Cover image photograph used with kind permission of Vordb,

shot by A.D. Copyright © 1993, Vordb.

© 2015 – Mimesis International

www.mimesisinternational.com
e-mail: info@mimesisinternational.com
Book series: Music, n. 2
isbn 9788869770364
© MIM Edizioni Srl
P.I. C.F. 02419370305
 INTRODUCTION

Mystical Black Metal eory

Come to the cryptic tombs, hear their call.
– Inquisition, ‘Strike of the Morning Star’, Nefarious Dismal Orations
(2007)

Quand’ io mi volsi, tu passati ‘l punto | al qual si traggon d’ogne

parte i pesi. [When I turned myself you passed the point to which
all weights are drawn from every part].
– Dante, Inferno XXXIV. 110–1

Pondus meum amor meus. [My weight is my love]

– Augustine, Confessions

Black metal theory is an amorphous ‘metallectual’ movement which was

initiated in 2009 with the symposium Hideous Gnosis.1 As stated on its
inaugural website, black metal theory attempts to creatively destroy the
boundary between metal and theory, to make something new in the space
of their shared negativity: ‘Not black metal. Not theory. Not not black
metal. Not not theory. Black metal theory. eoretical blackening of metal.
Metallic blackening of theory. Mutual blackening. Nigredo in the
intoxological crucible of symposia’.2 Since the rst symposium, black metal
theory has developed in the form of a distributed and vexed forum for
transdisciplinary intellectual work on black metal and related subjects.3 is
volume brings together the authors’ earlier and newer work on black metal
theory focusing on mysticism, a domain of thought and experience with
deep and essential connections both to the black metal genre and to theory
(theoria = vision, contemplation). More than a topic for black metal theory,
the mystical is here explored in continuity with the intersection of black
metal and theory. Accordingly, the volume spans two kinds of writing: 1)
theoretical essays on black metal; and 2) essays and interviews about black
metal theory. Within this framework, the book is less a heterogeneous
assemblage than a forward-looking retrospective synthesis which reveals a
constellation of inherently related principles. e reader is advised to look
on this collection as a multiform gesture pointing both from and towards
what black metal theory might be, rather than an exempli cation of what
black metal theory is. Our intention is not to erect an edi ce, but to break
ground, as for a crypt. What matters above all is the exploration of a
number of principles which the authors consider essential to black metal
theory and which have become clearer in the organization of this volume.
ese principles, outlined below by means of a circuitous archaeology, go to
de ne black metal theory as the ‘ oating tomb’ wherein black metal
levitates into the visionary experience, both a ective and intellectual, that it
already is.
e visionary concept of a oating tomb is here drawn simultaneously
from the music of Inquisition and from the medieval Christian motif, as
found in legends of Muhammad and omas the Apostle. Overall, the
motif pertains to the doubly inversive movement of mystical will wherein
spiritual ascent into the divine coincides with the death of God, as
expressed in a couplet by Angelus Silesius: ‘Love like a magnet is, it draws
me into God, | And what is greater still, it pulls God into death’.4 In the
cosmo-mystical oeuvre of Inquisition, the oating tomb emerges as an
explicitly obscure form, an ‘esoteric oating tomb’5 wherein inner spiritual
movement is blackly fused with the force of the cosmos itself as a space of
mystical death and ight. In one sense, the oating tomb gures the space
of mystical death (mors mystica) that is found in the extremity of perfect,
self-annihilating sorrow. is is the ‘solitary death’ of which Inquisition, in
tune with the medieval tradition of a ective Dionysian or apophatic
mysticism,6 sings:

Night of the black sorrowfull moaning winds blowing.

rough these melancholic woods how I feel so dead here,
Sad and cold as I hear crypt sounds of moan.
Only thought of sorrow bring me down to the pits of bottomless black.
In this endless extreme tomb of weeping sadness,
I am embraced by the cosmic force of night.7
 To this black metal night we may compare the ‘dark night of the soul’
described by John of the Cross, the night which ‘engulfs souls in its secret
abyss’ and causes them ‘to feel that they have been led into a remarkably
deep and vast wilderness unattainable by any human creature’.8 And like
the ‘perfect sorrow’ of e Cloud of Unknowing, which ‘ravishes a man from
all knowing and feeling of his being’,9 Inquisition’s ‘endless extreme tomb of
weeping sadness’ evokes a mystical death-by-sorrow in the sense of an
overpowering negativity of individual will that cryptically opens into the
dark in nity of cosmic forces, the will within and beyond the universe
itself.10 us, the oating tomb is that portal of solitary death wherein
solitude also dies in the embrace of the beyond, a sepulchre oating at
sorrow’s abyss-summit, the paradoxical nadir where the heaviest weight of
being swallowed into ‘the pits of bottomless black’ inconceivably levitates by
its own gravity into the night of mystical union, the ‘guiding night’ or Night
of Power: ‘Wings ock to my crypt, I y to my throne’.11 At the same time,
Inquisition’s oating tomb willfully re-exposes the spiritual night of
medieval mysticism to the black vastness of the modern, scienti cally
known universe, reopening in turn its dark, gnostic dimensions, in keeping
with the ancient view of the cosmos as a cavern or crypt, a literally mystical
or hidden place (Latin crypta, ‘vault’, ‘cavern’, from PIE krau-, ‘to conceal,
hide’).12 In ‘Force of the Floating Tomb’, the invocational opening of
Obscure Verses for e Multiverse, the tomb’s force is identi ed with
gravitation as a godly power, a cosmic might that black metal unleashes in
the sacri cial mode of a raised chalice:

Moons of titans, dead black sphere

Lord of skies, silent altar
Esoteric oating tomb
Like a shroud of the heavens
In the shadows of its craters
On the mountains of its ruins
Solar rays carve its valleys
Endless graves reign in caves
Raise the Chalice!
Strong as lightning is the force
 Gravitation … force of gods
Invocation of its mass
As a spirit oats and mourns
Raise the chalice!13

e chalice, ritual symbol of spiritual ow between earthly and heavenly

spheres, and more speci cally, the elevation of the lower via receptivity to
the higher,14 is the vessel of black metal itself raised to the multiverse, the
levitation of its metal art into visionary experience or theory of the hyper-
majestic universal blackness. Now the oating tomb takes on the sense of
both the whole apparent universe, the ‘dead black sphere’ which is both
womb and grave of this transient life, and one’s spiritual resurrection from
that heaviest of facts, a resurrection by means of the will that musically
realizes its continuity with ancient, titanic cosmic forces. As the expression
of mystical will, pointedly de ned by Bataille as the desire ‘to be everything
[tout]’,15 black metal analogously operates as a tomb- oating art in a
temporal and historical sense, elevating the dead metaphysical premodern
cosmos into the dark space of modernity, levitating into presence the old
mysteries by the occult magnetism of its sonic and imaginal force. Crucially,
black metal does so in an authentic or self-doing (auto-entes) way,
resurrecting the mystical universe without revival, in a manner that
maintains its spiritual essence in the non-mediating immediacy of self-
indicating gesture. e live will of black metal, raising the chalice of itself, is
the palpable invisible pole around which it turns, without return, ancient
into new. As Dagon says, when asked about the source of Inquisition’s
inspiration, ‘ e simple notion that my spirit is as ancient as time itself, I
am here in “modern times” but my spirit is very old therefore my
inspiration is old and cryptic’.16 Following the satanic refusal of the apparent
secondariness of individual being (createdness, epiphenomenality,
givenness, historicity, and so forth), black metal creates from the weight of
dead forms a counter gravity that draws one, inwardly and outwardly, into
the living presence of unlimited reality.17 ‘ ought and the Real touch only
in black, the color of vision itself’.18 Likewise, black metal is theory in the
sense of a ective-intellectual experience that reveals by re-veiling
everything in its own obscurity. As Inquisition make clear, the tomb it oats
is you:

Black Metal is about chanting to the occult forces of nature, our spirit,
our universe without believing any one single man made god no matter
how convincing they want to appear to be. We do not close our third eye
and simply believe. On the contrary we want to learn more, seek more to
nd the secrets that the cosmic veil hides from us or maybe even those
who do know hide from us. […] ese songs are the rituals of obscure
verses, songs to carry you into a journey of thought and re ect while the
hymns of Black Metal enshroud you, obscuring your surroundings
allowing you to see further into your own cosmos and the one that
surrounds you.19

More cryptically, Inquisition’s oating tomb evokes a medieval Christian

motif with deep thematic resonances to black metal as a Satano-Petrine
musical art of religious inversion, mystical profanation, and spiritual
suspension.20 Recasting antique examples of magnetically oating pagan
idols, the medieval legend of Muhammad’s tomb maintained that the
remains of the Prophet were venerated at Mecca in a metal tomb held in
the air by opposed forces of magnets.21 In the Liber Nycholay, a thirteenth-
century anti-Islamic life of Muhammad which follows in the tradition of
portraying him as a schismatic and apostate Christian, the tomb is described
as follows:

en they made a tomb [arcam] covered in gold and placed the foot [of
Muhammad] inside, anointed with balsam and wrapped with spices […]
All Saracens make pilgrimage to Mecca and venerate there the foot in the
tomb, the foot of Muhammad. Truly, the ark is held suspended in the air
and is drawn by three great stone magnets hanging above it on chains, for
the ark is not covered with gold in the part where the magnets in uence
it from above. Many simple-minded Saracens believe that this is made to
occur not arti cially, but by a greater power. […] Just as Christians believe
the Roman pope to be the vicar of Jesus Christ, so the Saracens believe
the caliph of Baghdad to be a vicar. And as Christian believe Jesus Christ
 to be the son of God, so the Saracens believe Muhammad to be the
messenger and prophet of the Most High Creator and to be saved
through him before God.22

e ideological signi cance of the legend operates through a mimetic

inversion typical of this polemical tradition, whereby the similarities of
Islam to Christianity only betray the former’s inherent falseness and
fraudulence. As Akbari observes, the legend ‘describe[s] the oating tomb
of Muhammad, suspended in a parodic imitation of the true bodily ascent
of Christ. is tomb, lled with the bones of the pseudo-prophet, is a carnal
imitation of the divinely empty Holy Sepulchre; its apparently miraculous
weightlessness is no manifestation of divinity, but simply a deceptive trick’.23
At the same time, just as the legend expresses ‘both an e ort to understand
the other in the shape of the known and a willful distortion of the other in
order to demonize him’,24 so does the shi ing point of similitude around
which its parodic inversion turns expose religious identity to the double
spectre of relative truth and falsehood. Muhammad’s oating tomb haunts
Christianity with the falseness of Islam and it haunts Islam with the truth
of Christianity. e inversion of parody also suspends, so that the gure of
the oating tomb, beyond the shiny ideological surface, carries its own form
of magnetic force, one that can neither be ignored nor decided. In one
direction, it pulls towards understanding the corruptibility and contingency,
if not outright falseness, of all religious traditions. In the other direction, it
pulls towards understanding the spiritual universality of their truth, the
divine reality to which any religion can at most only point.
Black metal, on the whole, follows a parallel design, doing to modern
Christianity what medieval Christianity does to Islam, profaning its
adversary in a manner that a rms yet also obscures the grounds of its own
authority. In fact, the emerging genre of anti-Islamic black metal nds itself
recapitulating Western medieval views, cursing Muhammad as ‘false
prophet’ and so forth.25 e oating metal tomb of Muhammad, a medieval
relic insulting to modern Christian and Islamic sensibilities, is thus a t
analog to black metal’s blasphemous force, originally created-preserved-
destroyed using low- delity—or better, in- delity—magnetic tape recorders
to manifest the classic ‘necro’ sound aesthetically associated with
entombment and decay.26 Furthermore, the oating tomb intersects directly
with Lucifer-Satan, both in connection to popular Christian views of the
prophet of Allah as the Devil’s servant or devil incarnate and in relation to
Satan’s medieval cosmic position, xed by his fall from Heaven at the lowest
place of everything, at the center of the earth, as per Dante’s Inferno.27 e
gravitational bond between the pseudo-prophet’s gilt black metal tomb and
the earth’s oating iron center is su ciently strong for the former to be
illustrated with the latter by the twel h-century philosopher William of
Conches: ‘a similar antagonism of forces draws [the earth] to the front and
the back, to the right and the le , as we have heard of the tomb of
Mahomet, which, being of iron, is sustained on every side by a magnet’.28
Indeed the eenth-century pilgrimage narrative of the Dominican
theologian Felix Fabri, burying the legend so as to preserve its truth,
describes the telluric hyper-crypting of the prophet’s tomb, in recapitulation
of Lucifer’s fall from heaven to earth, by means of a divine storm:

Many marvels are told of this prodigious sepulchre of Mahomet […]

But we have heard a truthful and certain tale, that in the year of our Lord
1480, there came on a sudden and terrible storm, sent, doubtless, by
Divine providence. Lightning ashed, dread thunder resounded, re
came down from heaven, and great hailstones fell upon Mecca, and drove
the temple and tomb of that accursed seducer deep into the earth, or
rather into hell, so that these a er it could not by any means or pains be
found again. A great part of the temple also fell, consumed by re, and
thus the Saracens have been deprived of the relics and body of their false
prophet, and utterly put to confusion, had they but minds to understand
it.29

Such ignorant confusion, at best ambivalently conscious of itself, is like a

negative image of the (non)apostasy of the Christian who ‘[has] himself
circumcised, or […] worship[s] at the tomb of Mahomet’, acts which
according to omas Aquinas signify but do not constitute or prove
unbelief per se, the essence of which resides rst in the heart.30 e true
evidence of unbelief, argues Aquinas, is not the performance or non-
performance of religious acts, but an internal and external discord that
necessarily follows upon the absence of faith as spiritual life-force:

just as when the life of the body is taken away, man’s every member and
part loses its due disposition, so when the life of justice, which is by faith,
is done away, disorder appears in all his members. First, in his mouth,
whereby chie y his mind stands revealed; secondly, in his eyes; thirdly, in
the instrument of movement; fourthly, in his will, which tends to evil. e
result is that ‘he sows discord’, endeavoring to sever others from the faith
even as he severed himself.31

For Dante, this apostatic state of inner and outer discord is exempli ed by
Muhammad, whom the pilgrim sees in the ninth bolgia of Hell, split down
the middle, speaking these self-indicating words: ‘Now see how I rend
myself, see how mangled is Mohammed!’32 Yet this discordant state is also
one through which the pilgrim must spiritually pass, a stage of the
concentric living hell which is the only way to the summit of Paradise.
Likewise, as Akbari acutely observes, the Dantean spiritual passage through
the center of Earth, the oating tomb of Satan, is de ned by an absolute
negative ambivalence of life and death, a suspension that at once enters
and inverses the magnetic direction of Muhammad’s tomb:

Like the suspended tomb of Muhammad […] the body of Satan is at ‘the
point to which all weights are drawn [traggon]’ (Inf. 34.111). e physics,
in each case, are opposite: the magnetic weights pull on the suspended
tomb, while the heavy matter pushes on the suspended gure of Satan. In
both cases, however, the result is suspension, an in-between state
mirrored in the narrator’s own state of being: at the sight of Satan, he
says, ‘I did not die and I did not remain alive … deprived alike of death
and life’ […] (Inf. 34.25, 27).33

In short, one enters and exits the oating tomb only by becoming the
tomb itself, via a movement that passes though the moment of non-
di erence between heaviness and lightness, gravity and ight. Only thus
does one arrive mysteriously beyond oneself, upon the other side of Hell,
where the question may be actually asked, as if of one’s now dead former
self, ‘Where is the ice? And he there, how is it that he is xed thus upside
down?’34 Correlatively, black metal venerates the blasphemous oating
tomb of itself, sonically sowing states of spiritual discord which hold open,
like the self-dilating wound of Inferno’s damned prophet, the space where
truth and falsehood, life and death, are plunged into impossibly mutual
negativity. Lodged in inversion, the cult of black metal performs
sacrilegious pilgrimage to the ‘originary blasphemy’ of religion itself, the
sacri cial crux which embodies, in the iconic ambivalent form of the
inverted satanic/Petrine cross, not only ‘the overturning of Christianity, but
also a mimesis of Christian self-desecration’.35 e blasphemous tomb of
black metal oats by sinking into the cryptic heart of spiritual suspension:
‘Forsaking ascension and mining a path towards the centre of the earth,
black metal nds a satanic stain lodged at the core of being’.36
To envision black metal on the model of the oating tomb thus also serves
to recognize the inversive mystical potentiality of its satanic stance. For as
the temporal Christian church is properly founded on the ‘rock’ of the
upside-downly cruci ed apostle who thrice denies Jesus (Matt. 16:18,
26:75), so does mysticism desperately overturn the order of creation
towards the impossible-inevitable point of eternal individual union with
God. Whence Meister Eckhart’s famously atheological prayer, voiced from
the position of a superessential self higher than both Creator and creation:

To preserve place is to preserve distinction. erefore I pray God to

make me free of God, for my essential being is above God […] For in that
essence of God in which God is above being and distinction, there I was
myself and knew myself so as to make this man. erefore I am my own
cause […] If I were not, God would not be either. I am the cause of God’s
being God: if I were not, then God would not be God. But you do not
need to know this.37

To this we may compare the words of Ahab in Moby Dick: ‘I own thy
speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will
dispute the unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the
personi ed impersonal, a personality stands here’.38 As the anti-cosmic
stance of the black metal art is historically inseparable from the modern
satanic hero—‘Black Metal is Romanticism’s uncanny double’39—so is black
metal’s spiritual impetus more deeply rooted in its premodern seed: the
heretical tendency of medieval mysticism—typi ed by the fourteenth-
century Free Spirit heresy with which Meister Eckhart was associated—
towards autotheism, antinomianism, and anticlericalism, all of which serve
the individual insistence upon divine union or spiritual birth (theosis, God-
realization) in this life, a union o en expressed in erotic terms: ‘He can
hardly wait for you to open up. He longs for you a thousand times more
than you long for Him: the opening and the entering are a single act’.40
Refusing the createdness or born-ness of individual being, the mystic from
this perspective is the one whose desperate will for divinity nds itself in
con icted amorous antagonism with religion as the means to
God/Truth/Reality.41 Caught, on the one hand, within the di erence
between way and goal, and on the other, within the di erence between the
will’s highest form (love) and its lowest form (lust), mystical desire su ers in
the tension between two intersecting opposed double imperatives: fuck
religion, love God; love religion, fuck God – to put it profanely. e
characteristic desperation and insistence of the mystic is found within this
tensional situation of opposing forces, according to which one spiritually
endures, intellectually and a ectively, via both head and heart, the fact of
being as groundlessly inverted, like the Hanged Man of the tarot: ‘Two
things characterise the state of the spiritual man: that he is suspended and
that he is upside down’.42 From this inverted perspective, the view of a
walking ‘dead man’ on the wayless way to mystical death, it seems
overwhelmingly that: 1) what must be, will never be, and 2) what actually
is, cannot be.43 Whence the radical dark refusal lurking within mystical
desire, which far more than only longing for God, feels bound to force itself
upon divinity, to do something desperate, in order to die to the limitation
of itself. In the Christian tradition, this is known as the ‘violence of charity’,
according to which the lover of God, as if turned to madness, is driven even
‘to spurn true life, to reject the highest wisdom, and to resist omnipotence’.44
Correlatively, the sorrower in e Cloud of Unknowing irts treacherously
with spiritual despair, going ‘nearly insane for sorrow, to such a degree that
he weeps, wails, quarrels, damns, and curses […] desir[ing] unceasingly to
lack the knowing and feeling of his own being’.45 is is the esoteric
signi cance of the satanic principle of non serviam, the mystical meaning of
‘th’ Apostate Angel […] | Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair’ in
Milton’s Paradise Lost.46 And in the Hindu tradition, this is known as the
‘tamas of bhakti’ or dark resistance of divine love, through which one insists
– to the death – that this birth will be one’s last: ‘A Devotee: “How can one
realize God?” MASTER: “ rough that kind of love. But one must force
one’s demand on God. One should be able to say: ‘O God, wilt ou not
reveal yself to me? I will cut my throat with a knife. is is the tamas of
bhakti’”’.47 Tamas literally means ‘darkness’ and is the most negative of the
three gunas (fundamental qualities), being a liated with ignorance,
resistance, disorder, violence, inertia, negativity, and the like.48 As it says in
the Bhagavad Gita, ‘Understanding is tamasic | when, thickly covered in
darkness, | it imagines that wrong is right | and sees the world upside
down’.49
By obscure coincidence, tamas coincides in sound and sense (PIE temo-,
dark; Aramaic te’oma, twin; Hebrew tehom, abyss) with omas the
Apostle, the other gure with whom the oating tomb motif was a liated
during the Middle Ages. ‘Now omas, one of the twelve, called the Twin,
was not with them when Jesus came’ (John 20:24). According to omas
Aquinas, the absent apostle gures the dark spiritual depth of doubt and
unbelief, the profound lack, which the depth of divine love and presence
alone lls:

e disciple who was absent is rst identi ed by his name, omas,

which means a ‘twin’ or an ‘abyss’. An abyss has both depth and darkness.
And omas was an abyss on account of the darkness of his disbelief, of
which he was the cause. Again, there is an abyss – the depths of Christ’s
compassion – which he had for omas. We read: ‘Abyss calls to abyss’ [Ps
42:7]. at is, the depths of Christ’s compassion calls to the depths of
darkness [of disbelief ] in omas, and omas’ abyss of unwillingness [to
believe] calls out, when he professes the faith, to the depths of Christ.50

Like a cryptic echo of Zurvanism, according to which the gods of light and
darkness are twins born from a moment of doubt in the most original
divine abyss,51 doubting omas, absently present at the resurrected Jesus’s
rst appearance to the Apostles, is found in the non-canonical Christian
scriptures as ‘as a Gnostic saint, Jesus’ dark twin brother, who begins by
doubting him but ends up believing in him precisely without touching
him’.52 at Christian tradition has seen omas as touching Christ’s risen
body in light of Jesus’s invitation to do so (John 20:27), despite the fact that
the Gospel text neither says that he did nor says that he did not, ironically
resembles the Gnostic view by inverting it, believing without the ‘touch’ of
sight, as per Jesus’s words to the believing omas: ‘Have you believed
because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet
believe’ (John 20:28). And yet this general religious belief, that omas
touched Jesus, is precisely the kind of rei cation and reduction of faith
from a mode of vision to a mode of blind assent that the episode obviously
points away from. To have faith is not to believe in this or that event, in this
case that omas placed his hand ‘in my side’ (John 20:27), but to live ‘by
seeing him who is invisible’ (Hebrews 11: 27) and thus spiritually touch the
divine reality lying beyond and within materiality, the truth that is too real
for the corporeality of the human nger to feel. In these terms, the gure of
doubting omas indexes the mystical domain of apophatic knowledge,
knowing the divine via negation and unknowing, not only as a speculative
or theoretic process, but as the very means of realizing what the individual
soul really wants, that is, to touch God, to unveil the eternal truth in the
terms of presence, to realize its own divine nature immediately: ‘O that you
would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!’ (Song of Songs 1:1). Yet how
else may the unknown be touched than through the known? How does the
soul touch God except through touching itself ? In contact with the twin
auto-a ectivity of touch and apophasis, the apocryphal Book of omas the
Contender represents omas as one whose self-knowledge, as if impossibly
mediated by uncanny corporeal likeness, is obscurely identical to
knowledge of the universal truth:

e secret words that the savior spoke to Judas omas […] e savior
said, ‘[…] Now, since it has been said that you are my twin and true
companion, examine yourself, and learn who you are, in what way you
exist, and how you will come to be. Since you will be called my brother, it
 is not tting that you be ignorant of yourself. And I know that you have
understood, because you had already understood that I am the
knowledge of the truth. So while you accompany me, although you are
uncomprehending, you have (in fact) already come to know, and you will
be called ‘the one who knows himself ’. For he who has not known himself
has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same time
already achieved knowledge about the depth of the all. So then, you, my
brother omas, have beheld what is obscure to men, that is, what they
ignorantly stumble against’.53

Divine knowledge, gnosis, is here de ned as a self-knowing illuminated in

unknowing, through a knowledge that does not know that it knows, just as
real love does not know that it loves, feeling that that it is ever far from
loving su ciently.54 Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century beguine whose
writings may have in uenced the Free Spirit heresy, calls this the ‘noble
unfaith’ of spiritual love: ‘So high is this unfaith that it continually fears
either that it does not love enough, or that it is not enough loved’.55 In
similar terms, omas gures the individual or soul not only as a twin abyss
of God, a depth that God alone can satisfy (as per Aquinas’s commentary
above), but as an abyssic twinness, an identity whose likeness to God is
unfathomable. On this model, omas embodies the di cult, rationally
inassimilable, and seemingly insuperable a lial relation between divinity
and humanity, as well as the inner depth of the mystical subject who, like
Angela of Foligno, touches God in the in nite intimacy of a ‘divine abyss’
about which one may speak only blasphemously:

It seems that whatever I say about it is blasphemy […] When I am in

that darkness I do not remember anything about anything human, or the
God-man, or anything which has a form. Nevertheless, I see all and I see
nothing. As what I have spoken of withdraws and stays with me, I see the
God-man. He draws my soul with great gentleness and he sometimes says
to me: ‘You are I and I am you’.56

at Angela – at least until the God-man appears – might be describing

the experience of listening to black metal, an art whose status as a possible
object of discourse is similarly vexed, should alert us to how obscurely yet
deeply its tamasic darkness, like omas, seeks to touch the divinity it
cannot – and cannot not – touch. ‘Rise thy horns | For I’m at one with the
dark | Divine presence ascends | Touching the forehead ov god’.57
As if in complicity with the mystical meanings of the oating tomb we
have been exploring, the late twel h-century Account of Elysaeus, an
adaptation of the Letter of Prester John which describes an Eastern Christian
kingdom bordering the earthly paradise, applies the motif to the tomb of St.
omas. at the motif, already associated with Muhammad since the
Historia de Muhamete of Hildebert of Tours (1055–1133), would be tied to
omas is striking. Beyond the generic fantastical orientalism, it suggests
the possibility of a more signi cant and obscure intersection between the
legendary gure of the apostate prophet and the dubious Apostle to India.
As the omas shadows Jesus with the profound abyss of inner doubt,
Muhammad shadows the Messiah with idolatrous and monumental
in delity. Where Muhammad embodies, in the medieval Christian
imagination, the very worst and lowest aspects of the tamasic spiritual
nature, to the point of being identi ed with Antichrist and the number of
the beast (666),58 omas embodies the best and highest aspects of tamas,
the luminous darkness of illumination and uncompromising spiritual zeal,
like the sword of truth which uni es by dividing (Matthew 10:34): ‘ omas
[…] comes from thomos, which means dividing or separating. […] He is
called dividing or separating because he separated his heart from the love
of the world. […] Or again, omas comes from totus means, a total
wanderer, one who is wholly outside himself in the love and contemplation
of God’.59 Where Muhammad’s unchristian tomb is a Middle Eastern object
of anxious scorn – ‘Hec est Arabia Magna in qua est Mecha ciuitas ubi est
sepultura detestabilis Machumeti’ [Here is Greater Arabia, where Mecca is,
the city in which the detestable Muhammad is entombed], as it says on one
eenth-century map – omas’s tomb is an object of Far Eastern Christian
fantasy.60 Yet, if we allow that medieval Christianity, despite its orthodox
nondual theodicy, still communicates against itself a sense of the divine
play between good and evil as twin principles, we may also understand
how the inexistent oating tombs of these two gures blackly intersect in a
truer way. As Meher Baba said, in connection to perhaps the most vili ed
person of the twentieth century, ‘ is war is a big drama. ere is the hero,
heroine, villain all playing their parts in the drama. It is not Hitler’s fault if
he is playing the villain in God’s drama. It’s good he is acting his part well. I
like villains, heroes, angels, devils – anyone who acts their parts perfectly!’61
A parallel dimension of play between mortally opposed forces is seen in the
legend of omas’s mission to India, rst, in the coincidentia oppositorum
between personal and divine will concerning the journey in the rst place:

‘Lord, send me anywhere you wish except India’. God replied: ‘Go in
safety, because I will be your guardian; and when you have converted the
Indians, you shall come to me with the palm of martyrdom’. omas: ‘You
are my Lord and I am your servant: your will be done’.62

And second, in the seemingly unforgiving and vengeful way that omas
serves as an instrument of divine justice:

e wine steward meanwhile, noticing that the apostle was not eating or
drinking but sat with his eyes turned toward heaven, struck him a blow
on the cheek. e apostle addressed him: ‘It is better for you to receive
here and now a punishment of brief duration, and to be granted
forgiveness in the life to come. Know that I shall not leave this table
before the hand that struck me is brought here by dogs’. e servant went
out to draw water, a lion killed him and drank his blood, dogs tore his
body to pieces, and a black one carries his right hand into the midst of the
feast.63

E cient cause of a black, ferociously forgiving eternal justice that not only
refuses to turn the other cheek, but violently exceeds the lex talionis which
Jesus’s injunction directly overturns (Matthew 5:38-9), omas oats
towards the paradise of martyrdom in the dark light of an alter-Islam,
submitting unquestioningly to the divine will and letting its law remove the
hand of the o ender.64 And how easily and gently he oats! Letting the
Truth do its own work, omas does not li a nger. As Eckhart says, ‘It is
a certain and necessary truth that he who resigns his will wholly to God
will catch God and bind God, so that God can do nothing but what that
man wills’.65
In ful llment of this mystically twinned form of power and agency,
wherethrough the world that one no longer desires to possess becomes
one’s own divine hand, it is the Apostle’s own right arm, the non-mediating
limb that touched God’s body, which projects from his hovering tomb:

[…] and the apostle, in his church on the mountain, is entombed in an

iron tomb, and the tomb remains in the air by the power of four precious
stones. Called lodestones [adamans], one is placed in the oor, a second
in the ceiling, one at one angle to the tomb, and another at another.
Truly, these stones love [diligent] the iron. e lower does not permit it to
ascend, the higher from not descending, and the ones at the angles do
not permit it to go from that place. e apostle is thus in the middle. e
right arm, with which he touched the side of Christ, is incorruptible and
remains outside the tomb.66

Playing on the gravity between magnets and love encoded in the medieval
Latin term (adamans) which was thought to derive from adamare (to love
truly, deeply), omas is here seen to be suspended in an amorous black
metal force- eld of opposing attractors. is love is not so , but
adamantine and operative in negation, in the form of resistance which non
permittit (permits not), as the conspicuously negative grammar makes clear.
Floating securely in his own geminal divine abyss, omas is saturated with
the radiant blackness of this negativity, this NO, which holds the
unthinkable thingless essence of creativity and eternal freedom:

In this context, ‘abyss’ is not a metaphor. […] it is the life of darkness in

God, the divine root of Hell in which the Nothing is eternally produced.
Only when we succeed in sinking into this Tartarus and experiencing our
own impotency do we become capable of creating, truly becoming poets.67

More speci cally, in the negative love of the lodestones is gured, no

doubt, the volitional negativity and in exibility of the Twin’s skepticism and
refusal to believe, which we must remember is also a form of love, an
absolutely dependable yes to a reality beyond a rmation and denial:
‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my nger in the
mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe [non
credam]’ (John 20:25). Now we see the factical mystical depth of the hyper-
literal materiality of omas’s negative will, which grasps itself in radical
immanence, like Augustine’s ‘my love is my weight’, no less at the
bottomless level of physics. e force of his oating tomb presents the
power of love in continuity with the universal gravitational force, the
inescapable inertial drive of things whose power is intensi ed by
opposition, sublimation, and renunciation. As Meher Baba states,

ere is nothing unnatural or arti cial about love. It subsists from the
very beginning of evolution. At the inorganic stage it is crudely expressed
in the form of cohesion or attraction. It is the natural a nity which keeps
things together and draws them to each other. e gravitational pull
exercised by the heavenly bodies upon each other is an expression of this
type of love. At the organic stage, love becomes self-illumined and self-
appreciative and plays an important part from the lowest forms like the
amoeba to the most evolved form of human beings. When love is self-
illumined, its value is intensi ed by its conscious sacri ce.68

Likewise, the levitation of omas’s tomb signi es a freedom that is found,

not by following the will’s every direction, but in its omni-directional
counterweight, the negative weight of expansive love which is itself
magnetically in love with one’s own will and thus holds the multidirectional
arrow of oneself in elevated suspension between earth and heaven, time
and eternity: ‘Now, the domain of freedom – the spiritual life – is found
placed between two gravitational elds with two di erent centres. e
Gospel designates them as “heaven” and “this world”’. 69
us, as Meister
Eckhart explains, the adamant bond of love between soul and God,
individual and Reality, is not properly a relation but an irresistible
separation that holds one invincibly suspended in a death more than death:
 He who hangs on this hook is caught so fast that foot and hand, mouth,
eyes, and heart, and all that is man’s, belongs only to God. erefore you
cannot better prevail over this foe and prevent him from harming you,
than by love. erefore it is written, ‘Love is as strong as death and as
hard as hell’ (Song 8:6). Death separates soul from body, but love
separates all things from the soul – it will not tolerate what is not God or
God’s.70

Entombed in this absolutely intolerant will, omas remains as if severed

from his own incorruptible part, the arm no longer his, pointing to the
divine mystery of its own touch. Looking closely, one sees that his hand is
making an ancient gesture, the sign of the horns or karana mudra, warding
o the eyes of those who do not see.
Such is the oating black metal tomb unearthed by playing the chaotic
spiral of black metal mystically backwards in time towards its placeless
origin. e reader is invited to keep its multidimensional form before the
mind’s eye while reading the texts that follow. us the oating tomb will
serve its function, which is to show forth, in both theory and practice, key
principles of black metal theory, as we insist upon seeing them.

Immense cosmic visions emerge from the slow intervention of

oblivion.
– Fides Inversa, ‘VII’, Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans

1 See Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal eory Symposium 1, ed. by Nicola Masciandaro (New York: n.p.,
2010); Ben Ratli , ‘ ank You Professor at Was Putrid’, New York Times, December 14, 2009.
2 Black Metal eory <http://blackmetaltheory.blogspot.com/>.
3 See Glossator 6: Black Metal, ed. by Nicola Masciandaro & Reza Negarestani (2012); Helvete: A
Journal of Black Metal eory (2013) <http://helvete.org>; Nab Saheb & Denys X. Arbaris,
Bergmetal: Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond (HWORDE, 2014); and Melancology: Black Metal
eory and Ecology, ed. by Scott Wilson (London: Zero Books, 2014). On the debates concerning
and relevant to BMT, see the ‘Commentary’ section of the blog Black Metal eory
<http://blackmetaltheory.blogspot.com/>; Juliet Forshaw, ‘Metal in ree Modes of Enmity:
Political, Musical, Cosmic’, Current Musicology, 91 (2011), pp. 140–60; Andy R. Brown, ‘Heavy
Genealogy: Mapping the Currents, Contra ows and Con icts of the Emergent Field of Metal
Studies, 1978–2010’, Journal for Cultural Research, 15 (2011), pp. 213–42; and Keith Kahn-Harris,
‘Metal Studies: Intellectual Fragmentation or Organic Intellectualism?’, Journal for Cultural
 Research, 15 (2011), pp. 251–3.
4 Angelus Silesius, e Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. by Maria Shrady (New York: Paulist Press, 1986),
p. 57.
5 Inquisition, ‘Force of the Floating Tomb’, Obscure Verses for e Multiverse (Season of Mist, 2013).
6 On the parameters of this designation, see Boyd Taylor Coolman, ‘ e Medieval A ective
Dionysian Tradition’, Modern eology, 24 (2008), pp. 615–32.
7 Inquisition, ‘Solitary Death In e Nocturnal Woodlands’, Into e Infernal Regions Of e Ancient
Cult (Sylphorium Records, 1998).
8 John of the Cross, e Dark Night, II. 17. 6, in e Collected Works, trans. by Kiernan Kavanaugh
and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991), p. 437.
9 As de ned in e Cloud of Unknowing, such deathly mystical sorrow is existential in the strongest
sense, a sorrow of being itself: ‘All men have grounds for sorrow [mater of sorow], but most
specially he feels grounds for sorrow who knows and feels that he is. In comparison to this
sorrow, all other kinds of sorrow are like play. For he can truly and really sorrow who knows and
feels not only what he is, but that he is. And whoever has not felt this sorrow, he may make
sorrow, because he has never yet felt perfect sorrow. is sorrow […] cleanses the soul […] and
makes a soul capable of receiving that joy which ravishes a man from all knowing and feeling of his
being’ ( e Cloud of Unknowing, ed. by Patrick J. Gallacher [Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute
Publications, 1997], p. 71, translation ours). See Nicola Masciandaro, ‘ e Sorrow of Being’, Qui
Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 19 (2010), pp. 9–35.
10 On the cosmicity of mystical sorrow, see Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Paradisical Pessimism: On the
Cruci xion Darkness and the Cosmic Materiality of Sorrow’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and
Social Sciences, 23 (2014), pp. 183–212.
11 Inquisition, ‘Desolate Funeral Chant’, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm
(Hells Headbangers Records, 2011). ‘Union with Him is the Night of Power [Koran XCVII],
separation from Him is the night of the grave – the night of the grave sees miraculous generosity
and replenishment from the Night of His Power’ (Jalal al-Din Rumi, quoted in William C. Chittick,
e Su Path of Love: e Spiritual Teachings of Rumi [Albany: State University of New York Press,
1983], 233). ‘O guiding night! | O night more lovely than the dawn! | O night that has united | the
Lover with his Beloved, | transforming the beloved in her Lover’ (John of the Cross, e Dark
Night, stanza 5, in Collected Works, p. 359).
12 ‘ e motif of the cave […] represents the underworld which, for the Gnostics, is the material
cosmos in which we presently live as the spiritually dead. […] e Pythagoreans, and a er them
Plato, showed that the cosmos is a cavern’ (Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Jesus and the Lost
Goddess: e Secret Teachings of the Original Christians [New York: ree Rivers, 2001], p. 108).
13 ‘Force of the Floating Tomb’, Obscure Verses for e Multiverse.
14 ‘ e chalice […] frequently takes the form of two halves of a sphere back to back. In this, the lower
part of the sphere becomes a receptacle open to the spiritual forces, while the upper part closes
over the earth, which it duplicates symbolically’ (J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. by
Jack Sage [New York: Dover, 1971], 43). Furthermore, the spiritual will-to-power communicated in
the song is in consonance with cosmic dimension of chivalry encoded in the grail myth: ‘It is said
that the Grail as a bright chalice (the presence of which produces a magical animation, a
foreboding, and an anticipation of a nonhuman life), following the Last Supper and Jesus’ death,
was taken by angels into heaven from where it is not supposed to return until the emergence on
earth of a stock of heroes capable of safeguarding it’ (Julius Evola, trans. by Guido Stucco
 [Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1995], 87).
15 Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. by Bruce Boone (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1988), p. xxxii.
16 <http://www.metalreviews.com/interviews/interviews.php?id=67>. Similarly, the gatefold text of
Obscure Verses for e Multiverse points towards the synthesis of traditional mysticism, modern
science, and individual speculative experience: ‘ is album is a tribute to something not only
hypothetical but I must say spiritual as well. Today the multiverse theories are something agreed
upon yet debated by many. Interesting to know how many ancient civilizations and their obscure
cults of philosophies have spoken to us about other dimensions and universes existing long, long
ago in times before modern cosmology were even a thought. ousands of years ago some of our
ancestors claimed to have visited these other worlds, other dimensions or universes through
hallucinogenic travels under spells of entranced mystical states of mind and body, through self-
hypnosis invoking their gods, or, plain and simply by gazing into the night sky and imagining such
a thing because imagination is what we have, and it is there for a reason … So we ask questions
and seek the answers’.
17 Cf. ‘Life seeks to unwind the limiting sanskaras [impressions] of the past and to obtain release
from the mazes of its own making, so that its further creations may spring directly from the heart
of eternity and bear the stamp of unhampered freedom and intrinsic richness of being which
knows no limitation’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th ed, 3 vols [San Francisco: Su sm Reoriented,
1973], I, p. 135).
18 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Secret: No Light Has Ever Seen the Black Universe’, in Dark Nights of the
Universe (Miami: NAME, 2013), p. 56.
19 Inquisition, Obscure Verses for e Multiverse, gatefold text. A similar triangulation of perspectives
(esoteric, philosophical, and scienti c) informs the work of Darkspace: ‘Darkspace is represented
by a triple approach to universal questions. While none of the three theories is fundamental,
Wroth mainly relies on esoteric/spiritual views, Zorgh represents scienti c thought patterns,
whereas Zhaaral goes for a metaphysical approach to the cosmos and the existence of Darkspace.
We constantly elaborate new points of view and discuss philosophical questions within this
trinity. […] Science is descriptive, it illustrates what we perceive with our senses, it speaks in
mathematical patterns and allows certain deductions and predictions. As fascinating as it may be
– it still is a unilateral approach to the Cosmos and its life forms. We are sure that neither
esoterical semi-thruth, nor scienti c limitations nor any religious dogma spoken for itself may
reveal the true nature of the universe’ (‘Interview with Darkspace’ <
http://www.mortemzine.net/show.php?id=1539>).
20 By ‘Satano-Petrine’ we mean to signify the weird domain of identity between black metal’s satanic
drive and the diabolical dimension of religion, the space of intersection between the devil’s and St.
Peter’s cross. e spiritual signi cance of this space is mystical, in the sense that mysticism
perforce reaches beyond religion in a ‘heavier’ movement of will that works both with and against
religion. In the genealogy of heavy metal, this space may be traced back to the inverted cross
design included in the gatefold of Black Sabbath’s rst album, the vertical panel of which contains
a poem describing a dark and surreal churchyard scene with ‘the headless martyr’s statue’,
presumably St. Denis, the cephalophore identi ed in medieval tradition with Dionysius the
Areopagite, putative author of the canonical mystical texts of the Dionysian Corpus. Like a
mashup of negative theology and gothic kitsch, the poem represents a world in nigredo, sinking
into death, yet not without the mysterious presence of spiritual promise: ‘ e cataract of darkness
form fully, the long black night beings, yet still, by the lake a young girl waits, unseeing she believes
herself unseen, she smiles […]’. In the contemporary black metal scene, the mystical intersection
between the diabolical and the orthodox is perhaps best represented by the syncretic metaphysical
 satanism of Deathspell Omega, who draw from ‘the whole religious literature, from the old Jewish
sects to the agnostics, from the St Augustinian approach to Christianity to radical Wahhabi
pamphlets’ in their musico-spiritual search for ‘the deus/diabolus absconditus’ (‘Interview with
Deathspell Omega from AJNA O ensive’ <http://ezxhaton.kccricket.net/interview.html>). Rome’s
Fides Inversa provide another conspicuous instance: ‘ e project comes to life as an extremely
individual idea in the eyes of the conceptual aspect, since it is the mirror of a personal spiritual
and philosophical iter, aiming to the ful llment of the so called “self dei cation”. Fides Inversa is
the inversion of the whole cosmic paradigm, not only the inversion of the judeo-christian faith,
aiming to the deconstruction of being. As you can imagine the idea of Death is omnipresent and it
has to be seen as the Void that attracts into the chaotic spiral. at is not only the negation of
what exists, but the state in which everything is complete’ (‘Interview with Fides Inversa’, Mortem
Zine <http://www.mortemzine.net/show.php?id=2549>).
21 On the sources and subsequent history of the legend, see Alexandre Eckhardt, ‘Le cercueil ottant
de Mahomet’, Melanges de philologie romane et de litterature medievale o erts a Ernst Hoep ner,
Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg 113 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
1949); Sandra Sáenz-Lápez Pérez, ‘La peregrinación a La Meca en la Edad Media a través de la
cartografía occidental’, Revista de Poética Medieval, 19 (2007), pp. 177–218.
22 ‘Quare fecerunt arcam deauratam et in ea posuerunt pedem ipsum balsemando et aromatibus
inuoluendo […] Omnes sarraceni peregrinacionem faciunt ad Mecham et adorabant ibi pedem in
archa, pedem Machumeti. Archa uero in aere detinetur suspensa et trahitur a tribus magnis
lapidibus in cathenis pendentibus super eam, non est enim ex ilia parte deaurata archa, quam
superius calamite tangent. Credunt multi simplices sarraceni quod non arti cióse sed potius
uirtuose illud sit factum. […] Quemadmodum christiani papam romanum credunt uicarium
Ihesu Christi, sic sarraceni credunt cali um de Baldacca esse uicarium. Et sicut christiani credunt
<Ihesu Christum lium dei fuisse, sic sarraceni credunt> Machumetum fuisse nuncium et
prophetam altissimi creatoris et eri salui per ipsum ante deum’ (Fernando González Muñoz,
‘Liber Nycholay: La layenda de Mahoma el cardinal Nicolás’, Al-Qantara, 25 [2004], p. 13, our
translation). e Liber Nycholay is unique in limiting the remains to the foot. On the symbolic
signi cance of Muhammad’s foot as abject idol in relation to Dante’s representation of
Muhammad, see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and
the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), pp. 231–5.
23 Akbari, Idols in the East, p. 232. Uebel explains further: ‘ e Western fantasy that Muhammad’s
tomb in Mecca was scandalously adored with idolatry […] dovetailed with the belief that the Hajj
was the Islamic counterpart of Christian pilgrimage to the relics of a saint. […] Even the Black
Stone embedded in the wall of the Ka’ba, which Muslim pilgrims pass seven times as they circle the
building, each time kissing or touching the stone, was imagined by Latin anti-Muslim writers to be
the magnetic stone that supported Muhammad’s co n. Moreover, to the Muslims was imputed
the belief that this levitation was a sign of the prophet’s divine power. e Muslims’ failure to
recognize the purely natural causes for this suspension was taken to be a sure sign of their
credulity and ignorance’ (Michael Uebel, ‘ e Pathogenesis of Medieval History’, Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, 44 [2002], p. 57).
24 Uebel, ‘Pathogenesis of Medieval History’, p. 57.
25 For example: Janaza, ‘Islamic Lies’, Burning Quran Ceremony (Black Metal Rituals, 2010) and
Taghut, ‘Blaspheme Muhammad’s Name’, Ejaculate upon the Holy Qur’an (Primitive Reaction,
2008). See Kim Kelley, ‘When Black Metal’s Anti-Religious Message Gets Turned on Islam’, e
Atlantic (2012) <http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/07/when-black-metals-
 anti-religious-message-gets-turned-on-islam/259680/>. In turn, heavy metal and black metal
especially provide individuals within Islamic contexts an avenue for more universal anti- and/or
alter-religious spiritual expression. On the one hand, there is the more skeptical/rationalist
metalhead who ‘declares his belief in God, puts Islam on the same level as Christianity […] and
refuses to submit to religious norms’ (Pierre Hecker, Turkish Metal: Music, Meaning, and Morality
in a Muslim Society [Farnham: Ashgate, 20120], ch. 7). On the other hand, there is the mystical
occultist like Lord Faustoos of Mogh, a Zurvanist anti-Islamic black metal project committed to
black magic and cybernetic war (<http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Mogh/3540343721>).
26 For example, one black metal reviewer speaks of ‘the ideal necro claustrophobic tomb recordings’
(Janet Willis, ‘Anal Over Analog: A Tape and Vinyl Lovers Wet Dream’, Forbidden Magazine
<http://forbidden-magazine.com/2014/06/anal-over-analog-a-tape-and-vinyl-lovers-wet-
dream/>).
27 On Muhammad as diabolical gure, see John V. Tolan, ‘European Accounts of Muhammad’s Life’,
in e Cambridge Companion to Muhammad, ed. by Jonathan E. Brockopp (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 226–50.
28 Quoted in Akbari, Idols in the East, p. 234.
29 e Wanderings of Felix Fabri, 2 vols (London: Palestinian Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1892–1893), II, p.
666.
30 ‘It belongs to faith not only that the heart should believe, but also that external words and deeds
should bear witness to the inward faith. In this way too, certain external words or deeds pertain to
unbelief, in so far as they are signs of unbelief, even as a sign of health is said itself to be healthy’
( omas Aquinas, Summa eologica, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province [New
York: Bezinger Brothers, 1947], Part II-II, Q. 12).
31 omas Aquinas, Summa eologica, Part II-II, Q. 12, Obj. 2.
32 ‘Or vedi com’ io mi dilacco! | vedi come storpiato è Mäometto!’ (Dante Alighieri, e Divine
Comedy, ed. and trans. by Charles S. Singleton [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973],
Inferno XXVIII. 30–1).
33 Akbari, Idols in the East, p. 234.
34 ‘ov’ è la ghiaccia? e questi com’ è tto | sì sottosopra?’ (Dante, Inferno XXXIV. 103–4).
35 Steven Shakespeare and Niall Scott, ‘ e Swarming Logic of Inversion and the Elevation of Satan’,
Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal eory, 2 (2015), pp. 1–2. Cf. Peter’s words in the apocryphal Acts
of Peter: ‘I beseech you the executioners, crucify me thus, with the head downward and not
otherwise […] Learn ye the mystery of all nature, and the beginning of all things, what it was. For
the rst man, whose race I bear in mine appearance (or, of the race of whom I bear the likeness),
fell (was borne) head downwards, and showed forth a manner of birth such as was not heretofore:
for it was dead, having no motion. He, then, being pulled down – who also cast his rst state down
upon the earth – established this whole disposition of all things, being hanged up an image of the
creation (Gk. vocation) wherein he made the things of the right hand into le hand and the le
hand into right hand, and changed about all the marks of their nature, so that he thought those
things that were not fair to be fair, and those that were in truth evil, to be good. Concerning which
the Lord saith in a mystery: Unless ye make the things of the right hand as those of the le , and
those of the le as those of the right, and those that are above as those below, and those that are
behind as those that are before, ye shall not have knowledge of the kingdom’
(<http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/actspeter.html>).
36 Shakespeare and Scott, ‘ e Swarming Logic’, p. 2.
37 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, trans. by Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroad
 Publishing, 2009), p. 424.
38 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, the Whale, ed. by Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York: Macmillan,
1964), p. 641.
39 Adrian Van Young, ‘Black Metal Is Sublime’, e New Inquiry
<http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/black-metal-is-sublime/>.
40 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 58. On the Heresy of the Free Spirit, see Bernard
McGinn, e Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (New York: Crossroad, 2005) and Robert
E. Lerner, e Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1972).
41 On mysticism as negation of mediation, see Eugene acker, ‘Wayless Abyss: Mysticism,
Mediation and Divine Nothingness’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 3
(2012), pp. 80–96.
42 Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism, trans. by Robert
Powell (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1985), p. 315.
43 ‘In this Path, ordinarily one has to pass through three stages. e rst stage consists of a keen
interest and intense longing to know about and experience God, resulting in bright hopes and
pleasant expectations. en the second stage of disgust, disappointment, apathy and consequent
su ering ensues. e third, but last stage is that of the Realization of God. […] the second stage
[…] lasts quite a long time’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 337).
44 Richard of St. Victor, On the Four Degrees of Violent Love, trans. and intro. by Andrew B. Kraebel,
in On Love, ed. by H. B. Feiss (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), p. 295.
45 e Cloud of Unknowing, p. 71–2, our translation.
46 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957),
Paradise Lost, I. 125–6.
47 e Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. by Swami Nikhilananda (New York: Ramakrishna-
Vivekananda Center, 1952), p. 186. Cf. ‘ e incident of birth is common to all life on earth. Unlike
other living creatures which are born insigni cantly, live an involuntary life and die an uncertain
death, the physical birth of human beings connotes an important and, if they are extra
circumspect about it, perhaps a nal stage of their evolutionary progress. Here onward, they no
longer are automatons but masters of their destiny which they can shape and mold according to
will. And this means that human beings, having passed through all the travails of lower
evolutionary processes, should insist upon the reward thereof, which is “Spiritual Birth” in this
very life, and not rest content with a promise in the herea er’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher,
p. 1788 <http://www.lordmeher.org/>, italics ours).
48 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guna>.
49 Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation, trans. by Stephen Mitchell (New York: ree Rivers, 200), 18. 37.
50 omas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, trans. by James A. Weisheipl and Fabian R.
Larcher (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1998), 25. 5. 2546, online at
<http://dhspriory.org/thomas/english/John20.htm>.
51 See R. C. Zaehner, e Dawn and Twilight of Zororastrianism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1961), chapter 10
<http://heritageinstitute.com/zoroastrianism/reference/zaehner/dawnVarZur10_1.htm>.
52 Glenn W. Most, Doubting omas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 108. Most
provides a doctrinal explanation. ‘For Gnostic readers of John’s Gospel, the fact that omas did
not touch Jesus’ body but nonetheless acknowledged his divinity could be taken as evidence that
 Jesus’ risen body was not material but purely spiritual, and hence as corroboration for the
systematic privilege the Gnostics accorded to the spirit over the body’ (p. 101).
53 e Book of omas the Contender, trans. by John D. Turner
<http://gnosis.org/naghamm/bookt.html>. Cf. ‘ omas is called abyss because he was granted
insight into the depths of God’s being when Christ, in answer to his question, said: “I am the way
the truth and the life”’ (Jacobus de Voragine, e Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. by
William Granger Ryan, 2 vols [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993], I, pp. 29–30).
54 ‘He who loves does not know that he loves! I have warned you to be natural and not pretentious.
God cannot be fooled; He knows what you are! So what is the use of pretending to be what you are
not?’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 616).
55 Hadewijch, e Complete Works, trans. by Mother Columba Hart (New York: Paulist Press, 1980),
p. 65.
56 Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, trans. by Paul Lachance (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 205.
57 Behemoth, ‘Horns Ov Baphomet’, Zos Kia Cultus (Here and Beyond), (Avantgarde Music, 2002).
58 See David Burr, ‘Antichrist and Islam in Medieval Franciscan Exegesis’, in Medieval Christian
Perceptions of Islam: A Book of Essays, ed. by John Victor Tolan (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp.
131–52.
59 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, p. 29–30.
60 Sandra Sáenz-Lápez Pérez, ‘La peregrinación a La Meca’, p. 195.
61 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 2133. Or as Ramakrishna is famously reported to have
answered when asked why there is evil in the world, ‘To thicken the plot!’
62 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, p. 30.
63 Ibid.
64 ‘[As for] the thief, the male and the female, amputate their hands in recompense for what they
committed as a deterrent [punishment] from Allah. And Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise. But
whoever repents a er his wrongdoing and reforms, indeed, Allah will turn to him in forgiveness.
Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful’ (Koran, 5:38–9 <http://quran.com/5/>).
65 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 92.
66 ‘[…]apostolus autem est in ecclesia eiusdem montis, et est in tumulo ferreo tumulatus; et tumulus
ille manet in aere ex virtute 4 preciosorum lapidum. Adamans vocatur, unus in pavimento positus,
in tecto secundus, unus ab uno angulo tumuli, alius ab alio. Isti vero lapides diligunt ferrum:
inferior non permittit ascendi, superior non descendi, angulares non permittunt eum ire huc vel
illuc. Apostolus autem est in medio. Bracfaium dextrum, cum quo tetigit latus Christi, inputribile
est, manens extra tumulum’ (‘Der Bericht des Elysaeus’, in ‘Der Priester Johannes’, ed. by Friedrich
Zarncke, Abhandlungen der philologisch-historischen Classe der königlich sächsischen Gesellscha
der Wissenscha en, 8 [1883], p. 123.)
67 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy,
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 253.
68 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, p. 85.
69 Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot, p. 306.
70 Meister Eckhart, Complete Works, p. 60.
ESSAYS AND COMMENTARIES
 N M

BLACK SABBATH’S ‘BLACK SABBATH’:

A GLOSS ON HEAVY METAL’S ORIGINARY SONG
{Rain … under … Bells … Metal!}1

PRIMORDIAL FOREBODING. e sound of the rain drowns and

darkens the world. Hearing the water we already know that it is late, that
we are not where we should be. For a moment this lateness is veiled by the
lame lateness of the familiar midnight storm gothic trope, the cultural
belatedness of the adolescent and kitsch. But how did it get dark? We have
already passed through this critical veil and are looking back at it from the
inside. Our thinking has already been destroyed by what we see and
believe. It is late. It is dark. We are where we want to be. Hearing the
rolling thunder, late becomes early. Chronological time becomes mythical
time as the liminal hour opens a space around a point outside of time, a
point of origin. under speaks from the beginning: ‘he ordered fog and
clouds to take their place, and thunder, that would stir the hearts of men’.2
But it calls towards the end: ‘He thundered, calling us to return to Him into
that secret place’.3 WHEN DOES THE WORLD END? Not in time, but
when the voice of thunder becomes human, the echoing question of the
being who answers it as thunder itself, earthly thunder striking the gods,
striking in a moment a place outside of time. ‘At that moment in one of the
intervals of profound darkness, following the ashes, a voice was heard at
his side; and almost at the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled
overhead. “Who’s there?” “Old under!” said Ahab, groping his way along
the bulwarks to his pivot-hole, but suddenly nding his path made plain to
him by elbowed lances of re’.4 under calls forth bells, nature art,
answering the storm’s question by repeating it, setting o a reverberation
through AC/DC’s ‘Hell’s Bells’, Metallica’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, and
beyond. Medieval church bells drove o storms and the demons who
stirred them. ‘And this is the cause why the bells be rung when it
thundereth, and when great tempests and outrages of weather happen, to
the end that the ends and the evil spirits should be abashed and ee, and
cease of the moving of tempests’.5 Heavy Metal bells stir men to dance with
summoned demons, to sacri ce the sacred and perfect the profane, to feast
on the corpses of dead values and drink the dawning of the real. ‘Come
Centaur | ose who prance to the Hymns of Truth | Come join us’ (Morbid
Angel, ‘Invocation of the Continual One’, Formulas Fatal to the Flesh). e
peal of the origin touches the end of time. Ouroboros. e judgement of
apocalypse invites the jubilation of apocatastasis! THREE NOTES: low,
high, and the tertium quid. Verba, res, and signi catio – ‘there am I in the
midst of them’ (Matthew 18:20). Earth, heaven, and what joins them.
Lightning. Yggdrasil. Axis Mundi. Skambha. e Epic Monolith. You know
it when you hear it.

