- Jun 26, 2003
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Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death."
-Swinburne, Hymn to Proserpine
Attempts at pagan revivalism are quite common in art. We see one above in the poetry of Swinburne, with the narrator asking Proserpine, following the proclamation of the Christian faith in Rome, to be near (him) now while he laments the passing of the Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day! We see them in the work of the symbolists, from William Butler Yeats immersion in the Cuchulainn cycle of Irish folklore, through to T.S. Eliots castigation of the modern waste land through the mind of Tiresias and the scaffold of the grail quest. We see them too in black metal music, where Enslaved write of Viking mythology dressed in the trappings of the era, and Burzum extols paganism in a mixture of feral Romanticism and Nationalism. Culture, it is posited, is sick; by returning to pre-Christian, pre-capitalist values we may heal it.
Such things stand and fall by their authenticity.
When authentic, heritage is that which structures culture: the roots of wisdom passed into tradition and in time becoming mythology. When inauthentic, heritage is manufactured, present in things, ideals and places separate from the underlying flavour of thinking that once brought them into being. Inauthentic heritage lines the walls of museums. It fills the pages of our history books. It prances on the fields of battle re-enactments. It echoes from our stereos. Culture is not found in ideologies, in isms, in willed codes of behaviour. It is found in the underlying thinking that brings FORTH these things.
Black and death metal are manufactured heritage. They do not approach the mindset of a bygone age but instead seize upon its appearance as a commodity for aesthetic image. The godheads they pay reverence to are false idols, enframed by a modern age as a tool to bring forth ideals. The heritage of black and death metal does not structure the world but stands adjacent to McDonalds, another plastic hammer for the hand of an ideology. Ideals are the crust of thought; not the thinking in itself. Any attempt to fix culture is merely a propagation of its sickness.
Ildjarn alone presents an authentic way of black metal.
-Swinburne, Hymn to Proserpine
Attempts at pagan revivalism are quite common in art. We see one above in the poetry of Swinburne, with the narrator asking Proserpine, following the proclamation of the Christian faith in Rome, to be near (him) now while he laments the passing of the Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day! We see them in the work of the symbolists, from William Butler Yeats immersion in the Cuchulainn cycle of Irish folklore, through to T.S. Eliots castigation of the modern waste land through the mind of Tiresias and the scaffold of the grail quest. We see them too in black metal music, where Enslaved write of Viking mythology dressed in the trappings of the era, and Burzum extols paganism in a mixture of feral Romanticism and Nationalism. Culture, it is posited, is sick; by returning to pre-Christian, pre-capitalist values we may heal it.
Such things stand and fall by their authenticity.
When authentic, heritage is that which structures culture: the roots of wisdom passed into tradition and in time becoming mythology. When inauthentic, heritage is manufactured, present in things, ideals and places separate from the underlying flavour of thinking that once brought them into being. Inauthentic heritage lines the walls of museums. It fills the pages of our history books. It prances on the fields of battle re-enactments. It echoes from our stereos. Culture is not found in ideologies, in isms, in willed codes of behaviour. It is found in the underlying thinking that brings FORTH these things.
Black and death metal are manufactured heritage. They do not approach the mindset of a bygone age but instead seize upon its appearance as a commodity for aesthetic image. The godheads they pay reverence to are false idols, enframed by a modern age as a tool to bring forth ideals. The heritage of black and death metal does not structure the world but stands adjacent to McDonalds, another plastic hammer for the hand of an ideology. Ideals are the crust of thought; not the thinking in itself. Any attempt to fix culture is merely a propagation of its sickness.
Ildjarn alone presents an authentic way of black metal.
