me through a metal detector; she asks me nicely if I'll
leave my bag in a locker near a glass case displaying ceramic masks made by
inmates, features twisted in combinations of anger and despair.
Faust bursts through the
visiting-room door with the intensity of a fly finally let out of it's glass
cage, wearing camouflage, gray and white, to blend with wintertime woods. Even
with his broad shoulders, Faust has the same childhood grasp on reality I
noticed in Hellhammer, but he's less good natured, more like the cruel little
boys in Lord Of The Flies.
Rocking his chair back against the
cement wall, he tells how he's always been fascinated with murder, collecting books,
magazines, and T-shirts relating to serial killers. When Faust moved from his
small village to work at Hell, his interest in violence intensified. He began
to crease an entire moral universe based on the precepts of Black Metal.
"I started thinking about macro- and micro-cosmoses and comparing human
life to dust on a far-off planet in a far-off galaxy in the middle of nowhere.
I made human life valueless."
In August 1992, while Faust was
checking out the newly completed Olympic Park at Lillehammer, a man approached
him and suggested they go together in the woods. "I hadn't been drinking
or anything. I just very calmly decided to end this man's life. Maybe my
subconscious was telling me that because he is gay I had that right."
Faust agreed and followed him into the deep forest. As the man came forward to
embrace him, Faust sunk a knife into his gut and yanked up. " He was
screaming 'No!' but I just went berserk stabbing him over and over. Once he was
down and the light had gone down out of his eyes, I kicked him to make sure he
was dead. Then I walked home with a completely empty head, like a zombie."
Two days after the murder, Count
Grishnackh, Euronymous, and Faust drove up to Holmenkollen Chapel, near the
Olympic ski jump. It was to be a symbolic act of catharsis for Faust. At first
they placed a homemade bomb onto the alter, but when that refused to detonate,
they piled hymnals and Bibles onto the alter, poured gasoline over them, and
lit a match. "We rode up the mountain to watch it burn. It was very
beautiful and exciting-when we got back to the record store we could hardly
sleep."
After his crime spree, Faust
checked the papers every day, but after a few weeks there was nothing more
about the murder. "As time passed," he says, "I almost forgot I
was a killer." It wasn't until Euronymous' murder that Faust was figured
and picked up. He was tried and convicted of manslaughter, and is now serving a
14 year sentence. He might regret getting caught, be he shows little remorse
for the murder. One should live by the sword, he decrees; society must return
to a natural order of survival by strength. He sees himself as not a criminal
but as a revolutionary in exile. Faust's favorite writer, Bret Easton Ellis,
exemplifies for him the truth about human beings' natural animosity to one
another. "In American Psycho he gets it down perfectly," Faust tells
me enthusiastically." One minute you're looking at a man's clothes and the
next you're sticking a knife in his eye."
Where Faust turned his Black-Metal
murder fantasy into evil reality, Ihsahn, the lead singer for Emperor- and its
only member not in jail- understands the power of metaphor. In his tailored
black pants and silk shirt, his dyed hair in a braid down his back, he's an
Armani vampire. The dark prince wears eyeliner and a touch of white powder; the
faint purple circles under his eyes give me a feeling that he tends to wander
in the woods long after dark.
When I ask why he didn't go with
Samoth and Grishnackh the night they burned down Skjold church, he explains
that he wasn't home when they looked for him but that he definitely would have
joined in. Christianity, he believes, is for people who live in the desert and
wear sandals. "It wastes love," he says. "In Norway, like in the
U.S., if you're weak everybody supports you. There are special centers, 12-step
programs. Everything is for the weak. Everything caters to people who are
failures. There is too much pity."
Runhold, Ihsahn's girlfriend and co
founder of the Black Metal Fanzine Descent, agrees. "None of the Gods in
Norse mythology are weak like Jesus is weak," she tells me. Runhild is
studying biotechnology; notes from her morning class are written on her hand.
She's wearing a long, black-silk dress and a necklace made from raven's feet, a
"love present" from an old boyfriend. She has always had a
fascination with death. At 13 she wrote a school newspaper on burial rituals,
and as a kid slept with her hands folded over her chest. Her obsession with
death, she feels, comes from being fearless. "Most pop music plays on
weakness, but Black Metal people don't believe in sacrificing yourself for
others the way Jesus did. They are strong enough to live by the sword."
Ihsahn believes the vampire to be
the perfect symbol of the Satanic. "Dracula feeds on others but feels
passion for just a few," he explains. He also sees similarities between
the vampire and the Viking. "The Viking went out and took what he needed,
violently and with much bloodshed; he fed on others just like a vampire."
As I prod Ihsahn about Black Metal's fascist tendencies, about the Holocaust,
about how weakness is an innate quality in even the strongest human, the
vampire grows testy. "Look," he says, sounding much like Lestat,
wearied by weaker creatures who lack bloodthirst and courage. "You'll
never understand me because you sit in the audience at a horror movie. I'm up
on the screen."
In Norwegian folklore, tongues of flame flicker up from the footprints
of Viking kings. Giant brown bears make their winter lairs on church alters. Flies
crawl out of the mouths of every dreamer, and fairies give babies honey cakes. Like
naughty children, Black Metal's true believers blur the line between fantasy
and reality, the seen and unseen, play- evil and real evil. And in this
superficially Christian country, where ruddy-faced blond kids glide down slopes
of perfect snow against hand-painted skis, is it any wonder Black Metal would
explode? It exposes the dark side, the deep melancholy and endless winter
nights, of the Norwegian soul.
Black Metal continues to stun
idyllic Norway with heathen ideology and terrorist acts. Last spring, Bishop
Aarflot recommended that every church in Norway post guards at its gates on
June 6 at six A.M., explaining that "666 is the most important number for
Satanists and that all churches would be vulnerable at this time."
Churches continue to be targets for arsonists, but no one I talk to is exactly
sure who is now setting the fires. "It's 13- and 14-year-old Black-Metal
kids who live out in the middle of nowhere," Faust tells me. "I'm
glad they're keeping it up. It means the torch has been passed, that the fire
still burns."
Count Grishnackh, Norway's most
notorious criminal, is now a media celebrity with a cult following-he receives
more than a hundred fan letters a week. In a recent interview from his cell in
Ila prison outside Oslo, the Count said he no longer wanted to be associated
with Black Metal. He's now strictly a neo-Nazi, an ideology he hopes to promote
through an organization called the Norwegian Heathen Front. A photograph from
his prison reveals that his dyed black hair has grown back to its organic
Scandinavian blond, but the hypnotic blue eyes haven't changed, Son of Odin,
pagan prince of the far North, the Count bides his time reading books on Nordic
history and the occult. He plans to use the postal system and computer lines to
influence young people before they're brainwashed by christian society. With
his guidance, he predicts, the heathened youth will bring about the new pagan
era by any means necessary- Helter Skelter, Viking style.