What is this

THE QUESTION before the question, the essence of questioning, the

question of existence. e rst word of the rst line of the rst song of the
rst album of Heavy Metal attacks the world with a question. Before the
question is articulated it preexists in its rst word, what, a word that speaks
without signi cation, which points, not to a thing, but to pure something.
Before the song says anything it names what exists ‘before’ saying. What is
this? Ignorant, we use words like world and life as if we know what they
signify, as if they capture the this that stands before us. Fracturing the
façade of habitual, unexamined notions, the question renames the world as
unknown, returning us to its origin. Does the world exist before the song
begins, before the rst word of its question? In a sense, no. NAMING THE
WORLD as a what, the rst word reveals the world to be, not a thing, but a
relation between self and thing. Naming with a question the biggest and
most obvious thing that does not and cannot have a name is the most
essential, the most natural, the most absolute, and thus the truest instance
of this relation. e world’s true name is a question. Truly naming the
world is not giving the world a name, which would reduce it to a thing, but
a revelation of the world as naming itself. But where does the question come
from? Nowhere! e question emerges out of who knows where only to
bring into view something that is simultaneously already and not yet there.
It calls into presence what is latent, hidden, invisible. e question is the
eternal enemy of unconsciousness and the unmaker of its conventionally
accepted mask, opinion. Real questioning is the in nitely perfectible
pastime of the person hell-bent on staying awake, on paying attention both
to what is happening and to what happening is. It almost seems that
questioning is consciousness and understanding itself. ‘ us a person who
wants to understand must question what lies behind what is said. He must
understand it as an answer to a question. If we go back behind what is said,
then we inevitably ask questions beyond what is said’.6 Here questioning,
whose heart resides in what, shows its powerful deictic function. It calls
attention to the overlooked, to the nearly forgotten, and even more
palpably, to the reality of the questioner, the self itself. Announcing and
attending upon itself with a question, Heavy Metal enters the world,
becomes itself, as a deictic art. rough sound and language it awakens
awareness of what exceeds sound and language. Cf. the rst word of
Beowulf, ‘Hwæt!’ Hear the strain in Ozzy’s voice, like the cry of an already-
ancient baby born angry at the absolute a ront of existence. How dare
there be anything! How dare I exist! ‘For what is it that I want to say, Lord,
except that I do not know where I came from into this dying life, or living
death?’7 ‘In the Original Unity of the First ing lies the Secondary Cause
of All ings, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation’.8 Ahab is not
born or made, but made by birth itself. Metal calls us back to beginning and
reopens the trauma of being. What is this that stands before me? re-enacts
the birth of consciousness as a question aimed at existence, as a current that
runs from unconsciousness to what is to me.

That stands before me?

e question actually produces the world as a situation of interstanding

(self and thing standing before each other) that demands understanding.
But can what stands before me ever possibly be understood? Of course not.
However comprehensively a thing is understood it is only understood
through a medium that separates us from what it is. Knowledge is
knowledge of what is known, not of the thing itself. QUESTIONING IS
HOPELESS and Heavy Metal plunges us into the hopelessness of all
questioning. ‘All these philosophical explanations are creations of the mind
that has never succeeded in passing beyond itself ’.9 But we love this
hopelessness, we stand trans xed before the question that has interrupted
us, the pounding ri that brings and rebrings things to a halt. Why? We
were going somewhere, doing something, but the question stops us in
suspicion that we do not know what we are doing, that we do not know
who we are (cf. Coleridge, e Rime of the Ancient Mariner). We wanted to
be interrupted. e beautiful secret of the hopeless question is that it points
back, indeed reproduces, the reality of the questioner. is sense becomes
obvious in the next line of the song, but here we are suspended on that
fact’s threshold, caught at me?, and thus frozen in the fear that behind the
question asked of the world, what is this?, there is a deeper question that
has produced the world as its answer and that that question has something
do to with us. Here we stand over a beyond opened up by asking what
stands before us, a beyond out of which we have sprung as mysteriously as
our question. ‘ e unitarian Beyond is an indivisible and indescribable
in nity. It seeks to know itself. It is of no use to ask why it does so’.10
QUESTIONING WHAT IS, Heavy Metal manifests itself more practically as
the friend of reality and the sworn enemy of values, isms, fads, religions,
collective egos, systems, parties, movements, tribes, societies, clubs, cults,
and especially all feel-good white-guilt hippie-shit whereby the self lays
claim to rather than realizes the real. Heavy Metal is born out of that
craving for the real which can hold it in a death-embrace, even if it turns
out to be nothing at all.

Figure in black which points at me

THE UNKNOWN POINTS BACK at the questioner, as if to say, ‘You

want to know what I am, but you do not know what you are!’ Cf.
‘BARNARDO: Who’s there? FRANCISCO: Nay, answer me. Stand and
unfold yourself ’.11 e point is not to determine the identity of the gure in
black, but to feel its pointing, to experience the treason of the question, as it
turns back on oneself and opens up more dark space within it, within the
inky term that the pointing repeats and re ects, within me. e gure in
black mirrors the one who questions it as a shrouded, self-blind being who
questions what is outside himself in an attempt to point to himself, to the
unseen being that is always looking for and staring back at itself. e
question, ostensibly about what, is unconsciously about who. Out of the
depths of the self, the question tries to bring the self into consciousness. But
how can who be brought into view? To reveal and know identity palpably,
as a thing that can be pointed to, would seem to reduce the self to a thing,
to reify who as a what. But there is no other way. We are caught at the
impasse of seeing what we have questioned pointing back to what we
cannot see in ourselves. e mysterious what confronting me seems to be a
who; it has a human shape, it recognizes me and knows who I am, yet it is
not a person, much less an individual, but only a gure, a depth created by
hollowness. e only way through is to accept the confounded boundary
between who and what embodied in the black gure and run headlong,
following the pattern of the already-given consciousness-making cosmos-
machine, into the what, to keep asking, with Sleep’s heavy pounding, ‘What
is the soul? What is the mind? Constructed?’ (‘ e Su ering’, Volume One).
SO THE METALHEAD, feeling the question echoing back on himself, is
drawn to mirror and materialize the gure conjured within his music in
himself by wearing black. Unlike the clerical black of the intellectual which
says, ‘I stand outside the world, being more abstract, critical, and smarter
than you’, and unlike the similarly adult black of the sophisticate which
says, ‘I stand above the world, being more powerful, elegant, and urban
than you’, the black of the metalhead is adolescent and funereal,
communicating a problematical immersion in the world rather than elite
transcendence of it. Heavy Metal black displays the mystery and mortality
of its wearer. It represents an attempt, however imperfect, to renounce
identity and revel in the unknowable and unnamable. ‘But I have that
within which passes show, | ese but the trappings and the suits of woe’.12
Black denies externality, reminding us that ‘Matter is understood through
the mind or the intellect working upon data given through the di erent
senses, but Spirit can be understood only through the spirit itself’.13 BEING
SINGLED OUT, made to face oneself in the mirror of question and answer,
the spirit is caught at its own threshold and we ee. is is not Tintern
Abbey, where the ‘burthen of the mystery [...] Is lighten’d’ and ‘we are laid
asleep | In body, and become a living soul’.14 is is the castle-dungeon of
Heavy Metal where the mystery-burden becomes unbearable and we have
no idea who we are or what to do, where the ‘I’ is elided and we do not
know who is speaking!

Turn around quick, and start to run

Simultaneously spoken by the singer to the narrator (get out of there), the
narrator to the singer (get out of here), the narrator to himself (I need to
save myself), and the singer to us (save yourselves), the line is a disembodied
imperative to go who knows where that leaves nowhere to go. e only
person in the song’s ction who could reasonably be said to have spoken
them, because they are spoken to the speaker, is the black gure who does
not say anything. So the line voices fear as the translation of silence into a
command, whereby the silence pointing to oneself is misinterpreted as an
order to run the other way. WHY FEAR? Fear is a form of ego-centered
self-created su ering that simultaneously acknowledges and fails to accept
the other, including the otherness of one’s own self. ‘Fear acts as a thick
curtain between the “I” and the “you” and it not only nourishes deep
distrust of the other, but inevitably brings about a shrinking and
withdrawal of consciousness so as to exclude the being of another from the
context of one’s own life’.15 e pain of fear is the pain of answering ‘Who
am I?’ falsely, the auto-violence of the person refusing to become
something else, the person afraid to die. Unlike pop music, which expresses
real fear, Heavy Metal enjoys fear to make friends with the real, above all,
the reality of annihilation: ‘Face the fear that grips your mind, | e nal
con ict – the end of mankind’ (Bolt rower, ‘ is Time it’s War’, e IVth
Crusade). And unlike horror movies, which try to intensify fear, Heavy
Metal thrives on inverting fear, on making moments where fear’s negative,
worried sense of what might happen is transmuted into the excited
expectation that something feared is about to happen, and there is nothing
you can do. e acoustic intro that you know will not last (e.g. Metallica’s
‘Fight Fire with Fire’) is but the outermost layer of an aesthetics of
inevitability that pervades Metal, a disembodied perspective that speaks
prophetically from the other side of fear: ‘An unforseen future nestled
somewhere in time. | Unsuspecting victims no warnings, no signs. |
Judgment day the second coming arrives. | Before you see the light you
must die[!!!!!!!]’ (Slayer, ‘South of Heaven’, South of Heaven).

Find out I’m the chosen one – Oh no!

THE ARBITRARINESS OF IDENTITY, the weirdness of being someone.

e elided ‘I’ now reappears as a monstrous uniqueness. Running from
what points to him, he discovers himself, and it is not easy. e ‘chosen one’
prophesied in the Dead Sea Scrolls 4Q534? Of course not. Among other
things, he’s missing the red hair, moles, and marks on his thighs. He is
Everyman, the universal individual, the everywhere-encountered person
selected by their own singularity, the chosen one. Why are you you and me
me? Nothing explains this. e absolute arbitrariness of the fact feels like a
glitch in the system, an abyss the world will fall into. Oh No! Heavy Metal
individualism is fundamentally di erent from, and opposed to, bourgeois
individualism, which believes in freedom from history and the
respectability of being someone. It goes beyond individualism as a value to
the reality of being an individual, which is something in nitely more
beautiful and horrible. Metal celebrates the individual – ‘Got no religion |
Don’t need no friends’ – but it spreads it feast, Bosch-like, in apocalyptic
zones: ‘I’ve seen the future | And I’ve le it behind’ (Black Sabbath,
‘Supernaut’, Volume 4). e soldier’s death and the sinner’s punishment are
among its essential tropes, complementary spaces where individualized
being is destroyed and disclosed. ‘Soldier boy, made of clay | now an empty
shell’ (Metallica, ‘Disposable Heroes’, Master of Puppets). ‘Day of judgment
God is calling | On their knees, the war pigs crawling | Begging mercy for
their sins | Satan laughing spreads his wings | Oh Lord yeah!’ (Black
Sabbath, ‘War Pigs’, Paranoid). Metal’s interest in these moments passes
their moral meanings to touch the metaphysical traumas they de ne. e
injustice of war and the justice of damnation are ne messages, but Metal
goes beyond messages into the more important subject of what happens.
And what happens here is DEATH, not simply as the end of living but as a
mutual breakdown of history and the individual, a collapsing of self and
world into each other that calls the whole mess into question and brings
the self into a beautiful suspension between life and death, yes and no. For
inside the ‘Oh yes!’ that Heavy Metal’s ‘Oh no!’ elicits – ‘You thought that it
was all over, | But it’s only just begun’ (Bolt rower, ‘Embers’, e IVth
Crusade) – there is a little door into that mircocosmic apocalypse that fools
fear and that the wise, in their in nite foolishness, know how to enjoy.
‘Sniper blazes you thru your knees | Falling down can you feel the heat’
(Slayer, ‘Mandatory Suicide’, South of Heaven). It is clear: Heavy Metal is
negative theology, with a beat.

Big black shape with eyes of re

FROM DARKNESS LIGHT. e central instance of the threefold

appearance of the gure ( gure, shape, Satan) assumes a form that
synthesizes the other two and so contains a triple signi cance that, like all
signi cance, is buried in the unknowability of the form that contains it.
Transparently, the ery-eyed gure is three things at once. One: the
enlightened person, who passes through darkness to become light. ‘ at the
intellect reach union with the divine light and become divine in the state of
perfection, this dark contemplation must rst purge and annihilate it of its
natural light and bring it actually into obscurity’.16 ‘I pray we could come to
this darkness so far above light! If only we lacked sight and knowledge so
as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that which lies beyond
all vision and knowledge’.17 ‘Never did the eye see the sun unless it had rst
become sun-like, and never can the Soul have vision of the First Beauty
unless itself be beautiful’.18 Two: a phenomenological literalization of the
human eye as the lucerna corporis that, at once containing and emitting the
being within the body, fuses subject, object, and will. ‘And of the organs
they rst contrived the eyes to give light […] and the pure re which is
within us and related thereto they made to ow through the eyes in a
stream smooth and dense’.19 ‘[In vision] three [things] […] are
compounded into a kind of unity, […] that form of the body which is seen,
and its image imprinted on the sense which is sight or formed sense, and
the conscious will which applies the sense to the sensible thing and holds
the sight on it’.20 ree: a dark version of the son of man as envisioned in
the Revelation of John. ‘His head and his hairs were white like wool, as
white as snow; and his eyes were as a ame of re’ (Revelation 1:14). e
coincidence of these meanings, an intuited musico-mystical unity of which
the passages cited are only ickering shadows cast by the light of
understanding, is a form whose name may be translated as MASTER OF
DESIRE. Holding this name up to the mirror of nomina sunt consequentia
rerum reproduces the big black shape as a correlative triple re ection. First,
a happy being who masters desire by following the in nity of desire beyond
desire to in nity itself. Cf. ‘For all that is beneth Him su ceth not us. And
this is the cause why that no soule is restid till it is nowted of all things that
is made’.21 Second, desire personi ed as an essentially ocular being, the eyes
being the ‘perilous mirror’ (see Romance of the Rose) or primary projector,
receiver, and re ector of love. Cf. ‘It is your eyes. ey looked into my eyes;
and that look went deep into my bowels and kindled consuming re in the
marrow of my bones’.22 ird, an evil being that seeks out and feeds upon
desire’s blindness. Cf. ‘ e Eye was rimmed with re, but was itself glazed,
yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened
on a pit, a window into nothing’.23 e line thus signi es a voice that speaks
simultaneously from within desire’s ame and from the void behind it.

Telling people their desire

is is frightening. To hear one’s desire spoken by another and to know it

as the desire of others, their desire, disrupts the comfort of enchanted,
unconscious identi cation with desire. ‘ e soul gets enmeshed in the
desires and cannot step out of the circumscribed individuality constituted
by these desires. It imagines these barriers and becomes self-hypnotised’.24 If
other than desire, what am I? Hearing my desire spoken by another – ‘I
know what you want’ being the logical essence of temptation, a
representation of the desired by someone else – proposes choice about my
identi cation with it. Do I use the other to con rm or to question my
identi cation with desire? Do I (saying yes to the black shape) extend my
self-hypnosis to another and dissolve myself ? Or do I (saying no) assert my
self as an individual distinct from desire and open myself ? e question of
the black shape’s telling is not whether you want what is spoken – of course
you do. e question is whether you want the you that wants it. How the
‘people’ in the scene choose is a mystery, an indeterminacy, masked by the
appearance of Satan.

Satan’s sitting there, he’s smiling

THE SMILING ARCH-INDIVIDUAL presides over them, indeed, is a

presence produced among them, as a being with a double aspect. His smile
is at once the mocking smile of the tempter as a person that appears near
the loss of individuality through desire’s hypnotization and the happy smile
of the inspirer as a person, like Black Sabbath’s Fi h Member, that appears
near the manifestation of individuality through creative, free action.
Depending on intention, either choice can produce either aspect, or both! e
moment of Satan’s appearance is of tremendous signi cance, not only for
the meaning of the song but for the subsequent history of Heavy Metal,
and most importantly, its future. As the moment concerns the appearance
and disappearance of individuality, both within the drama of desire and
within Satan’s own emerging (Satan/Lucifer being not only an original
individual but the only individual named in Metal’s original album), so
does it operate as an originary moment within each individual’s relationship
to Heavy Metal. How many links to the genre have been forged,
consciously and unconsciously, in the momentary imagination of Satan’s
smile! So also is this a moment to which Metal must return to reproduce its
newness, to rediscover its generic individuality. At stake in our
understanding of Satan’s appearance is nothing less than the essence of
Heavy Metal and the structure of every individual relationship to it. What
the true meaning of this moment is, I cannot tell you. If you know it, you
know why. What I can do is describe the three essential features of the
poetic image through which its true meaning may be discovered. First, the
appearance of Satan is only the recognition that he has been there all along,
as registered in the singer’s words, which imply that he has seen him before
he describes him. Second, the line alliterates, conspicuously, the only one
that does – an individualized irruption of the native, the pagan, in an
externally derived form. e letter S corresponds to the serpent, the sound
ES is the primitive root for being (Latin esse, Sanskrit sat, Greek ousia).
ird, the smile, the smile, the smile.

Watch those ames get higher and higher

SEEING THE SILENT SUBJECT. Within the experience of spectacle, the

command to watch, the will to watch, and the act of watching are
indistinguishable. Whether anybody tells you to, whether you want to,
whether you think you are, you are already watching (Cf. the story of
Alypius).25 Spectacle thus has the structure of consciousness itself, in which
all perception is ‘preceded’ by the observation of perception, by the
ontological preexistence, acknowledged or not, of a witness (hear the sound
of the monks nodding?), by a someone who is the subject of consciousness,
an unseen seer. at is what makes spectacle beautiful and dangerous, that
is reproduces the structure of consciousness in dramatic, experiential form
and so seems to o er the spectator his very self. THE SPECTACLE OF FIRE
is primal and universal spectacle, re being not only what joins earth and
heavens through Agni’s triple form ( re, lightning, sun) but, as light’s
maker, the means of spectacle itself. Fire-reverie (see Bachelard) takes place
within watching oneself watch the ame. Flame, opening the boundary
between spirit and matter, helps its seer see seeing without in nite regress
and thus transcend it, becoming a Seer, one who knows directly, who sees
things as they really are. Seeing into the re, Fu Hsi nds the I-Ching. is
is because the self, being neither spirit nor matter, recognizes itself and
nds a friend in the re, which makes being with oneself, and thus
intuition, easier. BEING WITH ONESELF is never easy. And in the ash of
an eye, Ozzy’s voice breaks, scrying becomes crying, reverie hell. Seeing into
the essence of all things burns all things up in their essence. ‘ is world-
order, the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is
and will be: everliving re, kindling in measures and being quenched in
measures’.26 True seeing burns the eye, the thing that cannot see itself. ‘ e
lesion in her eye was there to con rm the truth of her vision’.27 True
knowing destroys the little I, the self that cannot know itself. ‘ at is the
Truth. at is the Self. ou art at’.28 e leaping of the ames is the
beginning of the end. e end is the death of the false self. e death of
the false self is the beginning of real life. ‘ e conquest of the unconscious
by the conscious is complete, and the person continually dwells in the full
blaze of illumination or as one with illumination. He becomes illumination
itself ’.29 AN UNBEARABLE BEGINNING. is new beginning is not
represented, not because it does not happen, but because it cannot be re-
presented. e beginning, corresponding in the song’s time-structure to the
ever-happening about-to-happen moment when the ames reach their
borne unbearable height, happens outside of time. Rather than being
gured or signi ed, which would reduce the beginning to something else,
an event a er the ending, the beginning is contained experientially as its
own unrepresentability, in its being within the accelerating, un nishing
ending that is represented. (Heavy Metal is devoted to such scenes of
ending). e beginning’s being-within-ending is its truth, that which makes
it an actual beginning, not a beginning in time, but a beginning from time.

Oh no, no, please God help me!

is is the CENTER OF THE SONG, its real beginning, not where it

starts, but the place where it takes leave of time, where it takes o . e line
holds this beginning, in the form of a suspension before the song’s actual
speeding up, in two forms. First, the repetition of no, like the neti neti of
Advaita Vedanta, asserts the reality of a being that survives all subtraction
and negation, a self within the person that can witness its execution. Cf. the
disembodied vision produced in us by Slayer’s ‘On my wall, your head!’
(‘Piece by Piece’, Reign in Blood). Second, the tone of Ozzy’s voice here
approaches the whimpering of the damned, an unmaking of the person that
discloses the babyishness of its separative ego-mind. Cf. the possessiveness
mocked by Metallica’s ‘Someone help me | Oh please God help me | ey
are trying to take it all away’ (‘Ride the Lightning’, Ride the Lightning). is
conjunction of terri ed apophatic speaking and psychic infant sacri ce
produces, through a kind of logospasmic birth-pang, the real presence of
the true I, the present-tense being that resolves and transcends the
distinction between God and me. e horrible, the unimaginable, the
impossible happens, keeps on happening, and I am there to see it, to speak
it. Watching what cannot happen, what ends all happening, happen,
awakens the one who sleeps on the other side of happening. ‘At the point
you perceive the irreparability of the world, at that point it is
transcendent’.30 THE FINAL REPETITION of the tripartite ri consolidates
the transcendence of this encounter. On the one hand it means that
nothing has happened. We are burned alive and everything is as it was
before. On the other hand, it means that everything has happened, that we
have stepped into the reality of what has always already happened. What is
this reality? Nothing! e nal repetition reestablishes the nothingness of
happening. But this is a momentous nothingness, a nothing that turns out
to be everything. Knowing the nothingness of happening is knowing all
happening, just as hearing real silence is hearing all sound. is is the deep
identity that repetition reenacts, the unity of opposites in non-duality,
silence and sound equaling each other in their own in nite self-
equivalence.

Is it the end my friend?

THE FRI(END). As all friendship carries death within it as a future

transmuted into a past – ‘everything that we inscribe in the living present of
our relation to others already carries, always, the signature of memoirs-
from-beyond-the-grave’31 – so does dying express perfect friendship as a
renunciation of the present: ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). Friendship is the
inconclusiveness of the forgone conclusion of death. It is the life that is
 lived, not before death, but within it, within questioning the end, within
experiencing the end as a question. Is this all? Of course not. Look up.
Intuitively, we have already climbed the sublime signs of the internal
rhyme, nding fruits like ‘the end of friendship is friendship with the end’
and ‘friends end the end of friends’. THE ACCELERATION OF BEING.
e emergence of friendship, the immanence of the end, the speeding up
of the song, Satan’s impending arrival – everything combines to de ne an
intensi cation rooted in being itself. is is the delight, the exuberance,
that the deictic art produces, the ampli cation of this that being close to the
end enables. ‘Only in the purely negative register of this being-for-death,
when it experiences the most radical impossibility, can Dasein reach its
ownmost proper dwelling place and comprehend itself as a totality’.32 e
essence of deixis is that it de nes an originary unity of action and
representation, being and speaking, that more than demonstrating
something demonstrates demonstrating, the marvelous fact of its own
taking place. So here the action and the representation of it, mirroring the
action itself, are being overtaken by the immediacy, the urgency of their
happening. So here pleasure is a pleasure in action itself, in action as the
ampli er of being. ‘For since everything which exists desires its own being,
and in acting the agent’s being is in some sense enhanced [quodammodo
amplietur], of necessity pleasure ensues’.33 So this scene of acceleration, of
panic, becomes archetypal within Heavy Metal.

Satan’s coming ‘round the bend

THE INEVITABLE. Within the aesthetics of inevitability governing the

genre, acceleration occupies the position of inevitable occurrence or
stepping into what must happen. e ‘secret power’ of Heavy Metal is that it
transforms the inevitable, the essence of necessity (you must run or you will
die), into an aesthetic necessity and so enacts power over it, in short, over
death. A metal band that does not deliver the inevitable, and consequently
creates no panic, is impotent. e rhetorical equivalent of Heavy Metal
acceleration is the historical present, the shi to present tense discourse,
classically, within battle scenes in epic poetry. Acceleration is Metal’s musical
tense, a sonic intensi cation that produces the presence of the present. Like
the historical present, it not merely a matter of lending vividness or
verisimilitude to a represented event. It is about reentering the presentness,
the presence of happening, slaying the distinction between representation
and represented so that it dies in the reality of the actual and only present,
the now. is is a ful llment of art’s promise of being, that ‘the work of art
does not simply refer to something, because what it refers to is actually
there’.34 is is Metallica’s instruments becoming weapons as Het eld leads
the charge: ‘Attack! | Bullets are ying | People are dying | With madness
surrounding, | All hell’s breaking loose’ (Metallica, ‘No Remorse’, Kill ‘Em
All). WYRD. e link between battle and Metal’s sonic inevitable goes
beyond appropriateness. For each discloses the nature of the other as a
confrontation with something greater than both, a facing of the plain-as-
day fact that exceeds representation, an experience of the thing itself. As
battle is an event marked by the death of representation, one in which
conceptual categories are hacked open and happening is felt in its most raw,
naked negativity as an undetermined determination, so Metal is an art that
aims to kill representation, to slay music itself, show sound for the noise it
is, and thereby hear the inexorable, ine able music of wyrd or what
happens. Metal does this, not nihilistically, but naively. Like Quixote
suddenly decapitating papier mâché Moors at the puppet show,35 Metal
destroys representation by realizing it, killing the false with (and within) its
own fantasy.

People running ‘cause they’re scared

FINAL PANIC, FLAWLESS EXUBERANCE. As the now and the end

asymptotically converge and experience is absorbed into the inde nable
intersection of panic and exuberance, as we ail about in the nality of the
moment and enter the melee of being’s struggle for itself, language
contracts to no and no means everything. Dramatically, the line expresses
fear becoming futile at its extremity, the perceptual place where refusal and
pleading, intention and speech, pass through each other and become
something else, the hopeless and thus pure negation of what is already
happening, the soon-to-be-silent voice of the victim that speaks as a mere
voice, as a speaking-to-itself. is is the drama that spells the death of
drama, the scene in which acting ends, the moment when the word
belonging to language returns to the word behind language, the voice of
voice, the sound of being.

e people better go and beware!

METAL SPEAKS. e last movement of the song, its apotheosis, achieves

signi cance as an event a er language. Here the music, at once the sound
of the feared-anticipated event and the event itself, speaks everything that
no signi ed but could not say. It rushes out as a breaking of the silence of
language, a speaking of the unsaid, unsayable thing that has been known
and denied all along. And now, because we knew and denied it, because
we hid behind the lie that we let language tell us, that there was no way to
know it, now we get to hear it, and there is no telling what will happen.
‘And the reaction will be as instantaneous and as various as the reaction of
people in a room through which a cobra suddenly and swi ly passes, when
some would nervously laugh, some lose control of their bowels and some
feel great courage or reasonless hope and joy’ (Meher Baba).36 I am and am
not the representation that Heavy Metal is killing. ‘I was born to be dead |
You try and stop me’ (Today is the Day, ‘Mayari’, In the Eyes of God).
Hearing the nal punctuation, its repetition, and the silence between them,
I know three things. It is over. It is never over. It already is.

No, no, please, no!

1 e words in brackets make reference to the opening sounds of the song (Black Sabbath, ‘Black
Sabbath’, Black Sabbath [Warner Bros., 1970]). e reader is encouraged to listen to the song
before and/or while reading this commentary. Other musical works cited herea er are: Black
Sabbath, Paranoid (Warner Bros., 1970); Black Sabbath, Volume 4 (Warner Bros., 1972); Bolt
rower, e IVth Crusade (Earache, 1992); Metallica, Kill ‘Em All (Megaforce/Roadrunner, 1983);
Metallica, Master of Puppets (Elektra, 1986); Metallica, Ride the Lightning (Megaforce, 1984);
Morbid Angel, Formulas Fatal to the Flesh (Earache, 1997); Slayer, Reign in Blood (Def American,
1986); Slayer, South of Heaven (Def American, 1988); Sleep, Volume One (Tupelo, 1991); Today is
 the Day, In the Eyes of God (Relapse, 1999).
2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2 vols, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), I. 54–5.
3 Augustine, Confessions, trans. by F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), IV. p. 12.
4 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. by Charles Feidelson (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 646.
5 Jacobus de Voragine, e Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, as Englished by William Caxton (New
York: AMS, 1973), LXX.
6 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn, trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 370.
7 Augustine, Confessions, I. 6.
8 Edgar Allan Poe, e Works of the Edgar Allan Poe, 10 vols (New York: Colonial Company, 1903), IX,
p. 5–6.
9 Meher Baba, Beams from Meher Baba on the Spiritual Panorama (San Francisco: Su sm Reoriented,
1958), p. 7.
10 Meher Baba, Beams, p. 8.
11 Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Ann ompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden, 2006), I. 1. 1–2.
12 Shakespeare, Hamlet, I. 2. pp. 85-6.
13 Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th ed., 3 vols (San Francisco: Su sm Reoriented, 1973), I, p. 133.
14 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798, 2nd edn, ed. by W. J. B.
Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), ‘Tintern Abbey’, lines 39–46.
15 Meher Baba, Discourses, II, p. 68.
16 John of the Cross, e Dark Night of the Soul, II. 9. 3, in e Collected Works, trans. by Kiernan
Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991), p. 413.
17 Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical eology, 1015A, in e Complete Works, trans. by Paul Rorem (New
York: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 138.
18 Plotinus, e Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna (Burdett, NY: Larson, 1992), II. 6. 9.
19 Plato, Timaeus, 45b, in e Collected Dialogues, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 1173.
20 Augustine, e Trinity (De Trinitate), trans. by Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press,
1991), XI. 1. 5.
21 Julian of Norwich, e Shewings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Georgia Ronan Crampton
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994), p. 44.
22 Apuleius, e Golden Ass, trans. by Jack Lindsay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), X.
3.
23 J. R. R. Tolkien, e Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mi in, 1966), p. 379.
24 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, p. 36.
25 See Augustine, Confessions, VI. 7–8.
26 Heraclitus, 47 [F29], in e Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: e Complete Fragments and Selected
Testimonies of the Major Presocratics, trans. and ed. by Daniel W. Graham, 2 vols (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), II, p. 155.
27 Guibert of Nogent, A Monk’s Confession: e Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent, trans. by Paul J.
Archambault (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), p. 86.
28 Chandogya Upanisad, With the Commentary of Sankaracarya, trans. by Swami Gambhirananda
(Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1983), VI. 8. 7.
29 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, p. 41.
30 Giorgio Agamben, e Coming Community, trans. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 104.
31 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul De Man, trans. by Cecile Lindsay (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), p. 29.
32 Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: e Place of Negativity, trans. by Karen Pinkus with
Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 1–2.
33 Dante Alighieri, Monarchy, trans. by Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), I.
xiii.
34 Hans-Georg Gadamer, e Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. by Nicholas Walker,
ed. by Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 35.
35 Miguel De Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. by John Rutherford (New York: Penguin, 2000), II. xxvi.
36 Francis Brabazon, Stay With God: A Statement in Illusion on Reality (Sydney: Garuda, 1959), p. 66.
 E C

LEAVE ME IN HELL
e Areopagite, who delighted in etymologies, puns, and allusions,
ctionalized himself (or herself ) through the adoption of a pseudonym,
that of an Athenian converted to Christianity by St. Paul in the rst century
AD. In Acts 17, we read: ‘When they heard about the resurrection of the
dead, some of them sneered, but others said “we want to hear you again on
this subject”. At that, Paul le the council. Some of the people became
followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of
the Areopagus’. We should not be surprised that this same passage, which
ends with Dionysius’ conversion, begins with a sermon on ‘THE
UNKNOWN GOD’. As yet unnamed and unknown, the sixth-century
Areopagite – whose pseudonymous corpus has inspired the open burial and
consecration of authorial identity in a luminous blackened scriptorium of
secret press (HWORDE) within secret press (gnOme) where, writing
neither as ‘oneself nor someone else’,1 bergmetal theorist Denys X. Abaris
presents his (or her) Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond (2014)2 – is
responsible for what has been identi ed as black metal theory’s apophatic
outlook.3
is outlook is intimately connected to a symbology and a teratology
embodied by the monstrous male protagonist in metal culture,4 and is
nowhere more evident than in second-wave black metal, which introduced
corpse-paint, weapons, and shadowy horror- lm photos of dead-looking
musicians in cavernous basements and wintry Norwegian forests. Here, the
sonorous and visual, ideally atrophic, are inversely tied to the Areopagite’s
theories of symbolism and cognition, both of which depend on what he
calls a rmation and negation in the cognitive mode, and similitude and
dissimilitude in the process of representation.5 In a medieval exegetical
context, this dyad corresponds to what are called the cataphatic and
apophatic traditions, concerning the open and evident on the one hand,
and the mysterious and ine able on the other. e one is ‘philosophic and
employs methods of demonstration’, the other ‘resorts to symbolism and
involves initiation’; ‘the one uses persuasion and imposes truthfulness on
what is asserted’, ‘the other acts and, by means of a mystery which cannot
be taught, puts souls rmly in the presence of God’.6 e one, known as the
via positiva, begins by asserting such broad statements as ‘God is life’, ‘God
is Good’, and moves on to ever more speci c descriptions such as ‘small still
voice’ (1 Kings 19:12). e other, known as the via negativa, begins by
denying the lowliest and most speci c descriptions, and moves up to the
most comprehensive, negating every possible a rmation. Here, the journey
that begins with ‘God is not a worm’, ends with ‘God is not’.7
It may thus be said with some justi cation that apophaticism is a
pessimistic tradition. But like other systems of Neoplatonic thought, this
seeming pessimism is paradoxically optimistic, since what it dissuades us
from is an over reliance on rationalism, and what it councils against is facile
anthropomorphism. In recompense, it o ers through a correct approach to
cognition and symbolism a real and ful lling comprehension of the
intelligible. In fact, in the tradition’s epistemology as well as in its teratology,
comprehension of a thing through its image leads to a direct experience of
the thing – a becoming one with – through the transcendence of the
image.8
Nowhere is this movement of the spirit more explicit than in black metal,
in the black metal art of adopting monstrous aliases, pseudonymous
inhuman name-images: Male c, Ygg[drasil], Dagon, Fenriz, Frost, et al.
e latter is a particularly striking example of what Dominic Fox describes
as ‘black metal’s deliberate freezing of the world, [its] xing it within a
terminal image, in order that its frost-bitten surface may be shattered by
anonymous inhuman forces rising from the depths of the self ’.9 Ergo Frost:
‘I chose the name “Frost” when I entered Satyricon and became a member.
I wanted a name that I could identify with as a black metal artist. I wanted
it to be like a puri cation of the side of me that was into the darkness, the
grimness, and the coldness of black metal’.10
Whereas the apophatic mystic’s path ends with divine consummation, the
bleakness invoked in Frost’s namesake inversely portends black metal’s
renunciation of all objects, aims, or ends.11 ough we do nd this
somewhat pejoratively in Cioran, who said, ‘If I were to be totally honest, I
do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. e answer probably
lies in the irrational character of life, which maintains itself without reason
[without why]’,12 the speci c instances of whylessness within this tradition I
have in mind are Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268), Marguerite Porete (d.
1310), and Meister Eckhart (d. ca. 1327), in whose formulation life ‘lives
without Why, because it lives for itself. And so’, Eckhart says, ‘if you were to
ask a genuine man who acted from his own ground, “Why do you act?” If
he were to answer properly he would simply say, “I act because I act”’.13 To
put it more perfunctorily, as Masciandaro does: ‘the only purpose of life,
which itself properly belongs only to what lives without principle – “Hoc
enim propie vivit quod est sine principio” [Eckhart] – is to arrive at the
purposeless Reality’.14 ‘Reality’, according to Masciandaro’s Master, Meher
Baba, ‘is Existence in nite and eternal […] Everything – the things and
beings – in Existence has a purpose […] eir very being in existence
proves their purpose; and their sole purpose in existing is to become shed of
purpose, i.e. to become purposeless’.15
Purposelessness is perceived as heretical in the eyes of Christian
orthodoxy, because for the Christian there is always an underpinning
purpose to life: salvation. Indeed, in Dante’s account of damnation, in
Canto III of Inferno, purposelessness is on the same plain as sinful action.
Here, on the banks of the river Acheron, which approaches the rst circle
of Hell, purposeless souls: ‘ ese miscreants, who never were alive | Were
naked, and were stung exceedingly | By gad ies and by hornets that were
there. | ese did their faces irrigate with blood, | Which, with their tears
commingled, at their feet | By the disgusting worms was gathered up’.16 In
embracing purposelessness, the apophatic mystic heretically embraces Hell
(indeed, the reference to preferring the su ering of Hell to divine gi s is
present in many mystical texts, among which, of those by Marquerite
Porete, Mechthild of Magdeburg [d. ca. 1275], Richard of St. Victor [d.
1173], and Angela of Foligno [d. 1309], a passage from the latter is
especially indicative: ‘I have seen the One who is, and how He is being of
all creatures. God is present in everything that exists, in a devil and a good
angel, in heaven and hell, in good deeds and in adultery and murder, […]
erefore, while I am in this Truth, I take as much delight in seeing and
understanding his presence in a devil and the act of adultery as I do in an
angel and a good deed’),17 but whereas the apophatic mystic turns
purposelessness against God in a dramatization of what Daniel Colucciello
Barber would call the baselessness of love in the service of life,18 black
metal engages this process from the other side, ergo Venom’s ‘Leave Me In
Hell’ from the album that coined the movement, Black Metal (Success,
1982): ‘I don’t want to be born | I don’t want it | Leave me in Hell’.19
In a move similar to that made by Bataille, and later echoed by Jacques
Lacan, one could claim that black metal attains the same ‘Beyond’ as
apophatic mysticism, without knowing anything about it: ‘Exuberance is the
point where we let go of Christianity. Angela of Foligno attained it, and
described it, but didn’t know it’.20 Vide Nergal of Behemoth: ‘Do you
remember Virgil’s “Aenid,” «Obscuris vera involvens» ? e idea of obscured
truth is the source of each and every esoteric current – be it a major
religious system or an intimate process of individuation – it all leads to
numerous illuminations’.21
In a variant of what is regarded as black metal theory’s inaugural text,
‘What is is at Stands Before Me?: Metal as Deixis’,22 Masciandaro
brings all of these points together in order to stress, moreover, the
important relation between metal and apophatic mysticism as a discourse-
praxis immanently invested in facticity. As he notes here, ‘captured by the
Vedantic formula neti neti (not this, not this), the apophatic mystic
deictically negates all presence in a
Beyond. Metal’, he says, ‘practices a
potentially complimentary cra with
[…] Metal negates all absence in a
Beyond’.23
rmation and realization of a divine
di erent but symmetrically and thus
the same tool, held by the other end,
rmation and realization of itself as a

1 Pseudo-Dionysius, e Mystical eology, 1001A, in e Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid

(New York: Paulist Press), p. 137.
2 Lieut. Nab Saheb of Kashmir and Denys X. Abaris, Bergmetal: Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond
(Charleston, SC: HWORDE, 2014).
3 Niall Scott, Metal Hammer (June, 2012), p. 148.
4 Niall Scott, ‘God Hates Us All: Kant, Radical Evil and the Diabolical Monstrous Human in Heavy
Metal’, in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. by Niall Scott
(Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 201–12.
5 See Pseudo-Dionysius, e Mystical eology, 1032D–1048B, in e Complete Works, pp. 138–41.
6 Pseudo-Dionysius, Epistle IX, 1104A–1113C; 1105D, in e Complete Works, pp. 280–8; p. 283.
7 Cf. David Williams, Deformed Discourse: e Function of the Monstrous in Mediaeval ought and
Literature (Devon: University of Exeter Press, 1996).
8 See Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 592D–593A, 708 D, in e Complete Works, p. 53, p. 80. Cf.
Williams, Deformed Discourse, pp. 24–60.
9 Dominic Fox, Cold World: e Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria
(Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2009), p. 56.
10 Until e Light Takes Us, directed by Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell (Brooklyn, NY: Factory, 2010),
DVD. Cf. Aspasia Stephanou, ‘Playing Wolves and Red Riding Hoods in Black Metal’, in Hideous
Gnosis, ed. by Nicola Masciandaro (Lexington, KY: n.p., 2010), pp. 157–70.
11 Cf. the work of philosopher Emil Cioran (d. 1995) as it is taken up by the irreligious fathers of
black metal pessimism: Paul J. Ennis, Nicola Masciandaro, Eugene acker, and Ben Woodard. In
particular, Ennis’ ‘Bleak eory’ (in P.E.S.T., ed. by Michael O’Rourke and Karin Sellberg
[forthcoming]), ‘Even Bleaker eory’ (published as ‘Bleak,’ in A Spell to Ward O the Darkness,
directed by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell [2013; London, UK: Soda Pictures, 2014], DVD) and, no
doubt to come, ‘Bleakest Ever Bleak eory’, and ‘Slightly Bleaker eory Again’, capture the sense
of futility formulated in and constituting Cioran’s oeuvre, essentially the same book written and
rewritten over the course of his life (see Apocalypse According to Cioran [1995]
<https://youtu.be/78y06QkpnC8>). at this ends without end, echoes Ennis’ own ends: ‘I don’t
know how to end this, I’m just going to end’ (‘Bleak eory’). At the same time, in literally, visually,
and sonorously embracing the su ering of Hell, ‘understood as the absence of/from the “object” of
desire, as desire’ (Amy Hollywood, ‘Bataille and Mysticism: A “Dazzling Dissolution”’, in
Diacritics, 26.2 [Summer, 1996], pp. 74-87), black metal explicitly engages the apophatic tradition’s
desire ‘to live without a why’ (Daniel Colucciello Barber, ‘Whylessness: e Universe is Deaf and
Blind’, in Eugene acker, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Nicola Masciandaro, and Alexander
Galloway, Dark Nights of the Universe [Miami: NAME, 2013], pp. 19-43; pp. 34-37).
12 Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. by IIinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago and London:
 e University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 33.
13 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works (2010), trans. by Maurice O’C Walshe (New York:
Crossroad Publishing, 2009), p. 10.
14 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘ e Sweetness (of the Law)’, in Non Liquet: e Westminster Online Papers
Series, Law and the Senses Series: e Taste Issue, 2013, pp. 40–60; p. 51, note 39.
15 Meher Baba, e Everything and the Nothing (Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House Publications,
1963), p. 2, cited in Masciandaro, ‘ e Sweetness (of the Law)’, p. 51, note 39.
16 Dante Alighieri, Dante’s Divine Comedy, ed. by Anna Amari-Parker (Hertfordshire: Eagle
Editions, 2007), p. 25.
17 It is virtually impossible to nd the textual source of this quote, but see for example, ‘Christian’,
available from <http://home.grandecom.net/~tspringer/Christian.html> (accessed 01/04/15), and
‘Christianity - e Self’, available from <http://www.theself.com/christianity.cfm> (accessed
01/04/15). Cf. Isaiah 45:7, ‘I form the light, and create the darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I,
the LORD, do all these things’.
18 Barber, ‘Whylessness’, p. 41.
19 Venom, ‘Leave Me in Hell’, Black Metal (Success, 1982).
20 Georges Bataille, ‘Le point où nous lâchons le christianisme est l’exubérance. Angèle de Foligno
l’atteignit et le décrivit, mais sans le savoir’ (OC5: 259), cited in Hollywood, ‘A “Dazzling
Dissolution”’, p. 76.
21 Nergal of Behemoth, commentary on ‘Ben Sahar’, e Satanist (Nuclear Blast Records, 2013); sleeve
notes.
22 Cf. Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”: A Gloss on Heavy Metal’s Originary Song’, in
Reconstruction, 9.2 (2009), Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
<http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/092/masciandaro.shtml> (accessed 21/10/14).
23 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘What Is is at Stands Before Me?: Metal as Deixis’, Re ections In e
Metal Void, ed. by Niall W. R. Scott (Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2012), pp. 11–24; p. 6.
 N M

WHAT IS THIS THAT STAND BEFORE ME?:

METAL AS DEIXIS
Abstract: Metal holds an essential relation to the phenomenology of
deixis, a relation modeled in the opening scene of metal’s originary song,
Black Sabbath’s ‘Black Sabbath’, in which indication is dramatized as
pointing back on itself towards the one who indicates in such a way that
the negativity of the question is restored to the negativity of the subject –
the mystery, nitude, and acontextuality of their being – as its rst and
nal ground. Neither a refusal of signi cation nor an attempt to signify,
metal is a deictic art or indication production that points to the presence of
its own pointing. Metal utilizes signi cative forms (music, words) and
digests whole discourses expressly for this purpose, neither to express nor
not to express things with them, but to make and indicate the making of
the sonic fact of their expression into a signi cance preceding and
exceeding all they could express.

[S]uppose someone hears an unknown sign, like the sound of some

word which he does not know the meaning of; he wants to know what it
is […] [this] is not love for the thing he does not know but for something
he knows, on account of which he wants to know what he does not
know.1

[T]he signi cance of the is is, in reality, a Not-this that it contains; that
is, an essential negativity […] e problem of being – the supreme
metaphysical problem – emerges from the very beginning as inseparable
from the problem of the signi cance of the demonstrative pronoun, and
for this reason it is always already connected with the eld of indication
[…] Deixis, or indication […] is the category within which language refers
to its own taking place.2
 [T]he work of art does not simply refer to something, because what it
refers to is actually there. We could say that the work of art signi es an
increase in being.3

Were I medieval rather than medievalist, my paper would perform a

heretical allegorical exegesis of the opening of Black Sabbath’s ‘Black
Sabbath’ as the appearance of Heavy Metal itself, personi ed by the
mysterious gure who, escaping identi cation, points to the one who sees
it, to me: ‘What is this that stands before me? | Figure in black which points
at me’.4 Here metal, its authenticity or self-authorization emblematized by
the tautological terms of artist, song, and album, would signify an event
unveiling the negativity of the mystery of oneself, the unbelievable brutality
of the fact that one is, as the original evil of the world. So metal’s very
advent, an unpredictable/anticipated revelation of a more profound origin,
would constitute a messianic opening – think Sabbath’s mystical h
member – toward a world beyond this negativity, the experiential space for
its seizure and sublimation. e lovely heresy of this reading is its irting
with refusal of the divine ‘gi ’ of individuated being and its undermining of
the impotent Judeo-Christian explanation for what is wrong with
everything in terms of a collision between demonic and human agency, in
short, Eve. is move, moreover, my medieval alter-ego would discover, is
proportionally traced in the fate of Black Sabbath’s ‘Evil Woman’, a too-pop
cover-song reluctantly recorded and released as their debut single with
Sabbath’s own ‘Wicked World’ on side B, included in the UK release of the
rst album, replaced with ‘Wicked World’ in the US release by Warner
Bros., and since forgotten by a metal tradition which generally understands
that the problem is not something in particular but the world itself, the
whole ungraspable fact of our being in what stands before us.5 Or, as
expressed in the following catena (a medieval exegetical device) from Bolt
rower’s e IVth Crusade: ‘Insigni cance is our existence […] No escape,
there is no way out […] Existing in the present which surely cannot last
[…] Lost on a voyage with no destiny […] Our futile lives shall be no more
[…] Just isn’t how you planned […] To survive we must comply […] Faced
by this total stranger […] Take me far away – deep within the dream […]
Open our mind before it’s too late’.6
 Instead, I will pursue a similar argument in a di erent idiom, namely, that
metal holds an essential relation to the phenomenology of deixis, a relation
modeled in the opening scene of metal’s originary song wherein indication
is dramatized as pointing back on itself towards the one who indicates in
such a way that the negativity of the question is restored to the negativity of
the subject – the mystery, nitude, and acontextuality of their being – as its
rst and nal ground.7 As an expression of the experiential structure of
metal, of what metal rst feels like, this scene shows metal as founded on
an ecstatic experience of deixis’s essential negativity and so suggests that
metal nds itself, becomes and stays metal, as an insistent performance of
the fact that we encounter things, the real presence of the this, only
through negation. At the level of language, the negativity of deixis,
following Hegel and his commentators, is structured by the unutterability
of the singular, by the fact that when we say this, a sign whose signi cance
is wholly constituted by the contextual instance of its own event, what is
said is in fact a not-this, a universal which annuls the singularity of what is
meant.8 What makes deixis work, then, what enables its function in
discourse, is that it says by not saying, and more precisely, that it negates its
own inability to signify by speaking language, that is, by referring to the
actual event of our being in language, in the same manner that ‘I’ means
‘the one who is saying “I”’.9 e negativity of deixis thus resolves to a deeper
auto-deixis, its pointing to itself. And it is on this principle that the aesthetic
empire of metal is built. is means that metal, being like all music
something between language and art, discourse and making, is located at
the intersection between the phenomena described in my last two
epigraphs, that it takes place at the point where language’s referring to its
own taking place joins with art’s presencing of what it refers to. Neither a
refusal of signi cation nor an attempt to signify, metal is a deictic art or
indication production that points to the presence of its own pointing. e
ecstatic potential of such deictic self-presencing, literalized in the
metalhead’s tensionally vibrating devil horns, is explicable via Georges
Bataille’s de nition of ecstasy as ‘the opposite of a response of a desire to
know’, which traces a dialectical movement parallel to the opening of Black
Sabbath’s ‘Black Sabbath’:
 THE OBJECT OF ECSTASY IS THE ABSENCE OF AN OUTSIDE
ANSWER. THE INEXPLICABLE PRESENCE OF MAN IS THE
ANSWER THE WILL GIVES ITSELF, SUSPENDED IN THE VOID OF
UNKNOWABLE NIGHT.10

In tune with this pattern, the exuberance of metallic deixis is a bearing

forth of the abundance of its own presence, via qualitative and quantitative
sonic plenitudes, into the absence of what it would indicate, an aesthetic
production or actual making of precisely what can never be pointed to but
which deixis, prior to and as the basis of all signi cation, always does: its
own facticity, the fact that it is.11
What makes metal deictic in this deeper way? How does it produce the
presence of its own that? e simple and essential answer is noise, which
metal fashions, not as such, but in and out of the signi cative structures of
instrumental and vocal forms. So metal traces its circle of aural experience
with a compass constructed from the two points of the unknown or
unintelligible sonic sign: sound as the sign of an unknown event (something
happening, capable of being shown and witnessed – what was that?) and
sound as the sign of an unknown meaning (something being said, capable
of being understood and interpreted – what did he say?), with the uid
boundary between them being marked by the scream. ese two forms of
signi cative noise are the magnetic poles of a being-with-music that, in
keeping with Augustine’s analysis of our experience of unknown signs cited
above, instantaneously and continuously draws forth the will to know, our
what is this?, while feeding the will solely and purely with its own
inexorable dense presence, where it now means the phenomenon or event
happening in the ‘third area’ of reality between subject and object, here
nameable as the metalhead’s willing of metal, the becoming-metal of his
own head.12 Wrestling with and against its own indication, in love with the
sign as its ercest enemy, metallic deixis is a noisy semiotic struggle to make
itself what it points to. Before all signi cation or making of points, before all
themes and purposes, metal indicates via the negativity of the unknown
sign that it is indicating, that it is happening as indication. Indeed, metal
utilizes signi cative forms (music, words) and digests whole discourses
expressly for this purpose, neither to express nor not to express things with
them, but to make and indicate the making of the sonic fact of their
expression into a signi cance preceding and exceeding all they could express.
From this perspective, metal’s conceptual commitment to negative themes
(death, apocalypse, void, etc.) is an absolute aesthetic necessity, ensuring
that insofar as metal does signify beyond itself, that this beyond only
exposes metal’s own inexplicability as signi cative event. Facticity emerges,
is made present, through metallic deixis the way it usually does, through
suspension of the what, a suspension which belongs more generally to the
experience of wonder, where not knowing what a thing is leaves us caught,
xed before the fact that it is. In this, metal bears an important relation to
the avant-garde sublime, as explicated by Lyotard in relation to painting:
‘ e paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is to
this that it has to witness. […] e avant-gardist attempt inscribes the
occurrence of a sensory now as what cannot be presented and which
remains to be presented in the decline of “great” representational
painting’.13 But what distinguishes metal within this relation is that metal
achieves its sensory self-inscription not by standing apart from
representational tradition (a move more proper to the avant-garde as such)
but by wholly investing in it, by locating itself as a beyond within
representation, within musical and linguistic form. Metal achieves itself, as
such, a beyond not simply by simultaneously signifying and not signifying
(a domain more proper to conceptual and ironic art), but more ‘naïvely’
and desperately by signifying through the refusal to signify. Noisiness
constitutes this refusal as sound’s return from signi cance back towards
itself.
For instrumental sound, the noisiness of metallic deixis means sound’s
becoming substantial, dense, elemental, a thing and hence ‘no longer’
possibly the sound of something happening, nor the sound of music, but a
happening in and of itself. As captured in its own weighty generic term,
heavy metal takes sonic substantiality to its aesthetic limit: the reality of
sound so loud it can hurt, the fantasy of sound so solid it can kill. Whence
Doom, or, drowning under quaking mountains of sound: ‘Shockwaves
rattle the Earth below with hymn of doom’ (Sleep, ‘From Beyond’, Sleep’s
Holy Mountain). rash, or, hacking and being hacked to bits with nely
ground axes of sound: ‘ e only way to exit | Is going piece by piece’
(Slayer, ‘Piece by Piece’, Reign in Blood). Death, or, being disembowled from
within by chthonic rumblings of sound: ‘We’re turned inside out | Beyond
the piercing cries’ (Obituary, ‘Turned Inside Out’, Cause of Death). Black,
or, freezing to death in infernal ice wastes of sound: ‘We are fucking ice’
(Imperial Crystalline Entombment, ‘Astral Frost Invocation’, Apocalyptic
End in White).
For vocal sound, the noisiness of metallic deixis means sound’s becoming
self, the embodied being of the one to whom voice belongs and hence ‘no
longer’ the sound of being, nor the sound of language, but a being in and of
itself. is may be understood as an inversion of the usual experiential
relation between voice and language, whereby voice disappears via
articulation into language and thus stands behind the word, informing it. In
the metal lyric, voice appears via disarticulation from language and thus
stands between us and the word, interfering with it.14 Accordingly, metal
vocals, especially of the black and death variety, are capable of producing
the experience of hearing the word detached from vocal intentionality, the
word as unsaid by the one who speaks, as exempli ed by the self-indicating
word of the demonically possessed: ‘Jesus then asked him, “What is your
name?” And he said, “Legion”; for many demons had entered him’ (Luke
8:30).15 Opening a space between sound and meaning where voice teems
(cf. legion [legio, λεγιών] as simultaneously noun and name, both and
neither), metal vocals similarly produce voice as a singular multiplicity, so
that rather than hearing words spoken by voice (the one in the many), we
hear voice spoken by words (the many in the one).16 Vocal metallic deixis is
the inside-out voice of a linguistic self-possession indicating the presence of
what it says in the being who speaks. inking the metal vocal auto-
deictically in these terms, as intensifying the presence of its producer such
that (following Gadamer) the vocal does not merely speak something
because what it speaks is actually there, in other words, as voice as
possessed by what it says, coordinates with Agamben’s ontological
understanding of the negativity of deixis as grounded in the removal or
dispossession of the voice: ‘that which is removed each time in speaking,
this, is the voice. […] “Taking-the- is” and “Being-the-there” are possible
only through the experience of the Voice, that is, the experience of the
taking place of language in the removal of the voice’.17 What the metal vocal
enacts, then, is something like the return of the voice in vengeance against
the event of language as what negates it and thus a repossession and being
possessed by the voice as ontic exponent, a dialetheic pure will and pure
refusal to signify.18
is reading of metal as deixis indicates, moreover, an important relation
between metal and apophatic mysticism as a discourse-praxis radically
invested in the experiential possibilities of facticity or the that. As captured
by the Vedantic formula neti neti (not this, not this), the apophatic mystic
deictically negates all presences in a rmation and realization of a divine
Beyond. In the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing, for instance, the
contemplative ‘treads all things down full far under the cloud of forgetting’
and through a most intense psychic su ering of sorrow ‘that he is’ arrives at
a divine ravishment de ned as ‘that joy which robs one of all knowing and
feeling of one’s being’.19 Metal practices a di erent but symmetrical and thus
potentially complementary cra with the same tool, held by the other end,
as it were. Metal deictically negates all absences in a rmation and
realization of itself as a Beyond.20 is does not mean a rming the
presence of what is absent or denying the absence of what is present. It
means, quite simply, denying the absent, negating what is not present. In
other words, metallic deixis operates as the inverse of Meister Eckhart’s
famous apophatic prayer: ‘I pray to God to rid me of God’.21 As explicated
by John Caputo, this prayer, arising ‘from an ongoing distrust of our
ineradicable desire for presence’, is a movement toward God through the
negation of the name of God, the denial of ‘God’ as the ultimate and most
essential denial:

I pray God – that is, He Who is everything and none of the things this
signi er names, nomen omninominabile et nomen innominabile – to rid
me of ‘God’, that is, all of these nominal e ects which try to cow us into
submission, all of those historic-cultural-linguistic e ects which are
collected together by the word ‘God’ (or any other sacred cow).22

As the inverse of this movement, the unprayer of metal is like a mirror-

image asymptote, always-never arriving to the same place from the other
side. Rather than emptying God of ‘God’ as God’s nal and most intimate
veil, metallic deixis empties not-God (or world) of ‘not-God’ as world’s
ultimate covering, the illusory outside that renders here a place of absence,
a ground for the desire of presence. But metal’s unprayer, expressible as ‘I
pray to not-God (world) to rid me of not-God (world)’, also touches the
divine, for as Agamben says, ‘What is properly divine is that the world does
not reveal God’.23 e divinity of experiencing the world as not revealing
God is potentially identical to experiencing God emptied of ‘God’. Metal’s
relation to such experience is accordingly de ned by Scott Wilson in
apophatic terms as a voiding of God:

metal is a music in which experience is privileged over knowledge or

know-how as the path to joy that broaches, in headbanging heaven, the
divine. is is especially the case in a form like black metal which
generally favours low cost and low delity production values and a raw,
cold sound. In black metal the ecstatic experience is reached in
evacuating God, or indeed any other comforting name, from the space of
the divine.24

As these words suggest, metal’s atheological apophatic ecstasy is also

explicable with reference to its capital rite, headbanging, the intimate
opposite or countermovement of the head that bows itself in prayer. Where
the mystic bows to God for the sake of his own God-performed
decapitation, relinquishing the head that says ‘God’ as the nal veil (ego)
between the soul and God, the metalhead bows without bowing to nothing
but metal, banging the head against itself, against its own abject presence.25
Headbanging, the gestural expression of metallic deixis as unprayer,
conventionally accompanied by the manual horns that point impossibly to
metal itself, is the perfect inverse of nal mystical consummation. It is the
ecstatic realization, not of God, but of the non-realization of God, the
iterative and unceasing auto-decapitation of the being at the threshold who
as Bataille says ‘must throw himself headlong [vivant] into that which has
no foundation and has no head’.26 Headbanging is the maddening
becoming-divine of the one for whom there is none to bow to.27
Headbanging manifests the ritual structure of metal as essentially self-
sacri cial.28
 But how does metal deictically negate absence, something that is not there
to be indicated in the rst place? How can deixis instrumentalize denial of
what is not evident? Metallic deixis accomplishes this the only way it can be
accomplished, by pointing to something absent in a manner that denies
that there is anything to be pointed to, that is, by simultaneously pointing
and denying that one is pointing, by pointing in denial of pointing’s
signi cance. In these terms, deixis is the essential mechanism of metal’s
frequently appreciated Nietzschean spirit, as a self-liberating movement
away from all possibility of an outside towards which the world is ordered
yet therefore also a movement which both remains in contact with the
outside as impossible – ‘God is dead’ – and loves to forget that contact in
the midst of its own presence. Metal’s universal symbol, the sign of the
horns, perfectly embodies this movement, pointing to what it negates and
refuses, devilishly asserting itself as the divinity it denies, all the while
signifying little more than metal per se. Or as Behemoth sing it: ‘Rise thy
horns | For I’m at one with the dark | Divine presence ascends | Touching
the forehead ov god’.29 Metal-as-deixis is this touch, the rebellious
appropriation of all signi cance for the irreducible event of its indication, as
if the sign, forced to point back upon its own primal presence, would
disclose a transcendent anti-ontotheological tautology, a heretically divine
human tetragrammaton (I am who I am). So Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says:
‘For me – how could there be something outside me? ere is no outside!
But we forget this with all sounds; how lovely it is that we forget!’ And the
animals reply: ‘In every Instant being begins; round every Here rolls the
ball. ere. e middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity’.30
Forgetting that there is no outside, a special virtue of sonic experience, is
not an enchanting illusion that there is an outside, but more simply and
purely a suspension of the burden of consciousness that there is no outside,
a putting down of the labor of negation, and hence an opening towards real
experience of the principle that ‘the root of all pure joy and sadness is that
the world is as it is’.31

1 Augustine, e Trinity, trans. by J. E. Rotelle (New York: New City Press, 1997), X. 1. 2.
2 Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: e Place of Negativity, trans. by K. E. Pinkhaus and M.
Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 14–25.
3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, e Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. by N. Walker
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 35.
4 Black Sabbath, ‘Black Sabbath’, Black Sabbath (Warner Bros, 1970).
5 On ‘Evil Woman’, see P. Wilkinson, Rat Salad: Black Sabbath, e Classic Years, 1969–1975 (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), pp. 37, 48–9, 52.
6 Bolt rower, e IVth Crusade (Earache Records, 1992).
7 Cf. ‘From a logical point of view, the openness essential to experience is precisely the openness of
being either this or that. It has the structure of a question. And just as the dialectical negativity of
experience culminates in the idea of being perfectly experienced – i.e., being aware of our nitude
and limitedness – so also the logical form of the question and the negativity that is part of it
culminate in a radical negativity: the knowledge of not knowing’ (H. Gadamer, Truth and Method,
trans. by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall [New York: Continuum, 1994], p. 362).
8 As Hegel explains, ‘the sensuous is that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to
consciousness, i.e. to that which is inherently universal. In the actual attempt to say it, it would
therefore crumble away; those who started to describe it would not be able to complete the
description, but would be compelled to leave it to others, who would themselves nally have to
admit to speaking about something which is not’ (Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 110, cited from e
Hegel Reader, ed. by Stephen Houlgate [Oxford: Blackwell, 1998], p. 85). Ferrarin comments: ‘By
saying “this”, “now”, consciousness experiences the universality of language. e singular is only
opined or meant [gemeint] because all singulars can be indicated as a “this” or a “now”. e “this”
is “neither this nor that, a not-this”. In other words, the “this” cannot be identi ed positively with a
singular spatiotemporal given; it abides as a constant in the vanishing of its being referred to. In
sum, it is not an immediacy but a negation; the this is the negative proxy (demonstrative
pronoun) for each singular given’ (Alfredo Ferrarin, Hegel and Aristotle [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001], pp. 182–3). Cf. ‘ e force and truth of language negate and pass beyond
the singularity of the meant, a sheer sensuous Being, and thus raise it to the conceptual
universality of the uttered or expressed. Language will thus annul the singularity that meaning
intends to express with it’ ( omas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999], p. 108).
9 As Daniel Heller-Roazen, commenting on Agamben, explains: ‘Agamben argues that an analysis of
the potentiality of language […] leads to a solution, or more precisely, dissolution of the aporia of
self-reference. “ e name can be named and language can be brought to speech”, we read in
“Pardes”, Agamben’s essay on Derrida […] “because self-reference is displaced onto the level of
potentiality; what is intended is neither word as object nor the word insofar as it actually denotes
a thing but, rather, a pure potential to signify (and not to signify) . . . But this is not longer
meaning’s self-reference, a sign’s signi cation of itself; instead it is the materialization of a
potentiality, the materialization of its own possibility”. Hence the signi cance, for Agamben, of
those parts of […] language whose connotative value can be determined only on the basis of their
relation to an event of language […] At issue in each case are parts of speech that, in themselves,
bear no meaning; they are capable of functioning in discourse only because they suspend their
own incapacity to signify and, in this way, refer to an actual event of language. […] We have seen
that Agamben’s analysis of potentiality leads to the recognition that actuality is nothing other
than the self-suspension of potentiality, the mode in which Being can not not be. e same
suspension must be said of the potentiality constitutive of language: like all potentiality, it is not
e aced but rather ful lled and completed in the passage to actuality’ (Giorgio Agamben,
Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999], p. 20).
10 Georges Bataille, e Bataille Reader, ed. by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell,
1997), p. 45. Cf. ‘Being is dying by loving’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, p. 29).
11 Amy Hollywood explains the relationship between facticity, its speci c form in the arbitrariness of
identity, and Bataille’s understanding of ecstasy: ‘Bataille not only questions the meaning of his
own existence and that of human existence (why live in the face of death?) but also continually
brings himself face to face with the sheer contingency of his own existence as the individual he
himself is. Chance is the hook on which existence falls. It is without meaning and o ers no answer
other than its own sheer facticity. e abruptness and impudence of this facticity, the absence of
response in the response, is/engenders ecstasy’ (‘Bataille and Mysticism: A “Dazzling Dissolution”’,
Diacritics, 26 [1996], pp. 74–85). Cf. ‘ e burning corpse of god shall keep us warm in the doom of
howling winds | For we are a race from beyond the wanderers of night’ (Xasthur, ‘Doomed by
Howling Winds’, Xasthur [Moribund Records, 2006]), i.e. facticity as heat transfer from absence to
presence.
12 ‘[ is] topology […] has always been known to children, fetishists, “savages”, and poets. It is in this
“third area” that a science of man truly freed of every eighteenth-century prejudice should focus its
study. ings are not outside us, in measurable external space, like neutral objects (ob-jecta) of use
and exchange; rather, they open to us the original place solely from which the experience of
measurable external space becomes possible. ey are therefore held and comprehended from the
outset in the topos outopos (placeless place, no-place place) in which our experience of being-in-
the-world is situated. e question “where is the thing?” is inseparable from the question “where
is the human?”’ (Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. by
Ronald L. Martinez [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], p. 59).
13 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘ e Sublime and the Avant Garde’, trans. by Lisa Liebmann, in e
Inhuman: Re ections on Time, ed. by Andres Benjamin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 93, 103.
14 Cf. ‘what is common to most death, doom, and black metal is the anti-melodic, non-natural
treatment of the voice […] If, as Deleuze and Guattari assert, “the rst musical operation” is “to
machine the voice”, that is, to deterritorialize the voice from its ordinary, “natural” speaking
function, then death, doom, and black vocalists are fundamentally – indeed, primarily – musical in
their anti-lyrical non-singing, in that their growls, screams and grunts simply push music’s de-
naturalization of the speaking voice to extremes’ (Ronald Bogue, ‘Violence in ree Shades of
Metal: Death, Doom, and Black’, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics
[Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007], pp. 45–6).
15 Eugene acker has explored the shared phenomenology of the Gerasene demoniac’s plural name
and black metal vocals in his analysis of sonic swarms, ‘Pusle Demons’, Culture Machine, 9 (2007)
<http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk>.
16 Cf. ‘the demons blaspheme the theological relation between the One and the Many. What is
noteworthy here is that the demons rst announce their presence through voice. We are not told
whether the infamous answer “Legion” (more commonly translated as “I am legion”) is uttered in
chorus or as a single voice. e word “legion” itself denotes some sort of an organized quasi-
military unit, and thus a more rigid, disciplined mode of organization. But it is spoken – or rather,
“resounded”. We might even imagine that Jesus hears this demonic swarm before it is seen. But in
fact, it is never seen as such. For, during the exorcism, the demonic swarm is immediately and
invisibly transferred to a herd of swine. e iconography of the passage is striking – the true
nature of the demons, we presume, is revealed by the choice of their receptacle in a herd of “dumb”,
lowly animals. But, throughout the parable, the only real indication we have of a swarm of
demons is this enigmatic resounding of the word “Legion”’ (Eugene acker, ‘Pulse Demons’). So
 metal is symbolically invested/infested with swarmic self-images, e.g. ‘Howling our metal we light
up the world, | And the banner of Ungol is proudly unfurled. | Raising our legion, and now you
belong, | And the point of the blade will be screaming our song’ (Cirith Ungol, ‘Join the Legion’,
Paradise Lost [Restless Records, 1991]). On the horde-concept in Black Metal, via Darwin, Freud,
and Deleuze, see Valter, ‘Horde’, Documents
<http://surrealdocuments.blogspot.com/2008/05/horde.html>.
17 Agamben, Language and Death, pp. 32–3.
18 Cf. Agamben’s reading of Augustine’s analysis of the experience of the dead and/or unknown word:
‘[Augustine] isolates an experience of the word in which it is no longer mere sound (istas tres
syllabus) and it is not yet meaning, but the pure intention to sign y. is experience of an unknown
word (verbum incognitum) in the no-man’s-land between sound and signi cation, is, for
Augustine, the amorous experience as a will to knowledge: the intention to signify without a
signi ed corresponds, in fact, not to logical understanding, but to the desire for knowledge’
(Language and Death, pp. 33–4, my emphasis). Agamben’s ‘intention to signify without a signi ed’
intersects with the structure of metallic deixis.
19 e Cloud of Unknowing, ed. by P. J. Gallacher (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University
Press, 1997), pp. 70-1 (my translation).
20 Wormed’s explanation of the their rst album literalizes this movement vis-à-vis space:
‘WORMED is a mental state in which the human being dwells inside this immense universe, like a
small “worm” inside an “intestine” (the Universe). And how he feels when he realizes that he
cannot get outside of it. e necessity of crossing to beyond, something as being caught in a pre-
dimension. It isn’t anything material, it is simply a way of naming a deep human emotion, we call
this feeling WORMED. All lyrics concept [sic] in “Floating Cadaver in the Monochrome” explain
the “chapters” of this confused space and what [sic] this space can compress all dimensions in one
to create a hole in the universe. e Geodesic Dome is the “ne plus ultra” point in space that is able
to make that dimension portal. […] is is only the concept of the MCD “Floating Cadaver in the
Monochrome”. WORMED´s brand new full-length will be the threshold to this dimension’
(<http://www.wormed.net/concept.htm>).
21 Reiner Schürmann, Meister Eckhart (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 219.
22 John Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2000), p. 257.
23 Giorgio Agamben, e Coming Community, trans. by M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 90.
24 Scott Wilson, ‘From Forests Unknown: “Eurometal” and the Political / Audio Unconscious’, in
Re ections in the Metal Void, ed. by Niall W. R. Scott (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012), p.
206.
25 On traditional mystical meanings of decapitation, see A. K. Coomaraswamy, ‘Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight: Indra and Namuci’, Speculum, 19 (1944), pp. 104–25. On beheading as
representation of the impossible, see Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Non potest hoc corpus decollari:
Beheading and the Impossible’, in Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in Medieval Literature and
Culture, ed. by Larissa Tracy and Je Massey (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 15–36.
26 Georges Bataille, ‘ e Obelisk’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. by Allan
Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 222.
27 Of this, Meher Baba’s repeated banging of his head on a stone during the period of self-realization
provides a striking example: ‘Once when Merwan was banging his head on the oor at home, his
 mother heard a thudding sound coming from his room. […] Merwan had blood all over his face.
Crying she asked, “Merog, have you gone mad? Are you totally mad?” Wiping the blood o with a
towel, he said, “I am not mad! I have become something else!’’ As he later explained, “ is constant
hammering of my head was the only thing that gave me some relief during my real su ering of
coming down – which I have repeatedly said is indescribable”’ (Lord Meher, p. 196
<http://www.lordmeher.org/>, rst italics mine).
28 As Jamerson Maurer observes, metal ritually sacri ces the normative, everyday structures of
experience, ‘violently disrupting & transgressing this perceptory-illusion with a ritualistic
assassination of stasis, stagnation & ontophysiological inertia’ (‘Fire Walk with Me; or Dwelling
in the Lodge of Di erentiation’, Re ections in the Metal Void, p. 25). At the same time, headbanging
must be understood, not as a ritual proper or reenactment of some originary signi cance, but
rather, following Joseph C. Russo’s analysis, as a ‘ritual of ritual itself ’ (‘Induction of the Devotee:
Nile’s Primal Ritual’, Re ections in the Metal Void, 32). at is, the only signi cance of
headbanging, as ritual, is that one bangs one’s head, such that it is extremely meaningless to ever
be concerned how one bangs one’s head or whether or not one bangs one’s head. Metal ritually
compels headbanging, but headbanging remains essentially aritualistic.
29 Behemoth, ‘Horns Ov Baphomet’, Zos Kia Cultus (Here and Beyond), (Avantgarde Music, 2002).
30 Friedrich Nietzsche, us Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), p. 175. Nietzsche’s characterization of Zarathustra in Ecce Homo is most
relevant with regard to apophasis: ‘ e psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is how
he that says No and does No to an unheard-of degree, to everything to which one has so far said
Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of No-saying spirit’ (On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce
Homo, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufman [New York: Vintage, 1967], p. 306).
31 Agamben, Coming Community, p. 90, my emphasis.
 N M

ANTI-COSMOSIS: BLACK MAHAPRALAYA

CATENA

God or the good or the place does not take place, but is the taking-place
[aver-luogo] of the entities, their innermost exteriority.
– Giorgio Agamben1

I don’t want to be where I am, or anywhere for that matter.

– Male c of Xasthur2

e very questions ‘Whence?’ and ‘Whither?’ presuppose the beginning

and end of this evolving creation. e beginning of evolution is the
beginning of time and the end of evolution is the end of time. Evolution has
both beginning and end because time has both beginning and end.
Between the beginning and the end of this changing world there are
many cycles, but there is, in and through these cycles, a continuity of
cosmic evolution. e real termination of the evolutionary process is
called Mahapralaya or the nal annihilation of the world, when the
world becomes what it was in the beginning, namely nothing. […] Just as
the varied world of experience completely disappears for the man who is
in deep sleep, the entire objective cosmos which is the creation of Maya
vanishes into nothingness at the time of Mahapralaya. It is as if the
universe had never existed at all. Even during the evolutionary period the
universe is in itself nothing but imagination. ere is in fact only one
indivisible and eternal Reality and it has neither beginning nor end. It is
beyond time. From the point of view of this timeless Reality the whole
time-process is purely imaginary, and billions of years which have passed
and billions of years which are to pass do not have even the value of a
second. It is as if they had not existed at all.
– Meher Baba3
 ere is gangrene in the tubes | Of the vermicular ethics of how | Your
world view presents itself | Contradictions in terms of how | Your life
evolves in the chain of being | I claim you were never a part of reality.
– Mayhem4

One bright Sunday, as he was sitting withdrawn and deep in thought,

there came to him in the calmness of his mind the gure of a rational
being who was sophisticated in speech but inexperienced in deeds and
who over owed with rich ostentation. He began speaking to the gure
thus: Where do you come from? It said: I never came from anywhere. He
said: Tell me, what are you? It said: I am nothing. He said: What do you
want? It answered and said: I want nothing. And he said: is is very
strange. Tell me, what is your name? It said: I am called nameless wild
one. e disciple said: You are well named ‘the wild one’ because your
words and answers are completely wild. Now tell me something I shall
ask you. Where does your wisdom take you? It said: to unrestrained
liberty.
– Henry of Suso5

I pick up the guitar play until I found a ri that makes me either

shudder in fear, cry with pain, tremble with anger and I will play that ri
many times over […] I am never content or never will be with the
restrictions set upon me. I will destroy cosmos and return to freedom!
– Donn of Teutoburg Forest6

I contest in the name of contestation what experience itself is (the will to

proceed to the end of the possible). Experience, its authority, its method,
do not distinguish themselves from the contestation.
– Georges Bataille7

We are the Circle of Black Twilight. Spreading Kaos and Dissonance

through sacred ceremonial worship. We have transcended from this mind
and esh. We exist within this darkness and dwell within its unending
 void of disharmony. You too will come to proclaim its ultimate presence.
– Volahn8

A catena is a medieval form of exegetical commentary composed wholly

of a chain of citations from other works. Representing textual signi cance
as a plenitude spanning the voices of multiple authors, the textual form,
exempli ed by Aquinas’s Catena Aurea on the four gospels, is the generic
analogue of the cosmic spectacle that held sway during the thousand years
or so when catenae were written, namely, the vision of the universe as
constituting a great chain of being, an ordered procession of entities
formally bound together via the unity of their common origin and end. As
Macrobius explains, with properly consequential syntax, in his Commentary
on the Dream of Scipio:

since Mind emanates from the Supreme God, and Soul from Mind, and
Mind, indeed, forms and su uses all below with life, and since this is the
one splendor lighting up everything and visible in all, like a countenance
re ected in many mirrors arranged in a row, and since all follow on in
continuous succession, degenerating step by step [degenerantia per
ordinem] in their downward course, the close observer will nd that from
the Supreme God even to the bottommost dregs of the universe [a
summo deo usque ad ultimam rerum faecem] there is one tie [conexio],
binding at every link and never broken. is is the golden chain [catena
aurea] of Homer which, he tells us, God ordered to hang down from the
sky to the earth.9

e chain principle is an ontological wholism. It threads the fact of

universe itself, expressing the inseparability of the what and the that. e
cosmic catena is the necessary point of identity, piercing every entity,
between essence and existence, the invisible thing making it so that
everything is next to something else and part of everything itself. It is thus
in a full and total sense the chain of being, the fact of being’s being a chain
or binding: at once the universal necessity of the actuality of the everything
(the fact that there is such a thing as everything) and the individual
necessity of the actuality of individuation (the fact that each thing is
inexorably shackled to itself ). e chain encompasses from within the
impossible unity of perspective on being that cosmos presupposes: the
de nite vision of the unbounded whole from the position of one-sided
asymmetry occupied by the individual.
I begin with a catena, really an acatena – a broken, scriptureless exegetical
chain – as the only conceivable way of opening discourse on anti-cosmic
black metal, an art that proceeds in principle against the universe as the
principle of order, which is what cosmos means, and thus against the very
possibility or ground of discourse. We may recall that discourse, which
signi es logos as a circulation between beings, implies an
immanence/emergence of order, the actualization of a shared reality as its
medium. Only thus does word result in text (fr. texere, to weave), the
higher order fabric (cf. ‘fabric of the universe’) produced when the thread
of language passes to and fro across itself. Ful lling such a discursive
ontology, Dante’s Commedia realizes itself in the joyful retelling of a vision
of a complex universal form that takes a codexical, self-bound shape:

In its depth I saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume, that
which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe: substances and
accidents and their relations, as though fused together in such a way that
what I tell is but a simple light. e universal form of this knot I believe
that I saw, because, in telling this, I feel my joy increase.10

Inside the anticosmic impulse, the reality of such a volume, and with it
the space for speaking comedically in its margins, is both impossible and
inevitable. For the satanic reader, such a book of the cosmos is
paradoxically exactly what cannot exist and precisely what must be burned
and scattered in the furnace of Chaos as the ultimate expression of the
most horrible heresy: the fact that anything is happening at all. is
impulse, materialized in the initial scream of the opening track of
Teutoburg Forest’s Anti-Subhuman Scum, ‘Seeing God’s Creation, and
Despising it’, is explicable as absolute refusal of the originary causality that
the chain of being manifests, and more precisely, as hatred of the essential
weakness or impotence of the absolute one who cannot not make others,
the no-thing (Ein Sof) perfectly incapable of not creating many things.
Plotinus explains:

It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are
from it: in order that Being may be brought about, the source must be no
Being but Being’s generator, in what is to be thought as the primal act of
generation. Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the
One is perfect and, in our metaphor, has over owed, and its exuberance
has produced the new.11

As the angelic rst link and mirror produced in this ecstatic emanation,
Satan, second only to God, becomes archrival only, alonely, on the basis of
being arch-other, the original subject of the most intimate and intolerable
intersection between the absolute fact of God and something’s being other
than God.12 In this the satanic principle is in essence the inversely maximal
experience of the most minimal negation performed in the double ecstasy
of creation, following Pseudo-Dionysius, who writes that ‘the very cause of
the universe […] is also carried outside of himself […] He is […] enticed
away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all
things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to
remain, nevertheless, within himself ’.13 Hear this inverted in the voice of an
ego: I, e ect of the universe, am enclosed inside of myself, I am forced away
from my transcendent dwelling place and come to abide outside of all
things, and I do so by virtue of my supernatural and ecstatic capacity to
remain, nevertheless, without myself. Where, for whom, and to what end
does this being speak? What is the discourse of the one who would evade
this impossible enchainment, the extreme separation of the closest binding,
who totally cannot tolerate cosmos as the place of being? Is there an anti-
cosmic logos that is not ‘lost [as Bataille says] among babblers in a night in
which we can only hate the appearance of light which comes from
babbling’?14 Is there a convivial, symposial anti-cosmosis, not merely a
noise-making against, but a discursive noise that actually unmakes cosmos?
Talking with his grandfather over the ear- lling pleasing sound of the
celestial spheres [qui complet aures meas tantus et tam dulcis sonus], the
younger Scipio learns of the twin telos of music and philosophy: ‘Gi ed
men, imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in singing, have
gained for themselves a return to this region, as have those who have
devoted their exceptional abilities to a search for divine truths. e ears of
mortals are lled with this sound, but they are unable to hear it’.15 My black
mahapralaya inversely begins, unends my own beginning, by speaking
while listening to what I am unable to hear within the dissonant metal that
lls my mortal ears.
My cosmic dissolution begins, therefore, by ignoring both the anti-cosmic
discourse of Gnostic occultism, which adorns itself in the drapery of Chaos
like an enormous sigil-embroidered baby blanket, and the anti-discourse
world of consumerist metal fandom. I ignore these, remain consciously and
willfully stupid towards them, in favor of their simple, practical synthesis:
the dialectical pleasure of hearing and thinking black metal as itself an
occult experience of the acosmic abyss. In other words, I embrace as
axiomatic the e ective fact that black metal is only what has already
stripped me of banal belonging to the universe as the place of being,
restored to appearance the primal fact that her existence and mine are
coeval, that we go way back – a sonic ‘ecstatic, breathless, experience […]
[that] opens a bit more every time the horizon of God (the wound);
extends a bit more the limits of the heart, the limits of being’.16 Not for the
sake of knowing true black metal from false, but for being truthful about it.
e anti-cosmic structure of such metallic factical blackening of experience,
which makes the whole moment of life immediately ful ll Quentin
Meillassoux’s de nition of facticity as the ‘narrow passage through which
thought is able to exit from itself […] [and] we are able to make our way
towards the absolute’,17 is perfectly explicit in Shamaatae of Arckanum’s
cosmos-collapsing self-de nitions: ‘I am a living and revolving cosmos of
Kaos. I can’t stay as one and in one way’; ‘Chaos theory is a theory that
structures my way of living, I am chaos theory in esh. […] I am my own
in uence’.18
at this black metal shaman understands himself not only as Chaos
personi ed but as a self-originating incarnation of its theory, ‘theory in
esh’, opens and outdeepens the signi cance of the premature anti-
discursive commentary on this symposium which, in inimical collusion with
its own quixotic nigredic purposes, summons the intersecting problems of
anti-cosmic discourse and the theoretical occult, the space of relation
between what cannot be spoken and the speech that destroys. Someone
called e Scapegoat, sacri cing the law to maintain it, declares that ‘the
rst rule of black metal is that YOU DO NOT FUCKING TALK ABOUT
BLACK METAL’.19 Cum Crémed Guts, who lists his location as ‘cosmic
womb of abyss’ and so suggests his own primordial identity with the
inseminated viscera of the mater omnium, observes: ‘i thought one puts
occult into his black metal, not the other way around’.20 And Extra Cheese
Head trollishly quips discourse (as a form of irrelevant fantasy, inauthentic
a ect, and social weakness) in a way that indicates the special generic
authority of black metal as a grottophilic space of absolute refusal: ‘yep I
think Fenriz and the likes would laugh their asses o if they saw this bunch
of D&D playing, pseudo-misanthropics huddling together and attempting
to scholarize something as blatantly anti-everything as black metal’.21 In
short, these comments sonically perpetuate the stagnancy of a separative
and self-preserving vision, one that blindly holds the unseeable in collective
eclipse as the only way of looking at it. I see here, in the darkness of my
own self-projection, a ridiculous doubleness. On the one hand: cultic love
of an authentic occult, the experience of subjectively accessed realities
whose theory, unlike that of sciences which concern commonly observable
and manipulable phenomena, ‘can in no way approximate direct knowledge
in import and signi cance’.22 On the other hand: the hopeless failure of the
solely theoretical occultist who, because ‘occult realities are bound to
remain for them more or less in the same category as descriptions of
unseen lands or works of imagination’, perversely falls to accusing others of
ignorance as the ego’s last remaining option or investment in the hermetic
mode of instruction: teaching those who already know.23 is vulgar
policing of the space of authentic experience, which proceeds by holding
forever closed the meeting place of theory and practice, science and art,
philosophy and poetry, shutting them up in the minimally present and
maximally interviewable person of the master to whom alone is accorded
the privilege of a theoretical gnosis, de nes a position fatally prone to
drawing the wrong conclusion from Arckanum’s body, namely: that there
can be no black metal theory because black metal is esh. Impossibilizing
black metal discourse in the paradoxical mode of a tiny, pathetic
illumination that might expose its primal night as a cave-dweller’s fantasy,
such anxious refusal of the blackening, darkness-deepening potentiality of
thought betrays faithlessness in the awesome reality of the abyss, which,
whether we feel it as God or not, is absolutely divine.
ese are the torments of each, of all who wrestle in solitude with the
terrifying discontinuous continuities and continuous discontinuities
between the reality of what is loved and the image of thought. And this
pain points the way (backwards or forwards?) into the superior, more
pleasurable su ering wherein the noble lover, the immoderate cogitator of
Andreas Capellanus’s De Amore, the one who loves thinking about the
loved one, who knows that ‘loving [as Agamben says] is also necessarily a
speculation […] an essentially phantasmatic process, involving both
imagination and memory in an assiduous, tormented circling around an
image painted or re ected in the deepest self ’.24 is one both knows full
well the reality of the thought-image he loses himself in and wholly enjoys
its actualization of the original dark out of which it and his own being
strangely appear:

For then my thoughts, far from where I abide,

Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see.
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.25

Here we see the lovely, speculative hideous gnosis of an essentially

citational erotic consciousness, the unnamable entity who, sitting in the
medieval chained library of the body, practices loving things in the
intellectual mirror of his ownmost cosmic abyss. Such a one not only passes
the highest, Dantean test of occult authenticity, proving knowledge of
hidden realities by the joy of speaking about them, but ies with Walter
Benjamin’s ungenerated androgynous angelic self, Agesilaus Santander,
kabbalistically interpreted by his scholarly friend Gershom Scholem as an
anagram of e Angel Satan (Der Angelus Satanas).26 is angel, whose
ideal is a book that ‘would eliminate all commentary and consist in nothing
but quotations’, teaches the shocking citational discourse of living tradition
that ‘does not aim to perpetuate and repeat the past but to lead it to its
decline in a context in which past and present, content of transmission and
act of transmission, what is unique and what is repeatable, are wholly
identi ed’.27 In other words, the happy, Satanic catena, whose dissonant
rattle black metal already is, destroys cosmos by means of its own chain of
being, realizing the temporal present of the word as the original whim from
beyond, named by Reza Negarestani as ‘Incognitum Hactenus – not known
yet or nameless and without origin until now […] In Incognitum Hactenus,
you never know the pattern of emergence. Anything can happen for some
weird reason; yet also, without any reason, nothing at all can happen’.28

You too will come to proclaim its ultimate presence.

1 Giorgio Agamben, e Coming Community, trans. by M. Hardt (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press,1993), p. 14.
2 ‘Interview: Xasthur’ <http://www.anus.com/metal/about/interviews/xasthur/>.
3 Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th ed., 3 vols (San Francisco: Su sm Reoriented, 1973), I, p. 45-6.
4 Mayhem, ‘Chimera’, Chimera (Season of Mist, 2004).
5 Henry of Suso, e Little Book of Truth, Chapter 6, cited from Henry Suso: e Exemplar, with Two
German Sermons, ed. and trans. by Frank Tobin (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), p. 326.
6 ‘Interview with Teutoburg Forest’ <http://blogs.myspace.com/usbms archives>.
7 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. by Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1988), p. 12.
8 Cited from Crepúsculo Negro pamphlet (128 of 400).
9 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. by William Harris Stahl (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 145.
10 ‘Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna, | legato con amore in un volume, | ciò che per l’universo si
squaderna: | sustanze e accidenti e lor costume | quasi con ati insieme, per tal modo | che ciò ch’i’
dico è un semplice lume. | La forma universal di questo nodo | credo ch’i’ vidi, perché più di largo, |
 dicendo questo, mi sento ch’i’ godo’ (Dante Alighieri, e Divine Comedy, Paradiso XXXIII. 85–
93).
11 Plotinus, e Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna (Burdett, NY: Larson), V. 2.1.
12 ‘Of all the mightes I haue made, moste nexte a er me | I make the als master and merour of my
mighte; | I beelde the here baynely in blys for to be, | I name the for Lucifer, als berar of lyghte’ ( e
York Plays, ed. by Richard Beadle [London: Edwin Arnold, 1982], lines 34–7).
13 Pseudo-Dionysius, e Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (New York:
Paulist Press, 1987), Divine Names, 4. 13.
14 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. xxxii.
15 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, p. 74.
16 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 104.
17 Quentin Meillassoux, A er Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. by Ray
Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 63. Cf. ‘Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is’
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C. K. Ogden [Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 1998], 6. 44).
18 <http://www.chroniclesofchaos.com/articles/chats/1-123_arckanum.aspx>,
<http://www.bloodchamber.de/interview/a/5/>, respectively.
19 <http://www.foreverdoomed.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=14717 &start=60>
20 <http://www.fmp666.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20861>.
21 <http://decibelmagazine.com/forum/>.
22 Meher Baba, Discourses, II, p. 102.
23 For example: ‘Since the TOTBL [Temple of the Black Light] has reached is predetermined number
of fully initiated brothers and sisters, membership is closed, but it is still our duty to reach out
and o er guidance to the very few who bear within them the Black Flames of the acosmic Spirit. So
while we do not o er initiation into the Inner Sanctum at this time, we still o er relevant parts of
the Chaosophic teachings that we believe can lead the elect of our Gods to the illumination of the
Black Light. e texts presented on this website have as their purpose to test the readers, confuse
the feeble-minded majority, and guide the very few of spiritual work to other, more hidden points
of ingress into the very heart of the Current 218. A secondary motive for the outside manifestation
of the Anti-Cosmic Tradition is to counteract the essenceless and materialistic lth that is spread
in the name of Satan and Satanism. By presenting a spiritual and yet harshly antinomian form of
Gnostic Luciferianism, we hope to contribute to the establishment of visible alternatives to the
vulgarism preached by atheistic con men. Incipit Chaos!’
(<http://www.templeo heblacklight.net/main.html>).
24 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. by R. L. Martinez
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 81.
25 William Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 27.
5–12.
26 On Agesilaus Santander, see Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion A er Religion: Gershom Scholem,
Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 206 .
On the question of authenticating occult experience, Meher Baba writes: ‘occult experiences o en
bear unmistakeable credentials for their own claim to validity, and even when any such credentials
are not evident they compel due respect and attention because of the unusual signi cance, bliss,
peace and directive value with which they are surcharged. […] ordinary hallucinations and
delusions do not bring extraordinary bliss or peace to the person who experiences them. e bliss
and peace which are attendant upon real occult experiences are a fairly reliable criterion by which
 to distinguish them as genuine’ (Discourses, II, p. 88–9).
27 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption’, in
Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999), p. 153. Walter Benjamin’s ‘ideal was a book that would eliminate all
commentary and consist in nothing but quotations’ (Françoise Meltzer, ‘Acedia and Melancholia’,
in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. by Michael P. Steinberg [Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996], p. 162). Why? Because ‘in citation old and new are brought into
simultaneity’ (Eva Geulen, ‘Counterplay: Benjamin’, chapter 4 of e End of Art: Readings in a
Rumour A er Hegel, trans. by James McFarland [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006], p. 87):
‘To the traditionalizing e ects of commentary, Benjamin […] opposes the citation as shock, which
shatters the continuum and which does not resolve itself in any solution of continuity; and, on the
other hand, the citation as montage […] in which the fragments come into connection in order to
form a constellation intelligible to the present’ (Phillipe Simay, ‘Tradition as Injunction: Benjamin
and the Critique of Historicisms’, in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. by Andrew Benjamin
[London: Continuum, 2005], p. 147).
28 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press,
2008), p. 49. Cf. Meher Baba, ‘ e Whim from the Beyond’, in Beams from Meher Baba on the
Spriritual Panorama (San Francisco: Su sm Reoriented, 1958), pp. 7–11.
 N M

WORMSIGN
A writhing mass of words, spoken by many and none. A sermon in the
sign of the worm.1 Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage
cleanse the world.2 My text is the rst two minutes of Mgła’s Presence,
played over the space-folding sequence from David Lynch’s Dune.3 Mystical
advice for the voyage: You cannot do better than to place yourself in
darkness and unknowing […] No need to call to Him from afar: He can
hardly wait for you to open up: the opening and the entering are a single
act.4

Worms, hungering for all the dimensions

Eat through my heart and form within my dreams
Spawn of Leviathan ows through my veins
To gracefully poison thoughts of men.5

e worm stands, for not standing, for anything.6 e way of the worm
stands in its hunger. Avoid at once the error of reducing the worm to its
hunger, as if it were merely a hungering thing.7 Despite the interesting
ontology that would entail – interesting because it might grow your status
as philosopher-priest of the worm, as the other-than-worm that survives by
occluding worms itself with names – understand that worm is prior to its
hunger: worms, comma, hungering . . . Not prior in the negative direction of
being the subject of hunger, as if the worm would say I hunger therefore I
am. Prior in the positive direction of being the agent of hunger itself, pure
and in nite hunger. Absolute prepositionality. e for that tastes and moves
in the absence of all the dimensions, that alone knows how to hunger for
them. Note that Mgła does not say all dimensions, as if the number of
dimensions were indeterminate, as if this were a nameless hunger for some
unseen totality of dimensions, as if worm-hunger were a form of faith.8
Mgła sings all the dimensions, indicating the volitional vermicular writhing
as a form of dimensional knowledge, a feeling of the t( )tality, the ( )hole.
ere is no turning back, but only a pressing forward . . . It never rests till it
is lled with all being. Just as matter never rests till it is lled with every
possible form, so too intellect never rests till it is lled to its capacity.9 As
worms is exactly what emerges in a body’s a er, so worms is precisely the
corporealization of hunger as body’s before.10 He can hardly wait for you to
open up. Worm is sign of the hunger that takes esh, the desire that
instantly makes it as instrument. It is the self-movement of the essential
seizure of embodiment, the spontaneous body of primordial needing – as
gured on the cover of Wormlust’s rst demo Wormlust (Volkgeist, 2006),
in which the carrion meal of a decaying infant human also intimates the
sanguine daimonic emergence of the homunculus from a void of black
earth:11

Remember what happened, your happening – the slimy purity of self-

originating appearance. It will be an inevitable memory of what never
occurred, an impossible memory of something that still must. In the
absence of body, soul could not have gone forth, since there is no other
place to which its nature would allow it to descend. Since go forth it must,
it will generate a place for itself; at once body, also, exists.12 Must the sleeper
awaken? Will something be born from this restless slumber? e question
a rms its answer. e terrible fact of worm says yes. We now know the
location of this narrow passage through which thought is able to exit from
itself – it is through facticity, and through facticity alone.13 Specimens
longer than 400 meters have been seen in the deep desert.14 Don’t you see,
che noi siam vermi | nati a formar l’angelica farfalla?15 at we are worms?
Like Augustine: Omnes homines de carne nascentes, quid sunt nisi vermes?
Et de vermibus Angelos facit.16 All men born from esh, what are they if not
worms? And from worms he makes angels. Cadaver, in the common
medieval etymology, comes from caro data vermibus, esh given to worms.
So what. What is this monstrous birth, that is vermiformly at once from and
to? To be born (says a dead phenomenologist) is both to be born of the
world and to be born into the world.17
e evolution of individualized corporeal form around the integral
cyclonic ( )hole of birth and death is the crawling of WORMS, something
neither produced nor created ex nihilo but born from anything, from all
things.18 e worm is an animal that is commonly born from esh, wood,
or any terrestrial thing without any sexual union. […] ere are worms of
earth, water, air . . . 19 A something de ned by its self-modulating
movement, which is what worm signi es.20 What is my life? at which is
moved from within by itself. What is moved from without is not alive.21
Spontaneous, from sponte, by one’s own free will, by itself. e spirit blows
where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it
comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the spirit.22
Such is the subtle slithering among forms, the ex-per-ientia or coming-out-
of-going-through of individuated identity, the neither-this-nor-that thing
for whom there is no distinction between life and being. [I]n due course,
the soul experiences and feels that it is metal, vegetable, worm, sh, bird,
animal, man or woman. Whatever be the type of gross form and whatever
be the shape of the form, the soul spontaneously associates itself with that
form, gure and shape, and experiences that it is itself that form, gure and
shape.23 A worm […] unfolds its motion gradually, in direct line, stretching
out the contracted parts of its little body and contracting those extended
parts. So set in motion, it glides along.24 e old doctrine of spontaneous
generation is not only biologically incorrect but ontologically true of every
entity – a gura or specular image of the life-event that is actually
happening to you, a song sung by nothing, my sweetest vermin.25
Although the soul […] is in nite and without form, this partially
conscious soul actually experiences itself as a worm in the gross world. is
is ignorance. is ignorance persists as long as the consciousness of the soul
is not fully evolved, but even when the soul has come to full consciousness,
it is still said to be enveloped by ignorance because this fully evolved
consciousness does not make the soul Self-conscious instantaneously. On
the contrary, when the consciousness of the soul is fully evolved the soul
begins to identify itself as a human being.26 You have made your way from
worm to human, and much in you is still worm […] Behold I teach you the
overman […] e overman is the meaning of the earth.27 us it is that
throughout the myriads of universes there are planets on which the seven
kingdoms of evolution are manifested, and the evolution of consciousness
and forms is completed. But only on the planet Earth do human beings
reincarnate and begin the involutionary path to Self-realization. Earth is the
centre of this in nite gross sphere of millions of universes inasmuch as it is
the Point to which all human-conscious souls must migrate in order to
begin the involutionary path.28
ere will be owing water here open to the sky and green oases rich with
good things. But we have the spice to think of, too. us, there will always
be desert on Arrakis […] and erce winds, and trials to toughen a man. We
Fremen have a saying: ‘God created Arrakis to train the faithful’.29 One
cannot go against the word of God. I beseech you, my brothers, remain
faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of
extraterrestrial hopes! […] ey are despisers of life, dying o and self-
poisoned, of whom the earth is weary: so let them fade away! Once the
sacrilege against God was the greatest sacrilege, but God died, and then all
these desecrators died. Now to desecrate the earth is the most terrible
thing, and to esteem the bowels of the unfathomable higher than the
meaning of the earth!30 [So] I ung myself into the oily underground river
that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea; ung myself into that
putrescent juice of earth’s inner horrors before the madness of my screams
could bring down upon me all the charnel legions these pest-gulfs might
conceal […] [now] my dreams are lled with terror, because of phrases I
dare not quote. I dare quote only one paragraph […] ‘ e nethermost
caverns’, wrote the mad Arab, ‘are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for
their marvels are strange and terri c. Cursed the ground where dead
thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no
head. […] For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes
not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws;
till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth
wax cra y to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly
are digged where earth’s pores ought to su ce, and things have learnt to
walk that ought to crawl.31 Where was I?32
Lost in the black presence of Worms, hungering for all the dimensions,
gracefully hammering the idol of my metal head with the poison thoughts
of men. Sermo, a stringing together of words, from serere, to join. Regarding
the particular opening I am tunneling, object all you want that evolution is
not teleological.33 e point is that you want to. In nite teleology, terrifying
all-willing ateleological teleology ies stratospherically far above plan, has
no need for it, nesting only in the endless plan of realizing there is no plan,
only the planless plan of which each insane breath coming out your worm-
mouth is living, inhumanating proof. For so long as we persist as dammed-
up reservoirs of labour-power [says a thirster for annihilation] we preserve
our humanity, but the rivers owing into us are an irresistible urge to
dissolution, pressing us into the inhumane. Beneath the regulated
exchanges of words we howl and gnaw at our fettered limbs [i.e. are our
own worm]. An impersonality as blank and implacable as the sun wells up
beneath us, a vermin-hunger for freedom: If I am inhuman it is because my
world has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like
a poor, sorry, miserable a air, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities
and codes, de ned by platitudes and isms.34 Reza Negarestani – who is
here in spirit, as worm – senses this when he identi es worm-space with
the Whim: Nemat-space is an ultimate crawling machine; it is essentially
cryptogenic and interconnected with Anonymous-until-Now. […]
Incognitum Hactenus – not known yet or nameless and without origin
until now – is a mode of time in which the innermost monstrosities of the
earth or ungraspable time scales can emerge according to the chronological
time that belongs to the surface biosphere of the earth and its populations.
[…] In Incognitum Hactenus, you never know the pattern of emergence.
Anything can happen for some weird reason; yet also, without any reason,
nothing at all can happen.35 For all the dimensions.
is is the superlative craving, the supreme prepositionality according to
which anything is a perfect event, the hunger that comes from everywhere,
that unleashes each thing/being/entity as an all-eating void, a ( )hole. Our
luminescent, naked bodies dissolve into a swarm of obscure creeping
things, and we are a mass of glutinous coiling worms, endless.36 Whoever
walks in this way, whatever he does is all one; whether he does anything or
nothing is of no account. And yet the least action or practice of such a man
is more pro table and fruitful to himself and all men […] than all the
works of others who […] are inferior to him in love.37 is is the continual
breath of the Outsider, the one whose heart-tablet is inscribed with the
surviving invocation from the vermiform grimoire (De vermis mysteriis):
Tibi, magnum Innominandum, signa stellarum nigrarum […] To you, great
Not-To-Be-Named, signs of the black stars. e one who says: Such a lot
the gods gave to me – to me […] And yet I am strangely content […] I
know not where I was born, save that the castle was in nitely old and
in nitely horrible.38 Eckhart names him: It is one, it has nothing in
common with anything, and nothing created has anything in common with
it. All created things are nothing. But this is remote and alien from all
creation. […] If I were to nd myself for a single instant in this essence. I
would have as little regard for myself as for a dung worm.39 All this market-
driven herd-talk of ‘turns’ that now infects every culture, of this turn and
that turn, is only deferred, perverted desire to become, to convert to the
worm you already are, to the multiple singular agency that is culture’s very
ground. When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should
remember that its smoothness […] is mainly due to all the inequalities
having been slowly levelled by worms. It is a marvellous re ection that the
whole of the super cial mould over any such expanse has passed, and will
again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms.40
Stop fearing and worrying and fussing. Feast on the esh that only you
can eat, that you will eat. ey want us to fear death so much, but we can
inhabit it like vermin [says Land], it can be our space […] we can knot
ourselves into the underworld, communicate through it, cook their
heavenly city in our plague.41 Worms is not a self-grooming we. It is the
only, unbounded community – a line of openness that slashes through the
god, the human, the earth42 – the unimaginable ever-present perfect
abyssal consummation of all and one. A terrible thing is intelligence. It
tends to death as memory tends to stability. e living, the absolutely
unstable, the absolutely individual, is, strictly, unintelligible. Science is a
cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them. Worms also
feed upon corpses. My own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the
innermost recesses of my soul, once they are torn from their roots in the
heart, poured out on to this paper and there xed in unalterable shape, are
already only the corpses of thoughts. How, then, shall reason open its
portals to the revelation of life?43

Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543).44

‘Eat the esh of oating corpses | Heads converted to drinking bowls |

Swallow the blood from these rotting skulls  | Behold the ritual passage to
the in nite | And mutilate oneself for him […] Wretched esh eaters  |
Unholy beggars | Meditate on TOTAL DEATH | Sacri ce of the body |
Utmost annihilation of mind | All in the name of e Cursed One’.45
Baldasar Heseler, a Silesian medical student, was present at Andreas
Vesalius’s rst public human anatomy at Bologna in 1540. He wrote: ‘When
he had detached it [the cerebellum], he showed us in its end towards the
beginning of the medulla the vermis below which the duct leads to the
medulla along the spine. And he took out the vermis, and it was as living,
like worms that grow in wood and in esh, wie eyne made [worm]’.46 If a
Toradja man sees a worm on the path in front of him, he places his head-
cloth on the ground near to it. If the worm crawls on to the cloth, he then
knows that it is his own soul-substance. He puts the worm into the head-
cloth which he replaces upon his head, so that the soul-substance can enter
his body.47

Cambridge University Library MS Gg.1.1, f. 490v (detail).48

In the fourteenth-century Cambridge brain diagram illustrating Avicenna’s

Canon of Medicine, the cerebral worm is represented between the powers
of memory (vis memorativa) and cognition or imagination (cogitativa vel
ymaginativa). Mediating between the two, the worm works as a valve
modulating the active and passive operations of thought, its movement
translated in the human tendency to lower the head when thinking and
raise it when recollecting.49 Equipped by the artist with an oculus of its
own, the vermis gure captures the identity of life and thought as theoretic,
visionary movement, sermo mentis, the autophagous vermicular turning of
inner conversation. All life is thought [says the sage of the One] […] Men
readily distinguish the various kinds of life but do not do the same with
thought: they call some things thought and others not because they do not
try to nd out what life really is […] all beings are contemplations. […]
contemplation (theoria) and its object constitute a living thing.50 Up,
abysmal thought, out of my depths! […] you sleepy worm: up! […] Once
you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally. […] I, Zarathustra, the
advocate of life, the advocate of su ering, the advocate of the circle – you I
summon, my most abysmal thought!51 e eye with which I see God is the
same eye with which God sees me.52 Who is the human being into whose
throat everything that is heaviest, blackest will crawl? Meanwhile the
shepherd bit down as my shout advised him […] Far away he spat the head
of the snake […] Never yet on earth had I heard a human being laugh as
he laughed! […] I heard a laughter that was not human laughter – and
now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that will never be still.53
e worm stands, for not standing, for anything. It even knows how to
bite o its own head, to swallow itself whole. ‘What should I do now?’ And
a Voice said, ‘Eat! Eat Yourself!’ He had no choice but to eat, so He ate
Himself ! At that moment He found that He was EVERYTHING.54 It knows
how to bring forth from its very powerlessness to do so. e products of
putrefaction are to be traced to the Soul’s inability to bring some other thing
into being.55 Enter then into this ( )hole. Into the void within the planetary
body, a place in nitely vaster than that the space surrounding it. Man
reaches the World only by way of transcendental darkness in which he
never entered and from which he will never leave. A phenomenal
blackness entirely lls the essence of man.56 Enter the black you see. is
thing cannot be taught […] I have passed forth out of myself […] I am no
longer an object coloured and tangible, a thing of spatial dimensions; I am
now alien to all this, and to all that you perceive when you gaze with bodily
eyesight.57 Ful ll the promise of the Reverend Mother: You will learn about
the funeral plains […] about the wilderness that is empty, the wasteland
where nothing lives except the spice and the sandworms.58 Both are alive.
Inhabit the interface and turn into the worm that you are. Convert to
involution. Crawl through the blinding space of your own rot.
But You […] turned me back toward myself, taking me […] from where I
had put myself all that time that I preferred not to see myself. And you set
me there before my own face that I might see how vile I was, how twisted
and unclean and ulcerous.59 Embrace your blackening, the corpse bride of
yourself. ‘Any living form will su er from the plague […] On this very day,
He will chant through me | Anything great is built upon sorrow, through
your eyes I see the thousand lives I could swallow’.60 In order to really f***
the passions of nitude, in order to actually pierce through the dark
passage of facticity, it is necessary to weaponize the correlation, to behead
your being-in-the-world. Speculating about the worm is not su cient.
Better to study than to be ignorant, better to feel than to study, better to
experience than to feel, better to become than experience. Once when
Merwan was banging his head on the oor at home, his mother heard a
thudding sound coming from his room. […] [he] had blood all over his
face. Crying she asked, ‘Merog, have you gone mad? Are you totally mad?’
Wiping the blood o with a towel, he said, ‘I am not mad! I have become
something else!’61 Bang your head into a black hole, make space for the
worm to crawl. Black metal is the spice, boring into my skull. Ego […] sum
vermis et non homo (Psalm 22.6), For I am a worm and not a human.62 As
if he were to say, I who am more than a human penetrate the secrets of all
nature, as a worm [penetrates] the bowels of the earth, which no one
participating only in human nature can do.

British Library Additional MS 37049, f.32v.63.

Or turn away from the transi tomb, read no further in the body-soul
debate, the words of the worms ringing in your ears: Wretched soul, go
away. How long shall your quarreling last? | Worms are holding their own
debate, binding fast their judgments; | Maggots are casting lots on my esh.
| Many a noble body will rot. I am not the last.64 Do not mourn the earth.

1 In this text, sources are quoted without quotation marks.

2 Frank Herbert, Dune (New York: Ace Books, 1987), p. 124.
3 Dune, dir. by David Lynch (Universal Pictures, 1984), 38:10–40:55.
4 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, trans. by Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad
Publishing, 2009), p. 58.
5 Mgła, ‘I’, Presence (Northern Heritage Records, 2006).
6 A correction of bipedalism, the ideology of human superiority as scripted in the upright stance. e
superiority of the human posture lies not in its standing or standing-for (that is the identitarian
 lie of the human to itself, of the human-as-lie), but in the fact of uprightness as real form of
evolutionary movement, a movement that overcomes the vermicular only by continuing it, by
staying and remaining true to its squirmy, super-dimensional restlessness. e signi cance of
uprightness is not in standing for anything, but in aiming at purposeless through the necessity of
alteration – ‘Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens.  e sleeper must
awaken’ (Lynch, Dune) – that is, in vitally moving beyond principle: ‘What is without principle
lives in the proper sense, for everything that has the principle of its operation from another […]
does not live’ (Meister Eckhart, e Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense,
trans. by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn [New York: Paulist Press, 1981], p. 128). Just as
the logical manifestation of hands and mouth is founded on their mutual positive becoming-
uselessness (the freeing of forefeet from walking frees the mouth for talking and generates the hand
as grasper-feeder), so the evolution of consciousness itself occurs through the abandonment of
form and the death of prior capital directionalities: ‘I died as mineral and became a plant, | I died
as plant and rose to animal, | I died as animal and I was man. | Why should I fear? When was I less
by dying? […] Oh, Let me not exist! For non-existence | Proclaims in organ tones, “To Him we
shall return!”’ (Rumi, quoted in Reynold A. Nicholson, e Mystics of Islam [London: G. Bell and
Sons, 1914], p. 168). e evolutionary birthing of consciousness follows a rotational path – ‘the
roots of plants are analogous to the head in animals’ (Aristotle, On the Soul, II. 4, in Complete
Works of Aristotle: e Revised Oxford Translation, ed. by Jonathan Barnes [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984], p. 662) – around the ‘heaviest weight’ of the ‘new gravity: the eternal
recurrence of the same’, a path following the negative essence of the in nitization of will: ‘Do you
want this again and innumerable times again?’ (Nietzsche, e Gay Science, ed. by Bernard
Williams, trans. by Jose ne Nauckho [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], p. 194).
Reiner Schurmann coordinately explicates the process, via Eckhart, as an alchemical ‘rotation of
forces [that] terminates in singularization’, in the theotic production of a pure this: ‘ e alchemist
reduces metals by liquefaction so as to produce one piece of the most excellent metal; likewise the
soul’s forces must return to indistinction in God’s ground so it may become excellent in being
singularized […] Nothing less than God’s being is distilled in my singularization […] His
Godhead depends on it, which is to say that the ine able extensivity of being is identical to the
equally ine able intensivity of the singular’ (Broken Hegemonies, trans. by Reginald Lily
[Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003], pp. 287–8). e central idea and feeling of the
Mgła-Dune mashup (see <http://youtu.be/7uTrobzzodY>) is likewise one of taking inner ight by
intensively going nowhere and standing for nothing, by negatively staying, that is, standing not in
neutrality, but in the nigredic, self-liquefying resting in the depth of one’s own ground, with the
vermin that ‘eat through my heart’, where my ‘worm does not die, and the re is not quenched’
(Mark 9:48).
7 at would be the way of immanence-without-transcendence, the false promise of the reductive (as
opposed to creative) ‘this is it’ that claims knowledge of and identity with one’s own hunger –
surest way to ruin a meal.
8 I am thinking ‘faith’ here particularly in its (post)modern deferring form of belief (as opposed to the
older idea of faith as perception of the invisible [Hebrews 11:1]). e distinction between
hungering for all dimensions and hungering for all the dimensions captures the di erence between
desire and will, between simply wanting, needing something to be the case, to arrive, and the more
desperate and deliberate volition that asserts what it lacks through sheer negation of its negation.
Cf. Bataille’s desire ‘to be everything [tout]’ (Guilty, trans. by Bruce Boone [San Francisco: Lapis
Press, 1988], p. xxxii). ere is an everything and I will be it.
9 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 57.
10 e idea is played out in Aristotle’s De Anima, in which the essential intersection of life and feeding
is examined on the basis of self-similar continuance as imitation of eternity: ‘Since no living thing
is able to partake in what is eternal and divine by uninterrupted continuance […] it tries to
achieve that end in the only way possible to it […] so it remains not indeed as the self-same
individual but continues its existence in some like itself ’ (Aristotle, On the Soul, II. 4, in Complete
Works, p. 661). I, however, am installing this life-hunger before life, in the sense of a hunger that life
itself feeds and never satis es.
11 Image below reproduced with kind permission of Wormlust.
12 Plotinus, e Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna (Burdett, NY: Larson), IV. 3.9.
13 Quentin Meillassoux, A er Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. by Ray
Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 63. I.e., facticity is wormhole of the absolute.
14 Herbert, Dune, p. 529. e citation of the sci- data here aims to expose the sheer orchestral
beauty and brutality of actual existence, to restore the scholastic preciousness of ‘facticity’ to the
gargantuan domain of logic-squashing entity. Cf. ‘He was strangely convinced that the marking
was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassi able organism of considerably
advanced evolution’ (H. P. Lovecra , At the Mountains of Madness [New York: Modern Library,
2005], p. 11).
15 Dante, Purgatorio X. 124–5. Birth is not only production, but something from which something
else it born; birth births.
16 Augustine, In Joannis evangelium tractatus, I. 13, in Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Cursus
Completus: Series Latina, 221 vols. (Paris: Migne, 1844–91), XXXV. 385.
17 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge,
1962), p. 527.
18 Worm is not thus simply a speci c life-form peculiarly proper to panpsychist re ection on the
life/matter interface. Worm is rather the real concept of corporeal life, its elemental idea, as
Leibniz’s meditations on the cheese and the worms show. is is due to the way worm is
di erentially essential, at once a non-atomistic pure minimum of body always capable of
containing/being-contained in others of itself and a body always other than itself, something born
from other material and always moving into new forms. Worm itself is the real self-othering of
matter and the actual formlessness of form.
19 ‘Vermis est animal quod plerumque de carne, vel de ligno, vel de quacumque re terrena sine ullo
concubitu gignitur; licet nonnumquam et de ovis nascuntur, sicut scorpio. Sunt autem vermes aut
terrae, aut aquae, aut aeris, aut carnium, aut frondium, aut lignorum, aut vestimentorum’ (Isidore
of Seville, Etymologiae, XII. 5, ‘De vermibus’
<http://penelope.uchicago.edu/ ayer/L/Roman/Texts/Isidore/>).
20 ‘Worm. As. wyrm, G. wurm, Lat. vermis, worm ; Goth, vaurms, serpent; ON. ortnr, serpent, worm.
Sanscr. krmi, a worm ; Lith. kirmis, kirminis, kirmele, worm, caterpillar; kirmiti, to breed worms;
Let. zirmis, maggot, worm. e origin, like that of weevil, lies in the idea of swarming, being in
multifarious movement, crawling. Pl.D. kribbeln, krubbeln, krcmelen, krimmeln, kriimmeln, to be
in multifarious movement, to swarm, boil. ‘Idt was daar so vull, dat idt kremeled un wemelde:’ it
was so full that it swarmed. Up kribbeln (Hanover krimmeln) la/en: to let the water boil up. Du.
wremelen, to creep ; Da. vrimle, to swarm ; vrimmel, a swarm’ (Wedgwood & Atkinson, A
Dictionary of English Etymology [London, Trübner & Co., 1872], s.v. ‘worm’).
21 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 105.
22 John 3:8.
23 Meher Baba, God Speaks (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1973), p. 5.
24 ‘Vermis non ut serpens apertis passibus vel squamarum nisibus repit, quia non est illi spinae
rigor, ut colubri, sed in directum corpusculi sui partes gradatim porrigendo contractas,
contrahendo porrectas motum explicat, sicque agitatus perlabitur’ (Isidore of Seville,
Etymologiae, XII. 5).
25 e reference is to Le Chants de Nihil, Ma Plus Douce Vermine (Dernier Bastion, 2009). As time is
the ‘moving image of eternity’, generation is the purposeless image of the purpose of life: ‘ e Goal
of Life in Creation is to arrive at purposelessness, which is the state of Reality’ (Meher Baba, e
Everything and the Nothing [Beacon Hill, Australia: Meher House Publications, 1963], p. 62).
26 Meher Baba, Gods Speaks, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Su sm Reoriented, 1973), pp. 20-1.
27 Friedrich Nietzsche, us Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), p. 6.
28 Meher Baba, God Speaks, pp. 292–3. is is a di cult idea to get one’s head around. It is one thing
to think Earth as simply where I happen to be (life happened on earth and I happened to be among
its living at this point in its history), or more abstractly and generically, to think earth as radical
thisness or plane of immanence. It is another to think that this very particular planet, however
replaceable by another ‘Earth’ when this one dies, happens to be the singular turning point for the
initiation of involution, a kind of cosmic receptacle and interchange into which all human-
conscious souls throughout the universe must ow. e possibility is not any more absurd than
the general temporal-topological senselessness, less so if the fact of one’s being here somehow
attests to it. ere is no reason not to subject all events of arising, birth, sudden acontextual self-
presence, etc., every deep condition for asking ‘why am I here?’ to scienti c inquiry (other than the
false correlational reason of preserving the human ‘we’ as object of scienti c discourse) and
transmigrational planetary geography o ers a real domain for doing so. For me the attractiveness
of Earth as cosmic center lies precisely in its universal Ptolomaism, a reinvention of medieval
intuition that o ers a scientistic ground for the Nietzschean imperative: remain faithful to the
earth – a faith that the space-folding ight to Dune e ects.
29 Herbert, Dune, p. 488.
30 Nietzsche, us Spoke Zarathrustra, p. 6.
31 H. P. Lovecra , e Festival <http://www.hplovecra .com/writings/texts/ ction/f.aspx >.
32 Not standing on the earth, certainly. Has any who are here ever really been here, in the open air, as
it were? Rather it seems we are all being swallowed. Cf. ‘Earth: a sacred temple, godless and
unbuilding | Cooking consciousness into something it is not’ (Nicola Masciandaro, Event of
Oneself [New York: n.p., 2010], p. 33).
33 ere is a subtle semantic gesture here to the relation between objection and object, the discursive
throwing down of an obstacle and the older sense of that to which a power is related. Objecting is
an appetitive act.
34 Nick Land, e irst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge,
1992), p. 257.
35 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press,
2008), p. 49.
36 Eugene acker, An Ideal for Living: An Anti-Novel (Quodlibet Books, 2004), p. 13 [reprising
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem].
37 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 60.
38 H. P. Lovecra , e Outsider <http://www.hplovecra .com/writings/texts/ ction/o.aspx >.
39 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 297.
40 Darwin, e Formation of Vegetable Mould, Chapter 7 <http://darwin-online.org.uk/>.
41 Land, irst for Annihilation, pp. 93–4.
42 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, p. 207.
43 Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, trans. by Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1972), pp. 100–1.
44 Public domain image: <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vesalius _609c.png>.
45 Witchrist, ‘Devour the Flesh’, Beheaded Ouroboros (Invictus Productions, 2010).
46 Andreas Vesalius’s First Public Anatomy at Bologna, 1540: An Eyewitness Report, trans. by Ruben
Erikson (Uppsala, Almqvist & Wiksell, 1959), p. 289.
47 William James Perry, e Megalithic Culture of Indonesia (Manchester: University of Manchester
Press, 1918), p. 150.
48 Public domain image: <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:14th-century_painters_-
_Diagram_of_the_brain_-_WGA15761.jpg>.
49 Mary Carruthers, e Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 68.
50 Plotinus, Enneads, III. 8. 8.
51 Nietzsche, us Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 173–4.
52 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 298.
53 Nietzsche, us Spoke Zarathustra, p. 127.
54 Bhau Kalchuri, e Nothing and the Everything (Manifestation, 1981), p. 11.
55 Plotinus, Enneads, V. 9. 14.
56 François Laruelle, ‘On the Black Universe’, trans. by Miguel Abreu, in Dark Nights of the Universe
(Miami: NAME, 2013), p. 105.
57 Hermetica, trans. by Walter Scott (Boston: Shambala, 1993), p. 239.
58 Herbert, Dune, p. 30.
59 Augustine, Confessions, trans. by F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), VIII. 7.
60 Antaeus, ‘Rot’, Rot (Battlesk, 2004).
61 Lord Meher, p. 196 <http://www.lordmeher.org/>.
62 John Scotus Eriugena comments on Psalm 22.6: ‘For none of the material things in nature is more
lowly than the worm, which is conceived from simple earth. Nevertheless, through this is
represented the incarnation of the Word of God, which transcends every sense and intellect [Phil
4.7]. “Who will explain his begetting?” [Acts 8.33, from Isa 53.8, cf. Augustine, Expositions of the
Psalms: ‘In what sense “no man”? Because he is God. Why then did he so demean himself as to say
“worm”? Perhaps because a worm is born from esh without intercourse, as Christ was from the
Virgin Mary. A worm, and yet no man. Why a worm? Because he was mortal, because he was born
from esh, because he was born without intercourse. Why “no man”? Because In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God; he was God (Jn 1.1)’]. It can also be understood thus:
“I am a worm and a human is not”, that is, I am a worm and human is not a worm. As if he were to
say, I who am more than a human penetrate the secrets of all nature, as a worm [penetrates] the
bowels of the earth, which no one participating only in human nature can do. With the sense
agrees that which is written in another Psalm, “and my substance in the depths of the earth [Ps.
139.15]”, that is, and my substance, which is wisdom in itself, subsists in the depths of the earth,
that is, the innermost folds of created nature. “For the divinity beyond being is the being of all”.
 us the worm that penetrates the hidden things of all creation is the Wisdom of the Father,
which, while human, transcends all humanity’ (Paul Rorem, Eriugena’s Commentary on the
Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy [Toronto: Ponti cal Institute of Medieval Studies, 2005], p. 152).
63 Pubic domain image: <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Transitory_tomb_-_1435-
40.jpg>.
64 ‘Wrecche gost, thou wen away, hou longe shal thi strist laste? | Wormes holdeth here mot, domes
byndeth faste; | Maked he habbeth here lot on my eyshe to caste, | Mony fre bodi shal roten, ne be
y nout the laste’ (In a thestri stude y stod [In a dark place I stood], British Library MS Harley 2253,
fol. 57r).
 N M

ON THE MYSTICAL LOVE OF BLACK METAL

Deep in the shadows wings take to ight through clouds of chaos where
stars die.
– Inquisition1

e deeper secrets of a spiritual life are unravelled to those who take

risks and who make bold experiments with it. ey are not meant for the
idler who seeks guaranties for every step. He who speculates from the
shore about the ocean shall know only its surface, but he who would
know the depths of the ocean must be willing to plunge into it.
– Meher Baba2

[E]very visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany, that is, a
divine apparition. For [...] the more secretly it is understood, the closer it
is seen to approach the divine brilliance. Hence the inaccessible brilliance
of the celestial powers is o en called by theology ‘Darkness’.
– John Scotus Eriugena3

e world – insofar as it is absolutely, irreparably profane – is God.

– Giorgio Agamben4

O blissful Estrangement from God, how lovingly am I connected with

you!
– Mechthild of Magdeburg5

I love black metal. In secret. In the secrecy wherein black metal keeps its
own secret, above all from itself, and below. ‘Love sets on re the one who
nds it. At the same time it seals his lips so that no smoke comes out. Love
is meant to be experienced and not disclosed. What is displayed is not love.
Love is a secret which is meant to remain a secret save for the one who
receives it and keeps it’.6 As Bathory sings in e Return, ‘Dark as her closed
eyelids | Her secret […] She don’t fear the ames […] BORN FOR
BURNING’.7 Or as Marguerite Porete, burned for heresy in 1310, explains,
the annihilated soul (a secret who unknown to others and itself ) ‘is the
phoenix who is alone; for this Soul is alone in Love who alone is satis ed in
her’.8 So is it true what e Scapegoat said, that ‘the rst rule of black metal
is that YOU DO NOT FUCKING TALK ABOUT BLACK METAL’.9 About,
from OE onbutan, means ‘on the outside of, around’. No one speaks about
black metal – they do not know what they are talking about, nor what they
are doing (forgive them). Discourse on black metal is blasphemy, heresy,
sacrilege. at is the condition of its truth, that it break faith with itself. ‘It
seemed to her a kind of blasphemy’, writes the compiler of Angela of
Foligno’s Memorial, ‘to try to express the inexpressible […] More than
anyone else I ever knew, she was in the habit of saying: “My secret for
myself ”’.10 And this secret love (of black metal) is also precisely, perfectly,
what demands discourse. ‘I want to speak about it’, says the Soul to Love in
Porete’s text, ‘and I don’t know what to say about it. Nevertheless […] my
love is so certain that I would prefer to hear something slanderous
[médiscance] about you than one should say nothing about you’.11 e
secret is what can and must endure all blasphemy. is black metal love,
inviolable in the radically immanent solitude of its negative transcendence,
is born for burning: ‘She is not afraid to die | She will burn again tonight |
(she will always burn) | But her spirit shall survive’.12 Do not talk about it.
We will speak in black metal, there, where the secret of black metal is,
wherever black metal is the secret of itself. Into the Infernal Regions of the
Ancient Cult.13 Because black metal is love.
e mystical love of black metal is not a distinct or particular form of the
love of black metal, not one of several loves, but the very love of black
metal love itself, its pure and purifying form, the superlative intensity of a
love that is essentially mystical, a hidden love of the Hidden. All love of
black metal is, willy-nilly, mystical. Mystical love of black metal is trve
(love). is is my theoretical blasphemy: to out the black metal head as
secret mystic heart, to accuse black metal of divine love. e indictment is
distorted, twisted as usual around the complicity between inquisition and
heresy, at once ridiculous and patently true, a sentence whose denial is
simultaneously meaningless and indicative of a profound, unspeakable
signi cance. Imagine the prosecution of it as an inversion of the medieval
precedent grounded in a schematic genealogical analogy that contains a
modicum of historical truth: contemporary theory is to medieval theology
as black metal is to medieval mysticism – a connexion that, stretched upon
the cross of modernity, becomes evident in contestation over heterodoxy. In
the premodern situation, a hypocritical, falsely-orthodox theology faculty
accuses the mystic of heresy: becoming God. In the postmodern situation, a
hypocritical, falsely-heretical theory faculty accuses black metal of
orthodoxy: loving God. Where the material ame reveals the rst to be a
true saint, the intellectual ame reveals the second to be real mysticism.
Meaning what? How is black metal, a musical art, real mysticism? Not
black metal’s mystical themes, or to mystics who love black metal. I say
black metal itself is a real mysticism. Someone has already said that black
metal is a subjectless and objectless mysticism, mysticism without self and
without God. But black metal love has a living subject, the black metal
head, and an actual object, the black metal art. So we must re ne this to
mean that, mystically, the black metal head is a subjectless subject of an
objectless object, a self without itself (metal head) in love with a God who
is not God (metal). Subject and object remain, but only without themselves
via a mutual transformation that inters and occludes each term in the
other. Head becomes metal, yet remains a head. Metal becomes head, yet
stays metal. is is the essential reality of black metal as mysticism, its being
a musical materialization of the mystical relation in which the transcendent
subject and object, self and God, are equally dislocated and secreted in an
immanent and blackened inter-becoming of metal with everything, an
amorous pestilential alchemy that nigredically melts being into an ancient
cosmic essence that cannot be, taking ight through clouds of chaos where
stars die, into the darkest divine body, named by Eriugena as ‘that which
neither creates nor is created […] [which] is classed among the impossibles,
for its essence lies in not being able to be [cuius di erentia est non posse
esse]’.14 e mystical experience of black metal is likewise something that
cannot happen. One is somehow there to hear and see it, but the
experience is not one’s own. It is more like black metal possesses things in
order to experience itself, not reductively, but in a way that hiddenly opens
into the All, that leads without locating into the ‘Hidden Secret
Sabbat  summoning my name’.15 Dagon says, ‘ e music is the drug, the
poison, the spiritual experience and even war all in one dose. Come to an
Inquisition event and I promise you will walk out feeling just ne. I can’t
use many words here’.16 As if within the negative magnetism of blackening
sonic pressure the twin engines of mystical ascent, intellectus and a ectus,
head and heart, are projected into a twisted transposition of the lover-
beloved dyad. Head, embodying intellect, is now metal, the materialization
of the object of love phantasmatically held in the heart, and heart (the
place of feeling, memory, experience, self-presence) is now exploded into
space- lling metal sound itself, an omnipresent, di used but essentially
dislocated sonic heart that everywhere feels all the more intensely without
oneself, a transsubjective volitional eld that, rather than holding within
itself the image of what it lacks, continuously auto-deictically shows the fact
of its own being what it wills. is is a perfect inverse of the traditional
model of the mystical intimacy of divine longing or ‘holy desire’, wherein
the heart is an interior domain paradoxically lacking, as absent presence
and present absence, the Being that most acutely penetrates and informs it,
like a mirror into which self and God are always both looking, glimpsing
but never grasping the other, tfully speaking across impassible proximate
distance.17 Where the ideal atmosphere of that spiritual heart is silence, the
medium of incommunicable communication whose ocular analog is the
gaze, the atmosphere of black metal mystical intimacy is noise, the medium
of communicable incommunication whose ocular analog is the stare.
Diamanda Galás expresses something of this noisy heart-exploding
becoming-metal: ‘Noise blasts a human being into in nity and he lands in
an iron chair without a nametag, an overwounded eshmachine melted
down into an unrecognizable form’.18
e reality of black metal as mysticism may thus be thought as the secret
shadow of the transformation conventionally gured in Christian mysticism
as the becoming- re of black metal: ‘All love is a re, but a spiritual re.
What a corporeal re does for iron, the re […] does the same for an
impure, cold, and hardened heart. In consequence of the infusion of such a
re, the human mind gradually removes all blackness, coldness, and
hardness; and the whole mind changes into the similitude of him who
in ames it. e whole mind becomes white-hot from the igniting of the
divine re; it ares up and, at the same time, lique es in the love of God’.19
I conceive the love of black metal as an inside-out ame of this re, a
hyper-cold or meta-hot black ame (cf. Sabbat’s ‘Black Fire’) within the
heart of the metal head that preserves and ensures, precisely by preventing,
the all-out becoming- re of love. For such a dark burning, as the very
vehicle of the opposite of transubstantiation (in which accidents survive the
alteration of substance), is also discernible within the metaphor as the
secret virtue of iron that allows its cold black hardness to be a ected by re,
to preserve itself in the midst of burning, and to achieve total
transformation without loss of its own substance, that is, to really achieve it.
As Eriugena says, describing the becoming-divine of the individual, ‘Iron or
any other metal melted into re is seen to be converted into re [in igne
liquefactum], so that it appears to be pure re, yet the substance of the
metal is safely [permanente] preserved’.20 No one would claim that the
capacity of black metal to remain black metal in the midst of the in nite
re of love is incidental to its mystical, divine becoming. Rather, this
complicit resistance is its very ground, what gives ame to re in the rst
place, what permits re to be its endlessly burning self, what e ortlessly
su ers forever the perverse in nity of divine love and overmasters even its
own being totally overcome by it. ‘Once my soul was elevated’, says Angela,
‘[…] I did not see love there, I then lost the love which was mine and was
made nonlove [non amor]. […] A erward, I saw him in a darkness […]
anything conceivable or understandable does not attain this good or even
come near it. […] In this good, which is seen in the darkness, I recollected
myself totally’.21 e icy burning of the black metal essence that burns so
hot that even the eriest infernal love- re is burnt by it and retreats more
secretly within the metal substance is the profound property of an in nite,
non-subtractable individuality, a one of many who is nonetheless and all
the more One without number, the only and nal insurance that when you
become what you are (God), you can really say, with Al-Hallaj, I am the
Truth.22 In being melted, in wholly changing into the similitude of him who
in ames it, the iron is most intensively weaponized, made into a
superdirectional liquid blade, something cutting in all directions at once, all
the more easily wielding itself even against the All. ‘It is a certain and
necessary truth’, says Meister Eckhart, ‘that he who resigns his will wholly to
God will catch God and bind God, so that God can do nothing but what
that man wills’.23 Note that, in Inquisition’s ‘Summoned by Ancient Wizards
Under a Black Moon’, re is accordingly invoked as both ultimate wieldable
weapon and medium of nal self-dissolution: ‘I will open gates of unknown
time | I will breathe my re towards the cosmic eye […] Far before all time,
far beyond all time | I shall fade away in the re realm below’.24 e love of
black metal is a mystical sword of unconquerable re.
e love of black metal is a secret, inverted mysticism, a hidden love of
hidden universal divine reality, the absolute continuum that holds the
supreme, superessential essence of your so-called self. It is the love of
something (black metal) that materially makes and perceptually does what
mysticism spiritually is, namely: ‘a most secret [secretissima] talking with
God, no longer through a mirror and through the images of creatures, but
the kind where the mind transcends all creatures and itself, and relaxes
[otiatur] from the acts of all the powers that are able to grasp anything
created, in the desire of seeing and holding him who is above all, waiting
[expectans] in the darkness of the privation of actual comprehension, that
is, in the darkness of the actual unknowing of all things, until the one it
desires may manifest himself ’.25 It therefore does this precisely as if not
doing it, as if not withdrawing from the mirror of things but staying,
aesthetically dwelling in its very darkness, not seeking the face-to-face
vision that the dark mirror promises and prevents, but artistically folding
and vinylly pressing vision into the darkness of the mirror itself,
compounding darkness in darkness so as to sonically y away free from the
necessity of vision all together. ‘O Cryptic One I see – black | the veiled one
chanting near […] the shadow one in the mist | Wings ock to my crypt, I
y to my throne’.26
e love of black metal is an inside-out mysticism, not only in the sense of
a profanation of mysticism, but in the deeper sense of a mystical inversion
of mysticism, an unconscious occult recording or perverse intuitive
preservation of the heterodox love of God. Inversion must here be
recognized as a universal logical operator for transpositionally revealing-by-
concealing and concealing-by-revealing the essence of something. Inversion
is secret, cultic veneration of what remains in-version, immanent within the
midst of turning. It is a destructive-creative disclosure of the still point or
axis of inversion, for instance, the martyric moment of identity with Christ
on the Petrine cross (somewhere near the navel),27 a minimum intersection
at the center of all di erence which antipodal movement at once occludes
and twistingly intensi es. Inversion repeats without repetition, without
recording, keeping the old as the shadow of the new. e love of black
metal, far from being mere medievalism or anti-modern nostalgia for a lost
sacred world, is a new (blind) perception of spiritual reality.28 An insoluble
sonic synthesis or a-synthesis of premodern mystical negativity and the
expanding image of the unbounded cosmos. Dagon says: ‘ e massive
chaos, titanic cosmic bodies that dwindle around, everything around us is
so massive and powerful that I see the parallel of what all the known
mythologies have written about heaven and hell as a direct inspiration from
it (space) as something we have been overlooking our entire lifetime’;29 ‘ e
simple notion that my spirit is as ancient as time itself, I am here in
“modern times” but my spirit is very old therefore my inspiration is old and
cryptic’; ‘the eternal black universe, the cosmic sea of Lucifer. How can one
not be enlightened by such greatness a er a deep look into something so
primitive, vast and timeless’;30 ‘the cosmos and all nature holds the secrets
of mankind, creation and destruction, everything about it is so Satanic in
essence, so “Black Metal” in essence’.31
e love of black metal twists toward absolute cosmic exteriority along a
mystical path of intensive inversion. Ordinate mysticism takes an inward
and upward path to God as the source and goal of everything, withdrawing
from the exterior phenomenal world in order to ascend beyond it to the
One in a movement that is anabatic (rising) and anagogic (leading
upward).32 e love of black metal, reversely and contrarily, leads
downwards and outwards into a paradoxically disordered and multiple
cosmos that is no less divine, pursuing a musical path that is catabatic
(descending) and apogogic (leading away). Where music traditionally aims
to mimetically ascend to hyper-central divine truth through the harmony of
the celestial spheres, black metal’s noisy anti-modern sonic drive
coordinately plunges into the depths only to release and radically y upon
the in nite centrifugal power or negative cosmic wind of sound itself.
‘ rough cosmic chaos, through burning stars, abyss horns now bray. […]
 e kingdom closes through which I y as darkness opens | Our Earth has
opened as lunar craters become infernos | As ancient hymns call I sing the
song in caves of sorrow | e echoes wander with lifeless moan as horns are
braying’.33
As if black metal were indeed a subcultural Dionysian echo of antinomian
or ‘anarchic’ medieval spirituality, the truth of Marguerite Porete the real
outsider occluded in the inquisitorial memory of Baphomet (the putative
god of the Templars who were burnt only weeks before her in Paris), black
metal truths remain backwardsly legible within medieval mystical
discourse, above all in places where the ordered and integrative movement
of the return to the One is reversely accented toward individual reality. A
short list:
1) Irreligion. e principle that divine truth lies beyond religion, an
institution that separates rather than unites world and God. ‘[T]his Soul is
above the law, | Not contrary to the law’, says Porete, in the voice of Holy
Church.34 As opposed to such persons she calls ‘donkeys, [who] seek God in
creatures, in monasteries for prayer, in a created paradise, in words of men
and the Scriptures’.35
2) Freedom. e principle of absolute independence. ‘ is Soul, says
Love, is free, yet more free, yet very free, yet nally supremely free […] She
responds to no one if she does not wish to’.36 Nor is she ‘a servant of
oneself ’.37 Eckhart: ‘ e just man serves neither God nor creatures, for he is
free, […] and the closer he is to freedom […] the more he is freedom itself.
Whatever is created, is not free. […] ere is something that transcends the
created being of the soul, not in contact with created things […] not even
an angel has it […] It is akin to the nature of deity, it is one in itself, and
has naught in common with anything’.38
3) Intoxication. e principle of radical, concernless bliss. ‘And she is
inebriated not only from what she has drunk, but very intoxicated and
more than intoxicated from what she never drinks and nor will ever
drink’.39
4) Knowing oneself as totally evil. e principle that you are intelligible
only as pure perversion of the good. ‘[T]his Soul knows in herself only one
thing, that is, the root of all evil, and the abundance of all sins without
number, without weight, and without measure’.40 ‘ is is the sign of the
spirit of truth’, says Angela of Foligno, ‘to realize that God’s being is total
love and to acknowledge oneself as total hate’.41
5) Dereliction, desolation, and despair. ‘I perceive that demons’, says
Angela, ‘hold my soul in a state of suspension; just as a hanged man has
nothing to support him, so my soul does not seem to have any supports le .
e virtues of my soul are undermined […] and when it when it perceives
all its virtues being subverted and departing […] the pain and the anger
that it feels pushes it to such a point of despair that at times it cannot weep
and at other times it weeps inconsolably. ere are even times when I am
so overwhelmed with rage that I can hardly refrain from tearing myself
apart’.42
6) Rejection of creationism, the pervasive insidious habit of thinking being
as creature or inscrutable e ect of an external cause, whether divine
architect or a mute given cosmos that it is stupidly ‘out there’ before and
a er one’s own being. Eckhart says no: ‘For in that essence of God in which
God is above being and distinction, there I was myself and knew myself so
as to make this man. erefore I am my own cause according to my
essence, which is eternal, and not according to my becoming, which is
temporal’.43 No longer worry about how to return or keep or throw away
the ‘gi of being’.
7) Paradoxical denial of God. e upside down truth on which the
Christian ecclesia and black metal kvlt are both founded. ‘I pray to God to
make me free of God’, says Eckhart.44 e negation is necessary to open the
continuum, to realize the universal as an open system, i.e. a world of
wonders and monstrous births. Logically, the continuum is what is
thinkable in negation as the di erence between X and not not X. Equation
of these is the basis for the apogogic or indirect proof, which Kant notes
‘can indeed produce certainty, but not comprehensibility of the truth as
regards its connection with the bases of its possibility’, calling it ‘more of an
expedient than a procedure which satis es all the aims of reason’.45 It is
valid only within closed, nite systems, in ‘sciences where it is impossible to
erroneously substitute the subjective for the objective’.46 In the procedure of
apophatic mysticism (negating what is not God), the indeterminacy of the
apogogic, the gap between X and ~~X, is gured in the recognition that the
negation of the not-God does not produce God but leads only to the place
of God and that a further negation of the negation conditions divine
illumination, which transcends both objective subjectivity and logical
binarism, realizing a truth that, as Dionysius says in the Mystical eology,
is ‘beyond assertion and denial’.47 ‘Here’, he continues, ‘being neither oneself
nor someone else, one is supremely united by a completely unknowing
inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing
nothing’.48 Essential to this deployment of the negative is the principle,
contra Aristotle, that negation is not the opposite of assertion, but the
assertion of what is beyond it, a term of intensi cation that negatively
indicates what is in excess of the positive, such that ‘one might even say that
nonbeing itself longs for the Good which is above being. Repelling being, it
struggles to nd rest in the Good which transcends all being, in the sense of
a denial of all things’.49 Black metal is similarly intelligible as intensive
negation, negative indication of the excess beyond God, exuberant
sacrilegious signi cation of divinity in excess of deity. And/or intensive
double negation: aesthetic formal demonstration of the denial of divine
inexistence, negation of the God who is not (neither with nor without
assertion of a God-to-come). Investment in double negation is correlative
to open or non-positive a rmation, futurity, and the tautological
whylessness of the will to live, famously presented by Eckhart as an endless
iterable question and answer between man and Life: ‘If a man asked life for
a thousand years, “Why do you live?” if it could answer it would only say,
“I live because I live”. at is because life lives from its own ground, and
gushes forth from its own. erefore it lives without Why, because it lives
for itself ’.50 Here the depth of the continuum is perfectly exposed in the
di erence between willing to be and not willing not to be. e essence of
holy desire or divine love is de ned in medieval mystical texts not only
(and less) in terms of its absolutism (for the all-in-all, Bataille’s ‘desire to be
everything’), but in terms of negative continuity, as desire that will not go
away, a ceaselessness at once a liated with cosmic order (Dante’s ‘Love that
moves the sun and the other stars’)51 and what aims beyond it, within the
unlimitedness of desire for self-becoming. ‘For not what you are, nor what
you have been, God beholds with his merciful eye, but what you will to
be’.52 Denial of God = non-propositional a rmation of the anarchy of
divine life. e whole of the law . . .
CODA: And so forth. I say nothing, and too much. Ominous doctrines of
the perpetual mystical macrocosm are not doctrines of in the sense of about.
ey are about the perpetual mystical macrocosm only insofar as the words
name the black metal they entitle, insofar as black metal is the ominous
doctrines, called by a name that never ceases bleeding into the thing itself.
Ominous doctrines of the perpetual mystical macrocosm, the very doctrines
of the macrocosm itself, that belong to it, that are it. ere is no
understanding without being them. ‘Gloss this if you wish, or if you can’,
says Porete, ‘If you cannot, you are not of this kind; but if you are of this
kind, it will be opened to you’.53

What will? (asks the last human being, blinking)

1 Inquisition, ‘Across the Abyss Ancient Horns Bray’, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical
Macrocosm (Hells Headbangers Records, 2011).
2 Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th ed., 3 vols (San Francisco: Su sm Reoriented, 1973), II, p. 191.
3 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae), ed. by I. P. Sheldon-Williams and
Édouard A. Jeauneau, trans. by John. J. O’Meara, 4 vols (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced
Studies, 1999–2009), IV, p. 167. ‘[O]mnis visibilis, et invisibilis creatura eophania i.e. divina
apparition potest appellari; [...] siquidem [...] in quantum occultus intelligitur, in tantum divinae
claritati appropinquare videtur. Proinde a eologia coelestium virtutum, inaccessibilis claritas
saepe nominator tenebrositas’ (De divisione naturae [Monasterii Guestphalorum: Aschendor ,
1838], III. 19).
4 Giorgio Agamben, e Coming Community, trans. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p.89.
5 Mechthild of Magdeburg, e Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. by Frank Tobin (New York:
Paulist Press, 1998), IV. 12.
6 Meher Baba, Listen Humanity (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 19.
7 Bathory, ‘Born for Burning’, e Return (Black Mark Productions, 1985).
8 Marguerite Porete, e Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. by Ellen L. Babinsky (New York: Paulist Press,
1993), p. 89. On self-secrecy, cf. ‘But who they are [says Love to the three theological virtues(faith,
hope, charity)] […] this is known neither to you nor to them’ (p. 102); ‘She is where she loves, says
Love, without her feeling it’ (p. 121); ‘[…] the true seed of divine Love, which makes the Soul
completely surprised, without being aware of it’ (p. 101).
9 <http://www.foreverdoomed.com/forums/>.
10 Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, ed. by Paul Lachance (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 248.
11 Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 91.
12 Bathory, ‘Born for Burning’, e Return (Combat, 1985).
13 Inquisition, Into the Infernal Regions of the Ancient Cult (Sylphorium Records, 1998).
14 Eriugena, Periphyseon, I, p. 37.
15 Inquisition, ‘ e Initiation’, Into the Infernal Regions of the Ancient Cult.
16 <http://www.hellsheadbangers.com/inquisition/>.
17 Cf. the opening prayer of e Cloud of Unknowing: ‘God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and
unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche ee so for to
clense the entent of myn hert with the unspekable gi of i grace that I may par teliche love ee,
and worthilich preise ee. Amen’ (ed. by Patrick J. Gallacher [Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute,
1997], p. 21).
18 Cited from blurb to Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (New
York: Zone, 2011).
19 Richard of St. Victor, On the Trinity, VI. 2, in Trinity and Creation: A Selection of Works of Hugh,
Richard, and Adam of St. Victor, ed. by Boyd Taylor Coolman and Dale M. Coulter (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2011).
20 Eriugena, Periphyseon, V. 879A, p. 545.
21 Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, p. 202.
22 ‘Hallaj was taken to the gallows tree | And cried: “I am the Truth”; they could not see | e meaning
of his words and hacked at him, | Tearing his bleeding carcass limb from limb’ (Farid ud-Din
Attar, e Conference of the Birds, trans. by A ham Darbandi and Dick Davis [New York:
Penguin, 1984], p. 114).
23 Meister Eckhart, e Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, ed. and trans. by Maurice O’C
Walshe (New York: Herder & Herder, 2009), p. 92.
24 Inquisition, ‘Summoned by Ancient Wizards Under a Black Moon’, Into the Infernal Regions of the
Ancient Cult.
25 Mystical eology: e Glosses by omas Gallus and the Commentary of Robert Grosseteste on De
Mystica eologia, ed. and trans. by James McEvoy (Paris: Peeters, 2003), p. 65, citing Grosseteste’s
commentary.
26 Inquisition, ‘Desolate Funeral Chant’, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm.
27 Cf. Valter’s commentary on Aarseth’s belly button as punctum, ‘Black Metal Getting Medieval’,
Documents <http://surrealdocuments.blogspot.com/2009/03/black-metal-getting-
medieval.html>.
28 Cf. ‘I think that black metal is an artistic movement that is critiquing modernity on a fundamental
level saying that the modern world view is missing something. It’s missing acknowledgement of a
spiritual reality. at estrangement from spiritual knowledge is the source of very deep sadness
and alienation. I think that is fundamentally what black metal is all about’ (Aaron Weaver, An
Interview with Wolves in the rone Room’s Aaron Weaver <
http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2009/05/an_interview_w_13.html>).
29 <http://www.hellsheadbangers.com/inquisition/>.
30 <http://www.metalreviews.com/interviews/interviews.php?id=67>.
31 <http://mortemzine.net/show.php?id=1577>.
32 See Plotinus, e Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna (Burdett, NY: Larson), IV. 8.1; Augustine,
Confessions, trans. by F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), VII. 10.16; Pseudo-Dionysius,
Mystical eology, I.1, in Pseudo-Dionysius: e Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 135.
33 Inquisition, ‘Across the Abyss Ancient Horns Bray’, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical
Macrocosm.
34 Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 196.
35 Ibid., p. 144.
36 Ibid., p. 160.
37 Ibid., p. 127.
38 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 131.
39 Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 105. Cf. ‘[the] God-intoxicated […] experiences just that same
sensation that a drunkard enjoys, and cares for no one and nothing, in proportion to the extent of
his intoxication; the di erence is that his intoxication is continual, that it may increase but can
never decrease, and it has no physical or mental reaction. It is a state of permanent and unalloyed
intoxication’ (William  Donkin, e Wayfarers: Meher Baba with the God-Intoxicated [Myrtle
Beach, SC: Sheriar Press, 1988], p. 22).
40 Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, pp. 88–9.
41 Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, p. 229.
42 Ibid., p. 197.
43 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 424.
44 Ibid.
45 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996),
p. 723.
46 Anthony Winterbourne, e Ideal and the Real: An Outline of Kant’s eory of Space, Time and
Mathematical Construction (London: Kluwer, 1988), p. 117.
47 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, p. 141.
48 Ibid., p. 137.
49 Ibid., p. 73. ‘Now we should not conclude that the negations are simply the opposites of the
a rmations, but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this’ (p. 136). ‘In it is nonbeing
really an excess of being’ (p. 73).
50 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 110.
51 Paradiso XXXIII. 145.
52 e Cloud of Unknowing, p. 101 (my translation).
53 Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 183.
 E C

THE MISSING SUBJECT OF ACCELERATIONISM:

HEAVY METAL’S WYRD REALISM
What I o er is a web of half-choked ravings that vaunts its
incompetence, exploiting the meticulous conceptual fabrications of
positive knowledge as a resource for delirium, appealing only to the
indolent, the maladapted, and the psychologically diseased. I would like
to think that if due to some collective spiritual seism the natural sciences
were to become strictly unintelligible to us, and were read instead as a
poetics of the sacred, the consequence would resonate with the text that
follows. At least disorder grows.
– Nick Land, irst for Annihilation

1. Catena

I started writing a little poetry in college, I think as an adjunct to the

mathematics I was studying. en I defaulted into literature and had to
write a little more deliberately. Not sure about the ‘why’ part, but I was
attracted early on by annotated texts, exegetical reading, and my term
papers usually had a lot of footnotes. Now I am overtly interested in writing
commentaries.1

Now the weird personal fact I must somehow account for is that my
intellectual love of commentary is actually causally related to my love of
metal, according to the following timeline of events: 1986-1987: I develop a
habit of doing calculus homework while listening to tapes of KCMU’s
mostly death and thrash show Brain Pain, convinced that it improves my
thinking; 1988: during a unique dusk-to-dawn squid cleaning shi , I am
deeply impressed by my co-worker’s subtle interpretations of ‘Paranoid’;
2000: a er commenting philosophically on some metal lyrics, I joke with a
fellow medievalist graduate about writing a metal gloss; 2006: I start
organizing a collaborative image and text commentary project that never
gets o the ground; 2007-2008: I write a running commentary on the ‘ rst’
heavy metal song; 2008: I present on [metallic] deixis at the Heavy
Fundametalisms conference in Salzburg; 2008: I start the journal Glossator:
Practice and eory of the Commentary; 2009: I co-organize, with Reza
Negarestani, the Spring 2012 volume of Glossator on black metal; 2009: I
organize the rst black metal theory symposium Hideous Gnosis.2

ree days before the Hideous Gnosis event there was a spiral anomaly in
the Norwegian sky.

Two days before the Hideous Gnosis event, the Glory of Christ Church in
the Bronx was looted and torched by a ‘Satan-loving arsonist’.

Two weeks before the Hideous Gnosis event, I su ered a one-time seizure
in Union Square. For a few minutes, life and world were peeled away and
replaced like a super cial veneer over something much more solid.
Abdominal and back muscles took over a month to recover.

One week later, I presented a lecture on ‘Beheading and the Impossible’

for the Medieval Club of New York. One week a er that, at the
symposium, I talked about anti-cosmic Black Metal and the dissolution of
the universe.

e title of the symposium was taken from the title of a song by Caïna
which ends with the words, ‘No one’s there anymore’.

Some people, who think that Caïna is lame, Shoegazy post-Black Metal,
took the title of the symposium as proof that it too is lame, etc.

In an interview, published three days before the P.E.S.T. symposium in

Dublin, Andy Curtis Bignell of Caïna said the following about the Hideous
Gnosis material: ‘I have a copy of this. I thought in principle it was an
interesting idea, but the execution was generally very “pseudy”, self-
obfuscating and dull. I’ve read both better academic analyses of pop culture
and better journalism on Black Metal. It’s dated undergraduate readings of
Deleuze mixed with university-newspaper prurience. e only article of any
interest was the one that collected a load of interviews from USBM artists,
purely because it was more like a ’zine and therefore a bit more immediate
and pure. I don’t really think that either black metal or academia bene t
from this kind of half-arsed discourse’.

During the Hideous Gnosis symposium, there was an ice-machine in an

adjacent room that continued to make an annoying noise during the talks.
I did not appreciate the interruption, but I did like the fact that noise was
being made by ice, especially when Anthony Sciscione referred to
Leviathan’s ‘Fucking Your Ghost in Chains of Ice’ as ‘possibly the most
awesome-titled song ever’.

In my symposium talk, I criticized the ‘vulgar policing of the space of

authentic experience, which proceeds by holding forever closed the
meeting place of theory and practice, science and art, philosophy and
poetry, shutting them up in a minimally present and maximally
interviewable person of the master to whom alone is accorded the privilege
of theoretical gnosis’.3

No one ever experiences anything beyond one’s own nature. As below, so

above.

One more good reason to begin to stop being oneself.4

2. Mad Black Deleuzianism

Accelerationism’s ‘insistence that the only radical political response to

capitalism is […] to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding,
abstractive tendencies’,5 is situated historically in a genealogy, the holy
trinity of which, is: 1) stemming from Marx’s Grundrisse (1857-58) and, in
particular, from his meditation ‘on Machines’,6 the idea that from within
and through machinic development comes emancipation; 2) the idea of
ctioning or ‘of ctional qualities making themselves real’7 that, stemming
from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), would go on to inform the
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’s (CCRU) and, in particular, Nick Land’s
understanding of hyperstition;8 3) the not entirely unrelated doctrine of
libidinal materialism9 that, stemming from Nietzsche and Bataille, is
variably construed as a pessimo-psychoanalytic thermodynamic
energeticism,10 a primitive libidinal craving or thirst for annihilation that is
accomplishing itself through philosophy,11 and nally, then, a negative
excitation (‘to rather will negation than the negation of will [N II 839]’)12
instrumentalizable for political purposes.13
In Simon O’Sullivan’s review of this genealogy, as it is laid out in e
Accelerationist Reader (2014), it is this last instance of libidinal materialism
and, more speci cally, the scene from which it emerged – ‘a certain scene
that was as much about the body, and a ect, as it was about reason’ – that
constitutes, what he calls, ‘the missing subject of accelerationism’.14
Eschewing the twin poles on o er in the Reader itself: subjectivity’s
reduction to ‘a ective self-valorization’, on the one hand, and its total
obsolescence ‘in the wake of the rise of the machines’,15 on the other, he
notes of how accelerationism was not always so straightforwardly
concerned with the kind of dry rational/technological Prometheanism we
nd expounded by Ray Brassier and, currently, Reza Negarestani, both of
whom have become the key conceptual gures in its philosophical armory.
In recalling the particular moment that gave rise to the
indictment/excitement to ‘accelerate the process’, a cyberculture scene that
ostensibly germinated in Warwick’s philosophy department, in the circle
around Land, and was nourished in the CCRU research laboratory set up
by Sadie Plant, O’Sullivan suggests the Reader is remiss in relaying the
extent to which this particular moment ‘owes as much to other matters,
both non-academic and non-scholarly, for its inception and evolution’.16 In
pointing to the prominence of Jungle, for example, and what he calls ‘the
whole desiring production of the dance oor […] with its accompanying
synthetic supplements’, tended to by Land and Plant,17 the author insists
there was something else at stake in the genesis of accelerationism,
something other than the strictly philosophical, something that has been
misplaced through the Reader’s ensconcement of a rational/technological
Prometheanism: a machine-like subjectivity that is valorized in and through
the overtly crystalline epistemological methodology of Brassier and, more
pressingly for our purposes, the current Negarestani. at the CCRU
‘operated at least one step removed from this explicitly philosophical
trajectory’, with its emphasis on ‘reason and rationality’, and that it was
‘accompanied by an a ective charge – bodies, understood in the most
general sense, and encounters – an interest in other spaces and places
outside of philosophy’,18 is evidenced in O’ Sullivan’s personal recollection of
the Virtual Futures conferences of the 1990s, which he o ers as a
supplement to the Reader’s own genealogy. is supplement, which begins
by foregrounding a very particular performative element to these
conferences, that involved the insights and activities of DJs, artists,
cyberfeminists, and included experimental multi-media presentations and a
whole plethora of printed matter, all of which brought the ‘outside’ in to the
academy, ends in a form of writing ‘with’ rather than ‘about’ its subject,
what O’ Sullivan, with respect to Land, calls a ‘mad black Deleuzianism’.19
at this ‘mad black Deleuzianism’ is also attributable by the author to the
writings of an earlier Negarestani, the current exemplar of that dry
rational/technological Prometheanism promoted by the Reader, betrays an
intimate link between black metal theory and accelerationism, whose
‘missing subject’, it would seem, is nothing more, or less, than what I would
like to term, heavy metal’s wyrd realism, its ‘art of making reality, of
knowing reality, and knowing how to make reality’20 through its ‘aesthetics
of inevitability’:21

whence, for instance, Mortifer’s account of Absonus Noctis’s latest

release as producing in the listener the event it narrates: ‘Penumbral
Inorgantia is a chronicling of a man’s journey to ancient underground
kingdoms haunted by the inhuman entitites that once dwelt therein. He
must seek arcane instruments to rid earth of all organic life a er sinking
into the abysmal pools of their souls to shed his human frame and assume
an elevated, blackened, and immortal state of being, enabling him to
 reign over the desolation he has created. Each song represents a speci c
stage in his journey and shall consequently engulf the listener in an
experience of metamorphoses into inhumanity’.22

A kind of cosmic hyperstition, with deep and essential connections to the

genres of commentary and weird ction, heavy metal’s wyrd realism,
causally imaged as a web, the threads of which, like the linking together of
singular responses in the ‘chain’ or catena (from Greek δέω meaning ‘to
bind’) above,23 represents the endless interrelatedness of all living things,
but also of mechanical forces: if one bre vibrates, so too all the others.24
Hence, Scott Wilson notes of how, at the same time in the British midlands
‘as Warwick’s philosophy department was reanimating the writings of
Nietzsche and Bataille to inform [that “mad black”, or] extreme, nihilist
version of Deleuze and Guattari which celebrated the destructive forces of
global capitalism as the most radical form of machinic desire’, Coventry’s
Bolt rower, heavy metal in its explicitly political form – that of death
metal, a sub-genre deriving from the legacy of grindcore – was echoing
Land’s contention that ‘war in its intensive state is desire itself, convulsive
recurrence, unilateral zero’.25 Stemming from what he calls a ‘position of
deep ambivalence towards humanity, if not a profound anti-humanism’,
concomitant with that of accelerationism, Wilson suggests that
contemporary academic interest in metal is wyrdly related to the exultation
‘in the destruction of liberal culture and the universal humanities’ that
Land’s acolytes breathlessly embraced in the promise of techno-science,
‘particularly digitalization, as represented in cyberpunk, Blade Runner and
the Terminator movies’.26 For as he notes, mirroring O’ Sullivan’s contentions
on ‘that particular future-oriented moment at Warwick’,27 ‘as dated as some
of it seems now, this imagination provided the impetus for developing a
“para-academic” space on the network that provided some of the most
interesting and innovative models for the survival of thought in the ruins of
the university, in virtual spaces where much of the new academic interest in
metal currently resides’.28

3. Black Metal eory, or Accelerationism qua ‘Fucking Your Ghost in

Chains of Ice’
 Following a certain Landian logic, a logic that is in itself the a ect ‘of a
generation of graduates, metallectuals on the margins of the Academy, for
whom metal’s “unemployed negativity” provides the most appropriate
vehicle’, a practice ‘with which to articulate not just their discontent and
contestation of the violence of neoliberal subjecti cation in state
institutions, but also and as such to forge a di erent form of intellectual life
on the other side of culture’,29 black metal theory was inaugurated with the
aim of providing black metal and the commentarial tradition with ‘a
vanguard front capable of exposing the established order to the corrosive
in uence of the outside and a ecting any outside-oriented determination
with the non-escapist in uence of the established’.30 Or to put it di erently,
as Masciandaro and Negarestani did at a particularly decisive moment in its
inception and evolution: ‘since the zone of operation for both black metal
and commentary is the margin, by expanding the margin of the established
order they increasingly expose it to the in uence of the beyond. Yet since
they also perforate the boundaries, they establish an a ect between the
beyond and the center’,31 an a ect that is, however dryly, recapitulated
epistemologically in Negarestani’s ‘Labour of the Inhuman’,32 a correlative
‘reworking of the sublime as “beyond within” (Lyotard, Lessons on the
Analytic of the Sublime)’33 operative in the holy trinity of accelerationism.
‘Haunted by the principle of ignotum per ignotius as its own logical
spectre, the clarifying-by-complicating and explicating-by-obfuscating
movement of commentary’34 inscribed in black metal theory and, indeed,
in his own theory- ction,35 Negarestani’s current crystalline, even icy
methodology (in the sense that, as Charlie Blake suggests, ‘the cold shower
of post-analytic philosophy [stands in] contrast to the warm delirium of the
novel [Cyclonopedia]’),36 seems to constitute something like a u-turn or
break from the amorphous metallectual movement with which he was
previously aligned. To the extent that, despite a deep connecting root, we
feel we are encountering, in accelerationism and black metal theory, two
disjointed camps or moments in the history of thought. But the current
clari cation-by-simpli cation and explication-by-illumination merely
constitutes a di erent approach, a di erent methodology, that is, as Rory
Rowan has suggested, attributable to a shi in concern from ontology to
epistemology, a shi that remains, nevertheless, consistent in its content.37
What Ben Woodard and Paul J. Ennis – both black metal theorists and
leading experts, respectively, on Negarestani’s philosophy and the Sellarsian
school of scienti c realism – would outline as ‘a shi ing from [an] early
Deleuze and Hyppolite Hegelian nexus to a Hegelian nexus of
phenomenology but read by Brandom [apropos of the Pittsburgh Hegelian/
Sellarsian school, where Brandom is joined by Rorty, and both of whom are
then interminably taken-up by so-called “Le accelerationism” typi ed by
Negarestani and Brassier, whose abiding concern with “the manifest image”
is discounted entirely vis-a-vis its own supercession in the scienti c realism
of true Sellarsianism behind so-called “Right accelerationism”, typi ed by
Land, and the Churchlands and Metzinger before him] so you have all the
rigor of [black metal theoretical discourse, cf. necrology in Masciandaro and
Negarestani’s “Black Metal Commentary”] transplanted into the pseudo-
phenomenological method of the pragmatic or dialectical coming to be of
the reasoner’.38
at this coming to be of the reasoner, essentially a myth based non-
human becoming, a rational/technological Prometheanism, is causally
related to Negarestani’s own love of metal and its commentarial method,
whose etymology ‘(via cominisci, to devise, invent), indicates the creativity
of thinking with something’39 apropos of that mad black Deleuzianism we
nd in Land and, more speci cally, in the very last line of Fanged
Noumena, to which, as Amy Ireland suggests, he can be seen to be
responding, is – both in form and in content – exemplary of heavy metal’s
wyrd realism.40 As above, its art of making reality, of knowing reality, and of
knowing how to make reality through its aesthetics of inevitability:
Seen from this side, Vauung is the gamble that the ruin lacked cunning.
It leaves a question of method. Not exactly urgent, but obscurely
pressing.41

4. Coda

e world keeps on turning –

Men still live and die
 ough many have questions
So few even try
To search for the answers
at you have found here –
Unaware of the threads in
e web that is wyrd
– Sabbat, ‘Mythistory’, Dreamweaver (Noise Records, 1989)

1 David Hoenigman, ‘An Interview with Nicola Masciandaro’, Word Riot (March 28, 1997)
<http://www.wordriot.org/archives/3570 > (accessed 21/02/15).
2 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies and the Scission of the Word: A Personal Archaeology of
Headbanging Exegesis’, Journal of Cultural Research, 15. 3 (2011), p. 249.
3 Cf. Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya’, Hideous Gnosis, ed. by Nicola
Masciandaro (New York: n.p., 2010), pp. 67–92.
4 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Re ections from the Intoxological Crucible’, Black Metal: Beyond e
Darkness, ed. by Tom Howells (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012), pp. 72–5. Cf. the reversed
hermeticism of Georges Bataille, in whose writing ‘the body is projected onto the world: as below,
so above’ (Alaistair Brotchie, ‘Introduction’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical
Dictionary & Related Texts and the Encyclopaedia Costa, ed. by Georges Bataille and Robert Lebel
& Isabelle Waldberg, respectively, trans. by Iain White [London: Atlas Press, 1995], p. 12).
5 See ‘Introduction’, in #Accelerate: e Accelerationist Reader, ed. by Robin Mackay and Armen
Avanessian (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), p. 4.
6 See Karl Marx, ‘Fragment on Machines’, in e Accelerationist Reader, pp. 51–66. Cf. ‘It is sometimes
said about machinery, therefore, that it saves labour; however, as Lauderdale correctly remarked,
the mere saving of labour is not the characteristic thing; for, with the help of machinery, human
labour performs actions and creates things which without it would be absolutely impossible of
accomplishment’ (Karl Marx, ‘ e Chapter on Capital’, Grundrisse, trans. by Martin Nicolaus
[London: Penguin Books in association with New Le Review, 1993], p. 389).
7 See Simon O’ Sullivan, ‘ e Missing Subject of Accelerationism’, available from Mute (2014)
<http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/missing-subject-accelerationism> (accessed
21/02/15).
8 Cf. ‘Hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words “hyper” and “superstition” to describe the
action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Akin to neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins’ concept
of memes, hyperstitions work at the deeper evolutionary level of social organization in that they
in uence the course taken by cultural evolution. Unlike memes, however, hyperstitions describe a
speci c category of ideas. Coined by renegade academics, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
(CCRU), hyperstition describes both the e ects and the mechanisms of apocalyptic postmodern
“phase out” or “meltdown” culture. Functioning as magical sigils or engineering diagrams,
hyperstitions are ideas that, once “downloaded” into the cultural mainframe, engender
apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Whether couched as religious mystery teaching, or as secular
credo, hyperstitions act as catalysts, engendering further (and faster) change and subversion.
Describing the e ect of very real cultural anxieties about the future, hyperstitions refer to
exponentially accelerating social transformations. e very real socio-economic makeover of
 Western (and increasingly global) society by the hyperstitions of Judeo-Christianity and free-
market capitalism are good examples of hyperstitional feedback cycles. As Nick Land explains:
“capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of
intensity, turning mundane economic ‘speculation’ into an e ective world-historical force” (email
interview). […] As Nick Land explains in the Catacomic (1995:1), a hyperstition has four
characteristics: ey function as (1) an “element of e ective culture that makes itself real”, (2) as a
“ ctional quality functional as a time-travelling device”, (3) as “coincidence intensi ers”, and (4) as
a “call to the Old Ones”. e rst three characteristics describe how hyperstitions like the
“ideology of progress” or the religious conception of apocalypse enact their subversive in uences
in the cultural arena, becoming transmuted into perceived “truths”, that in uence the outcome of
history. Finally, as Land indicates, a hyperstition signals the return of the irrational or the
monstrous “other” into the cultural arena. From the perspective of hyperstition, history is
presided over by Cthonic “polytendriled abominations” – the “Unuttera” that await us at history’s
closure (in Reynolds 2000:1). e tendrils of these hyperstitional abominations reach back
through time into the present, manifesting as the “dark will” of progress that rips up political
cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities. “ e [hu]man”, from the perspective of the
Unuttera “is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag”, writes Land in Meltdown (1995:14)’
(Delphi Carstens, ‘Hyperstition: 2010’, Merliquify
<http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition/#.VPcP7SjWqcM> [accessed 21/02/15]).
9 Regarding the above note on hyperstition, and the following de nitions of libidinal materialism
that I go on to give, cf. ‘Another description might run like this: libidinal materialism is the textual
return of that which is most intolerable to mankind’ (Nick Land, irst for Annihilation: Georges
Bataille and Virulent Nihilism [London and New York: Routledge, 1992], p. xxi, my emphasis).
10 Land, irst for Annihilation, p. xx.
11 ‘Is this primitive craving that seeks abolition of reality an object of philosophical investigation, or
a drive accomplishing itself through philosophy?’ (Land, irst for Annihilation, p. xxi). Cf. ‘To
state explicitly that we are already dead is to argue implicitly that philosophy is no longer a
discipline concerned with the good life’ (Paul J. Ennis, ‘Anti-Vitalism As A Precondition For
Nihilism’, in Breaking the Spell: Contemporary Realism under Discussion, ed. by Anna Longo and
Sarah De Sanctis [Mimesis, forthcoming]). Ennis is vicariously responding to Land here vis-à-vis
the claim that ‘[t]hinking has interests that do not coincide with those of the living, indeed they
can be pitted against the latter’, made by Ray Brassier, in Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and
Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi.
12 Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Werke, ed. by Karl Schlechta (München: Hanser, 1969), p. 839, cited in Land,
irst for Annihilation, p. xxi.
13 See Mark Fisher, ‘Terminator vs. Avatar’, in e Accelerationist Reader, p. 340.
14 O’ Sullivan, ‘ e Missing Subject’.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 See O’ Sullivan, ‘ e Missing Subject’, note xiii. O’Sullivan doesn’t attribute this quote to anyone
speci c, though as we know it is a term Brassier has long-used, and seems to derive from the
following context: ‘ e French philosopher Vincent Descombes once described Deleuze and
Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy as manifestations of what he called
 “mad black Hegelianism.” An attempt to nd the prosecution of a kind of Marxist materialism
that would somehow be anti-Hegelian. In the same regard, Land’s work is a “mad black
Deleuzianism,” an attempt to turn Deleuze’s vitalist impetus, the a rmationist élan that animates
the Deleuzoguattarian corpus into something much more ostensibly unsavoury, but also much
more conceptually liberating’ (Ray Brassier, ‘Accelerationism’, transcribed from a recording of
Accelerationism, Goldsmiths, University of London, 14/10/10, available from e Backdoor
Broadcasting Company <http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/09/accelerationism/> [accessed
21/02/15]).
20 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. by George Van Den Abbeele (London and
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 91.
21 See Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”: A Gloss on Heavy Metal’s Originary
Song’, Reconstruction, 9.2 (2009), Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
<http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/092/masciandaro.shtml> (accessed 21/02/15),
concerning the lines ‘Is it the end my friend?’ and ‘Satan’s coming round the bend’, respectively. Cf.
the introductory lines concerning ‘[h]eavy metal and glossing [/ commentary] [having] the
character of a conjuration. At their best, this conjuration becomes an incarnation’.
22 Reza Negarestani and Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Black Metal Commentary’, in Hideous Gnosis, pp. 257–
66; 264–5; Wraith Productions <http://www.wraithproductions.net/> (accessed 21/02/15). Cf.
Absonus Noctis, Penumbral Inorgantia (Wraith Productions, 2005): ‘ is (and apparently, at least
to some degree, all of Absonus Noctis’ work) is a conceptual release, though any real
understanding of it has to be gleaned rather indirectly due to a lack of published lyrics. Absonus
Noctis has an apparent infatuation with the underground and various subterranean sundries, and
indeed, the music here appears to, track by track, move further down into the caverns in which the
album’s seemingly loose narrative takes place. From what I’ve been able to ascertain, said
narrative appears to describe one individual’s descent into the caverns, where upon reaching the
lowest level, he takes possession of some dark, mystical (magical?) power. Not quite directly
Lovecra ian, but the in uence is certainly there. e atmosphere is suitably dank and dismal for
such a subject. For some reason, the music reminds me of the soundtrack and general ambiance of
the computer game “Quake”; so strikingly so that it seems only to be missing the “chink” of the
grenade launcher as it prepares to decimate a pack of lurching undead to make the union
complete’ (Noktorn, ‘Yes, e (Literal) Underground, We Get It’, Encyclopeadia Metallum
<http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/Absonus_Noctis/Penumbral_Inorgantia/70805/>
[accessed 21/02/15]).
23 ‘ e chain principle is an ontological wholism. It threads the fact of universe itself, expressing the
inseparability of the what and the that. e Cosmic catena is the necessary point of identity,
piercing every entity, between essence and existence, the invisible thing making it so that
everything is next to something else and part of everything itself. It is thus in a full and total sense
the chain of being, the fact of being’s being a chain or binding: at once the universal necessity of the
actuality of the everything (the fact that there is such a thing as everything) and the individual
necessity of the actuality of individuation (the fact that each thing is inexorably shackled to itself.
e chain encompasses from within the impossible unity of perspective that cosmos presupposes:
the de nite vision of the unbounded whole from the position of one-sided asymmetry occupied by
the individual […] We may recall that discourse, which signi es logos as a circulation between
beings (dis-cursus), implies an immanence/emergence of order, the actualization of a shared reality
as its medium. Only thus does word result in text (fr. texere, to weave), the higher order fabric (cf.
“fabric of the universe”) produced when the thread of language passes to and from across itself.
 Ful lling such a discursive ontology on a cosmic scale, Dante’s Commedia realizes itself in the
joyful retelling of a vision of a complex universal form that takes a codexical, self-bound shape: “In
the depth I saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume, that which is dispersed in leaves
throughout the universe: substances and accidents and their relations, as though fused together in
such a way that what I tell is but a simple light. e universal form of this knot I believe that I saw,
because, in telling this, I feel my joy increase”’ (Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, pp. 71–4; Dante
Alighieri, e Divine Comedy, ed. by Charles S. Singleton [Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1973], Paradiso 33.85–93). Cf. Barbara Rappengluck, ‘ e Power of Binding and Loosening: Ropes
establish the Cosmic Order’, in Calendars, Symbols, and Orientations: Legacies of Astronomy in
Culture, ed. by Mary Bloomberg, Peter Bloomberg and Goran Henriksson (Sweden: Uppsala,
2003), pp. 89–92.
24 ‘ e idea of life-force […] an Anglo-Saxon concept of energy, that holds strong resemblance to that
of chi and prana. Also the spirit world is of signi cance. e spirits are manifestations of all forces
that are part of the one binding principle, the Anglo-Saxon cosmology in a nutshell: Wyrd. […]
Wyrd is the most important idea of the Anglo-Saxon world. Sometimes it is inaccurately seen as
synonymous to “fate” or “destiny”, but its signi cance stretches far beyond these words. Wyrd
exceeds our notions of free will and determinism. e principle suggests an endless
interrelatedness between all aspects of the cosmos, including all living things, but also mechanical
forces. All these things are situated individually in a spectrum between the poles of Fire and Frost.
at is why Wyrd is o en depicted as a web, the threads of which represent the myriad links
between all aspects of the cosmos. Besides this, the sketched image seems to imply causality to
some extent: if one bre vibrates, so to[o] all the others. Nevertheless, this view does not justify an
argument that suggests the opposite. A er all, Wyrd is omnipresent and thus has nothing to with
time’ (Leon van Gulik, ‘ e Rune oracle and Anglo-Saxon magic: A plea for Wyrd as a guideline for
thorough divination’, in Prana, Issue 108 [1988], pp. 1–8); ‘ e idea of fate and the unalterable
course of events in life is one which is common property both of the heathen and of the Christian
faith. […] We saw already how the idea of wyrd = Fate, Chance, could be made subject to God’s
Providence […] wyrd was used for something that was subject to God […] wyrd referring to
something like a miracle […] It is o en said that God, being superior to fate, is therefore called
wyrda waldend […] from the idea that the plural wyrda refers to the three goddesses of Fate, but
neither in prose or poetry is there any proof for this contention, because this plural wyrda occurs
elsewhere […] in such a way that association with the goddesses of Fate is impossible. It may
su ce to refer to Beowulf p. 3030 [cf. below] wyrda ne worda. For this reason the translation
given by B.-T. (IV, 1) is to be preferred: “an event, with the special idea of that which happens by
the determination of Providence or Fate,” […] Beowulf ’s heart is full of gloomy forebodings of his
approaching death (wyrd ungemete neah), […] the originally heathen words which were adapted
to Christianity: doomed (by God) to die. e word is very common in Christian poetry […]
Another example of wyrd = death is given by B.T. s.v. wyrd, Va. […] God is superior to Fate,
because He can control Fate. … [but] in general wyrd is not felt to be a personal being […] e
general development of the meaning of wyrd is then something like this: wyrd, originally the name
for the power that ruled mens lives, the blind and hostile Fate, and at one time a proper name for
the goddess of Fate, came to be used for the events as they happened according to fate. In the
period of transition from the heathen to the Christian belief and also a er that time the word was
used by the astrologers with reference to the course of men’s lives as predetermined by the stars
[…] and by those who thought that this world was governed by chance. e word continued to be
used in the Christian texts with reference to the lot as ordained by God’s Providence, so that it
came to mean lot, both in the general sense and in the special sense of one man’s lot (pine wyrd)
and
kind of lot (widerwearde wyrd, god wyrd). From this the word developed the meaning of events (in a
collective sense in the singular, but also in the plural, e.g. wyrda Waldend, wyrda gescea ), but
o en with reference to a special kind of event in man’s life, a miraculous, wonderful event, or a
terrible, grievous event. In the ninenth century wyrd was also used for the miraculous deeds of
saints and priests. From the general sense of lot may be traced the development of meaning
represented by wyrd = end of the world (wyrde gebidan; wyrd = Drihtnes dom) or the end of a
person’s life = death’ (B. J. Timmer, ‘Wyrd In Anglo-Saxon Prose in Poetry, III. Wyrd In Poetry’,
Neophilologus, 26: 3 [Jan 1, 1941], pp. 213–28; 213–27). See Beowulf, 3rd ed., ed. by W. J. Sedge eld
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1935), pp. 455, 477, 572, 734, 1205, 2420, 2526, 2574,
2814 (for wyrd as ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’); pp. 1056, 1233, and, in particular, p. 3030 (for the plural wyrda
as ‘events’). Vide ‘Nature is not the primitive or the simple, and certainly not the rustic, the
organic, or the innocent. It is the space of concurrence, or unplanned synthesis, which is thus
contrasted to the industrial sphere of tellic predestination: that of divine creation or human work’
(Nick Land, ‘Circuitries’, in e Accelerationist Reader, pp. 251–74; 272–3).
25 Scott Wilson, ‘Heavy Metal and the Other Side of Culture (Abstract for e Home of Metal
Conference 1st–4th September 2011)’, Amusia <http://scott wilson-
amusia.blogspot.ie/2011_05_01_archive.html> (accessed 21/02/15); Land, ‘Aborting the human
race’, in irst for Annihilation, p. 149; ‘Constructed with vengeful hate | e extinction of life, man’s
nal plight | We strive until the end | ough none shall be taken alive | A killing machine,
programmed for death | To destroy all that comes within sight | Mindless, created insane |
Mankind shall never survive | Never survive | Never Survive | Strength becoming weaker, as fears
grow within | Faced with eternal damnation, the end shall now begin | Profane creation, the dawn
of a new age | Technology’s progression, over man machines reign | Enslaved without compassion,
new masters of earth we | dwell | Human life is worthless, in this automated hell | In the quest for
perfection life becomes obsolete | Humanity faces deletion, this nightmare world is complete | As
we wait for execution, in silence we stand in line | e total extinction of mankind | Our futile life’s
now ended, free from su ering and pain | Our systems are loaded, we have been created profane |
Profane creation, the dawn of a new age | Technology’s progression, over man machine’s reign |
Enslaved without compassion, new masters of earth we | dwell | Human life is worthless in this
automated hell | In the quest for perfection, life becomes obsolete | Humanity faces deletion, this
nightmare world is complete | As we wait for execution, silent we stand in line | e total
extinction of the existence of mankind’ (Bolt rower, ‘Profane Creation’, War Master [Earache
Records, 1991]). Cf. Scott Wilson, ‘Return to Zero’, e Order of Joy (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2008), pp.
89–106.
26 Wilson, ‘Heavy Metal’. Cf. ‘ e [Reader’s] editors’ Introduction does attend to this, pointing to the
importance of the “collective pharmo-sensory-tecnological adventure of rave and drugs”, and
more speci cally, of “dystopian strains of darkside and Jungle” themselves remixed with
Ballardian Science Fiction narratives and samples from Terminator, Blade Runner and the like.
But certainly it is worth restating here that these experimental conjunctions (that involved a
de nite outside to the Academy and a whole host of di erent kinds of subject) produced a very
speci c energy and intensity that, it seems to me, were crucial to that moment’ (O ‘Sullivan, ‘ e
Missing Subject’); see Mackay and Avanessian, e Accelerationist Reader, p. 21.
27 O’ Sullivan, ‘ e Missing Subject’.
28 Wilson, ‘Heavy Metal’.
29 Ibid.
30 Masciandaro and Negarestani, ‘Black Metal Commentary’, p. 259.
31 Ibid.
32 Reza Negarestani, ‘ e Labour of the Inhuman’, in e Accelerationist Reader, pp. 425–66.
33 Masciandaro and Negarestani, ‘Black Metal Commentary’, p. 260.
34 Ibid., p. 261.
35 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re. press,
2008). Cf. ‘Cyclonopedia is a book that opens Earth to the divinity of reality. e intoxicating e ect
of its theory- ction is to defuse the double, mutual hostage-taking of philosophy and religion,
their shared aporetic stand-o according to which reality remains the occluded object of ction
and divinity the eclipsed object of theory. Here theory- ction is not a cool new hybrid capable of
synthesizing and rescripting their domains towards an iterable new science [pace * Negaresatani’s
current modern science of knowledge project] or discipline. It is not about unifying and resolving
their double truth […] So the text’s symptom, a sign of its truly taking e ect, is to render the
philosopher (realist or idealist) no longer concerned with being right and the believer (nihilist or
theist) no longer concerned with being good – a corruption or fatal breaking of anxious
commitment, far from ruining rightness or goodness, extimately intensify them into the beautiful
absolute contingency of truth or being-divine of reality.’ (Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Gourmandized in
the Abattoir of Openness’, Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, ed. by Ed Keller, Nicola
Masciandaro and Eugene acker [New York: Punctum Books, 2012], pp. 181–4).
36 Personal communication with the author via the social media site Facebook, 26/02/15.
37 Personal communication with the author via the social media site Facebook, 26/02/15.
38 Ben Woodard, personal communication with the author via the social media site Facebook,
28/02/15; private one-to-one discussion on the epistemic legacy of Wilfrid Sellars between Paul J.
Ennis and the author, 01/03/15. Relevant texts that pertain to this discussion include the
following: on ‘the manifest image’, as it emerges here, see James R. O’ Shea, ‘Revisiting Sellars on the
Myth of the Given’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 10 (2002), pp. 490–503, which, it
should be noted, is not just about ‘the manifest image’ (though they are always coupled), but
speci cally ‘the myth of the given’, where the images are presupposed. O’Shea provides a general
introduction to the Pittsburgh Hegelian lineage of Sellars in this text, with an emphasis on the
myth of the given as central plus his own thrust on how Robert Brandom and Richard Rorty play
down scienti c realism (which Sellars never did); on Negarestani and Brassier, as they are situated
in this lineage, and further, then, to O’ Sullivan’s claim that ‘[c]ertainly, these last two are not
thinkers of the [R]ight but, on the other hand, it is hard to see how their writings might be
brought in line with a typical [L]e agenda insofar as the latter is o en premised on preserving a
certain category – even a folk image – of the human against those forces that seek to alienate and
dehumanise’ (‘ e Missing Subject’), see Brassier, Nihil Unbound, pp. 3–31, which, as Ennis notes,
‘is on Sellars and against Churchland (albeit not harshly so; but by the time of e View from
Nowhere he has gone full Brandom but via Metzinger which he uses to reduce Habermas to
shreds, but again comes out on the side of Brandom)’, and Negarestani, ‘Labour of the Inhuman’,
in e Accelerationist Reader itself, pp. 425–66, regarding which, as Ennis notes, ‘one nds
evidence, in the discourse used, su cient undertones of Brandom for anyone aware of the
Sellarsian tradition to know which line he is following’. On Land himself, see irst for
Annihilation or Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, second edition, ed. by Robin
Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic and Sequence Press, 2012). As
Ennis notes here, ‘Land is not a Sellarsian by evidence, but one might adduce it from the ruins
question that ends Fanged Noumena’. On Churchland, Ennis suggests it would be useful to go
back to an older text such as Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1988), as he notes, ‘[t]echnically he sort of created his own school by following Sellars
to the scienti c side. But stands alone’. On Metzinger, Ennis suggests going direct to the source,
omas Metzinger, Being No One: e Self-Model eory of Subjectivity (Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 2003), but adds that most of his texts seem to suggest that ‘he does not care much about
what Pittsburgh Hegelians are up to’. For Ennis’ own curious blend of black metal theory and
accelerationism (qua ‘scienti c realism’ Sellarsianism), see Paul J. Ennis, ‘Even Bleaker eory’,
presented at Edia Connole, Paul J. Ennis and Nicola Masciandaro with Ben Russell, ‘A Spell to
Ward O the Darkness: Live II’, Darklight Film Festival, e Generator, Smith eld Square, Dublin,
27/04/14, and subsequently published as ‘Bleak’, in A Spell to Ward O the Darkness, directed by
Ben Rivers and Ben Russell (2013; London, UK: Soda Pictures, 2014), DVD: ‘Bleak theory might be
de ned […] as a morbid over-identi cation with the so , unthinking world. A world that rejects
us and tells us we are not of that world. We are condemned to associate with the unnatural; with
the human aberration. With a species whose chief correlate is not simply su ering, which is
common to all the living, but the additional insult of conscious su ering. […] Consciousness is
that which traps a solitary entity and then lands it in the middle of the communal.
Once there selves scythe through one another even as they try to understand one another. But
nobody ever understands anyone else and here there is a clue. To every self every other is dreaming
a di erent reality. A false one since, as every individual knows, my world is the world. H. P.
Lovecra , in his guise as Professor Nobody, tells us, “Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense.
For as a reality, it is a rank failure.” Or if you prefer it from Edgar Allan Poe: “All that we see or
seem | is but a dream within a dream.” Better yet, ask the nearest infant to row a boat. But I’m not
here to defend solipsism or relativism or whatever. Life is a hallucination, but a very real one. It
may have the character of an elaborate continuous, but determinate in duration, fantasy, but it’s
really happening. R. Scott Bakker tells us that “ e ability of the brain to ‘see itself ’ is severely
restricted.” Or, more poetically, in the words of omas Metzinger, “transparency is a special form
of darkness.” Which is to say that consciousness, that which one is, is inexplicable to itself. Even if,
as will happen some day, the processes involved in consciousness are understood it will simply
con rm what you already know. What constitutes your self is a series of evolutionary “kluges”
(Bakker) hammered together in some far-o deep time game of adaptation that could just have
easily bene ted another random species. And the great error introduced into nature is precisely
thinking. It has, as Nick Land and Ray Brassier, have argued, interests of its own. It works against
life, or precisely, the will-to-life, and venerates the will-to-know, which has as its symbol death as
de-humanized, non-subjective truth. […] e more we know the more routine and base our
impulses become, “murder, the pleasure of humans” (Tormentor [‘Tormentor’, Anno Domini
(Nocturnal Art Productions, 1995)]). Escape from nature is not escape from the worst parts of
ourselves, it is a doubling up of aberrancy generating the machinic living-dead; de-naturalized we
become a confused mechanics shoring up increasing complexity. All this is owering toward a
non-future. I’ll end with an old Russian proverb: “Smile, for tomorrow will be worse”’.
39 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy’, Collapse, VI (2010), p. 51.
40 Personal communication with the author via the social media site Facebook, 26/02/15.
41 Land, ‘A Dirty Joke’, in Fanged Noumena, pp. 629–34; 634. Cf. ‘FWIW, the rst time I heard Reza
fully elaborate his modern system of knowledge project I thought of the last lines of “A Dirty Joke”
in Fanged Noumena […] My hunch back then was that Reza was responding, however obliquely,
to the failure of the Landian project precisely by upping the cunning, and switching tactics re:
method. at it was all still Skynet, just more artfully delivered as a “humanism” and via the very
thinkers that would disarm critics of Land (Kant, Hegel)’ (Amy Ireland, personal communication
with the author via the social media site Facebook, 26/02/15); as Ireland would go on to note,
Negarestani denies this.
 N M

SILENCE:
A DARKNESS TO WARD OFF ALL SPELLS1
In fact, there is only God and me. His silence invalidates us both.
– E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

Whenever [Meher] Baba went to a movie, it was his usual habit, no

matter how good the lm, to watch part of it, then stand up and walk
out.2

Let us die, then, and enter into this darkness. Let us impose silence
upon all cares, desires, and phantasms.
– Saint Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind into God

AC S
On 12 December 1934, seventy ve years to the day before the rst black
metal theory symposium in 2009 and nine years into his self-imposed and
never-broken silence, Meher Baba arrived in New York City on the
Majestic, at that time the largest ship in the world. In the days previous it
was made clear that he ‘did not wish to meet any outsiders while in New
York – no new persons, no interviews and no publicity’.3 ere would be no
headlines like the one in the New York Times two years before, ‘A Silent
Seer Comes to Arouse Americans: Shri Meher Baba, Who Has Lived Seven
Years Plunged In ought, Teaches Disciples by Means Of Signs’.4 A group
of reporters and photographers attempting to enter his cabin before
disembarkation were asked to leave and eventually dispersed. ‘Immigration
o cials tried to make him talk. But he just smiled’.5 is was a period of
work on the unrealized cosmological lm project How It All Happened, the
directions for which begin, ‘Show a calm, still, Shoreless Ocean of most
dazzling light. Limitless, it has no space above it’.6 e day’s activities
included a meeting between Meher Baba, his disciple and silent lm actress
Norina Matchabelli, Hungarian lm producer and director Gabriel Pascal,
and German playwright and screenwriter Karl Vollmöller. In the evening,
Baba and his close companions went to Radio City Music Hall, at that time
the largest cinema in the world. At one moment on the following day,
Meher Baba, silently texting on his alphabet board, said to a dumbstruck
Spinozist philosopher, ‘ ings that are real are given and received in
silence’.7

T R
Silence is the largest theater and the most majestic ship, the space of most
distant translations and closest communications. Cinema is cinema, the
place of its own movement, on the grounds of willful silence – ‘Please
refrain from talking during the movie’ – and the perfection of silence is
glimpsed in the limitless ocean on the other side of a screen:

Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,  

e questa siepe, che da tanta parte
dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude. 
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati 
spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
silenzi, e profondissima quiete
io nel pensier mi ngo; ove per poco
il cor non si spaura.8

Always dear to me was this lonely hill,

and this hedgerow, which from so
much of the ultimate horizon,
excludes the view. But sitting and
gazing, unending spaces beyond and
superhuman silences and profoundest
quiet I seem to see in thought,
until my heart is almost afraid.

Silence is the rest. It is all that is le and everything that remains from the
in nite beyond all the way up into each thing whose sight prevents us from
seeing it. Silence is the quiet wherein repetition repeats the unending, all
that is le and everything that remains from the in nite beyond all the way
up into each thing whose hearing prevents us from hearing it. As place of
the giving and receiving of the real, silence holds the transaction of truth,
the sound of the setting aside of ctions, or rather seeing through them. Full
of patient even painful silence is the moment when unmasking coincides
with seeing the truth of the dream. Dante writes: ‘It happened that almost
in the middle of my sleep I seemed to see sitting alongside in my room a
young man dressed in the whitest garments; and with the aspect of one
deep in thought he gazed at me where I lay; and when he had looked at
me awhile, he seemed to call me, sighing, and spoke these words: Fili mi,
tempus est ut pretermictantur simulacra nostra [My son, it is time to do
away with our simulacra]. I then seemed to recognize him, for he called me
as in my dreams he had o en called me before; and as I watched him, he
seemed to me to be weeping piteously and seemed to await some word
from me’.9 So in Leopardi’s poem there is symmetry between imaginatively
seeing in anchoritic repose all that is screened from view by the local
boundary and perceiving the in nite in the gment of its image at the
cordial threshold of fear, where external expanses are expanded beyond
perception by the enclosure which bounds their seeing to the imagination.
A Spell similarly casts our gaze into vistaless vistas, but in an ambivalent,
inversive manner such that what is felt beyond the horizon – a horizon that
itself o en feels too local and close – is less the vertiginous outside of
cosmic nature as the shoreless planetary sprawl of the anthropocene. e
horizons of this lm are not dear in the Romantic sense of the proximate
sublime; the line of their arbitrariness is not shot through with the In nite,
but permeated by wayward temporariness, by the inauthenticities of
contemporary human dwelling. Here, horizon attracts more in its
claustrophobic aspect, by being a boundary within which one cannot stay
and across which one must stray because remaining only generates more
noise. ‘ e present state of the world’, wrote Kierkegaard, ‘and the whole of
life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should
reply: Create silence! Bring men to silence’.10 is is the protagonist’s path.
What is art if it does not silence? If it does not unveil the unmoving
threshold where what it refers to is actually there, opening the eye in which
nature is imagination itself?11

W B M
Cinema occurs in silence. Silence is the moving place of cinema’s screen, its
immanent beyond. Observe how entering lm is a question of facing
silence vis-à-vis movement, of being able to be silent insofar as it moves or
not being able to be silent as it does not. Correlatively, silences of cinema
are awkward and/or sublime, aesthetically spelling a movie’s death and
reduction to mere lm and/or resurrecting its animation to life and the
waking of consciousness to its own cinematic structure – those magic
moments in Plato’s cave where the self-forgetful souls secretly recognize, by
means of the total projection itself, their own enchaining enchantment and
in that silent unshared ash of common mystical insight escape everything
without going anywhere. Cinema’s in nite and absolutely literal truth, the
truth that suspends it over the depth of its own silence, is that one is in
cinema. As Meher Baba said to some Bollywood celebrities in 1958, ‘For
better or for worse, the world of motion pictures has grown extensively
within the larger world of so-called realities. But the lm world is not
foreign to the “real” world – the two are a liated so intimately that they
can be seen essentially to be made of the same fabric’.12 Whatever is given
and received in cinema happens upon this supremely actual and invisible
screen, woven from the imaginal ‘stu of dreams’, the universal medium or
barzakh of experience through which anything is seen. ‘For when you
perceive it and are intelligent’, writes Ibn Arabi, ‘you will know that you
have perceived an ontological thing upon which your eyes have fallen. But
you will know for certain by proofs that there is nothing there in origin and
root. So what is this thing for which you have a rmed an ontological
thingness and from which you have negated that thingness in the state of
your a rming it?’13 It is the space within-around all words and the general
line touching all forms wherethrough the whole world, the entire cosmic
show, is per force a silent movie.14 To see this is to resist and quiet the
anxious excitement of subject-object relation, to rest in desisting from the
correlation, dri ing in the simplicity of a rst, unmoved mover (akinēton
kinoun) or non-cinematic cinema where ‘thought thinks itself because it
shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of
thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that
thought and object of thought are the same’.15 is is the one place where
the quantum law of the mirror, of simultaneous correlative movement,
does not hold: ‘And the object of desire and the object of thought move in
this way; they move without being moved’.16 Here is the cinematic mirror
itself, as Meher Baba continued to explain to the movie people, ‘In the lm
world, the actor has to think, feel and act according to the pattern held
before him – to mirror, though temporarily, the personality of the character
being portrayed by him. is can be said to be true to a considerable extent
of those outside the world of motion pictures who struggle to follow the
conventional pattern of living as they imagine it is expected of them, even if
it cramps their inner individual expression. is is so not only guratively
but literally. While looking in the mirror, people o en see themselves more
through the eyes of others than through their own. e re ected image
evokes in their minds the impression they will make on others and the
expectations which others have of them – and the best that most can do is
to try to look the part they play. us, the mirror literally and guratively
has become such a seemingly indispensable part of modern life that we
might almost name this age a mirror-civilization’.17

Y A N
e conspicuous motif of the mirror in A Spell to Ward O the Darkness
concerns the reality of the imaginal, which lives like silence in the middle,
third domain of yes and no. As Max Picard observes, the image is interface
between silence and language: ‘Images are silent, but they speak in silence.
ey are a silent language […] ey stand on the frontier where silence
and language face each other closer than anywhere else’.18 is subtle stu
of dreams, lling the space between the corporeal and the intellectual,
mystically forms the immanent portal to the superessential Reality which is
neither yes nor no, that is, the superlatively dark divine Truth which
Dionysius says is ‘beyond assertion and denial’19 and which is dramatized in
the answering non-answering and non-answering answering of the God-
Man: ‘‘Have you no answer to make? […] But Jesus was silent’ (Matt.
26:62-3); ‘‘Are you the Son of God, then?’ And he said to them, ‘You say
that I am’’ (Luke 22:70). Correlatively: ‘ is event is so utterly
extraordinary and so much against the experience of reason and against
everything the eye has seen, that man is not able to make response to it in
words. A layer of silence lies between this event and man, and in this
silence man approaches the silence that surrounds God Himself ’.20 e
silence of God as Man is the mirror in which the unseeable divinity of the
human appears, the Narcissus-species of the Man-God. Silence ful lls the
in nite re ective order of things, as per the conclusion of William Blake’s
ere is NO Natural Religion: ‘He who sees the In nite in all things sees
God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. erefore God becomes
as we are, that we may be as he is’.21 is divine silence is the specular place
where the absolute yes and no of God-become-Man – Man’s own
paradoxically perfect appearance as other-than-Man – becomes the
inevitable impossibility of Man becoming God, so that against the religious
blindness of believing in God, which only guarantees not seeing Him, the
will to see God is necessarily de ned by a rmative denial and negative
a rmation (Eckhart’s ‘I pray to God to make me free of God’)22 in keeping
with the yes-and-no structure of the mirror, as explicated by Ibn Arabi:
‘Imagination is neither existent nor non-existent, neither known nor
unknown, neither negated nor a rmed. For example, a person perceives
his form in a mirror. He knows for certain that he has perceived his form in
one respect and he knows for certain that he has not perceived his form in
another respect. […] He cannot deny that he has seen his form, and he
knows that his form is not in the mirror, nor is it between himself and the
mirror. […] Hence he is neither a truth teller nor a liar in his words, “I saw
my form, I did not see my form”’.23 Proportionally, the cephalophore or
head-bearing saint, a gure for the neither-oneself-nor-someone else24
mystical subject who exits the self/world correlation and survives the
absolute specular decapitation of entering Reality’s mirror, represents the
third thing beyond the silence/speech boundary. As David Williams
observes, ‘headlessness […] suggests, above all, silence, the removal of the
body’s locus of speech. us the severed head that speaks compounds the
monstrosity by adding a contradiction to it: the cephalophore represents
speech in silence and silence in speech’.25
Such are the essential terms in which to understand Lowe’s silence-
breaking scream near the lm’s end, as a deafening silent word emergent
from the severed head – corpse paint being an imaginal deadening of the
face which restores head itself to the status of spirit mask. Having passed
away into the self-dissolving ame of the silent universal mirror, the entity
mystically remerges through unheard-of sound, only to be given back to
himself by the mirror in the post-performance scene of auto-unmasking.
is last act, placed before the nal walking o into the dark night whose
city-lit waters inversely re ect the beginning, is the penultimate summit of
the lm’s process, its summit as penultimacy or non-arriving arrival as per
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s de nition: ‘Transcendental black metal sacralizes
the penultimate moment […] because it has been found that there is
nothing a er the penultimate moment. e penultimate moment is the nal
moment. e fabric of existence is open. ere is nothing that is complete;
there is nothing that is pure’.26 Yet penultimacy, the almost ultimate, by its
own logic, is not something that properly can be sacralized or set apart as
transcendant and inviolable – which is clearly part of the idea. For if there
is nothing complete, nothing pure, nothing absolutely perfect, no real
summit, the penultimate is itself nothing but an optimal next, another false
summit that, saved from having to be true, serves as the true one for the
moment. Yet the next is precisely the hallucinatory or phantasmatic
medium of a rmation’s reduction to hype, excitement, anticipation and
thus humanity’s most perversely precious term of endless delusion and
instantly pre-emptive self-destruction: ‘Anything you look forward to will
destroy you, as it already has’ (Vernon Howard). erefore, the
transcendental a rmation of the penultimate, being in danger of sliding
into that strange inverse apostasy of the faithlessly faithful, of the seeker
who calls perilous lostness adventure and loves searching above nding,
stands in need of corrective comparison to the traditional understanding of
the complete and pure as spiritually discoverable without closure, indeed,
as found in an openness that is only disclosed by nding that there is in fact
an ultimate. As Eriugena says, ‘since that which human nature seeks and
toward which it tends, whether it moves in the right or the wrong
direction, is in nite and not to be comprehended by any creature, it
necessarily follows that its quest is unending and that therefore it moves
forever. And yet although its search is unending, by some miraculous
means it nds what it is seeking for: and again it does not nd it, for it
cannot be found’.27 And Augustine, ‘Seek his face always [Psalm 104.4], let
not the nding of the beloved put an end to the love-inspired search; but as
love grows, so let the search for the one already found become more
intense’.28 In other words, transcendent penultimacy is found all the more
so in the fact that it has NOT been found that there is nothing a er the
penultimate moment. e dark silent ending of A Spell con rms this, as I
see it.

S M
e rst mirror in A Spell is the dark mirroring lake of the opening shot
(and its continuing permutations) which, in panning horizontal accord with
the spontaneously emergent song, visually mimics a sound wave being
played. ‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God
was moving over the face of the waters’ (Genesis 1:12). Such is the headless
cinematic gaze of what is creating universe by projectively seeing it into
being and being it into seeing. Whose eye is this? Meister Eckhart says, ‘ e
eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye
and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love’.29 Can
your gaze encompass the monstrous circle of the Abyss whose depth forever
gazes more deeply into you, the terrible circuit of eternal honesty? Of
Meher Baba’s silence, Charles Purdom wrote, ‘Is it not terrifying that Baba
should have maintained silence all these nearly forty years? For silence is
the abyss, or the very edge of the abyss. In the ordinary way in silence we
come dangerously near the gap of meaninglessness, in which nothing has a
name or a rightful place. To me it is astonishing that a man should look into
the darkness so long, and should live’.30 From within the specular faciality
of the rst scene, sound comes like a spontaneous echo of abyssic silence
and thus a dissonance which births a third thing, something unheard of.
 e monstrous birth is music, Schopenhauer’s ‘true and complete image of
the essence of the world, which continues to roll on and maintain itself in
the vast confusion of innumerable forms and through constant
destruction’.31 e musical is the form-relation between silence and sound
whose becoming immediately becomes more than itself, the emergent
excessive third whereby world is maintained whether you will or no at once
beyond and in the duality of a rmation and negation via the temporal
procession of creation (yes), preservation (yes and no), and destruction
(no). Whence the lmmaker’s inaugural insertion of the ame-triangle
frame image within re’s appearance from its own sound – an alchemical
symbol of its own substance that thus allegorizes cinema itself as the world-
frame.

A Spell to Ward O the Darkness. 32

Repeating the rst opening of the world or world-as-opening, the image

re-occurs at each phase-transition in the lm, three times in total before
vanishing without vanishing in the nal black silence which holds it all
along. e virtual non-appearance of the image in the nal transition
signals the ultimate acosmic not yes nor no – both Mahapralaya, ‘the nal
annihilation of the world, when the world becomes what it was in the
beginning, namely nothing’,33 and the unveiling of a fourth world beyond
the triplex domain of this one, which is composed of the nested intersection
of gross, subtle, and mental spheres, or in Meillassoux’s terms, matter, life,
and thought.34 Yet so much about the lm – the apotropaic title, its
iconization of the temporal-processual triangle, its respectable atmosphere
and elision of brutality (Stone’s Severed Ways [2007] and Herzog’s Happy
People [2010] are appropriate ctional and documentary counterpoints) –
seems to betray a spiritual delity to the preservational, a desire to hold on
to and perpetuate the possibilities of this-worldly life, the circular human
chains of horizontal being, and thus some kind of delay of or indi erence
towards what stands outside the temporal count of things. is is
con rmed by the parallel statements in the published synopses, which
de ne the lm as ‘a direct inquiry into what it means to lead a spiritual
existence in an increasingly secular world’ and ‘a radical proposition for the
existence of utopia in the present’ – statements whose obeisance to the
anthropic cultural-historical frame impossibilizes the traditional signi cance
of their privileged terms, which concern the eternal, i.e. that which stands
beyond time and space. at the lm obviously and deliberately fails to
demonstrate within itself this meaning or proposition, that it is darkly and
intentionally symptomatic of itself in this way, means that A Spell is more
truly a statement on silence as the darkness to ward o all spells, i.e. that its
truth is expressed insofar as it strongly quiets itself against human delusion,
especially, the primal ideology of separate and nite identity which is
rooted in identi cation with time and language, the nexus of the word
spell.35
Neither inquiry nor proposition, the lm is more properly a spelling of
silence. Silence is the mirror A Spell provides for simultaneously seeing
through its own mask and yours, for glimpsing the cinema that holds them
both in place. is is why all of the movie’s three literal mirror scenes, one
for each phase, are involved with face paint, with the non-masking mask
and alter-self one projects into the world without fooling anyone but
oneself, the see-through spell of identity or person (from per-sonare, what
is sounded through a mask in the theater). Where the rst mask, a fantasy
of being someone, is the mask applied to the child by society, the second, a
counter-mask of being no one, is the self-applied ction whose negativity
releases one into the third, cephalophoric stage of being neither someone
nor no one. e authenticity of A Spell is that it masks itself in silence, in an
image truer than itself, and thus casts the truth that is found only, and only
found, in no longer being oneself, in never again being you.

AT S
e three-part dialectical progression of A Spell (commune à solitude à
black metal scene) unveils the question of silence as an intensive, darkening
invalidation of discursive human identity, an increasingly powerful warding
o of its terrible psychic spell. In the rst stage, silence is a presence
hovering within and without human conversation, disclosing its essentially
hallucinatory, centrifugal, and hypocritical structure. Everything that is said
within this phase, however meaningful or senseless, is absorbed and
cancelled by the parallel silence of camera and protagonist. Here silence is
something erasing human identity from within human nature itself. In the
second stage, silence is what haunts human self-presence and aloneness in
the minute and expansive forms of the external world. All of the natural
and cultural objects of human attention appear submerged in silence,
existing within their own kind of visible yet inaccessible stasis, so that the
movements of the protagonist communicate arbitrariness and absence of
purpose beyond whatever is necessary to maintain stillness. Here, silence is
a planetary-cosmic presence cancelling the human centripetally from
without. In the third stage, silence is what secretly unnames the human
inside the negativity of its own desperate self-representation, in the shared
a-community of musical non-belonging. is is a deeper and higher vertical
silence, a positive world-silencing silence heard in music’s negativity as a
force driving logos into itself, into the unlying inner word – pure yes/no –
described by Augustine as follows: ‘this word cannot be uttered in sound
nor thought in the likeness of sound, such as might be done with the word
of any language; it precedes all the signs by which it is signi ed, and is
begotten by the knowledge which remains in the mind when this same
knowledge is spoken inwardly, just as it is’.36 Here, silence is a third
presence cancelling the human identity from beyond internal and external
nature, at points of impossible unity between center and periphery. Simply:
the silence directly seen within the re ective human face, in some more
than others.

S M V
‘If we see things black, it is because we weigh them in the dark, because
thoughts are generally the fruit of sleeplessness, consequently of darkness.
ey cannot adapt to life because they have not been thought with a view
to life. e notion of the consequences they might involve doesn’t even
occur to the mind. We are beyond all human calculation, beyond any
notion of salvation or perdition, of being or non-being, we are in a
particular silence, a superior modality of the void’.37 Such is the thought of
black metal, the thought which black metal is. What, then, is the formal
relation of black metal to silence? I will conclude with the sketch of a
theory.
First, let us distinguish between the active and passive ways in which
black metal gurally invokes silence. e passive form of black metal silence
is that which belongs to the astral depths, inhuman cosmic domains. It is
the oppressive and misanthropic silence that falls upon man from the vast
alterity of nature, silence which speaks the nightmare of being. is is the
silence out of which black metal rants and moans like a derelict suicidal
ghost. Example: Striborg, ‘Beyond the Shadow of Silence’, Nefaria / A Tragic
Journey Towards the Light (Displeased Records, 2006). is passive form of
black metal silence is the modern shadow and inversion of the traditional
cosmos as silently speaking the divine glory: ‘ e heavens are telling the
glory of God; and the rmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day
pours forth speech, and night declares knowledge. ere is no speech, nor
are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all
the earth, and their words to the end of the world’ (Psalms 19:1-4). e
active form of black metal silence is that which pertains to apocalypse and
the anti-human earth. It is the peaceful and deathly silence that lls the
world when all enemies, or life itself, is nally destroyed, silence which
sings in the absence of all hearing. is is the silence towards which black
metal shouts and screams like a satano-fascist warrior. Example: ‘Silence fell
| Upon the earth | All gods were dead | We killed them rst […] A silence
planet | All life erased’ (Gehenna, ‘Silence the Earth’, WW [Moonfog
Productions, 2005]). e active form of Black Metal silence is the shadow
of that towards which divine wrath is ordered: ‘ eir way has become
painful to me, | By day I cannot rest, by night I cannot sleep; | I will destroy
(them) and put an end to their way, | at silence be established, and then
let us sleep!’38 Black Metal circulates between these two ideas of silence,
one freezing and the other burning, turning them within one sonic image.
 Music e ects silence by sounding the materiality of thought. It manifests
silence by means of the suspension of thought’s structural mechanicity,
exposing the space between one thought and the next whose continuity is
time. Expanding and contracting time, silence is absorbed and released in
mutations of thought’s materiality that bring into presence its immanent
beyond. Accordingly, silence is produced in six ways which correspond to
the six types of transformation or phase changes among the three states of
matter (gas, liquid, solid). Silence is analogous to the inverse of the
presence of heat in these phase changes. It is what is absorbed and released
by them as thought, binding its time to sound, allowing itself to change
shape. Silence is released in the melting, evaporation, and sublimation of
thought. Silence is absorbed in the condensation, freezing, and deposition
of thought. Melting silence: music produces this silence by loosening
thought-space, untying the noetic joint, so ening the gap between thought
and thought. Here silence emerges from the smooth ows of thought.
Evaporative silence: music produces this silence by dilating thought-space,
stretching open the noetic joint, loosening the gap between thought and
thought. Here silence emerges in airy cloud forms of suspended thought.
Sublimative silence: music produces this silence by exploding thought-
space, blasting the noetic joint, momentarily destroying the gap between
thought and thought. Here silence emerges as the instant ight of
individual shards of thought. Condensing silence: music produces this
silence by closing thought-space, shrinking the noetic joint, touching
thought to thought. Here silence emerges as the gravitational falling of
thoughts. Freezing silence: music produces this silence by bonding thought-
space, xing the noetic joint, fastening the gap between thought and
thought. Here silence emerges as the immobility of thoughts. Depositive
silence: music produces this silence by imploding thought-space, collapsing
the noetic joint, instantly growing the gap between thought and thought.
Here silence emerges in form of the crystalline lm of thought.
e three domains of these six phase changes correlate with the three
principal forms of black metal (profane, melancholic, occult)39 as follows:
 As the three states of matter (gas, liquid, solid) also re ect the three
universal worlds (mental, subtle, gross), the six forms of silence correspond
to the six products of thought, feeling, and sound: feeling of thought,
sound of feeling, feeling of sound, thought of feeling, sound of thought,
thought of sound. Accordingly, in order to bring this beginning of a theory
to a proper end, the reader is asked to contemplate in turn the forms of
relation between the six modes of musical silence and the three generic
forms of black metal as they intersect in both ascending (active) and
descending (passive) directions. When the triangle of black metal silence is
comprehended cinematically, that is, as moving through itself in both
directions at once, the plasma portal to the fourth world of unheard-of
Silence will open.

1 is essay was written in response to the lm A Spell to Ward O the Darkness, directed by Ben
Rivers and Ben Russell (Rouge International, 2013). As the title suggests, my intention is to invert
the sense of the lm around its own axis of silence.
2 Lord Meher, p. 1663 <http://www.lordmeher.org/>. Cf. ‘Baba would o en say he wished to go to the
movies to contact the spectators internally. Immediately a er his work was over, he would get up
and leave. ose who accompanied him had o en become engrossed in the lm’s story but had no
choice other than to leave with him’ (Ibid., p. 1570).
3 Lord Meher, p. 1648.
4 New York Times, 24 April 1932: XX7.
5 Lord Meher, p. 1648.
6 Meher Baba’s Early Messages to the West: e 1932–1935 Western Tours (North Myrtle Beach, SC:
Sheriar Foundation, 2009), p. 167.
7 Lord Meher, p. 1654. Asked about the possibility of any kind of fortuitous connection between this
statement and Spinoza, Daniel Colucciello Barber replied, ‘ at makes sense – in Spinoza’s terms,
human ctions create causal purposes and in doing so make things contingent upon the ction.
Human ctions thus preclude seeing things as they really are, and so I take silence as meaning a
refusal to speak such ctions’ (email correspondence, 5 March 2014). Keeping silence works to
erase the illusion of agency, as per the passiveness of the construction ‘things […] given and
received’. ere is a giving and a receiving, but where the Real is transacted, who is the giver and
who the receiver? Refusal to speak ctions is likewise an essential and conspicuous element of both
 mystical and black metal discourse. For example, ‘If someone asked Watain about our vision, our
work they shouldn’t expect an answer about guitar models and mixing disks […], unfortunately
that is what most bands of today are able to provide and that is why people have a hard time, once
again, relating to a band that rather talks about the essence of their work in a spiritual sense. […] I
think the more that times passes Watain in itself will be the answer to the questions that people
ask us about religion. In the end Watain itself and the music and the lyrics that we share with our
audience contain more essence and gnosis than any eloquent answer I may give in an interview
concerning these things. Yeah I suppose that is an insight that has come with age, you get older
and wiser and more silent’ (Watain, Opus Diaboli [His Masters Noise/Temple of Watain, 2012],
DVD).
8 Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, trans. by Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010), p.
106.
9 Dante, Vita Nuova, trans. by Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1995), XII. 3–4.
10 Søren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, as quoted in Max Picard, e World of Silence, trans. by
Stanley Godman (South Bend, IN: Gateway, 1952), p. 232.
11 ‘But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself ’ (William Blake, e
Complete Poetry & Prose, ed. by David V. Erdman [New York: Doubleday, 1988], p. 702). ‘ e work
of art does not simply refer to something, because what it refers to is actually there’ (Hans-Georg
Gadamer, e Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. by Nicholas Walker [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986], p. 35).
12 Lord Meher, p. 4350.
13 Meccan Illuminations, 304.16, cited in William C. Chittick, e Su Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-
Arabi’s Metaphysics of the Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 118.
14 On the concept of the ‘general line’, drawn from Galileo’s 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief
World Systems, see Oleg Tcherny, La Linea Generale (2010).
15 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072b, in e Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. by Richard McKeon (New York:
e Modern Library, 2001), p. 880.
16 Ibid., p. 879.
17 Meher Baba quoted in Lord Meher, p. 4350.
18 Picard, e World of Silence, p. 80.
19 Pseudo-Dionysius, e Mystical eology, in e Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid (New
York: Paulist Press), p. 141.
20 Picard, World of Silence, p. 228.
21 Blake, Complete Poetry & Prose, p. 3.
22 Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, trans. by Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad
Publishing, 2009), p. 424.
23 Meccan Illuniations, 304. 16, cited in Chittick, e Su Path of Knowledge, p. 118.
24 ‘Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united by a completely unknowing
inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing’ (Pseudo-Dionysius,
Complete Works, p. 137).
25 David Williams, Deformed Discourse (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), p. 307.
26 Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, ‘Transcendental Black Metal’, in Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal eory
Symposium, ed. by Nicola Masciandaro (New York: n.p., 2010), p. 63.
27 Eriugena, Periphyseon, in Patrologia Latina, CXXII. 919, translation cited from Bernard McGinn,
 e Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century (New York: Crossroad,
1994), p. 118.
28 Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, trans. by Maria Boulding, 6 vols (Hyde Park, NY: New City
Press, 2003), VI. 186.
29 Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, p. 298. ‘ e created world […] is the vision of God – in both
senses of the genitive, for the world is theophany, or self-showing of God, created in and through
God’s seeing of it and of himself in it. And the created human, in its relation to the theophanic
creation, sees itself as seen by the God who creates by seeing’ ( omas A. Carlson, e Indiscrete
Image: In nitude and the Creation of the Human [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008], p. 94).
30 C. B. Purdom, e God-Man (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 413.
31 Arthur Schopenhauer, e World As Will and Presentation, trans. by David Carus and Richard E.
Aquila, 2 vols (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011), II, p. 507.
32 Reproduced with kind permission of the directors. As Ben Russell explains, the image
appropriately emerged as an element of the lm process: ‘ ere was already a lot of re in A Spell,
so in the end we decided not to burn the lm as well [laughs]. However, the material, the
materiality of the lm is present in A Spell: the triangles you see at the beginning of each section
are hole punches, holes made in the actual lmstrip […] at is the zero point for the lm counter
and it provides a spot to synch up your time-code when you conform the negative. Most of the
labs use a circular spot to mark the zero point, but the Belgian lab we were using for A Spell had
triangular hole punches’ (Michael Guarneri, ‘Ben Russell, 2014: Maybe I Will Talk in My Language
and I Will Complete Everything’ <http://www.debordements.fr/spip.php?article237>).
33 Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th ed., 3 vols (San Francisco: Su sm Reoriented, 1973), I, p. 45-6.
34 Quentin Meillassoux, ‘ e Immanence of the World Beyond’ in e Grandeur of Reason: Religion,
Tradition, and Universalism, ed. by Conor Cunningham and Peter Candler (London: SCM Press,
2010), pp. 444–78.
35 ‘Identity is the primal form [Urform] of ideology’ ( eodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by
E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 2005], p. 148).
36 Augustine, On the Trinity, ed. by Gareth B. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), XV. 20.
37 E. M. Cioran, e Trouble With Being Born, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Seaver Books,
1973), p. 116.
38 Alexander Heidel, e Babylonian Genesis: A Complete Translation of All the Published Cuneiform
Tablets of the Various Babylonian Creation Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p.
19.
39 See Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya’, in Hideous Gnosis, p. 90, n. 41.
 E C

LES LÉGIONS NOIRES:

LABOR, LANGUAGE, LAUGHTER
For Nicola, Valter, and Vordb,

[…] in true knowledge, in which the identity of being the truth’s knower
is renounced before the truth itself, […] in which previous forms of
realization and thought are both surpassed and preserved (au ebung).1

Labour
In the manner in which poetic justice is so o en meted, the gargantuan
task of providing a reading of the formation, recordings and legacy of Les
Légions Noires – France’s nebulous answer to Norway’s Inner Circle and
Russia’s e Blazebirth Hall – has fallen to this author through the equally
inscrutable oeuvre of Nicola Masciandaro, the man who inaugurated the
genre of black metal theory.2 A specialist in medieval literature, whose
work falls between philosophy, mysticism, and criticism, Masciandaro is
said to have ‘given the Middle Ages back to metal’,3 through the essentially
phenomenological methods of medieval commentary. From what is widely
regarded as black metal theory’s inaugural text, ‘What Is is at Stands
Before Me?: Metal as Deixis’,4 to ‘Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya’,5 and
more recent works such as ‘Floating Tomb: On Inquisition’,6 whether in
gloss or catenic form, Masciandaro’s consistent limning and wielding of
medieval commentary’s phenomenological methods betrays an abiding
concern with what Agamben terms the ‘scission of the word’ in
contemporary critical discourse:

e scission in question is that between poetry and philosophy, between

the poetic word and the word of thought […] the scission of the word is
 construed to mean that poetry possess its object without knowing it while
philosophy knows its object without possessing it. [In much contemporary
critical discourse] the word is thus divided between a word that is
unaware, as if fallen from the sky, and enjoys the object of knowledge by
representing it in beautiful form, and a word that has all seriousness and
consciousness for itself but does not enjoy its object because it does not
know how to represent it.7

Twisted around the essentially relational principle of medieval exegesis,

according to which text interpretation is understood ‘not through objective
context alone [the modern propensity for “high-altitude thinking”]8 but
through understanding derived from the text’s as well as the subject’s own
subjective context’,9 black metal theory emerges in opposition to this
scission a chthonic art form, wherein black metal is not some abstract plain
we contemplate, but the very soil we cleave to, as per Heidegger’s being-in-
the-world.10 Born out of an intellectual commitment to commentary
causally related to Masciandaro’s own love of metal,11 in an instance of
what I would term heavy metal’s wyrd realism, its ‘art of making reality, of
knowing reality, and knowing how to make reality’12 through its ‘aesthetics
of inevitability’,13 black metal theory materializes phenomenological
consciousness, reversing the formula according to which ‘the fan is an
unconscious and sleeping philosopher and the philosopher a mere fan’ of
the music.14 ‘No one listens to music’, as Masciandaro suggests, ‘[i]t is an
object that infects and possesses the subject’.15 In methodologically
actualizing this humanistic subject-object relation,16 Masciandaro redeemed
black metal from the impoverishment of instrumentalization: the sonically
inimical ‘suspension of the in nite immanence of the present’ entailed in
criticism as ‘a distinctly modern way of knowing’ that, in neither
representing nor knowing but knowing the representation, sets ‘the spheres
of knowledge and pleasure apart’.17 So he quotes Nietzsche in ‘Metal as
Deixis’: ‘“For me – how could there be anything outside me? ere is no
outside! But we forget this with all sounds; how lovely it is that we forget!”
And the animals reply: “In every Instant being begins; round every Here
rolls the ball. ere. e middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of
eternity”’.18 And Agamben again: ‘the root of all pure joy and sadness is that
the world is as it is’.19
Consciously breaking the back of criticism, by displaying an assertive,
decisional generosity concomitant with that of commentary, ‘whose
etymology (via comminisci, to devise, invent), indicates the creativity of
thinking with something’,20 and in the name of a ‘generative logos wherein
philosophy and poetry would fuse in a saying of knowing the representation
so full as to produce the subject in the object’,21 black metal theory is
imbued with ‘the logic of the third, of the between, of the both and/or
neither’, above all in Masciandaro’s ongoing dialogue with Agamben, and
the phantasmal topology traced in Stanzas, what he calls ‘a khoral third
place “more original than space”’ that provides ‘the where of poetico-
philosophic realization’.22 e real phenomenal ‘where’ of this place is an
essential negativity located in language and inverted through voice qua
infancy (from the Latin in, ‘not’, and fans, present participle of fari,
meaning ‘to speak’) in the mode of Agamben’s in in-fari or not not-
speaking and the negation of negation in the vacillation between actuality
and potentiality which Masciandaro mapped onto the rubric of black metal
theory.23 It is here, in this third term, area, or zone, nominally known as
topos outopos (placeless place, or no-place place), whose inexorable
phenomenal equivalence with Paul’s third heaven (1 Cor. 12.2)
Masciandaro insists upon,24 that we were told, in Stanzas, ‘a science of man
freed of every eighteenth century prejudice should focus its study’.25
Conceived as just such a ‘science without object’,26 a discipline whose
methods, ordered towards its own un nishable end, are the only (proper)
fruition of its practice, and the very mode of its arrival – a stillborn science,
then, a ‘simultaneously nascent and dying “metallectual” movement’27 –
that, inverting ‘the problem of the alienation of language from its own
event, of the word from its factical being’,28 ‘face[s] the unknown with a
lucid and passionate gaze’,29 black metal theory points the way of a
conscious criticism which, ‘turned, like a Petrine cross upside-down’,30
perversely betrays its emergence from, and alignment with, a broader
project of humanism, namely, ‘an apophatic humanism, a humanism of
unknowing, one grounded in the passion of the question as the substance
of human being’.31
Masciandaro’s entire oeuvre puts in motion this experience of unknowing,
all the while oscillating between a kind of absurdly naive yet noble quest
for neotony, like a child ‘who so adheres to its lack of specialization and
totipotency that it refuses any destiny and speci c environment so as to
solely follow its own indeterminacy and immaturity’.32 What is at stake here
epistemically – and in no small way related to what is at stake ontologically
– is a pronounced instability, one that inheres in infancy: ‘As the
speci cally human vocation, infancy is, in this sense, the preeminent setting
of the possible and the potential’.33 What characterizes black metal theory
by extension, is precisely that ‘it is its own potentiality (potenza), it lives its
own possibility (possibilitas)’,34 a kind of ‘collective self-making’35 that
manifests formally in the mappable phenomenal a ects of medieval
commentarial method:

Reading it, you are conspicuously on your own, hermeneutically alone to

a degree that is conventionally foreclosed by the controlled/controlling
voice of academic writing, an expert voice that ful lls its role by saying
what it means and specifying what it says. Here, instead, you steer your
way somewhere in a sea of meanings towards the remote possibility of a
knowledge that might order your understanding of them.36

is epistemic instability or non-determined determinacy, which re ects

the fundamental restlessness that constitutes our being-in-the-world,37 is
considered generative and productive, and especially edifying with regard
to the practice of critical discourse and the question of its becoming.38
Su used with the paradisal potency of the third heaven ‘into which Paul is
unknowingly ravished (raptus, harpazzo)’, black metal theory permeates a
third area of individuated being where the self-other identi cation
sustained via-à-vis the academic voice qua institution is e aced and
trans gured into a being-with-black metal.39 is being bound so
authentically together rapturously frees the reader in her freedom for
herself, a freedom which, in keeping with Masciandaro’s analysis of
Augustine’s discourse on unknown signs, ‘instantaneously and continuously
draws forth our will to know, our what is this?’40
at this was fated (also from Latin fari, via fatum, ‘that which has been
spoken’) in the rst line of heavy metal’s originary song41 is wyrdly related
to black metal theory’s emergence as a genuinely philosophical elaboration
of the phenomenology of deixis, and a fortiori of a deictic art that restored
the negativity of the question to the negativity of the subject in this vital
rst line, that is, ‘the mystery, nitude, and acontextuality of their being –
to its rst and nal ground’.42 Accordingly, like the medieval commentarial
method that bore it, black metal theory is either conceivable as a ‘pre-
critical stillbirth’, a stillborn science, then, as above, or as a ‘post-critical
evolution’, ‘a being together of meaning so productive that it may be
entrusted as knowledge, so alive that, no longer needing [an] animating
voice […] it can speak its truth in the reader’s own’.43
So the ‘poetic-philosophic power’ of black metal theory resides in the fact
that, as actually practiced, it is never merely meaningless nor ‘a sure means
to knowledge’.44 In this it holds open for us the essential possibility of a
truer inverted criticism, ‘whose movement towards knowledge and joy
resides in the conscious experience of the two forms of ignorance proper to
poetry and philosophy (not knowing the object and not knowing how to
represent it) and in the never- nished nding of their intersection in
unknowing’.45 Black metal theory, ‘[n]amely: a discipline that both
represents and knows by unknowing the representation’.46

Language
 At minimum, as Masciandaro avers in following Jean-Luc Marion, this
‘unknowing is […] the sine qua non of any ethical humanism, the privilege
of the human as precisely what preserves the human from itself, what
impossibilizes its rei cation and ideological reduction to an ism’.47 What we
are dealing with here is the alienation of a thing by the concept that
precedes and reconstitutes it into an object. ‘In naming a thing’, writes
Marion, ‘man substitutes for its immediate being and its qualities of
representation “a name, a sound made by [his] voice, something entirely
di erent from what [the thing] is in intuition”’.48 No one understood this
process of alienation better than Hegel. Indeed, Kojeve would go so far as
to say that for Hegel in naming a thing we are killing it, that for Hegel ‘all
conceptual understanding (Begriefen) is equivalent to a murder’.49 ough
we are at a task to nd a statement nearly as sensational in Hegel’s own
writing, in chapter VII of the Phenomenology he does refer to the ‘lifeless
abstraction [of ] the things of perception’,50 and in an alternate translation,
speaks of the ‘deadness of abstraction’ inherited by ‘the things of
perception’.51 e object loses its being in order to receive it from the I: ‘the
object is not what it is’, writes Hegel, ‘the thing is not what it is’. 52
What makes black metal a ‘truly fucking awesome [art]’ in this instance, is
that it ‘ ght[s] against and break[s] this condition of impasse through the
wholehearted acceptance of it’. Black metal ‘enact[s] a deep frustration with
language and representation via excess language and representation’.53
Incipit Masciandaro’s ‘Sublime Celestia’,

‘Rimbaud’s programmatic explanation “I is an other” (Je est un autre)

must be taken literally: the redemption of objects is impossible except by
virtue of becoming an object. As the work of art must destroy itself to
become an absolute commodity, so the [black metal] artist must become a
living corpse’ (Agamben).54

As inside-out image of absence, the import of corpse paint at the level of

language, is that it functions like deixis. Giving expression to the supreme
metaphysical problem – that of being – for the ocularly obsessed
metalhead, the cadaverous countenance screams: ‘the signi cance of is is,
in reality, a Not-this that it contains; that is, an essential negativity’.55 is
essential negativity, this ‘ is’,56 ‘this such a lot the gods gave to me – to
me’,57 is recapitulated sonically in metallic instrumental and vocal deixis in
the aesthetic production of noise oriented toward an aural experience of
the unknown: ‘sound as the sign of an unknown event […] and sound as
the sign of an unknown meaning’.58
In his seminal work of black metal theory, Masciandaro explains how this
unknowing manifests formally in vocal metallic deixis through an inversion
of the normal experiential relation between voice and language, ‘whereby
voice disappears via articulation into language, and thus stands behind the
word informing it’.59 Accordingly, in being oriented toward an aural
experience of the word detached from meaning, vocal metallic deixis
signals ‘the return of the voice in vengeance against the event of language
as what negates it and thus a repossession or being possessed by the voice
as ontic exponent’.60 While this typically corresponds to what Masciandaro
elsewhere calls ‘those moments’, in interviews, where the black metal artist,
‘asked to articulate the deeper meaning […] behind their music and its
philosophical/esoteric references, retreats/advances into tautological
reductiveness (its just fucking metal) or some absolute emotion or stance (I
hate everything, I just do what I like)’,61 for one dark autarkic Entity,
namely, Vordb, the leader of that shadowy group of mid-1990s bands
known as Les Légions Noires (LLN), vocal metallic deixis corresponds to
the invention and articulation of an unknown language, Gloatre.
A proli c producer, most likely the founding member of up to nineteen
known permutations of LLN (Brenoritvrezorkre, Bor.E – previously Black
Murder, Dvnaèbkre, Glorhme, Hdroelvbe, Moévöt, Noervbtraurvne, Uatrb
Vélèpre, Varkruèrme, Vénambre, Vèrhzlévaryyavge, Vor.Ulkre,
Vzakprevémèkr,62 Norzvgorobtre, Vagézaryavtre,63 Bélkètre, Urdbyakre,
Vzaéurvbtre64), and certainly no stranger to philosophical concepts and
academic intellectualism, Vordb’s (Vordb Báthor Ecsed: 1991-1994; Vordb
Dréagvor Uèzréèvb: 1994-2012; Vordb Na R.iidr: 2012-?) entire oeuvre
could be construed as an absurd e ort to answer to the task Western
metaphysics sets us. at is to say, in conceiving Gloatre, Vordb can be seen
to follow the call of contemporary philosophy in proposing the necessity of
a new experience of language, in which what is at stake is the very event of
language itself, language’s pleasurable taking place prior to sense and
meaning, encapsulated for Agamben in the experience of infancy, and for
Masciandaro in vocal metallic deixis: ‘[metal’s] noisy semiotic struggle to
make itself what it points to’.65 Both of these positions are interrelated,
intersecting at the site that makes speech possible and sequestrable
simultaneously, and both are productively opposed to, in pointing beyond,
the fatal split between poetry and philosophy, and its corollary, an essential
negativity accorded to language – and by extension, to voice, as the very
ethos or ethical dwelling place of humanity – by the Western metaphysical
tradition.66

Vaszagraèbe Éakr Uatrè Brenoritvrezorkre

Vèrmyaprèb
Nèvgzèrya
Uatr Borvuatre Zuèrkl Szaèmdre
Èrvœlbtre
Morvbtre Urvdrèm Zlaèvatanvèrhzlévaryavge67
Éèpr Govérèrv
Favoapr Uatr Zu èvbre Oatrb Bouarvtre Blèhrurb
Tsaévarya Zurgtapre
Hkrèbre
Maèvdréu
Bor.arp!68

Eminently expressive, but cipheric in form like all invented languages,

having the ‘pulsational, repetitive, and incantatory characteristic of infantile
babble,’69 Gloatre, despite an uno cial glossary, is ostensibly resistant to the
‘co-intimate impulses to collect, order and comment upon lyrics’ inherent to
black metal theory (as an extension of the lyric tradition Masciandaro
traces from ‘the troubadour anthologies of the thirteenth century […] to
Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of album commentaries’).70 And yet, the surfeit
of impossibly named artists, albums, and song titles constituting Gloatre’s
lexical totality71 has already been the focus of a commentary by a now
elusive black metal theorist known only pseudonymously as Valter. In a
2009 piece entitled ‘Black Metal Sound Poetry’, the latter established a
genealogy linking LLN’s lyrics backwardly through the Dadaists, the
Russian and Italian Futurists, Quirinis Kuhlmann, Molière, Pètrus Borel,
Lewis Caroll, Christian Morgenstern, and Paul Scheerbert, to the
Renaissance works of Rabelais, and from there to the medieval coq à l’âne
explored by literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin:

One of the popular forms of comic speech was the so-called coq à l’âne,
‘from rooster to ass’. is is a genre of intentionally absurd verbal
combinations, a form of completely liberated speech that ignores all
norms, even those of elementary logic. e forms of verbal absurdities
were widespread during the Middle Ages […]. In a period of the radical
breaking-up of the world’s hierarchical picture and the building of a new
concept, leading to a revision of all old words, objects, and ideas, the coq
à l’âne acquired an essential meaning: it was a form which granted
momentary liberation from all logical links – a form of free recreation. It
was, so to speak, the carnivalization of speech, which freed it from the
gloomy seriousness of o cial philosophy as well as from truisms and
commonplace ideas.72

Drawing on Bakhtin’s re ections on language in Rabelais and His World,

Valter begins his commentary on LLN’s lyricism by reasserting black metal’s
status as a carnival genre: ‘a genre of destruction and uncrowning
[wherein] [t]he good is dethroned in favor of its opposite – both in a moral
ideological sense (evil), and in an aesthetic sense (bad, in the sense of
ugly)’.73 Supplementing his contention in On Ugliness, the medieval scholar,
semiotician, and philosopher, Umberto Eco, notes of how,

at carnival time the main element was the grotesque representation of

the human body (hence the masks), the parodies of sacred things and
complete license in language, blasphemy included. e triumph of all that
during the rest of the year was considered ugly or forbidden, these
festivities nonetheless were an interlude granted and tolerated only on
speci c occasions. For the rest of the year there were the o cial religious
holidays. On these occasions the traditional order and respect for
hierarchy were recon rmed, while during carnival the traditional order
and hierarchy was allowed to be overturned […] and the clownish and
‘shameful’ traits of popular life emerged. e people took gleeful revenge
on the feudal and ecclesiastical powers and, through parodies of devils
and the underworld, they tried to react against the fear of death and the
a erlife, and against the terror of plagues and catastrophes that would
dominate the rest of the year […] and so one might say, paradoxically,
that seriousness and gloominess were the prerogative of those who
practiced a healthy optimism (we have to su er but then eternal glory will
be ours), while laughter was the medicine of those who pessimistically
lived a wretched and dismal life.74

On Valter’s reading, the grotesque license in language which characterizes

LLN’s carnivalization of speech, Gloatre’s sacri cing of logopoeia (meaning)
to phonopoeia (sound value), is thus deeply rooted in the thousand year-
old development of the culture of folk humor that prevailed in the Middle
Ages and reached an apogee in the Renaissance, when, as Eco notes,

the ostentation of scurrility was no longer practiced in the ghetto of the

barely tolerated carnival festivals […] [but] was transferred into cultural
literature […] [where it took on] a philosophical function. It was no
longer a matter of an occasional anarchic rebellion, but a genuine cultural
revolution. In a society that had come to advocate the prevalence of the
 human and of the earthly over the divine, obscenity became the proud
assertion of the rights of the body.75

Accordingly, Gloatre’s lexical obscenities can be gloriously76 situated in a

genealogy that, stemming from folk culture’s comic verbal compositions,
nds its greatest expression in the verbal absurdities of comic speech, from
fatrasie to soties, and nally to the coq à l’âne of Rabelais which, as Bakhtin
convincingly argues, ‘not only determined the fate of French literature, and
of the French literary tongue, but in uenced the fate of world literature as
well’.77
e problem with this reading, one that Valter himself acknowledges, is
the emancipatory and optimistic tone that accompanies Rabelaisian coq à
l’âne – at least as it is found in Bakhtin: a tone of revivi cation and renewal
that is pointedly absent from the macabre acoustic sensation produced on
the ear by Gloatre’s guttural combination of vowels and consonants.
Indeed, as one of only two buccal presences in LLN’s ‘rawer than raw’78
black metal, Gloatre’s sonorous quality is more evocative of the ‘bare
negation’ Bakhtin deemed ‘completely alien to folk culture’.79 is is actual
necro-corpse sound, punctuated by a point of no-return, of non-renewal, a
kind of Ur-ennui encapsulated in Brenoritvrezorkre’s ‘Eamkl
Uatrebervotremdre’ (Vermyaprèb, 1995), in the torturous screams
bellowing from the backside of a creature distantly dying from the inside-
out.80 An ‘inside-out (a l’envers)’ that unsettles the characteristic carnival
logic of the ‘turnabout’: ‘of a continual shi ing from top to bottom, from
front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations,
profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings’.81
And yet, despite LLN’s terrifying tone, and seeming ambivalence to the
verbal slapstick of coq à l’âne, there remains something deeply regenerative
in what Rabelais would term the ‘morosophic’ (foolish-wise) logic of
sacri cing meaning to sound value.82 Recapitulated instrumentally, this
manifests formally – as it does with all black metal – in the exceedingly lo-
production value which, in the case of Brenoritvrezorkre, for example,
foregrounds ‘the opacity and materiality of music as a recorded artifact’83 by
deictically pointing to ‘the technical frame, the unheard material pre-
condition of the recording on the level of content’,84 namely, the
microphone that is on this occasion (wrongly rumored to have been) fatally
thrust up a rat’s anal cavity, completing, in its swallowed screams, LLN’s
‘rawer that raw’ buccal dyad. ‘Bucca is not os’, as Jean-Luc Nancy reminds
us, but a more primitive term: ‘Os, oris, mouth of orality is the face itself,
understood as the metonymy of the mouth that it surrounds, bears and
renders visible, the passageway of all sorts of substances, above all the
ethereal substance of discourse. But bucca is pu ed-up cheeks; it is the
movement, the contraction and/or distension of breathing, of eating, of
spitting, or of speaking.’85 It is the ‘unheard material pre-condition’,86 the
‘opening – unstable and mobile – [that] forms at the instant of speaking’,87
at the point or punctum of pronunciation prior to sense and meaning:
Èrvœlbtre, Dzlvarv, Dvnaèbkre, Norzvgorobtre. At this point one discerns
nothing, and the mouth belongs to no one.
In bringing us back to the mouth before the ego (before the I who takes
charge of the utterance, a buccal mouth that does not communicate, but
that is formed by communication, that does not signify, but that is prior to
signi cation), the regenerative aspect of Vordb’s deictic project, though
sympathetic to, would seem to resist any real alignment with Rabelaisian
coq à l’âne, with the classic ‘rooster to ass’ speeches of Kissarse, Bumfondle,
and Pantagruel, which, despite releasing words from the shackles of sense,
still operate at the level of orality, of an I who takes charge of enunciation,
and is thereby situated temporally/spatially. On the contrary, there is no
relationship of person, of ego, to utterance in Gloatre, the focus is on
manner rather than content, punctuated by an emphasis on plainchant in
many of Vordb’s own projects. Cf. Moévöt’s ‘Notre Pere’, and the arresting
sonorous series, ‘Chant d’Eternité’ (Abgzvoryathre, 1993), both of which
evoke the harmonious pre-Lapsarian language of Adam, a kind of ‘paradisal
Ursprache’ lost to man, but still spoken by angels and demons: ‘ e
language Adam spoke was the music that Adam heard, one that was
paradisal – it was the song of the angel choir’.88 Foregrounding the
precedence of manner over content in his exposition of this language,
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the sixteenth-century author of the book Of
Occult Philosophy, would note: ‘So souls going out of the body, so Angels,
so Demons speak: and what man doth with a sensible voice, they do so by
impressing the conception of the speech in those to whom they speak, a er
a better manner than if they should express it with an audible voice’,89 ergo
‘the mute inhuman oratorio’,90 the ‘unspeakable words’ (1 Cor. 12.4) Paul
heard when he was unknowingly rapt up to the third heaven, ‘whether in
the body or out of the body, I do not know’ (1 Cor. 12.2).
In its aural orientation toward this third heaven, toward ‘territories of
noise that could only be reached and described by a soul travelled in
landscapes that were not earthly’,91 Gloatre, and its lexical obscenities (cf.
the ‘shrill cries’ of Vaszagraèbe Éakr Uatrè Brenoritvrezorkre [1995] and the
total improvisation or ‘instinctisation’92 of Moévöt’s Voèkrèb I-III [1994]
which, ‘liberated from the ‘“enslavement” of the “known” word’, and ‘from
any rational musical parameter’, respectively),93 are better situated in a
lineage that, stretching from the Montanists down to the present day,
reached an apogee in the twel h century, in the mystical climate that
produced Hildegard of Bingen’s Ignota Lingua; widely regarded as the
earliest extant example of an invented language. Here, the regenerative
aspect of Vordb’s Adamic project may be construed along the lines of
Hildegard’s own, through the privileging of a concept that allows for a novel
understanding of metal’s ‘greening of black’,94 its viriditas, dually denoting a
naïveté and a vitality: the dark fountain from which black metal theory’s
own commentarial method springs.95
Closely associated with humiditas, ‘moisture’, and sudor, ‘sap’, viriditas,
‘greenness’, or ‘greening power’, is one of the most potent metaphors in
Hildegard’s Ignota Lingua, her Unknown Language,96 which assigns over a
thousand new names to the things of her spiritual, human, and natural
world. In a letter to a contemporary she compares ‘the virginal beauty of
woman to the earth, which exudes the greenness or vitality of the grass’, the
Virgin Mary is, of course, viridissima virga, ‘the greenest branch’, and in a
responsorium of St. Dissabode, she speaks of the ‘Green/ nger of God
[…]’, O viriditas digiti Dei.97 is is restated sonically in the lyrics of her
musical compositions, in the nal chorus of her Ordo virtutem, for
example, which, aurally evocative of LLN’s rst o cial demo, Moévöt’s
Abgzvoryathre (1993) – recorded within weeks of the Circle’s formation,
and comprising a groundbreaking mix of guttural growls and sad falsetto, of
unusually rich plainchant alien to extreme metal – aptly resounds: In
principio omnes creature uiruernant, ‘in the beginning all creation
“greened”’.98
Green in English has, of course, numerous negative connotations
accompanying the notion of naïveté, such as a lack of experience or
sophistication, an artless clumsiness that could extend to Brenoritvrezorkre’s
‘retarded anti-aestheticism’,99 or even to Vordb’s invention of Gloatre which,
no more than Hildegard’s own Unknown Language, has been rendered
laughable, the butt of so many jokes about its unpronounceability – as if
this or that person’s inability to pronounce a word means at all that that
word is unpronounceable: ‘ e thousands of words I cannot pronounce, in
various languages, such as Czech or Chinese’, Vordb pro ers, ‘does not
mean for all that they are unpronounceable, but only that I myself am not
able to pronounce them; it does not mean either that when assembled they
are not valid as a proper language, just because Vordb cannot speak this
language, but only that Vordb did not learn how to speak this language’.100
‘Verzogle’, sounds like vorace (vɔʀas) aigle (εgl), ‘voracious ingenuity’.101
Of course, the greenness of naïveté also evokes the ‘new’, just as green is
imaged in English too. Recall that for Hildegard, in whose mystical visions
the microcosm of human physiology mirrored the macrocosm of God’s
creation, ‘greenness’ is not only ‘the very sap that lls out leaves and
shoots’,102 but as one science- ction writer puts it, ‘it is a peculiar pressure
pushing toward pattern, a tendency in matter to evolve into ever more
complex forms, a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening we call viriditas,
and it is the driving force of the cosmos. Life, you see’.103 To ‘green’
language, accordingly, ‘is to strip it of its withered bark, the overly familiar
associations we normally give to words’.104 is is doubtless what Bakhtin
had in mind when, in asking of the artistic and ideological meaning of
Rabelasian coq à l’âne, he outlined its ability to make the familiar strange,105
to make events ‘green again through a process of defamiliarization’,106
whereby in unknowing we are o ered ‘new opportunities for interpretation
and appreciation’.
In invoking what the Russian Formalists called ostranenie (estrangement),
and what Bakhtin himself would call vnenakhodimost (outsideness), that
which can be conjointly construed as ‘making the familiar strange, or […]
making the things of this world divine again through the alterity of new
signs’,107 the greening involved in inventing a language is aligned with the
architecture of apophasis,108 the de ning phenomenological feature of
which was set forth in Plotinus’ imperative in the Enneads (V. 3. 17.): ‘Take
everything away’.109 e very sap of viriditas is loss (it is, apropos of Falls of
Rauros, ‘ e Light at Dwells In Rotten Wood’)110 or, better, losing, as in
the withered bark or the aridity of language that, through Greek apo, ‘away
from’, and phasis, ‘assertion’, God’s Word promises to make green again. is
turning away from assertion or unsaying – already given in the etymological
derivation of the word ‘mysticism’ which, from Indo-European root mu,
gives us the English ‘mute’ via Greek muien, to ‘close the eyes or lips’111 –
forms the higher or more accurate element in a mystical theology that was
introduced by the Pseudo-Dionysius in the sixth century. Here, it is
coupled with the cataphatic, from Greek cata, ‘a rmative’ and, again,
phasis, ‘assertion’, from phanai, to ‘speak’, intending knowledge of God that
moves in accordance with language as it is conventionally conceived. As
Ewert H. Cousins states, in cataphatic mystical discourse ‘language runs
riot: it leaps, it vaults, it sings. It speaks in prose and poetry; it gives
objective descriptions of experience and ies on the wings of ecstasy; it
guides neophytes with gentle care and cuts through illusion with razor-
sharp arguments’.112
While for Dionysius, in the face of the unresolvable dilemma of
transcendence, the apophatic and cataphatic are mutually interdependent,
insofar as ‘[e]very act of unsaying demands or presupposes a previous
saying’,113 the via negativa or negative path that is the guiding semantic
force of apophaticism is more accurate because beyond the twin pressures
of this interdependency there is a need to negate the contradiction that
emerges between them. is additional negation of the negation of
a rmation is not some supplementary utterance that, ‘in good linguistic
order’, would posit an intelligible synthesis; it is, on the contrary, the
collapse of our a rmations and negations into disorder, ‘which we can only
express, a fortiori, in bits of collapsed and disordered language, like the
babble of a Jeremiah’.114
Sarah L. Higley, the glossopoeist who rst analyzed, edited, and translated
Hildegard’s Ignota Lingua into English, says she nds ‘little apophaticism’115
in it. Referring to the ‘leaping, vaulting, singing quality of Hildegard’s
visionary writing’, she suggests the penchant here and elsewhere ‘runs
toward explication and [therefore] cataphaticism’,116 essential to the Lingua’s
provision of translations – its furnishing of glosses and lemmas in Latin and
German for over a thousand words (mostly nouns but some adjectives) that
resound with the beauty and dynamic the mystic saw in God’s creation as
orzchis, ‘immense’, crizanta, ‘decorated’, and chorzta, ‘glittering’, with all the
renewal of zinrinz, Higley’s favorite word, which unsays ‘stairwell’, greening
it literally through sonorous imitation of its ‘repeating coil’ and the ‘hissing
vertigo one experiences descending it’.117
e proclivity for exposition we nd in Hildegard’s Ignota Lingua, and in
her Scivias, in and of itself an explication, an elucidation of her mystical
visions,118 is notably absent from Vordb’s conception of Gloatre, and the
role it plays in his equation of ‘audio Darkness’.119 Conceived in the
formative days of Moévöt, in the project’s nominal ‘concept of a protean
non-human creature haunting places (and humans) through some sort of
repeated and unchanging ritual journey’, Gloatre’s role in ‘the audio
Darkness equation’, as yet unresolved, and in all its inchoateness, consisted
solely in the spectral projection of ‘eerie sounds, fragments of chaotic
instrumental or vocal parts, words whispered from the Dark into [Vordb’s]
ear, […] [words] that did not always immediately make sense […] [but
induced instead] a state of mind and body close to torture, which, far from
rejecting, [the artist] used, on the contrary, to nourish his quest, in an
infernal cycle’120 of sound research.
is sound research, the purpose of which was to express darkness far
beyond the sole ‘metal concept’, was enriched by Vordb’s continuous
wanderings in desolate places, ‘cemeteries, castles, ruins, frozen
landscapes’,121 the topologies of which, along with all the psychospheric122
trappings of ‘solitude’, ‘depression’, ‘decadence’, and ‘paralysis’,123 were
mapped onto Gloatre’s lexical obscenities – above all, we suppose, its ‘rot of
referentiality’, and its ‘insidiously powerful feeling-tone’, the acoustic
sensation of which suggests ‘the darkness of Transylvanian tombs’.124 In
having since upheld the mystery of its inhuman words, whispered from the
Dark to the ears of this onomaturge, Vordb appears less a ‘receptacle for the
Divine gi s of God’, and more a channel akin to that through which ‘a
substantial amount of language distortion of medieval writing is connected
to the Devil’.125
Which is to say, in refusing to assume the role of explanatrix scripturarum
to his own language, Vordb’s obscure(d) utterances – considering the
manner in which they are said to be channelled: given to him by the
Darkness like so many unintelligible glossolalic phenomena – at once recall
the alienatio mentis associated with religious ecstasy, such as we nd in
Elizabeth of Schönau, for example, Hildegard’s contemporary, and the
demonic connotations this same verbal ecstasy took on in the h century,
particularly with the decline of the Montanists and the establishment of a
rational emphasis on Christianity under the in uence of Augustine who, in
alluding to Acts 2: 1-8, in his tractate on the Gospel of John, wrote that
while the apostles were given this gi no one anymore need speak in
‘tongues’.126 Like Vordb, Elizabeth spoke of bodily torture, of ‘pain, feelings
of strangulation, and fainting’,127 that accompanied those words seen and
heard in visions, words unlike that which a human mouth utters, words
emptied of the semiotic and semantic requirements of a workable language,
and in whose dissociation from signi cation and signature dis gurement
and appropriation, echoism and pulsation, are evoked the blather of the
apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, and gnostic texts, as well as the darker
gibberish of incantation and necromantic conjuration.
Gloatre words like ‘Vermyapre’ and plural ‘Vermyapreb’, which appear to
be an appropriation and dis gurement of Old English and French
‘vampyre’ and proto-Slavic ‘ǫpyrь’, evoke the damnation associated with
language distortion, in its departure from divine reason, as illustrated in
‘realm[s] of linguistic ruin’128 such as Dante’s Inferno. In Canto 7.1, in
Pluto’s exclamation ‘Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe’, we nd a similar
appropriation and dis gurement of either Greek papai, an exclamation of
pain or surprise, or Latinate Greek papa, denoting a debased form of ‘pope’
or ‘father’ which, along with aleppe, the Italian form of the Hebrew word
for the rst letter of the alphabet, expressed in Latinate ‘alpha ed omega’
and, consequently, how God de nes Himself in the Bible (Apoc. 1:8; 21:6;
22:13), seems to suggest something like ‘O Pope Satan, my God’, which
nearly all construe as an invocation of Satan, a cry of alarm or warning, and
some, such as Robert Hollander, as a parodic inversion of the ve words
called for by Paul in Corinthians: ‘Yet in the church I had rather speak ve
words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also,
than ten thousand words in an unknown language (14:19)’.129 Correlatively,
in Canto 31.67, Nimrod’s exclamation ‘Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi’
appears to be a distortion of Hebrew, and of falsely applied Kabbalah,
mirroring that in which the thirteenth-century French poet Rutebeuf had
his Jewish sorcerer conjure the devil: ‘Bagahi laca bacha hé | lamac cahi
achabahé | Karrelyos’.130
More broadly, though LLN’s lack of a lyrical oeuvre renders it di cult to
discern the extent to which Gloatre exhibits ‘echoism’, the tendency to
repeat syllables and syllable clusters in succession, such as we nd in the
‘abracadabra’ of conjuration or the ‘[…] laca bacha he […] achabahé […]’
of demonic invocation apropos of Rutebeuf above, we do nd strong
elements of ‘primitivism’, the other de ning feature of glossolalic utterance,
in which we witness the simpli cation or degeneration of the phonic variety
typically found in the speakers native language. Note, for example, the
predominance of ‘v’ as an initial consonant in Gloatre: Voarmtrèb
vzaéurvbtraya, Vagézaryavtre, Vzaéurvbtre, Voèkrèb, Vélèpre,
Vèrhzlévaryavge, Varkruèrme, Vèrmibdreb, and so on. Note too the
predominance of ‘r’ as a medial consonant: Uèzréèvb, Abgzvoryathre,
Brenoritvrezorke, Glorhme, Uèzréèvb, Vor. ulkre, Urdbyakre, Ambre
Zuèrkl Vuordrévarvtre, Bvrolarimnambde.
is phonic simpli cation aside, Gloatre displays neither the open
syllables nor the lack of consonant clusters typical of glossolalic utterance.
Indeed, Vordb’s graphic preference for consonant clusters is what gives
Gloatre its breath-stopping guttural quality and decidedly Transylvanian
avor, suggesting that he, like Hildegard, has had formal training in a
foreign language. But above all, it is in the assignment of meaning to
individual words that Gloatre di ers from the free vocalization – from the
‘essentially oral, performative, and spontaneous nature’131 – of glossolalia.
And this is to say nothing of its written variety, glossographia, which,
though di ering structurally and philosophically, still does not replicate the
thought-out nature of Hildegard’s Ignota Lingua or of LLN’s unknown
language where meanings are rationally applied to words or parts of words.
In its appeal, or at the very least, its pretension to a taxonomy in common
with Hildegard’s verbum pro verbo explication, and certainly in its
corresponding use of antiphony, Gloatre, along with its lexical obscenities –
the shrill cries, guttural growls, and instances of instinctisation – is
di erentiated from the various competing conceptions of glossolalia and
posited, with the Ignota Lingua, in an entirely di erent category, that of
glossopoesis, which Higley maintains ‘comes closer in concept and construct
to what Hildegard had in mind eight hundred years ago than anything else
in her own era’.132 Essentially, Higley argues that, despite its entrenchment
in a milieu of Pentecostalism, of perpetual optimism regarding the recovery
of a lost linguistic unity (Genesis 11:1-9), the Ignota Lingua remains unique
to its time in that it is an ordered, written, rational invention of language,
that is, for the most part, not looked upon as being divinely inspired,
bringing it in line with Vordb’s conception of Gloatre, as a contemporary
example of the kind of private and ctional invention of languages she sees
in succeeding centuries. And yet, unlike the secular, science- ctional, and
even hysterical examples her study furnishes, there remains something of
what Masciandaro would call ‘the medieval language miracle’133 in Gloatre:
a purportedly divine/demonic acquisition of knowledge not entirely absent
from the Lingua itself.
ough Vordb’s statements appear to be more explicit in this regard, he
says that ‘Gloatre was a very decisive part of [his] evolution as an Entity’,134
an Entity ‘born during one night in Autumn 1991’ when, out of ‘a place of
indescribable grief and mourning’, a ‘certainty’ ‘descend[ed] from Darkness
and enter[ed] within [him]’ –

Without fear […] I understood [then] that its aim was to help me vomit
the ocean of pain trapped within my body and soul that was slowly killing
me, and express a disgust of humanity that could not stay within me any
longer: some sort of physical and spiritual drain without which this
infection would have gotten the better of me.135

– we do nd similar statements in Hildegard which, though not directly

related to the genesis of her Ignota Lingua, pertain to another language
miracle recorded in the Scivias. Here she says:

And behold! In the forty-third year of my earthly course, as I was gazing

with great fear and trembling attention at a heavenly vision, I saw a great
splendor in which resounded a voice from Heaven, saying to me, ‘O
fragile human, ashes of ashes, and lth of lth! Say and write what you
see and hear. But since you are timid in speaking, and simple in
expounding, and untaught in writing, speak and write these things not by
a human mouth, and not by the understanding of human invention, and
not by the requirements of human composition, but as you see and hear
them on high in the heavenly places in the wonders of God […]’ And
[…] [so] [i]t happened that, in the eleven hundred and forty- rst year of
the Incarnation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, when I was forty-two
years and seven months old, Heaven was opened and a ery light of
exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and in amed
my whole heart and my whole breast, not like a burning but like a
warming ame, as the sun warms anything its rays touch. And
immediately I knew the meaning of the exposition of the Scriptures,
namely the Psalter, the Gospel and the other catholic volumes of both the
Old and New testaments, though I did not have the interpretation of the
words of their texts or the divisions of the syllables or the knowledge of
cases or tenses.136

Despite acknowledging her ‘prodigious ability with the metaphoric

language of visions, demonstrated time and again in the Scivias, and
despite having ‘no doubt that Hildegard was familiar with the xenoglossia
of Acts, and considered what she was exercising a charisma, o ering “new
language,” in fact an “unknown language” inspired by God’,137 Higley
concedes no language miracle to the Lingua. But prefers instead, in
returning the designation ‘glossolalia’ to its more traditional meaning of ‘free
vocalization inspired by an alienatio mentis’, to substitute the term
‘glossopoeia’ for what Hildegard is doing, quite simply, ‘inventing a glossary
of nouns from a German summarium with meaningful elements in them
that she translates’, bringing the Lingua in line with her medical work as a
‘kind of down-to-earth dispensary of knowledge and matter organized in a
list’.138 Higley’s study presents something of a blind spot in this regard, for
only earlier in trying to date the language’s creation which, as she notes,
took eight years in the making (c. 1150-1158), the author cites a letter
Hildegard wrote to Pope Anastasius in 1153, where the mystic says plainly:

Sed ille qui sine defectione magnus est, modo paruum habitaculum
tetigit ut illud miracula uideret, et ignotas litteras formaret, ac ignotam
linguam sonaret, atque ut multimodam sed sibi consonantem melodiam
sonaret.139

[But He without defect, who is great, has just now touched a lowly
dwelling, so that it might see a miracle, and might form unknown letters,
and might utter an unknown language, and also that by itself it might
sound forth multitudinous, harmonious melodies.]

Even if there were no such direct evidence that the Lingua entailed the
miraculous acquisition of language, as Masciandaro maintains in relation to
the corresponding incident recorded in the Scivias, the manifestation of
Hildegard’s Unknown Language should not be read as an isolated instance,
but one that coincides with her ‘more general illumination’.140 Whereby the
gi of language depends on a gi of knowledge, or what Vordb would call
‘certainty’ – for ‘words are not given for any speech, but to disseminate or
receive the Word’141 – allowing us to see in the Lingua a ‘medieval
continuation of the contemporaneity of the language miracle’,142 or
alternately, in Gloatre, a contemporary continuation of the medieval
language miracle.
e marked proximity of Vorbd and Hildegard’s statements, in terms of
‘knowledge’ or ‘certainty’ that ‘descended’, ‘entering’ ‘within’ them,
‘permeating’ them, respectively, from ‘Darkness’ and from ‘a ery light of
exceeding brilliance’, lies not only in the descriptive language used but in
the corroboration of a given source, which, though alluded to through
seemingly singular semantics, is only ostensibly di erent – Hildegard’s ‘ ery
light of exceeding brilliance’ being precisely that ‘inaccessible brilliance of
the celestial powers’ which, as John Scotus Eruigena would concur in the
Peripheyson, is called by the apophatic tradition, in general, and by Vordb,
in particular, ‘Darkness’.143
Darkness is not to be understood here in an experiential, but in an
epistemological context, that of ignorance, or unknowing: ‘as the immensity
and surpassing excellence of the divine light […] into the surpassing light
that beats down and darkens our intellect’.144 is darkness has numerous
precedents in the mystical traditions. In Su sm, for instance, Ibn Al’ Arabi
exalts it in the capacity of ‘bewilderment’.145 In Neoplatonism, Plotinus
praises it qua the cessation of every intellectual activity.146 And in the
Christian tradition, which brings together Greek and Jewish elements,
Pseudo-Dionysius extols it as that which, while not oppositional to, is
distinct from, and more accurate than, the cataphatic tropes of light,
illumination, and radiation deployed by Hildegard:

e fact is that the more we take ight upward, the more our words are
con ned to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge
into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall nd ourselves not
simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.147

In his commentary on this section of e Mystical eology, Paul Rorem

notes how ‘the entire Dionysian enterprise is a cognitive exercise,
dominated throughout by the right interpretation of the revealed symbols
for God, whether in the Bible or in the liturgy, and climaxed by the
intentional abandonment of all such interpretations’.148 at this
‘abandonment is itself a conscious cognitive technique’ is taken-up by
Denys Turner who argues further that there is a di erence between an
apophasis that presupposes the inadequacy of language and one that
discovers the failure of language altogether. Apophasis, in Turner’s words,
 is the conception of theology not as a naive pre-critical ignorance of
God, but as a kind of acquired ignorance […] It is the conception of
theology as a strategy and practice of unknowing, as the fourteenth
century English mystic called it, who, we might say invented the transitive
verb-form ‘to unknow’ in order to describe theological knowledge, in this
its deconstructive mode.149

Hildegard’s Ignota Lingua and Vordb’s unknown language share the

concept of a perfected language, a language that by its very invention
presupposes the aridity or inadequacy of that which, through the invention
of ‘new words – or better one’s own words – for old things’,150 it promises to
make green again, to re-inject language with new sap, with viriditas, thus
opening the gates to an Elsewhere apropos of Ursula K. Le Guin,151 to what
Octavia Paz in his détournement of Paul Éluard’s words would call ‘another
world, in this one’.152 ere is, however, a di erence beyond the mutual
presupposition of the inadequacy of language that the Lingua and Gloatre
share, one that could only be construed as Vordb’s discovery of the failure
of language altogether. For if Hildegard’s penchant runs toward explication,
and then, illumination and cataphaticism, Vordb’s very clearly runs toward
mystery, and then, darkness and apophaticism, along the via negativa or
negative path that leads in all directions to the realization that, as
Masciandaro would aver contra Paz in his détournement of Emil Cioran,
‘[t]here is not another world, and it is this one’.153 How else are we to
explain Vordb’s persistent refusal to provide ‘any translation of the
Gloatre’,154 other than as what Turner would call ‘a paradoxical
transpositioning of the dialectics of apophaticism on to the sphere of
ascetical practice’,155 a conscious cognitive exercise of saying and unsaying
arising from his discovery of the failure of language to contain ‘the
limitlessness of the real’.156
We could, of course, in the context of Higley’s study, put it down to a
certain ‘bashfulness’,157 a ‘shyness, intimacy’, even ‘inutility’158 and
corresponding ‘shame’159 which she suggests inventors of private languages
o en feel. So much so that ‘they hardly ever show their works to one
another’, indeed, to anyone, as J. R. R. Tolkien – the inventor of Elvish –
relayed in his sensitive commentary on the subject, tellingly titled ‘A Secret
Vice’.160 But what was undoubtedly a secret vice for Tolkien has been a
public virtue for Vordb, who has never made a secret of his language, only
of the meanings assigned to its individual words. In fact, even in refusing to
give an accurate translation of the Gloatre, he says himself ‘I have no
problem in giving overall comments on my audio projects or [on the
meaning of ] a particular song’.161
e detractors could then add, perhaps there is no translation to be had at
all. Perhaps Gloatre is little more than a sound experiment, a type of
musical glossolalia empty of any real signi cance, only given meaning
through melody which is then relayed retrospectively. In the context of
Higley’s study, they might then point to popular music examples furnished
therein, to the spontaneous lyrics and fantastic languages of Sigur Rós,
Ekava, Urban Trad and Cocteau Twins, or even to ‘scat’, the yodeling vocal
style associated with jazz, which, in its (mis)conceived inchoateness, comes
closer to Vordb’s instinctisation and the kind of free vocalization readily
ascribed to the meaning of glossolalia, as it is outlined above.162
But it could be countered, that if one were to point to a popular or jazz
precedent for Gloatre, the most obvious and relevant example would be
Magma, the French progressive rock band led by Christian Vander, who
invented a language, Kobaïan,163 in which most of the band’s lyrics are
sung. Magma were most active in France in what would have been the
formative years of the various members of the LLN Circle, and they have
since exerted a signi cant in uence on black metal.164 More speci cally,
Kobaïan is phonetically similar to Gloatre, both languages share strong
Slavonic and Germanic elements. And insofar as it forms the lyrical basis of
ten concept albums, each of which is interwoven into an overarching
narrative, Kobaïan is the medium for that same cinematic feeling one gets
through the formal structure of a substantial amount of LLN recordings,
particularly the early demos by Moévöt, which have been connected to the
‘poetic, highly intertextual’, purposefully ‘outmoded’, ‘odd art-horror lms’165
of French director Jean Rollin.
ough not intentionally cinematic, in coupling the found sound of
footsteps, birdsong, droning cicadas, wind, rain, and church bells with
macabre organ playing, ominous chanting, agonized rasping vocals, and sad
choir-like singing, these early Moévöt demos166 capitulate a lmic
vocabulary that transports the listener track by track or, as Vordb suggests,
scene by scene, to ‘a nihilistic world where […] the shadows churn with the
stalking movements of unspeakably vile creatures’.167 As LLN’s ‘father audio
project’, one that ‘involuntarily gave birth to many other audio projects in
this Circle, and so considerably contributed to its unique artistic richness’,168
this early Moévöt aesthetic dually developed through a very speci c
iconography that accompanies all of LLN’s recordings, and has had the
cumulative e ect of a mythos, a recurrent narrative theme that sees the
Circle aligned with the gure of the vampire as we nd it in Rollins lms,
and whose terrifying presence is then recapitulated sonically through
Gloatre’s Transylvanian quality.
It is ostensibly this, the thought-out nature of Gloatre, that brings it closer
to Kobaïan than any of the musical examples furnished in Higley’s study,
with the exception of those unglossed words we nd in Hildegard’s
antiphon, which we will turn to momentarily. But beneath the construct of
a mutual mythos, or in Magma’s case, a mythopoeia (a coherent
cosmogonical science- ction tinged apocalyptic story of intergalactic
warfare and battles between wizards and demons), is the more pertinent,
for our purposes, fact that Kobaïan is said to spring, like Gloatre, from the
dual understanding of ‘inventing’ a language as ‘authoring’ and ‘ nding’.
Hence Vander, like Vordb, speaks of Kobaïan as that which he never
learned, as that which imposed itself upon him,169 and in the corresponding
circumstance of venting disgust at, even wishing death upon, humanity.170
Whether conceived as demonic or divine, in the miraculous acquisition of
Kobaïan, it is the openly referred to ‘sonorities’ that distinguish it from the
‘applied meanings’171 of Gloatre, which, unlike Vander’s language, resists
translation not because accurate interpretation cannot be retroactively
given, but because Vordb’s penchant very explicitly runs toward secrecy and
apophaticism: a proclivity to keep his words, like his works, in the Darkness
from which they were made.172
Central to an understanding of this proclivity in the context of Higley’s
study, is the power she ultimately ascribes not to the systematic lemmata of
Hildegard’s Ignota Lingua, but to the unglossed words of her liturgical
antiphon, ‘O Orzchis Ecclesia’.

O orzchis Ecclesia
armis divinis precinta
et iazinto ornato
to es caldemia
stigmatum loifolum
et urbs scientarium.
O, o, tu es estiam crizanta
in alto sono et es chorzta gemma.

[O orzchis Church
girded by divine arms
and ornamented in jacinth!
ou art caldemia
of the wounds of loifolum
and the city of knowledge.
O, O, thou art also crizanta
in sounds on high and art a chorzta gem.]173

Unlike the Ignota Lingua, an ‘unknown language’ only insofar as it was

not a known language, but one that would be ‘proudly made known, even
if only in part, and to a small audience of readers’,174 there is a genuine
opacity of meaning or epistemological darkness that surrounds the sung
adjectives and nouns of this antiphon: orzchis, caldemia, loifolum, crizanta,
chorzta.175 Pointing to its musical context, Higley notes of how the antiphon
has the feel of something produced in an ecstatic state, lending its invented
words an authenticity, an air of devotion that is lacking from Hildegard’s
cataphatic taxonomy. Focusing on the sung phrase ‘in alto sono’, which
literally performs its own meaning – with the accompanying notes soaring
in crescendo – the glossopoeist states, that it is with this correlation
between music and meaning, imitated by the Lingua, that Hildegard’s
Adamic project best resonates. A er all, for Hildegard, ‘the language Adam
spoke was the music that Adam heard, one that was paradisal – it was the
song of the angel choir’.176 In drawing on the oeuvre of Augustine (AD 354-
350), whose re ections on the acquisition of knowledge in De Magistro
mirror Hildegard’s own, where ‘we speak, know, and teach not through our
own agency but through […]’177 what the mystic would call a fecundity or
‘greening love’,178 Higley nds the grounds to extend his re ections on
signi cation and interpretation to the unglossed words of the antiphon.
Concluding, that there is no need for us to wonder about the meaning of
its unknown language, but rather that in hearing crizanta, for example,
hitting the high note on its rst syllable, bringing us down from Ecclesia’s
highest pinnacle to meet the upward rush of ‘sounds on high’, we would do
better to remember the Saint’s proposition that ‘the things signi ed should
be of more value than their signs’.179
is proposition provides the most crucial axis in Higley’s study, in whose
opening and closing pages we are moved to ask what relationship invented
words have with the things of this world if they have no circulation in the
world. What is it that an invented language like Vordb’s displays for others
if it is not translated? What value has Gloatre beyond that which we have
seen in the building of a mythos if it remains closeted and rari ed, subject
to what Wittgenstein would call Vordb’s ‘super-privacy’180 – his proclivity, as
mentioned, to keep his words, like his works, in the Darkness from which
they were made?
 Wittgenstein, whose oeuvre interrogates the logic and limitations of
language, would ask whether a language as private as Vordb’s could even be
conceived as language – in its resistance to translation, to circulation within
the world, to that which, in the end, makes language language.181 In
drawing on his Philosophical Investigations, from whose pages Gloatre
emerges something like a ‘phantom’, ‘an impossibility of language’,182 Higley
would seem to concur that there can be no private language ‘wherein we
engage in “inner ostentation,” [as] Wittgenstein avers – assigning highly
personal names to subjective sensations that […] cannot be pointed to –
and have it be considered language as we know it’.183 But even in a rming
the di erence between, say, Vordb’s truly, then, unknown language, and
Hildegard’s Ignota Lingua, which, as the author notes, is not private in this
sense, Higley nds more useful for her conclusion, and so it is fortuitously
for ours, the distinction Wittgenstein makes in his Philosophical Occasions
between ordinary ‘privacy’, which assumes one keeps hidden from others
that which could be expressed if the subject wished, and the kind of ‘super-
privacy’ we encounter with Vordb, which assumes the inaccessibility of
meaning altogether: ‘Nobody but I can see it, hear it, feel it; nobody but me
knows what it’s like’.184
As Higley notes, this distinction approaches one she makes early in her
own study, between what Hildegard’s provost Volmarus refers to as her
‘inaudite lingua’, and the ‘ignota lingua’ that was published, namely, ‘an
experience she had in her head (that she perhaps could not articulate –
super-privacy), a list of words that she had not yet written down (ordinary
privacy), and the project that was revealed’.185 As the glossopoeist states, no
one who has published his or her invented language, as Hildegard did with
the Ignota Lingua, is interested in its super-privacy, or even in keeping it
ordinarily private: Hildegard, and the likes of Le Guin, contemporary
Internet conlangers,186 and even Tolkien – who is said to have kept the real
accomplishments of his Elvish in a closet187 – are all open and cataphatic in
discussion and description of their imaginary languages.188 Vordb, on the
other hand, is closed and apophatic; Gloatre displays nothing for others but
the fact of itself and its resplendent alterity. Wittgenstein again: ‘Not how
the world is, is the mystical, but that it is’.189
Recognizing this fundamental distinction, which is in the end, then, one
between ‘saying’ and ‘showing’ – what Heidegger a er the medievals would
term ‘quidity and haecceity, the what and the that, as the irresolvable terms
through which being both appears and remains inconceivable in itself or as
a whole’190 – amounts in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre to what Bertrand Russell
would call ‘a curious kind of logical mysticism’,191 a mysticism of unsaying
that ostensibly ends in silence, just as the Tractatus does: ‘What we cannot
speak about we must pass over in silence’.192 (For as Masciandaro avers in
‘ e Sorrow of Being’, which is epigraphically animated by Wittgenstein’s
work: ‘More suspicious than God are the not-Gods that de nitions of God
set-up’.)193 In being helically bound to this proposition, Vordb’s super-
privacy takes on an ethical dimension not entirely absent from the Ignota
Lingua, for even in valuing the sign over the signi ed, as Higley proposes in
the conclusion of her study, it is arguably ‘the creation [of an unknown
language that] is [itself ] the message, the sign of an invented world’s
alterity’.194 In the creation of an unknown language we encounter a
Wittgensteinian ‘showing’, whose ‘words are’, in Masciandaro’s terms,
‘heartbreakingly close to being what they say’,195 namely, nothing.
Nonsense.
In the Tractatus, the only book by Wittgenstein published in his own
lifetime (1921), the philosopher stresses the essentially pictorial character of
language: an utterance gains its sense from being a linguistic representation
of an actual or possible ‘state of a airs’,196 if it does not have this relation to
reality, i.e. if it fails to give meaning to certain signs in its proposition, or
utterance, then it is nonsense. is conceptual move was notable in
allowing the Tractatus to dispense with metaphysics, which, like the
language of art and of ethics, was seen to fail in adequately connecting its
component parts (words) to things in the world. In the Tractatus’
treatment of logic and meaning, the language of religion doesn’t even go so
far as failing, ‘because of our inability to show how (e.g.) the word God
goes proxy for an object in the world, all sentences containing that word are
[from the outset] devoid of sense’.197 Nonsense.
Building on Wittgenstein’s stated desire to ‘cut out the transcendental
twaddle’,198 thinkers have repeatedly equated the Tractatus’ consignment of
religion to the realm of the nonsensical with an aggressive atheistic attitude,
promulgated by, for example, those predecessors in the history of the
criticism of religion, such as Ludwig Feuerbach and David Hume, and
those contemporary philosophers, dubbed the ‘Vienna Circle’, who devised
an empiricist program in collaboration with Wittgenstein, which would
become known as Logical Positivism. But as Brian R. Clack and Ray Monk
amongst others have noted, despite the many factors that would seem to
favor this equation, even a cursory glance at the Tractatus – in particular, at
its introduction and its conclusion – reveals the most important aspect of its
‘numbered propositions, its logical and mathematical symbols and its dense
and opaque pronouncements about the structure of language’,199 to be, not
the glaringly rigorous treatment of logic and meaning, but rather, as
Wittgenstein himself averred, the ethical: ‘the point of the book is ethical’.200
In outlining the value of his work in the preface to the Tractatus,
Wittgenstein says that the rst thing in which the value of the work consists
is its aim to draw a limit to the expression of thought, the truth of which,
now nished, seemed to him ‘unassailable and de nitive’.201 In having thus
e ectively solved all of the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein then adds:
‘the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows
how little is achieved when these problems are solved’.202 Given the
scholarly achievements of the Tractatus, the many plaudits it received –
and continues to receive – upon publication, it is noteworthy that
Wittgenstein himself considers the book’s propositions to be of merely trivial
signi cance. e reason for this is better expressed in an earlier preface,
about which the philosopher wrote to a prospective publisher, Ludwig Von
Ficker:

I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually
are not in it, which, however, I’ll write to you now because they might be
key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the
one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And
precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is
delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I’m convinced that,
strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think:
All of that which many are babbling today, I have de ned in my book by
remaining silent about it.203

As Clack notes, the point here, then, is not that nonsensical discourse is
worthy of ridicule, but on the contrary, ‘that those things which he has
banished from the realm of meaningful language are in nitely more
important than that which can be legitimately articulated’.204 And the
philosopher is certainly not determined to cast any doubt on the reality of
this realm of the nonsensical, from the propositions of the Tractatus itself
(and taking us back to the saying/showing distinction): ‘ ere are, indeed,
things that cannot be put into words. ey make themselves manifest. ey
are what is mystical’.205
In demarcating what can be said from what cannot be said, within the
limits of language, whilst maintaining that the unsayable alone is
important, Wittgenstein assumes a philosophical and ethical position that,
drawing on late medieval negative theology and permutations of its
principles in contemporary philosophy, Masciandaro elaborates in ‘Labour,
Language, Laughter’ as one of ‘apophatic humanism’: that which ‘points
towards unknowing and non-identity as wisdom’s home’.206 Wittgenstein
again:

e urge towards the mystical comes of the non-satisfaction of our

wishes by science. We feel that even if all possible scienti c questions are
 answered our problem is still not touched at all.207

ere is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. If I

wrote a book called e World as I found it, I should have to include a
report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate
to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the
subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no
subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.208

If Wittgenstein’s ideas seem idiosyncratic, even o ensive to the ‘anti-

re exive re exivity’209 generally attributed to black metal musicians, then
one could, before continuing, indicate the a nities existing between the
apophatic humanism elaborated by Masciandaro and found in
Wittgenstein, and that which, in Vordb’s words, (reversely) points towards
the same philosophical and ethical principles.210 If one were inclined to
expand on these principles vis-à-vis Vordb’s vocal metallic deixis (Gloatre’s
negative indication: its pointing to nothing), then one could explain how,
like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, they belong more broadly to a dis-ontological
discursive e ort to avoid reifying the transcendent, that begins with a
genuine aporia, and ends, not in silence, but in a new mode of discourse, a
negative theology that is based, as Masciandaro states in his seventh
proposition on black metal truths that remain backwardsly legible within
medieval mysticism, ‘on paradoxical denial of God. e upside-down truth
on which the Christian ecclesia and black metal kvlt are both founded: “I
pray to God to make me free of God,” says Eckhart’.211 One could then
tirelessly traverse back through Vordb’s oeuvre in order to identify the rest
of these truths – the rejection of creationism, the instances of dereliction,
despair, and desolation, the knowledge of oneself as evil, the intoxication,
the freedom, and the irreligion – black metal shares with medieval
mysticism, only to move forward again in explaining the metaphor of
emanation and over owing we nd in Vordb’s Fountain of Darkness that,
along with a distinct dialectic of transcendence and immanence, is one of
the de ning features of medieval mysticism. Only then, through a self-
hating assiduous academic exercise that threatens to banalize these
a nities through explication and over-exposure, of saying, saying, and
saying, and of footnoting, footnoting, and footnoting to sources, would we
come to what Masciandaro posits as the key component of apophatic
humanism: mystery – mystery, not asserted, but performed,212 as we nd it
in Wittgenstein and Vordb.
is mystery, essentially an epistemic instability that Masciandaro mapped
onto the rubric of black metal theory, is ‘a hidden love of the hidden’,213
what Michael Sells would call ‘a referential openness onto the depths of a
particular tradition, and in conversation with other traditions’.214 ‘[A]
hidden love of hidden universal divine reality’,215 it is ‘a monstrous
hermeneutic movement that utopically realizes the place of its practice and
thus the larger life where it is thrown as a third heaven on par with the one
into which Paul is unknowingly ravished (raptus, harpazo), “whether in the
body or out of the body, I do not know” (1 Cor. 12.2.)’.216 For as
Masciandaro avers in following Sells, ‘it is not only “apophatic texts [that]
have su ered in a particularly acute manner from the urge to paraphrase
the meaning in non-apophatic language or to ll in the open referent.”’217
‘Poetry, drama – almost any form of art – risks being trivialized when its
meaning is de ned and paraphrased discursively’.218 Ergo Vordb: ‘ ere
would be no mystery anymore if I suddenly told everything about my
work; such an attitude would also not be the re ection of my personality
anymore, so there is a part of my work that will always and only belong to
me’.219 And Meher Baba: ‘Love sets on re the one who nds it. At the
same time it seals his lips so that no smoke comes out. Love is meant to be
experienced and not disclosed’.220
‘Anyway’, Vordb asks, with a nod to the Tractatus, ‘can such things be told
with precise words?’ ‘I know it is perhaps frustrating’, he says, ‘for some
people who would like to know what it is exactly that I am talking about in
my lyrics that are written in this language; but on the other hand, I think
that there should always be something in any artistic work that should
remain only accessible to its author. I think it is artistically logical and
legitimate’.221 Meher Baba again: ‘Love is a secret which is meant to remain
a secret save for the one who receives and keeps it’.222 ‘Now, even with tons
of explanations’, Vordb adds, ‘you will never get everything about the work
of someone else. Try to think of a painting for example: whatever your
interpretation of it, you will never be sure that the feeling you get gazing at
it refers to what the painter had in mind when he painted it, even if he tries
to tell you what that particular feeling was’.223 It is in this tension between
saying and unsaying, which Vordb voices, and which a painting shows, that
mystery emerges qua referential openness. An openness that, albeit
eeting, as per Plotinus, ‘as soon as one thinks one has it, one has lost it’,224
is in principle accessible to all, in the capacity of Augustine’s analysis of the
hermeneutics of the ‘dead word’ (vocabulum emortuum) outlined by
Agamben in e End of the Poem: ‘For Augustine, this experience of an
unknown word (verbum ignotum) in the no-man’s land between sound and
signi cation is the experience of love as will to know’.225

Laughter
In inventing a language, putting it ‘out there’, and yet refusing to translate
it, Vordb betrays a particular intuition into the dilemma of transcendence,
at the core of which is a saying/showing distinction Wittgenstein considered
crucially important in understanding the nature of logic. In his ‘Notes
dictated to G. E. Moore’, this distinction is announced in the very rst line:
‘logical so-called propositions shew the logical properties of language and
therefore the universe but say nothing’.226 In the Tractatus, this distinction
becomes central and, as Wittgenstein’s letter to Ficker suggests, of
considerably wider signi cance, because the inexpressible – that which has
to be shown and cannot be said – is no longer limited to logic, but extends
to ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy itself. While there is not a single
mention of ethics in the notes dictated to Moore, in Wittgenstein’s summary
of it to Ficker, he claims that the point of the Tractatus is ethical. As Monk
states: ‘Where the book is unique – and this has evoked ba ement
amongst its readers for the ninety [odd] years it has been in print – is that it
attempts to make its ethical point by remaining silent on the subject!’227
Insofar as it too betrays a particular intuition into the dilemma of
transcendence, and like LLN’s unknown language, constitutes a particular
response to it, it is perhaps that, as Georges Bataille would write (having
said, ‘[e]verything I’ve asserted, [every] conviction I’ve expressed, it’s all
ridiculous and dead’): ‘I’m only silence, the universe is silence. e world of
words is laughable […] Sovereignty does not speak’.228
But like Bataille, Wittgenstein does speak, indeed, regarding the
saying/showing distinction, Russell is reported to have expressed hesitation
caused by the fact that, as he says, ‘a er all, Mr. Wittgenstein manages to
say a good deal about what cannot be said’.229 Even Vordb’s metallic deixis,
oscillating for Augustine somewhere in the no-man’s land between noise
and language, betrays this perennial tension between saying and unsaying
(the human urge to speak about that which lies beyond human
knowledge), a primary theme of medieval mysticism, and an idea that
Masciandaro links to black metal, wherein, mirroring the exacting demands
of the Tractatus, that one should not speak for fear of speaking nonsense,
the Scapegoat says, that ‘the rst rule of black metal is that YOU DO NOT
FUCKING TALK ABOUT BLACK METAL’.230 But even Wittgenstein sees
some worth in breaking the Tractarian silence. For while the results of the
thrust against language’s limits may be cognitively hopeless,

the inclination, the running up against something, indicates something.

St. Augustine knew that already when he said: What, you swine, you
want to not talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not
matter!231

Postscript
ere were these two guys in a lunatic asylum … and one night, one
 night, they decide they don’t like living in the asylum anymore. ey
decide they’re going to escape! So, like, they get up onto the roof, and
there, just across the gap, they see the roo ops of the town, stretching
away in the moonlight … stretching away to freedom. Now, the rst guy,
he jumps across with no problem. But his friend, his friend daredn’t make
the leap. Y’see … y’see he’s afraid of falling. So then, the rst guy says
‘Hey! I have my ashlight with me!! I’ll shine it across the gap between
the buildings. You can walk along the beam and join me!!’ B-But the
second guy just shakes his head. He says ‘Wh-What do you think I am
crazy?’ He suh-says … ‘you’d turn it o when I was half way across!’232

1 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Never Born … Never Die (A Lecture on Gebser’s Ever-Present-Origin)’, e

Whim <http://thewhim.blogspot.ie/2014/10/never-born-never-die-lecture-on-gebsers.html>
(accessed 19/10/14). is text has been developed in conversation with Vordb, from whom I have
sought, and kindly been granted, authorization to use his words in reference to his work. I would
like to thank him and Nicola for their guidance and patience.
2 See Nicola Masciandaro, commentary on Valter, ‘Black Metal Sound Poetry’, Surreal Documents
<http://surrealdocuments.blogspot.ie/2009/02/black-metal-sound-poetry.html> (accessed
21/10/14).
3 Karl Steel, ‘Satan Laughing Spreads His Wings’, In the Middle
<http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2007/03/satan-laughing-spreads-his-wings.html>
(accessed 21/10/14). Cf. Ethan Knapp’s call for recognition of the phenomenological project within
medieval studies: ‘We have reinvented the phenomenological project under many guises, especially
in medieval studies. is new attention to the life of things, and to the boundaries between human
and the non-human or the post-human all take up powerfully the kinds of questions advanced in
the twenties by Husserl and Heidegger’s early work. And our focus on desires, and wants, comes
back around to intentions and subjects, transcendental or not […] is is not just the new Middle
Ages, this is our Middle Ages, the Middle ages of a modern phenomenological subjectivity’
(Knapp, ‘Publish or Perish’, paper presented at the 44th International Congress on Medieval
Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2009, cited in Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Eros as Cosmic Sorrow:
Locating the Limits of Di erence in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love and e Cloud of
Unknowing’, Mystics Quarterly, 35 (2009), pp. 59–103; p. 83 (note 9).
4 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘What Is is at Stands Before Me?: Metal as Deixis’, Re ections In e
Metal Void, ed. by Niall W. R. Scott (Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2012), pp. 11–24. Cf. Nicola
Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”: A Gloss on Heavy Metal’s Originary Song’, in
Reconstruction, 9.2 (2009), Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
<http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/092/masciandaro.shtml> (accessed 21/10/14).
5 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya’, in Hideous Gnosis, ed. by Masciandaro
(New York: n.p., 2010), pp. 67–92.
6 Forthcoming in Mors Mystica: Black Metal eory Symposium, ed. by Edia Connole and Nicola
Masciandaro (London: Schism, 2015).
7 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. by Ronald L. Martinez
 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. xvi–xvii, cited in Nicola Masciandaro,
‘Labor, Language, Laughter: Aesop and the Apophatic Human’, Su cient Unto e Day: Sermones
Contra Solicitudinem (London: Schism, 2014), pp. 113–14, Masciandaro’s emphasis.
8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty o en used this phrase (pensée de survol); see, for example, e Visible and
the Invisible, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 73.
9 Richard A. Cohen, ‘Humanism and the Rights of Exegesis’, in Ethics, Exegesis, and Philosophy:
Interpretation a er Levinas (West Nyack, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 239, cited in
Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies and the Scission of the Word: A Personal Archaeology of
Headbanging Exegesis’, Journal of Cultural Research, 15. 3 (2011), p. 248.
10 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1962). Cf. omas Nagel, e View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986).
11 See Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies’, p. 249.
12 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. by George Van Den Abbeele (London and
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 91.
13 See Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”’, regarding the lines ‘Is it the end my friend?’
and ‘Satan’s coming ‘round the bend’, respectively. Cf. Edia Connole, ‘ e Missing Subject of
Accelerationism: Heavy Metal’s Wyrd Realism’, in this volume.
14 Nicola Masciandaro, in ‘Dominik Irtenkauf interviews Nicola Masciandaro (January 2011)’, e
Whim <http://thewhim.blogspot.ie/2011/02/interview-on-bmy.html> (accessed 21/10/14).
15 Masciandaro, ‘Dominik Irtenkauf interviews (January 2011)’.
16 See Nicola Masciandaro on method in ‘Conjuring the Phantasm’ (a review of Giorgio Agamben,
e Signature of All ings: On Method [2009]), in eory and Event, 13 (2010), Project Muse
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae.13.3.html> (accessed 21/10/14), and in
‘Dominik Irtenkauf interviews (2011)’: ‘Nothing signi cant is produced without method […] And
it is precisely in relation to the speci city of method, to its necessary individuation, that there is
no general way’. Cf. Edmund Husserl on style, in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenological Constitution, trans.
by R. Rojcewisz and A. Schuwer (London: Kluwer, 1993): ‘Every man [human being] has his
character, his style of life in a ection and action, with regard to the way he has of being motivated
by such and such circumstances’ (p. 283).
17 Masciandaro, ‘Dominik Irtenkauf interviews (2011)’. Cf. Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies’, p. 249, and
‘Labor, Language, Laughter’, pp. 111–20, respectively. On all occasions, Masciandaro is either
alluding implicitly or explicitly to the passage from Agamben in Stanzas that is cited in the
opening of the introduction above, which ends with the conjecture that criticism ‘neither
represents nor knows, but knows the representation’ (p. xvii).
18 Friedrich Nietzsche, us Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by A. Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), p. 175, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Metal as Deixis’, p. 13.
19 Giorgio Agamben, e Coming Community, trans. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 90, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Metal as Deixis’, p. 13.
20 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy’, Collapse, VI (2010), p. 51.
Cf. Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies’: ‘ e creativity of commentary is legible in the word itself, which,
from comminisci (“to devise,” “invent”), indicates the power of thinking with something.
Regarding the development of metal studies, commentary may thus be deployed, practically and
theoretically, to productively engage the distinction between studying with and studying about
 metal, as well as to hold metal studies formally open to the commentarial currents of metal
culture’ (p. 247).
21 Masciandaro, ‘Labor, Language, Laughter’, p. 117.
22 Masciandaro, ‘Conjuring the Phantasm’. Masciandaro is quoting Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and
History: e Destruction of Experience, trans. by Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1993), p. 19.
23 Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies’: ‘I have formulated the rubric of black metal theory as a third term
that exploits and exacerbates this distinction [between studying with and studying about metal]:
“Not black metal. Not theory. Not not black metal. Not not theory. Black metal theory. eoretical
blackening of metal. Metallic blackening of theory. Mutual blackening. Nigredo in the intoxological
crucible of symposia” (<http://blackmetaltheory.blogspot.com>)’ (p. 247, note 2). See Agamben,
Infancy and History, pp. 37–53. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: e Place of Negativity,
trans. by Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1991). e in in-fari of Agamben is also essentially inscribed in heavy metal’s originary song, Black
Sabbath’s ‘Black Sabbath’, in the line ‘Oh, no, no, please God help me!’, where ‘[f]irst, the repetition
of no, like the neti neti of Advaita Vedanta, asserts the reality of being that survives all subtraction
and negation, a self within the person that can witness its execution, cf. the disembodied vision
produced in Slayer’s “On my wall, your head!” (“Piece by Piece,” Reign in Blood). Second, the tone
of Ozzy’s voice here approaches the whimpering of the damned, an unmaking of the person that
discloses the babyishness of its separative ego-mind. Cf. the possessiveness mocked by Metallica’s
“Someone help me | Oh please God help me | ey are trying to take it all away” (“Ride the
Lightning,” Ride the Lightning). is conjunction of terri ed apophatic speaking and psychic
infant sacri ce produces, through a kind of logospasmic birth-pang, the real presence of the true I,
the present-tense being [fans] that resolves and transcends the distinction between God and me’
(Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”’).
24 Masciandaro, ‘Labor, Language, Laughter’, p. 121.
25 Agamben, Stanzas, p. 59, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Conjuring the Phantasm’, (note 2). Cf. ‘Labor,
Language, Laughter’, p. 121.
26 Agamben, Stanzas: ‘For if in the human sciences subject and object necessarily become identi ed,
then the idea of a science without object is not a playful paradox, but perhaps the most serious
task that remains entrusted to our time’ (p. xvi), cited in Masciandaro, ‘Conjuring the Phantasm’.
Cf. Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies’, regarding black metal theory as that which is grounded in ‘the
experience of a dilated present where “content of transmission and act of transmission […] are
wholly identi ed”’ (pp. 248–9); Giorgio Agamben, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness
and Historical Redemption’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. by Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 153.
27 Edia Connole, Paul J. Ennis, and Nicola Masciandaro, with Ben Russell, ‘A Spell to Ward O the
Darkness: Live II’, Darklight Film Festival, e Generator, Smith eld Square, Dublin, 27/04/14.
28 Masciandaro, ‘Conjuring the Phantasm’. Cf. Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”’,
concerning the lines, ‘Find out I’m the chosen one’, and ‘Watch those ames get higher and higher’,
respectively. e latter is particularly pertinent: ‘True knowing destroys the I, the self that cannot
know itself. “ at is the Truth. at is the Self. ou art at” (Chandogya Upanisad, VI.8.7.)’.
29 Raoul Vaneigem, e Movement of the Free Spirit, trans. by Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson
(New York: Zone, 1998), p. 12, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Conjuring the Phantasm’ (note 5), my
emphasis. Cf. Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”’, concerning the lines, ‘Figure in
black which points at me’, and ‘Big black shape with eyes of re’, respectively.
30 ‘[…] both represents and knows by unknowing the representation’ (Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies’,
 p. 249).
31 Masciandaro, ‘Labor, Language, Laughter’, p. 121.
32 Giorgio Agamben, ‘For a Philosophy of Infancy’, in Public, 21, available from York University
<http://www.yourku.ca/public/backissu/v21_1.html> (accessed 21/10/14). Cf. Masciandaro’s last,
say, seven texts, at the time of writing: ‘Never Born … Never Die’, a keynote presentation on the
theme of crisis and mutation (‘underpinning the complex and con icting undulations of human
evolution’), delivered at the ‘Forty-Fourth Annual International Jean Gebser Society Conference’,
17–18 October 2014, Judson Memorial Assembly Hall, New York, NY; ‘I Am Not Supposed To Be
Here: Birth and Mystical Detection’, an essay on ‘the wrongness of being’ as read through the
television show True Detective, written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cari Joji Fukunaga
(HBO, 2014), in True Detection, ed. by Edia Connole, Paul J. Ennis, and Nicola Masciandaro
(London: Schism, 2014), pp. 65–74; ‘Silence: A Darkness To Ward O All Spells’, a keynote
presentation on the theme of silence (‘as a dark intensive invalidation of human identity’), as read
through the experimental lm A Spell to Ward O the Darkness, written and directed by Ben
Rivers and Ben Russell (2013; London, UK: Soda Pictures, 2014), DVD, delivered at ‘A Spell to
Ward O the Darkness: Live II’, Darklight Film Festival, 27 April 2014, e Generator, Smith eld
Sq., Dublin, Ireland; ‘Following the Sigh’, a presentation on the theme of pessimism (forming one
part of a two-part lecture series concerning ‘a universal theory of sorrow’), delivered at ‘ e
Congress of Pessimism’, e Bureau of Melodramatic Research, 23–24 April 2014, Bucharest,
Romania; ‘Astonished by Christina’, a poetic (chapter-by-chapter) summary of the Vitae Sanctae
Christinae Mirabilis Virginis by omas of Cantimprae, in PLINTH, Issue 1
<http://www.plinth.us/issue01/masciandaro.html> (accessed 21/10/14); ‘Amor Fati: A Prosthetic
Gloss’, a presentation-commentary on Nietzsche’s e Gay Science in light of the cybernetic,
delivered at ‘Cyber-Nietzsche: Tightropes, Tunnels, Net-&-Meshwork’, e New York/ New School
Nietzsche Workshop @ Western, April 13, 2013, e New School, NY; ‘ e Sweetness (of the Law)’, an
essay that undertakes ‘an analysis of the logical and phenomenal relation between sweetness and
the law in order to argue for the universal ontological illegality of worry’, in Non Liquet: e
Westminster Online Papers Series, Law and the Senses Series: e Taste Issue, 2013, pp. 40–60.
33 Agamben, ‘For a Philosophy of Infancy’.
34 Ibid.
35 Michael O’Rourke, ‘ e Mutual Pestering of Black Metal and eory’, in P.E.S.T., ed. by Michael
O’Rourke and Karin Sellberg (Milan: Radical Matters, forthcoming 2015).
36 Masciandaro, ‘Labor, Language, Laughter’, p. 112.
37 ‘We are, and to the extent we that we are, we are always waiting for something. We are called upon
by something as a whole. is “as a whole” is the world […] is is where we are driven in our
homesickness: to being as a whole. Our very being is this restlessness […] We name it nitude’
(Martin Heidegger, e Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. by
William McNeill and Nicholas Walker [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995], p. 5, cited in
Masciandaro ‘Labor, Language, Laughter’, p. 112).
38 Masciandaro ‘Labor, Language, Laughter’, p. 111.
39 Cf. Masciandaro, ‘Metal as Deixis’, p. 4.
40 Masciandaro, ‘Metal as Deixis’, p. 4.
41 Black Sabbath, ‘Black Sabbath’, Black Sabbath (Vertigo, 1970).
42 Masciandaro, ‘Metal as Deixis’, p. 1. Cf. Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”’.
43 Masciandaro, ‘Labor, Language, Laughter’, p. 117.
44 Ibid., p. 117. Cf. ‘Yes, Black Metal eory is, as Curtis Bignell says “half-arsed.” We have, most of
 the time, no idea what it is that we are doing and remain in a state of productive ba ement,
because we don’t really know, cannot anticipate, what we are doing will bring about.’ (O’Rourke,
‘ e Mutual Pestering’, forthcoming).
45 Masciandaro, ‘Labor, Language, Laughter’, p. 117. Cf. inter-scission in O’Rourke, ‘ e Mutual
Pestering’, forthcoming.
46 Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies’, p. 249. What follows here, is, for the most part, not (good) black
metal theory, it functions instead as a kind of lemma, as if it were, on another occasion, a gloss of a
gloss of heavy metal’s originary song. For while I do not claim to know what this is that stands
before me, I do write from an essentially epistemic point of view and, accordingly, hazard a good
guess, which emerges vicariously in the text through black metal theory’s commentarial method.
ough, to borrow my colleague Gary J. Shipley’s turn of phrase, I am not certain that it is not
entirely unequivocal, I would liken this method to riding a motorcycle: the ‘Fast melting steel
|Fortune on wheels’ synonymous with black metal since Venom, in whose eponymous lines,
‘Riding hell’s stallions | Bare-back and free’ (‘Black Metal’, Black Metal [Neat Records, 1982]) I am
reminded of what Heidegger would call the ‘ready-to-hand’ nature of black metal in, what is for
me, (good) black metal theory. See Heidegger on the ‘ready-to-hand’, ‘unready-to-hand’, and
‘present-at-hand’, in Being and Time, p. 98. Cf. Craig Bourne, Philosophical Ridings: Motorcycles
and the Meaning of Life (Oxford: One World, 2007), pp. 56–61.
47 Masciandaro, ‘Labor, Language, Laughter’, p. 123. Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, ‘Mihi magna quaestio factus
sum: e Privilege of Unknowing’, in e Journal of Religion, 85 (2005), pp. 1–24. At maximum, as
Masciandaro avers in following Carlo Rovelli, ‘Without unknowing, reality itself shuts down. […]
And not simply in some vague phenomenological sense [“ e cosmos has no foundation save that
of ignorance […] this is the rst elementary lesson of the void” (Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Absolute
Secrecy: On the In nity of Individuation’, in Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary
Philosophy of Religion: e Enigmatic Absolute, ed. by Joshua Ramey and Mathew Harr Farris
[forthcoming]), hence]: “ e lack of certainty is not a weakness in scienti c thinking but rather its
strength […] Reality continues to appear to us as other than we had thought. And in the evolution
of our love story with it lies the growth of our knowledge”’ (Masciandaro, ‘Labor, Language,
Laughter’, p. 120; Rovelli, ‘Anaximander’s Legacy’, Collapse, 5 [2009], pp. 69–70).
48 Marion, ‘ e Privilege of Unknowing’, p. 9. Marion is quoting G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel and the Human
Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6), with commentary,
trans. and ed. by Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1983), pp. 89–90, translation
modi ed.
49 Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction To e Reading Of Hegel: Lectures On e Phenomenology Of Sprit,
trans. by James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 140.
50 G. W. F. Hegel, e Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by J. B. Baillie (Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 2003), p. 408.
51 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), p. 420.
52 Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, p. 88, cited in Marion, ‘ e Privilege of Unknowing’, p. 9.
53 Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”’.
54 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Sublime Celestia’, e Whim <http://thewhim.blogspot.ie/2009/10/sublime-
celestia.html> (accessed 21/1/14). Cf. Agamben, Stanzas, p. 48.
55 Agamben, Language and Death, p. 14, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Metal as Deixis’, p. 1, quotation
modi ed to omit ‘the’.
56 What the medievals a er Aristotle, and from Anselm of Canterbury on, termed haecceitas, and
what Heidegger termed facticity, that which accounts for the individuality of an individual, or the
individuation of di erent members of a species. For a good introductory reading on the subject,
see for instance, Philip Toner, ‘Haecceitas and the Question of Being: Heidegger and Duns Scotus’,
in Kritike, 2 (2008), pp. 146–54. With respect to my conjecture on corpse paint as it relates, cf. ‘ e
rites and rituals, the shadows, the make-up, are re ections of our personality, not self-erasure’
(Nick Richardson, ‘Looking Black’, in Black Metal: Beyond e Darkness, ed. by Tom Howells
[London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012], pp. 149–69; p. 165, my emphasis).
57 H. P. Lovecra , ‘ e Outsider’, in e H. P. Lovecra Omnibus 3: e Haunter of the Dark and
Other Tales (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 11, cited in various places throughout
Masciandaro’s oeuvre, most notably perhaps, in ‘ e Sorrow of Being’, in Qui Parle, 19 (2010), pp.
9–35; p. 9.
58 Masciandaro, ‘Metal as Deixis’, p. 3.
59 Ibid., p. 5.
60 Masciandaro, ‘Metal as Deixis’, pp. 5–6.
61 Masciandaro, comment on Valter, ‘Black Metal Sound Poetry’.
62 Solo audio projects, where Vordb is alone. N.B. Black Murder is di erent from the later audio
project of Vorlok.
63 Common audio projects, that are mainly Vordb’s, but where he invites someone to participate.
64 Common audio projects, where the creation is equally divided between Vordb and another
member of LLN. Vordb also participated in various audio projects that were not his, but where he
produced, composed, or played a session instrument, amongst them: Ak, Arkha Sva, Black
Murder, Vèrmibdrèb, Vlad Tepes, Seviss, and Torgeist.
65 Masciandaro, ‘Metal as Deixis’, p. 4.
66 Cf. ‘We marvel to this day how the Europeans could lapse into interpreting as nihilistic the
nothingness of which you speak in that lecture [“What is Metaphysics?”]. To us, emptiness is the
lo iest name for what you mean to say with the word “Being”’ (Martin Heidegger, ‘A Dialogue On
Language, between a Japanese and an Inquirer’, On e Way To Language, trans. by Peter D. Hertz
[HarperCollins: San Francisco, 1971], p. 19). at there is a tendency in the Western metaphysical
tradition to presuppose and posit a foundation for being and language in negativity is addressed
most explicitly by Agamben in Language and Death. Here, Agamben sets himself the task of
inverting this tendency through an experimentum linguae that allows for a new experience of
language, as well as a revised conception of the relation of actuality and potentiality. In brief, the
philosopher suggests that a consideration of language and death is concomitant with a
consideration of the place of negativity within Western metaphysical thinking, which requires an
examination of the correlative philosophical presupposition that human being is a being-
towards-language and -towards-death. is raises the question of whether this determination of
human being as speaking, mortal being does not in fact eclipse, rather than reveal, humanity’s
proper nature, since it suggests that the ethos or ethical dwelling place of humanity resides in
nothingness or negativity. is radical ungroundedness of being qua language and death leads
Agamben to re ect on the problem of voice as the fundamental metaphysical problem and
originary structure of negativity, which in turn leads to the insight that humanity’s ethos in voice
must be unshackled from the informulability to which Western metaphysics has consigned it. All
this goes to say, the collapsing of metaphysics into ethics that the ungroundedness of being qua
voice generates is increasingly evident as nihilism. Because so much contemporary critical
thought has failed to understand let alone rede ne this nihilism, nothingness, or originary
 negativity at the heart – or ethical dwelling place – of humanity this is the task that Agamben sets
us, which, he argues, ‘must be done through a thinking of the experience of language, in which
language is no longer grounded in the essential negativity of Voice’ (Catherine Mills, e
Philosophy of Agamben [Stocks eld: Acumen, 2008], pp. 11–12).
67 Some demo titles constituting the rst chapter of Brenoritvrezorke, 1995–6.
68 Some song titles from the demos constituting the rst chapter of Brenoritvrezorke, 1995–6.
69 Je rey T. Schnapp, ‘Virgin Words: Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua Ignota and the Development of
Imaginary Languages Ancient to Modern’, in Exemplaria, 3 (1991), pp. 267–98; p. 273.
70 Nicola Masciandaro, commentary on Ben Woodard, ‘ e Blackish Green Of e Greenish Black,
Or, e Earth’s Coruscating Darkness’, in Glossator 6: Black Metal (2012), pp. 73–88; p. 84. Cf.
‘Regarding the development of metal studies, commentary may thus be deployed, practically and
theoretically, to productively engage the distinction between studying with and studying about
metal, as well as to hold metal studies open to the commentarial currents of metal culture’;
‘Continuum’s “33 1/3” book series and the forthcoming Black Metal Revolution book
(http://www.blackmetalrevolution.com) are prominent examples of album-commentary projects
that move across this distinction. Commentary is also visible within the medievalism of metal
culture, for example in the Encylopedia Metallum Project (http://www.metal-archives.com) and in
the cover image of Vulcano’s Tales from the Black Book’ (Masciandaro, ‘Metal Studies’, p. 248).
While Woodard’s essay, a commentary on Wolves in the rone Room’s lyrical totality at the time
of writing, and Masciandaro’s own commentary on heavy metal’s originary song, ‘Black Sabbath’s
“Black Sabbath”’, are exemplary instances of black metal theory’s commentarial method, for a
more recent example, see Lieut. Nab Saheb of Kashmir and Denys X. Abaris, O.S.L., Bergmetal:
Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond (Austin and New York: HWORDE, 2014).
71 For all but the Entity, Vordb.
72 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 1965), pp. 422–6, cited in Valter, ‘Black Metal Sound Poetry’.
73 Valter, ‘Black Metal Sound Poetry’, and see the earlier assertion regarding the same in Valter, ‘Black
Metal Production’, Surreal Documents <http://surrealdocuments.blogspot.ie/2006/11/black-
metal-production.html> (accessed 21/10/14). Cf. carnival as the ‘transient overturning of power
relationships, transgression, absurdity, and burlesque: the displacement of high by low culture; a
world of masks, animalism and sensuousness; a mix of gender inversions, crude misogyny and an
overthrow of conventional sexuality; and a nal return to what is held to be cultural and social
normality’ (H. R. Kedward, ‘ e anti-carnival of collaboration: Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien
[1974]’, in French Film: Texts and Contexts, ed. by S. Hayward and G. Vincendeau [London and
New York: Routledge, 2000], pp. 227–39; p. 235).
74 Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, trans. by Alastair Mc Ewen (London: Maclehose Press, 2011), p. 140.
75 Eco, On Ugliness, p. 142.
76 Cf. ‘According to classic medieval criteria […] deformity becomes glorious’ (Eco, On Ugliness, p.
142).
77 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 2; on fatrasie, soties, and their relation to coq à l’âne, see pp.
422–6.
78 Nathan T. Birk, ‘South of Helvete (And East of Eden)’, in Black Metal: Beyond e Darkness, pp. 8–
28; p. 16.
79 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 11.
80 is is not true. I have kept it in here for poetic value, but Vordb assures me that it is ‘a pure
 invention, like so many things about me/the Circle’ (private communication, 11/02/15).
81 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 11.
82 Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. and ed. by M.A. Screech (London: Penguin
Books, 2006), passim.
83 K-punk, ‘Phonograph Blues’, Abstract Dynamics <http://k-
punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.html> (accessed 21-10-14), cited in Valter,
‘Brenoritvrezorkre – Four demos’, available from Surreal Documents
<http://surrealdocuments.blogspot.ie/2009/02/br.html> (accessed 21/10/14).
84 Valter, ‘Brenoritvrezorkre – Four demos’.
85 Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego Sum (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), p. 162.
86 Cf. ‘ at once a mechanical instrument, an organ of speech production, and what opens to (opens
into exteriority) the soul of the one whose being it is to utter’ (Jacques Derrida, On Touching: Jean-
Luc Nancy [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005], p. 29).
87 Nancy, Ego Sum, p. 162.
88 Cf. ‘wie die Sprache, die Adam sprach, so war nach Hildegard auch die Musik, die Adam vernahm,
eine paradiesische—es war der Gesang der Engelchöre. Von daher kommt es, daß im Menschen,
wenn er Musik vernimmt, wehmütige Erinnerungen an seine paradiesische Heimat entstehen’
(Michael Embach, Die Schri en Hildegards Von Bingen: Studien Zu Ihrer Überlieferung und
Rezeption im Mittlealter und in der frühen Neuzeit [Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003], p. 269,
translation provided by Sarah L. Higley in Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language; An Edition,
Translation, and Discussion [New York and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007], p. 121).
89 Henry Cornelius Agrippa, ree Books of Occult Philosophy, Bk. III, Ch. xxiii, trans. by James
Freake (London: Gregory Moule, 1651), pp. 412–14, cited in Higley, Unknown Language, pp. 44–5,
my emphasis. Cf. ‘Demons lack lungs and tongue, but by art they can create and show a tongue, as
well as teeth and lips, according to the condition of the body. Hence they cannot truly talk in their
own right, but since they have understanding, when they wish to express the understanding of
their mind, it is not vocal expressions that they use. ey knock air that has not been drawn in
through inhaling, as in the case of humans, but has been held within an assumed body, and then
they release it in an articulate way to the air outside up to the ears of the listener. at something
resembling a voice can be made with air drawn that has been drawn in by a process other than
inhalation is shown by certain non-breathing animals, which are said to give voice, and by certain
other instruments, as the Philosopher says in e Soul, Bk. 2 [2.8]. For when the herring is taken
out of the water, it suddenly lets out a vocal sound| and dies […] If someone wishes to, let him
[also] examine St. omas in the Commentary on Pronouncements, Bk. 2, Dist. 8, Art. 5 [actually,
2.8.1.5]’ ( e Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Male carum, Part II
107B, trans. by Christopher S. Mackay [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011], pp. 305–6).
90 Clarice Lispector, e Passion According to G.H., trans. by Idra Novey (London and New York:
Penguin Books, 2014), p. 169.
91 Vordb, ‘Brenoritvrezorkre’, Kaleidarkness
<http://www.kaleidarkness.com/brenoritvrezorkre.html> (accessed 21/11/14).
92 Vordb, ‘Music Technique’, Kaleidarkness <http://www.kaleidarkness.com/music_technique.html>
(accessed 21/11/14). Cf. Vordb, ‘Concepts’, Kaleidarkness
<http://www.kaleidarkness.com/concepts.html> (accessed 21/11/14).
93 Vordb, ‘Brenoritvrezorkre’, and Vordb, ‘Biography of e Entity’, Kaleidarkness
<http://www.kaleidarkness.com/biography_of_the_entity.html> (accessed 21/11/14).
94 Cf. Woodard, ‘ e Blackish Green’, and Niall Scott, ‘Blackening the Green’, in Melancology: Black
Metal eory and Ecology, ed. by Scott Wilson (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2014),
pp. 66–80.
95 Hildegard’s notion of viriditas corresponds with that of ‘living spring’ (Job. 3.23) in Hadewijch, a
thirteenth-century Flemish Beguine regarded as the most important proponent of love mysticism,
described as ‘a preeminently feminine phenomenon [whose] essential hallmark, as shown by the
term “love” (minne), is that union with God is lived here on earth as a love relationship: God lets
himself be experienced as Love (Minne) by the person who goes out to meet him with love (minne)’
(Paul Mommaers, ‘Preface’, in Hadewijch: e Complete Works, trans. by Mother Columba Hart,
O.S.B. [Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980], p. xi). e keyword in all of Hadewijch’s literary works is
love, and in her Poems in Couplets she speaks of ‘Love’s Sevens Names’, the sixth of which is ‘living
spring’. Here, we see the attributes it shares with Hildegard’s notion of viriditas, as ‘ is owing
forth and this re ux | Of one into the other, and this growth in God, | Surpass the mind and
understanding, | e intelligence and capacity | Of human creatures. | But still we have it in our
nature: | e hidden ways where Love makes us walk | And where she lets us receive, amid blows,
that sweet kiss – | Here it is that we receive that sweet giving life, | So that Life shall give life in our
life. | is name is living spring because this spring nourishes | And preserves in man a living soul:
| e spring gushes forth, living itself, from life | And, from this life, brings forth new life to our life.
| e living spring ows at all times, | In long-standing virtues and in new ardor. | As the river
pours forth its waves | And receives them back again into itself, | So love engulfs all her gi s. | is
is why Love is named spring and life’ ([128–148], p. 356). In my assertion above, regarding ‘the
dark fountain from which black metal theory’s own commentarial method springs’, I am
simultaneously alluding to Vordb’s ‘Fountain of Darkness’ (discussed below) and
viriditas’/spring’s relation to apophaticism, what some term ‘darkness mysticism’. For use of the
term ‘darkness mysticism’, see for example, Eugene acker, ‘ e Subharmonic Murmur of Black
Tentacular Voids’, In e Dust Of is Planet: Horror Of Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Winchester and
Washington: Zero Books, 2011). For darkness mysticism’s relation to notions of viriditas, ‘living
spring’, and/or ‘fountain’ (from Old French fontaine, from late Latin fontana, feminine of Latin
fontanus, adjective from fons, font – ‘a spring’), cf. ‘the dark, the dark from whence each of us came,
the nihilo without which there is no creatio, yes, that dark, “the fecund dark in which we create”
(Cocteau), […] Master Niall of Preston [aka Niall Scott] and not Meister Eckhart is right (“Nature
throws us into darkness”– the scintlilla animae unites  when what  understanding requires is
distance); the dark that comes rst and abides as the future into which being is projected, the
conditio sine qua non open to any possibility, prime matter, formlessness receptive to the forms we
choose to give to the world, our world, rotating in the dark, the dark that allows gravity to act and
our feet to stay planted to the earth, thus the dark of life, the dark which allows refreshing sleep,
the dark of winter preparing spring renewal, that dark, yes, that dark, the dark of cool evenings
that dry the sweat of our brows, the dark of the water that does not re ect our face, the dark that
absorbs us so that we do not become self-absorbed, the dark of tarrying in an experience without
classifying it, the dark that resists the light-speed exchange of information in the name of free
thinking, the emptiness of not being full of oneself, that dark which people are afraid of because
they cannot be alone with themselves.  is dark’ (‘On e Dark’, Je Noonan
<http://www.je noonan.org/?p=2210> [accessed 21/12/14]).
96 Ignota Lingua per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, as the rubric of the Wiesbaden’s
Riesencodex would have it, ‘an unknown language brought forth by the simple being Hildegard’
(cited in Higley, Unknown Language, p. 4).
97 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 19.
98 Ibid., p. 20.
99 Valter, ‘Brenoritvrezorkre – Four demos’.
100 Vordb, ‘Languages’, Kaleidarkness <http://www.kaleidarkness.com/languages.html>(accessed
21/11/14).
101 My sincerest gratitude to the musicologist Juliet Forshaw for this sonorous suggestion. ‘Verzogle’
is the Gloatre title of a fascinating track from Vordb’s audio project Uatrb Vélèpre. e track was
recorded and released amongst the Circle between 1995–6. In alluding to its psychedelic origins,
Vordb describes it as his own insane vision of a music ‘that was already considered insane in its
own time, the 1960’s’. He says further, that it was produced during ‘a genuine outburst of creativity
that [he] felt and o en described as “a dark fever consuming [him] from the inside […] and which
led [him] to approach any style [he] felt attracted to and put [his] trademark on it!”.’ See Vordb,
‘Biography of e Entity’.
102 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 19.
103 Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars (New York: Spectra, 1994), p. 9. Cf. Masciandaro (citing Meher
Baba) above, ‘[t]he cosmos has no foundation save that of ignorance [greenness]’.
104 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 20.
105 ‘What is the artistic and ideological meaning of the genre? […] Events are conceived outside their
traditional o cial interpretation and o er, therefore, new opportunities for interpretation and
appreciation’ (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 423–4).
106 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 20.
107 Ibid., p. 111. Higley does not discuss Bakhtin at all, nor does she discuss any details of Russian
Formalism, or indeed that of ostranenie as a concept, beyond that provided in this quote. It is a
solitary, almost inexplicable, but for this author fortuitous instance in her discussion of
Hildegard’s Ignota Lingua. For Bakhtin’s thoughts on Russian Formalism, see ‘Discourse In e
Novel’ (1935), in M. M. Bakhtin, e Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holoquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422. On Bakhtin’s relation to Russian
Formalism, and on the meaning of the concept vnenakhodimost, as that which, like ostranenie,
suggests ‘the observing self must be distanced from what it perceives, if art is to happen’, see
Emerson, ‘Shklovsky’s ostranenie, Bakhtin’s vnenakhodimost (How Distance Serves an Aesthetics
of Arousal Di erently from an Aesthetics Based on Pain)’, Poetics Today, 26 (2005), pp. 637–64; p.
640.
108 Cf. ‘If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing,
that which lies beyond all vision and knowledge […] We would be like sculptors who set out to
carve a statue. ey remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by this
act of clearing aside (aphaeresis, “denial”) they show up the beauty which is hidden’ (Pseudo-
Dionysius, Mystical eology, 1025 A-B, in Complete Works, trans. by Colm Luibheid [New York:
Paulist Press, 1987], p. 138).
109 See Plotinus, e Enneads, V. 3. 17, trans. by Stephen MacKenna (London: Faber and Faber
Limited, 1969), p. 400; MacKenna translates this as ‘Cut away everything’. Cf. ‘Withdraw into
yourself and look. And if you do not nd yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue
that is made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other
purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So you do also: cut away all that is excessive,
straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make one glow of beauty
until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the
 perfect goodness established in the stainless shrine’ (Plotinus, Enneads, I. 6. 9, in MacKenna
translation, p. 63).
110 Falls of Rauros, e Light at Dwells In Rotten Wood (US: Bindrune Recordings, 2011). I am
indebted to Heather Masciandaro for unknowingly reminding me of this connection.
111 Cf. ‘I love black metal. In secret. In the secrecy wherein black metal keeps its own secret, above all
from itself, and below. “Love sets on re the one who nds it. At the same time it seals his lips so
that no smoke comes out. Love is meant to be experienced and not disclosed” [Meher Baba]’
(Nicola Masciandaro, ‘On the Mystical Love of Black Metal’, in this volume).
112 Ewert H. Cousins, ‘Bonaventure’s Mysticism of Language’, in Mysticism and Language, ed. by
Steven T. Katz (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 236–57; pp. 238–9, cited
in Higley, Unknown Language, p. 56.
113 Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago and London: e University of Chicago
Press, 1994), p. 3.
114 Denys Turner, e Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), p. 22. Cf. e Project Gutenberg Ebook of e Expositor’s Bible: e
Prophecies of Jeremiah, by C. J. Ball, pp. 58–73, <http://www.gutenberg.org/ les/42601/42601-
h/42601-h.htm> (accessed 21/11/14). e via negativa is, of course, mapped onto the rubric of
black metal theory, which proceeds from the negation of a rmation (‘Not black metal. Not
theory’.) to the negation of the negation of a rmation (‘Not not black metal. Not not theory’.) and
so on; cf. note 24, above.
115 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 56.
116 Ibid., pp. 56–7.
117 Ibid., p. 106.
118 See Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. by Mother Columba Hart, O.S.B, and Jane Bishop (New
York: Paulist Press, 1990).
119 ‘[…] a very clear predominance of “music,” and more precisely a sound research, the purpose of
which was to express Darkness through sound, established: the aim of Vordb Báthor Ecsed was
no longer to be found, nor was the de nition of the expression “Darkness through Sound,” which
would later be even better expressed as “audio Darkness,” and Vordb himself considered as a
Kaleidarkness’ (Vordb, ‘Moévöt’, Kaleidarkness <http://www.kaleidarkness.com/moevot.html>
[accessed 21/11/14]). Cf. Vordb, ‘Audio Darkness’, Kaleidarkness
<http://www.kaleidarkness.com/audio_darkness.html> (accessed 16/12/14).
120 Vordb, ‘Moévöt’.
121 Ibid.
122 A neologism introduced by writer Nic Pizzolatto, taken to mean ‘the psychological atmosphere of
a locale’ (Paul J. Ennis, ‘ e Atmospherics of Consciousness’, in True Detection, ed. by Edia
Connole, Paul J. Ennis, and Nicola Masciandaro [London: Schism, 2014], p. 98).
123 Vordb, ‘Moévöt’.
124 Valter, ‘Black Metal Sound Poetry’.
125 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 55.
126 Augustine, In evangelium Ioannis tractatus 32.7 (PL 35:132), cited in Higley, Unknown Language, p.
38. Cf. ‘When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2) And suddenly a
sound came from heaven like a rush of a mighty wind, and it lled the house where they were
sitting. 3) And there appeared to them tongues of re, distributed and resting on each of them. 4)
And they were all lled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave
 them utterance. 5) Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation
under heaven. 6) And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered,
because each one heard them speaking in his own language. 7) And they were amazed and
wondered, saying “Are these not all these who are speaking Galatians? 8) And how is it that we
hear, each of us in his own language?”’ (Acts 2: 1–8, RSV); ‘these signs will accompany those who
believe; in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up
serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the
sick, and they will recover’ (Mark 16: 17-8). In Masciandaro’s reading of Augustine’s sermons on
Pentecost – in ‘Pentecost and its A erlife: e Medieval Language Miracle’ (unpublished
manuscript) – which is, admittedly, more sophisticated than Higley’s, in this regard, the assertion
that nobody anymore need speak in tongues, while related to a post-Babelian appeal to the
universality of language, or to the ideal unity of all languages, is supplemented with the parallel
appeal to a universality of concepts (p. 17; note 26). Understood thus, Augustine’s assertion can be
seen in the light of what he perceived at this time as the lack of a necessity to literally speak in
tongues apropos of Acts, not because a unity of language had been achieved in the Church’s
adoption of Latin as its main language, as Higley suggests in Unknown Language (p. 38), but
because a harmony of mind and unity of language had been achieved through the teachings of the
Church which, though di ering in dialect from country to country, now spoke the one truth: ‘Held
together through love in a unity of mind, each member of the Church speaks the languages of the
others because speech is only secondary syllabic articulation’ (Masciandaro, ‘Medieval Language
Miracle’, p. 19). Cf. ‘Of course I speak them, because every language is mine, that is, of that body of
which I am a member. e Church, spread out through the nations, speaks in all languages. e
Church is the body of Christ, in this body you are a member. erefore, since you are a member of
this [or His] body which speaks all languages, believe that you speak all languages. For the unity of
the members is of one mind through love; and this very unity now speaks in the way one man
spoke then [at Pentecost]’ (Augustine, In Ioannis 32.7, PL 35:1645, cited in Masciandaro, ‘ e
Medieval Language Miracle’, p. 18).
127 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 36.
128 Schnapp, ‘Virgin Words’, p. 278.
129 Dante, ‘Inferno’, in Dante’s Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, trans. by Henry W.
Longfellow (Hertfordshire: Eagle Editions, 2007), p. 45. See Robert Hollander, ‘Dante and Paul’s
“ ve words with understanding,”’ in Occasional Papers No. 1, Center for Medieval and Early
Renaissance Texts and Studies (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,
1992), pp. 17–18; p. 20. Cf. Higley, Unknown Language, p. 55.
130 Dante, ‘Inferno’, p. 143. See Rutebeuf, ‘Le Miracle de éophile’, in Oeuvres Complète de Rutebeuf,
vol. II, ed. by Edmond Feral and Julia Bastin (Paris: Picard, 1960), p. 185, cited in Higley, Unknown
Language, p. 55.
131 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 39.
132 Ibid., p. 100.
133 See Masciandaro, ‘Medieval Language Miracle’.
134 Vordb, ‘Languages’, Kaleidarkness <http://www.kaleidarkness.com/languages.html> (accessed
21/12/14).
135 Vordb, ‘Biography of e Entity’.
136 Hildegard of Bingen, ‘Preface’, in Scivias, pp. 59–60.
137 Higley, Unknown Language, pp. 42–43.
138 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 43.
139 Hildegard of Bingen, Epistolarium, Letter 8, cited in Higley, Unknown Language, p. 22.
140 ‘ is kind of illumination is neither an acquisition of uency, literacy, or the ability to write
(though in some unspeci ed way Hildegard gains these before authoring the Scivias). Nor is it the
unutterable mystical illumination whose Christian prototype is Paul’s claim to have heard
“arcana verba, quae non licet homini loqui” (2 Cor 12:4). Instead, Hildegard claims a knowledge of
speci c texts which is mysteriously separate from the knowledge of their words, which she does
not have. If her ignorance of their words was simply a matter of not being able to read them or not
having heard them, the knowledge she describes could be easily interpreted as an infusion of the
same kind of knowledge others have of Scripture through reading. But her ignorance of syllables,
cases, and tenses, which implies an ignorance of Latin, precludes this. Nor does Hildegard describe
a general miraculous spiritual wisdom roughly equivalent to what the Scriptures communicate.
Rather, at one and the same time she a rms both the separateness of the meaning of Scripture
from its words and, by claiming knowledge of speci c texts, their inseparability. Or, as Bartlett
notes, “ e ‘ ery light’ reveals to Hildegard the meaning of the page without enabling her to
understand the written words themselves, a textual version of the gi of tongues, a re-enactment
of Pentecost” (p. 48). Again, the only model of language which permits this paradox is that
sketched above, where the verbum mentis is both distinct from every verbum vocis which
expresses it and mysteriously united with it, where it belongs both to none and to every language.
By understanding Latin texts without understanding Latin, Hildegard asserts the unity of
language. In the Pentecostal ery light which bridges the gap between known and unknown
languages, language is redeemed from the division at Babel. And behind the linguistic paradox
which this redemption involves, there can be seen nothing less than those other great paradoxes
central to medieval culture, that “verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis” (Jn 1:14) and that
the Scriptures, translated into Latin, are nonetheless the word of God. e kind of illumination
which the accounts describe, however, cannot be understood apart from the more general
Christian ideal they express, namely, the superiority of spiritual rectitude and humility over
intellectual sophistication and book-knowledge, and more speci cally, the greater wisdom,
eloquence, and erudition of God’s servant, in short, that ideal whose Biblical models are, excluding
Pentecost itself, the twelve-year-old Christ’s impressive conversation with the teachers in the
temple (Lk 2:46–8) and the eloquent self-defense before the Jewish authorities by Peter and John,
“sine literis, et idiotae” (Acts 4:13), and which is enshrined in such stories as the defeat of a ock of
pagan philosophers by the virgin St. Catherine who at eighteen years of age “possessed every kind
of philosophy” through her love of God’ (Masciandaro, ‘Medieval Language Miracle’, pp. 25–7; p.
7). Cf. Anne Clark Bartlett, ‘Miraculous Literacy and Textual Communities in Hildegard of
Bingen’s Scivias’, Mystics Quarterly, 18 (1992), pp. 43–5.
141 Masciandaro, ‘Medieval Language Miracle’, pp. 7–8.
142 Ibid., p. 8.
143 ‘[O]mnis visibilis, et invisibilis creatura eophania i.e. divina apparition potest appellari; […]
siquidem […] in quantum occultus intelligitur, in tantum divinae claritati appropinquare videtur.
Proinde a eologia coelestium virtutum, inaccessibilis claritas saepe nominator tenebrositas’
(De divisione naturae, [Monasterii Guestphalorum: Aschendor , 1838], III.19), cited in
Masciandaro, ‘On e Mystical Love of Black Metal’. Cf. ‘namely, the domain of the primordial
cause of all visible things, “which is perceived by no intellect except that which formed it in the
beginning”’ (John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon [De Divisione Naturae], ed. by I. P. Sheldon
Williams and Édouard A. Jeauneau, trans. by John. J. O’Meara, 4 vols. [Dublin: Dublin Institute
for Advanced Studies, 1999–2009], II.551a, cited in Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Paradisical Pessimism:
On the Cruci ction Darkness and the Cosmic Materiality of Sorrow’, in Qui Parle: Critical
 Humanities and Social Sciences, 23 (2014), pp. 183–212; p. 197); ‘As explicated by Eriugena, the
divine image is constituted by an ontological auto-eclipse, the brilliant obscurity of being to itself,
its self-visible occlusion of essence: “the Divine likeness in the human mind is most clearly
discerned when it is only known that it is, and not known what it is . . . what it is is denied in it
[negatur in ea quid esse], and only that it is is a rmed” (IV.73). And this essential
incomprehensibility is likewise seen in all creatures so that the divine image is, as if
indistinguishably, at once something properly within the human speci cally and the general
visibility of the image to the human within all things, a living visibility or image-being that the
human, in the immanent space of its own being to itself, actually is. Ful lling the ontic role of an
entity paradisically placed in the midst of a divinely improper world, the human is the
unaccountable visibility of the divine darkness, the obscure comprehensibility of the
Incomprehensible and discernible indiscretion according to which the world’s non-revelation of
God is not simple privation but a strange plenitude that does not not reveal God. Such an
apophatic and positively negative concept of the divine image is visible in the negative epistemic
aspects of the cruci xion darkness: the spiritual blindness of “they [who] know not what they do”
(Luke 23:34), the radical question of divine abandonment marking the darkness’s end (Matt. 27:46),
and the fearful supernatural mystery of the visible darkness itself (Matt. 27:54)’ (p. 200).
144 Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, ed. by Elvira Borgstadt and Frank Tobin
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 117.
145 Ibn Al’ Arabi, e Bezels of Wisdom, trans. by Ralph Austin (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980). Cf.
Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Bask in the Glory of Bewilderment’, e Whim
<http://thewhim.blogspot.ie/2015/01/bask-in-glory-of-bewilderment.html> (accessed 10/02/15).
146 ‘[I]f you want to grasp the isolated and Alone’, he says, ‘you will not think’ (as cited in Eric D. Perl,
eophany: e Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite [New York: State University of
New York Press, 2007], pp. 12–13).
147 Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo-Dionysius: e Complete Works, trans. by Paul Rorem
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 139.
148 Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to their in uence
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 200.
149 Turner, Darkness of God, p. 19.
150 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 18.
151 ‘To make up a name of a person or a place, is to open the way to the world of the language the
name belongs to. It’s a gate to Elsewhere’ (Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Foreword’, in Encyclopedia of
Fictional and Fantastic Languages, ed. by Tim Conley and Stephen Cain [Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2006], pp. xvii–xviii, cited in Higley, Unknown Language, p. 110).
152 See McKenzie Wark, ‘ ere is another world, and it is this one’, Public Seminar Commons
<http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/01/there-is-another-world-and-it-is-this-
one/#.VKfGSyjWqcM> (accessed 21/12/14).
153 Masciandaro openly détourned Cioran’s words on the social media site Facebook (26/12/2014):
‘ ere is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? e inner smile provoked within
us by the patent nonexistence of both’ (E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, trans. by Richard
Howard [New York: Seaver Books, 1983], p. 134). Cf. ‘What would a world created [in] your image
look like?’ ‘It would be a “no” world. e obliteration of a “world” like the one of the humans’
(Interview with Belketre, in e Black Plague: First Chapter (And maybe the last one), ed. by Lord
Meyhna’ch [LLN Fanzine, 1995], p. 13).
154 Vordb, ‘Languages’.
155 Turner, e Darkness of God, pp. 19–20.
156 David Williams, Deformed Discourse: e Function of the Monster in Medieval ought and
Literature (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), pp. 5–6, cited in
Masciandaro, ‘Labour, Language, Laughter’, p. 119. Cf. ‘I pray to God to make me free of God’
(Meister Eckhart, e Complete Mystical Works, trans. by Maurice O’ C Walshe [New York: Herder
& Herder, 2009], Sermon 87).
157 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 85.
158 Ibid., p. 9.
159 Ibid., p. 86.
160 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘A Secret Vice’, e Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. by Christopher
Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mi in & Co., 1884), pp. 198–223, cited in Higley, Unknown Language,
pp. 8–19; p. 85.
161 Vordb, ‘Languages’.
162 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 85. Cf. Vordb on the misconceived ‘inchoateness’ of improvisation
in ‘Concepts: What is “instinctisation”?’ Kaleidarkness
<http://www.kaleidarkness.com/concepts.html> (accessed 21/10/14).
163 I am indebted to both Brooker Buckingham and Servane Hunt for pushing me on this point, i.e.
the critical similarities and, indeed, dissimilarities between Vander and Vordb’s languages. Cf. ‘You
have constructed your own language. Is it not important to understand what is being sung? Blasquiz:
Yes, it is very important, but in many cases the text is considered much to[o] important, so that
the music itself is ignored. It is then reduced to background music. e song is important but not
as deep as the music. e kobaïan language has emerged at the same time as the music. It is logical.
It is a physiological language, a ritual, a form of universal esperanto. It is a musical language. It is
easy to sing, and at the same time it shall prevent that people start to think about what we mean
with this text or that line. It is a form of music without semantics. It does not exclude, that we one
day will try something else. We have invented a phonetic language made by elem[e]nts of the
Slavonic and Germanic languages to be able to express some things musically. e language has of
course a content, but not word by word. e language has a united content, and that is what is
important’ (Poul Erik Sørensen, ‘Da Zeuhl Wort Mekanïk is Kobaïan for Magma’, MM
[August/September 1977] <http://www.danbbs.dk/~m-bohn/magma/interview.htm> [accessed
21/12/14]).
164 For a general overview of this in uence through apocalyptic thought see, for instance, Gary
Gomex, ‘Occultism in Music’, Illuminati News, (January, 2004) <http://www.illuminati-
news.com/art-and-mc/occultism-in-music.htm> (accessed 21/12/14). Cf. ‘Q: Where does the
aesthetic aspect of the group come from? A: I’ve always liked black, even as a child. It teaches
silence and concentration’ (‘English Translation of Christian Vander Interview in Re echir & Agir
[No. 41]’, Kohntarkosz – e Blog For Magma And Zeuhl Music
<http://kohntarkosz.blogspot.ie/2012/07/english-translation-of-vander-interview.html> [accessed
21/12/14]); ‘ e description of Vander’s music as “Teutonic” does not refer to his nationality. Steve
Lake notes that Vander is of Slavic descent – his grandfather was a nomadic gypsy violinist (18).
Nonetheless, Lake describes Vander’s Kobaïan language as “full of guttural noises, and strange
Teutonic syllables”; some contemporary critics even accused Magma of harboring Fascist or Nazi
sympathies, solely on account of the aggressive quality of their musical style and their penchant
for wearing black shirts with the Magma logo in performance. As Stella Vander (Christian’s wife
and a singer in the band) put it, “when Magma arrived on the French musical scene, it was enough
 to be dressed in black – amidst the groups of the time who, themselves, were dressed in a riot of
color – to be compared to a sect, and especially of the extreme right. Indeed, Christian never made
any attempt to contradict these assertions; he even added to them from time to time”’ (Kevin
Holm-Hudson, ‘Apocalyptic Otherness: black music and extraterrestrial identity in the music of
Magma’, Popular Music and Society [December 2003]
<http://robert.guillerault.free.fr/magma/textes/2003/apocalyptic.htm> [accessed 21/12/14]); ‘[Q.]
At the start, with albums like Magma/Kobaia, your view of humanity was very bleak. Do you feel
the same way now, especially with all the trouble with the world nowadays? Do you think
mankind can evolve past our current state? [A.] Alas, with time and in light of world events, I have
a vision of man becoming darker. ere is hope, however: it is likely that man will self-destruct,
which would be a boon for all the species populating the known and unknown universe’ (Rok
Podgrajšek, ‘Interview with Christian Vander’, trans. by Franck Carducci, e Rocktologist
<http://www.therocktologist.com/interview-with-christian-vander.html>[accessed 21/12/14]).
165 Valter, ‘Moévöt’, Surreal Documents
<http://surrealdocuments.blogspot.ie/search/label/French%20Black%20Metal> (accessed
21/12/14). Cf. ‘Yes, I totally agree with this opinion, and I would even say that Moévöt – especially
early Moévöt – is certainly cinematic […] I know parallels have already been made between my
audio Darkness and cinema. I remember an article on the internet, a few years ago, where someone
wrote about Moévöt and connected it to the cinema of the French movie director Jean Rollin’
(Vordb, ‘Music Technique’).
166 I’m thinking here of Ézley drèb Vepréu Zuèrkl Mazagvatre Erbsedréa (1991–4), in particular.
167 is is actually said of Mütilation’s Vampires of Black Imperial Blood (1995), but for me really
captures the early Moévöt aesthetic, which makes sense given that Moévöt is LLN’s ‘father audio
project’, as I go on to mention; see ‘chaossphere review’, Encylopedia Metallum: e Metal Archives
(November 2003)
<http://www.metalarchives.com/reviews/Mütiilation/Vampires_of_Black_Imperial_Blood/
٢٣٥٣/chaossphere/٤٦٢> (accessed ٢١/12/14).
168 Vordb, ‘Moévöt’.
169 ‘ e music and the lyrics come up at the same time. If I am singing, and if it has to be in Kobaïan,
they come up in Kobaïan. Sometimes there is a word that is maybe French or English and I leave it
in because it is there, and its natural. e lyrics come at the same time, parallel to the music. For
pieces like Mekanïk, they were not written in one shot or one session. I had to run a tape recorder
to be able to capture it instantly – it goes very fast. I sing with new words that I don’t know, and
when I am improvising further, the same words come back, even though I don’t know them. But I
didn’t learn them, they impose themselves on me’ (George Allen and Robert Pearson, ‘From
Coltrane to Kobaïa’, trans. by Laurent Goldstein, in Expose: Exploring the Boundaries of Rock
[1/11/1995] <http://www.expose.org/index.php/articles/display/the-christian-vander-interview-2>
[accessed 21/12/14]). Cf. ‘Creation, more precisely, the claim to creation is purely human’ (Vordb,
‘Moévöt’, e Black Plague, p. 19).
170 ‘Vander actually developed his own language based upon a time when he was playing free jazz in a
club. As the story goes, he was playing to an unappreciative audience; and he thought about the
people who were dying to play this music (think Coltrane – Vander viewed Coltrane as his major
hero according to the press of the time) and he wished the audience dead – and he was going to tell
them. What came out of his mouth, if we are to believe him, was the foundation of Kobaïan, the
language of all of the Magma music’ (Gomex, ‘Occultism in Music’).
171 Ian MacDonald, ‘An Irresistible Life Force’ (1975), Ork Alarm/ e Interesting Alternative
 <http://www.orkalarm.co.uk/?page_id=244> (accessed 21/12/14).
172 ‘In an <<ideal>> world as I view it (which does not exist of course but one can always dream
[…]), people who appreciate my works would also be people who respect them, and the people
who respect them would be also people who do not expose them out of the Darkness which they
are made for and, on the contrary, rejoice in keeping them in [this] Darkness, where [their] sole
place is’ (Vordb, ‘ e Fountain of Darkness’, Kaleidarkness
<http://www.kaleidarkness.com/the_fountain_of_darkness.html> [accessed 21/12/14]).
173 Hildegard of Bingen, ‘O Orzchis Ecclesia’, the oldest version of which is found in the eologische
Sammel handschri codex theol. et phil. 4. 25 of Stuttgart, cited in Higley, Unknown Language, p.
30; my translation is based on Higley’s, but respects the apophatic gesture of the original. Cf.
Higley in conversation with Daniel Mitsiu about its unknown words in the note below.
174 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 111.
175 Cf. ‘DM: is antiphon is written in Latin, with ve “unknown” words; one of these is found in the
glossaries, but here is declined like a Latin noun. Two others, you argue, are related to words in the
glossaries, and two are not found in them at all. In the antiphon, two of the “unknown” words
function as adjectives. What does this antiphon reveal about the unknown language, its scope and
its intended use? SH: is antiphon has been examined and debated by scholars interested in the
Lingua Ignota. e famous word is Loi ol (in the glossary, people, meaning speci cally those of the
Church, as opposed to the commonfolk: viliscal, glossed as vulgus). It is found in the antiphon as
loifolum, declined by the genitive plural ending in Latin. is is perfectly understandable: she
would apply the declensions to her own words because they are placed in a song meant to be sung
in Latin. I argue that both orzchis (immense) and crizanta are alterations of orschibuz (oak-tree)
and crizia (church), in order to: 1) equate the Catholic Church with an immense tree, and 2)
suggest that it is “enchurched” i.e. anointed by the songs sung in it. Crizanta, an adjective declined
as a feminine participle, is translated in two places where the antiphon is found: in the Riesencodex
of Weisbaden, the superscription reads ornata (decorated) but in the Sammelhandschri of
Stuttgart it is uncta (annointed). Since the association of the Church with unction or chrism is
suggested in her invented word for Church, I prefer the latter de nition. e two words that are
not found are caldemia and chorzta, glossed as aroma and choruscans (glittering). See my pages 30
and 31 for an in depth discussion of Hildegard’s extraordinary word-play. As for the scope and
intended use of her language hinted at in this antiphon, we can only surmise. We will never know
for certain how it is Hildegard invented her words. Whether she had a vocabulary she didn’t
record, or whether she invented these words on the spot when she composed this poem (through
association perhaps? and declining them spontaneously?) remains unclear’ (Daniel Mitsiu,
‘Interview with Sarah Higley on Hildegard of Bingen and her Unknown Language’, e Lion & e
Cardinal [Oct 2010] <http://www.danielmitsui.com/hieronymus/index.blog?start=1287118859>
[accessed 21/12/14]).
176 Higley, Unknown Language, pp. 30–2.
177 ‘ is concept [of a post-Edenic rational dei c language] brings me to Augustine’s argument in De
Magistro, that we speak, know, and teach not through our own agency but through the power
most able to reveal truth: Christ. Our thoughts and words derive from Him if we are to speak
truthfully’ (Higley, Unknown Language, pp. 32–3).
178 ‘[…] [that] hastens to the aid of all. With the passion of heavenly yearning, people who breathe
this dew produce rich fruit’ (Mathew Fox, Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen [Santa Fe, NM:
Bear & Co, 1985], p. 30).
179 Augustine, De Magistro, 9.25.1–4, Corpus christianorum series latina, vol. 19/11.2 (Turnhout:
Brepols, 1970); Against the Academicians: e Teacher, ed. and trans. by Peter King, (Indianapolis,
Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1995), p. 127, cited in Higley, Unknown Language, p.
33.
180 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1951, ed. by J. Klagge and A. Nordman
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), pp. 46–7.
181 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: e English Text of the ird Edition, trans. by
G. E. M. Anscombe (Englewood Cli s, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958). Cf. ‘My current personal, political
opinions and deep beliefs, and all that deals with my private life outside of my activities as Vordb
(including my real name) will never be exposed, in any way, on my website and in my works. In
their way, they too are underground and shall stay so. is is a personal as well as an artistic
choice, as such informations are not necessary for the Vordb Entity to ful ll its mission’ (Vordb,
‘Privacy’, Kaleidarkness <http://www.kaleidarkness.com/privacy.html> [accessed 27/11/2014]).
182 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 95.
183 Ibid., p. 96. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, starting with para. 202 on ‘rules’, and
explicated most fully in para. 243, p. 81 and p. 88.
184 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, p. 47, cited in Higley, Unknown Language, p. 96.
185 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 96.
186 e term ‘conlanger’ refers to people who construct languages within a particular contemporary
(Internet) context: ‘My interest in Hildegard’s Lingua was deepened by a discovery I made in 1998.
Since about 1991, over three hundred people from around the world, I found, were “playing” on a
Brown University sponsored listserv called CONLANG, a discussion group devoted to the
CONstruction of LANGuages.’ (Higley, Unknown Language, p. 81).
187 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 8.
188 Ibid., p. 96.
189 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness
(London and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 88: ‘6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is
mystical, but that it exists’. Cf. ‘things are in: not in the original, which runs, “[Tr. 6.44] Not how
the world is, is the mystical, but that it is”’ (Max Black, A Companion to Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971], p. 375).
190 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘ e Sorrow of Being’, in Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences,
19 (2010), pp. 9–35; p. 12. Cf. Wittgenstein ‘3.221 Objects can only be named. Signs are there
representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only
say how things are, not what they are’ (Tractatus, p. 15).
191 Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (London: Unwin, 1959), pp. 84–5.
192 Wittgenstein, Tractatus (7), p. 89. It is a far from inconsequential fact that this is Wittgenstein’s
seventh proposition, indicating, in mystical discourse, the plane of the unborn or, apropos of
Naragaroth, the annihilation of the self (coextensive with silence qua unknowing and non-
identity): ‘Seven tears are owing to the river | And six of ‘em are mine’ (Black Metal Ist Krieg [No
Colours Records, 2001]); ‘For in the same being of God where God is above being and above
distinction, there I myself was, there I willed myself and committed myself to create this being who
I am. erefore I am the cause of myself in the order of my being, which is eternal and not in the
order of my becoming, which is temporal. And therefore I am unborn, and in the manner in which
I am unborn I can never die. In my unborn manner I have been eternally, and am now, and shall
eternally remain’ (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 48, in e Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises
 and Defense, trans. by Bernard McGinn and Edmund College [Paulist Press: Mahwah, NJ, 1981], p.
202). Cf. Masciandaro’s treatment of Donn of Teutoberg Forest’s proclamation ‘I will destroy
cosmos and return to freedom!’ in ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, pp. 67–72; p. 70. Or perhaps more apposite is
the preceding appearance here of the very Wittgensteinian claim of Mayhem’s ‘Chimera’ (Chimera
[Season of Mist, 2004]): ‘ ere is gangrene in the tubes | Of the vermicular ethics of how | Your
world view presents itself | Contradictions in terms of how | Your life evolves in the chain of being
| I claim you were never part of reality’ [p. 69]).
193 Masciandaro, ‘ e Sorrow of Being’, p. 20.
194 Higley, Unknown Language, p. 110.
195 Masciandaro, ‘ e Sorrow of Being’, p. 26. Cf. ‘Logical so-called propositions shew the logical
properties of language and therefore of [the] Universe, but say nothing’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Notebooks 1914–1916 [Oxford: Blackwell, 1981], p. 108).
196 See Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.0272–2.063; 2.04: ‘ e totality of existing states of a airs is the
world’ (Wittgenstein, Tracatatus, pp. 8-9; p. 9).
197 Brian R. Clack, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999), p. 28.
198 Wittgenstein quoted in Clack, Philosophy of Religion, p. 31.
199 Ray Monk, ‘Foreword To e Great Minds Edition’, Tractatus, p. xi.
200 See ‘Letters to Ludwig von Ficker’, in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, ed. C. G. Luckhardt
(Harvester: Sussex, 1979), pp. 82–98; p. 94.
201 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 4.
202 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 4.
203 See ‘Letters’, pp. 94–5.
204 Clack, Philosophy of Religion, p. 33.
205 Wittgenstein, proposition 6.522, in Tractatus, p. 89. Cf. Wittgenstein, proposition 4.1212 in
Tractatus, p. 31: ‘What can be shown, cannot be said’.
206 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Labour, Language, and Laughter: Aesop and the Apophatic Human’, in Book
Prospectus: Fragments Towards A History of a Vanishing Humanism, ed. by Eileen A. Joy and Myra
J. Seaman <http://www.siue.edu/babel/ProspectusFragmentsVolume.htm> (accessed 21/01/15).
207 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 51. Cf. ‘[Tr. 6.52] We feel
that even when all possible scienti c questions have been answered, the problems of life remain
completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions le , and this itself is the answer’
(Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 88).
208 Wittgenstein, proposition 5.631, in Tractatus, p. 69.
209 is is a term developed by Keith Kahn-Harris. I intend it to mean very basically here, an ‘anti-
re ective re ectivity’ generally attributed to black metal musicians, in the capacity of Harris’
development of the concept of ‘re exivity’ found in the work of Anthony Giddens, from where we
could, then, make a more explicit semantic link to the nonconceptual or intuitional (Anschauung)
cognitive content of Immanuel Kant apropos of Vordb’s account of instinctisation: ‘Giddens
(1984) describes re exivity as the continuous monitoring of action which human beings display
(8). […] Giddens argues that the very nature of re exivity has changed in modernity: e
re exivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined
and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively
altering their character. (1990:28) In modernity, re exivity ensures that all structural principles
are continually revised and rede ned. e concept of re exivity thus takes on some of the
 connotations of “re ectivity”, signifying the capacity to relentlessly question certainties’ (Keith
Kahn-Harris, ‘ e “Failure” of Youth Culture: Re exivity, Music and Politics in the Black Metal
Scene’, in European Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (2004), pp. 95–111; pp. 5–6). Cf. Robert Hanna,
‘Kant and Nonconceptual Content’, in European Journal of Philosophy, 13 (2005), pp. 247–90: ‘Here
is the punchline of this paper. Kant’s important idea for contemporary philosophy of mind and
cognition is that the forms of intuition constitute nonconceptual content by introducing
designated intrinsic phenomenal spatial or temporal structures into all human or non-human
sensibility, whose speci c cognitive semantic function it is to determine the empirical
representation of individual material objects in real empirical space and real empirical time, by
uniquely locating these objects. e forms of intuition also provide a rst person representational
platform for all other sorts of cognitive content, and in particular involving conceptualization or
judgement, the speci cally rational cognitive contents’ (p. 282).
210 See Vordb, ‘ e Name of the Entity’ and ‘Concepts: What is “Instinctisation”?’, respectively.
211 Masciandaro, ‘On the Mystical Love of Black Metal’; Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, Sermon
87.
212 Cf. My own textual inspiration for this essay: ‘ e coming humanism, the humanistic avenir for
which I am happy to labour, is not a new program or implementable theory of the human and its
eponymous disciplines. Rather it is an entering into a more and more honest, anarchic, and
spontaneous experience of this already existential place via the ongoing renunciation and
forgetting of three false values through which discourse pretends to transcend these powers:
bourgeois-elitist attitudes toward the liberal arts (discourse ≠ labor); intellectualist con ation of
knowledge and language (discourse = truth); and scholarly gravitas (discourse ≠ laughter)’
(Masciandaro, ‘Labour, Language, Laughter’, p. 118).
213 Masciandaro, ‘On the Mystical Love of Black Metal’.
214 Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages Of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.
8.
215 Masciandaro, ‘On the Mystical Love of Black Metal’.
216 Masciandaro, ‘Labour, Language, Laughter’, p. 119.
217 Ibid., pp. 119–20. Cf. Sells, Mystical Languages, p. 4.
218 Sells, Mystical Languages, p. 4.
219 Vordb, ‘Languages’.
220 Meher Baba, Listen Humanity (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 19, cited in Masciandaro, ‘On
the Mystical Love of Black Metal’.
221 Vordb, ‘Languages’.
222 Baba, Listen Humanity, p. 19, cited in Masciandaro, ‘On the Mystical Love of Black Metal’.
223 Vordb, ‘Languages’, my emphasis.
224 See Sells, Mystical Languages, p. 8.
225 I am indebted to Masciandaro for this reference. See Giorgio Agamben, e End of the Poem:
Studies in Poetics, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999),
p. 64. Cf. Masciandaro, ‘Metal as Deixis’, p. 4.
226 Wittgenstein, Notebooks, p. 108.
227 Monk, ‘Foreword’, in Tractatus, p. xiv.
228 Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. by Bruce Boone (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1988), pp. 40–1. Cf. Edia
Connole, ‘Bataille: Exhuming Animality’, in e Accursed Book: Essays On and With Bataille, ed.
by Will Stronge (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
229 Russell, Philosophical Development, p. xxxv, cited in Monk, ‘Foreword’, Tractatus, p. xvi.
230 See Masciandaro, ‘On the Mystical Love of Black Metal’. Cf. Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 83.
231 Wittgenstein cited in Clack, Philosophy of Religion, p. 36.
232 Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, Batman: e Killing Joke: e Deluxe Edition (New York: DC
Comics, 2008), pp. 49-51; with thanks to Lucca Fraser.
QUESTIONS OF BLACK METAL THEORY
 N M R N

BLACK METAL COMMENTARY

And therea er I saw the darkness changing into a watery substance,
which was unspeakably tossed about, and gave forth smoke as from re;
and I heard it making an indescribable sound of lamentation.
– Corpus Hermeticum

L’OBJET DE L’EXTASE EST L’ABSENCE DE RÉPONSE DU DEHORS.

L’INEXPLICABLE PRÉSENCE DE L’HOMME EST LA RÉPONSE QUE
LA VOLONTÉ SE DONNE, SUSPENDUE SUR LE VIDE D’UNE
ININTELLIGIBLE NUIT. [THE OBJECT OF ECSTASY IS THE
ABSENCE OF RESPONSE FROM THE OUTSIDE. THE INEXPLICABLE
PRESENCE OF MAN IS THE RESPONSE THAT THE WILL GIVES
ITSELF, SUSPENDED OVER THE VOID OF AN UNINTELLIGIBLE
NIGHT].
– Georges Bataille

e burning corpse of god shall keep us warm in the doom of howling

winds
For we are a race from beyond the wanderers of night.
– Xasthur

Vacuum/Void/Abyss: Black Metal and commentary share concern with

explicitly spatial forms of emptiness and absence, and with the
horror/joy/creativity of being before them. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht nds a
relation to emptiness as the context for commentary’s imminent return:
‘ e vision of the empty chip constitutes a threat, a veritable horror vacui
not only for the electronic media industry but also, I suppose, for our
intellectual and cultural self-appreciation. It might promote, once again, a
reappreciation of the principle and substance of copia. And it might bring
about a situation in which we will no longer be embarrassed to admit that
 lling up margins is what commentaries mostly do – and what they do best’
( e Powers of Philology). Black Metal similarly lls voids, sounds abysses
with its sonic/verbal/visual representations of them. So they share a deeper
function beyond explanation/representation, namely, to multiply
explanation and representation fractally, to generate more and more
perceptual enclosures, spaces within which the
unexplainable/unrepresentable is brought into presence.

Liminality/Marginality: Black Metal and commentary situate themselves,

and derive power by operating from, margins of genre, history, ideology,
knowledge. Both enjoy ‘uno cial’ cultural status. Both destabilize, by
holding intimate relation to, categories of the center: truth, onto-theology,
‘God’. Both enjoy forms of authority that are fundamentally ambivalent,
safe from attack in a space of irrelevance, yet therefore capable of perfect
incursions, the most dangerous unrecognizable raids.

Avant-Garde: e expansion of the margin and the perforation of the

boundary associated with Black Metal and commentary provide both with
a vanguard front capable of exposing the established order to the corrosive
in uence of the outside and a ecting any outside-oriented determination
with the non-escapist in uence of the established. To put it di erently,
since the zone of operation for both Black Metal and commentary is the
margin, by expanding the margin of the established order they increasingly
expose it to the in uence of the beyond. Yet since they also perforate the
boundaries, they establish an a ect between the beyond and the center.
e vanguard in Black Metal and commentary does not merely set itself
against the status quo in order to make di erence (the hallmark of
modernism), but rather operates as a form of resistance which is bent on
conjuring the potentialities of what has already been grounded and
bringing about the obstructed possibilities of beyond within the established
(primary text, world, idea, etc.). e modernist determination against the
status quo presumes an emancipatory sublime which adheres to the
modernist temporality of progress and the possibility of unilateral
determination against the established. For Black Metal, however, this
unilateral determination as the vector of modernism is too reliant on the
initial possibility of a unilateral separation from the established gravity and
the promise of an escape or access to the outside free from the in uence of
what is already there. Breaking from such promises, Black Metal resorts to
action whose scene is here, within and in relation to what is already there,
its initiation is not dependent on a hypothetical opportunity, its resources
are limited to what is available and its line of determination de ects inward
in the direction of what is already there. Black Metal, in this sense,
confounds the distinction between expression and praxis. For Black Metal
as well as commentary, the deferral of aesthetic or ideological resolution is
not compatible with the concrete and conciliatory model of the sublime
developed by despotic, fascist and racist movements. Since a notion of the
sublime that belongs to another time and is dependent on a promised
opportunity or the ful llment of an initial possibility is prone to ethico-
political manipulations, both genres grasp the avant-garde through a
reworking of the sublime as ‘beyond within’ (Lyotard, Lessons on the
Analytic of the Sublime).

Arcana/Enclosure: e nexus of erudition and the esoteric. Commentary

and Black Metal collude in perverse attachment to sedimentary, occult lore,
to what is buried in books, and more generally in relations to lore as buried,
in need of excavation. is shared loric perversity may be understood on
the analogy of archaeology, as a discipline which unearths so as to reinter in
the tombs and vaults of its own expertise, which understands by entombing
itself in a relation to the object as artifact. So, like the alchemical
manuscript, itself o en the story of another found-and-lost text,
commentary makes itself available via indirection, not generally but for
those who want to know, who love to follow the multiplying referential
labyrinths of knowing. Similarly, Black Metal delves into obscure discourses
only to sing them through the dark veils of its own trobar clos, so as to
produce and enjoy itself as a hidden relation to the hidden. Hermetic,
subterranean, semi-anonymous, Black Metal and commentary pursue
parallel adventures in conspiratorial and melancholic epistemic conditions,
in erotic relation to their objects as always already lost. At the same time,
commentary and black metal, by pro-ducing their arcane or enclosed
condition, by bringing it into presence as art, also keep open and play in
freedom from it, as modeled in Robert Burton’s melancholic and
melancholy-curing commentarial Anatomy – ‘I write of melancholy, by
being busy to avoid melancholy’ – and in the black bile-sweetening music –
‘a certain melancholy disposition [...] made sweet for us by frequent use of
the lyre’ (Letters) – of the saturnine occultist commentator Marsilio Ficino,
who understood ‘that the melancholy man was uniquely suited to perform
the talismanic incantations which he believed were capable of liberating the
spirit from the world of appearances’ (Robin Headlam Wells, ‘John
Dowland and Elizabethan Melancholy’). Haunted by the principle of
ignotum per ignotius as its own logical spectre, the clarifying-by-
complicating and explicating-by-obfuscating movement of commentary,
which is captured in Montaigne’s complaint that ‘everything swarms
[fourmille] with commentaries’, is analogous to Black Metal as a
motion/anti-motion of artistic expression that articulates from and through
enclosure, or, as Dante knew, bubbles to the surface from black depths:
‘Fixed in the slime they say: “We were sullen in the sweet air gladdened by
the sun, bearing within us the sluggish fumes [accidioso fummo]; now we
are sullen in the black mire”. is hymn they gurgle in their throats [si
gorgoglian ne la strozza], for they cannot speak it in full words’ (Inferno
7.121-6).

Necrology: Black Metal is usually characterized among its followers and

opponents by its ambivalent relationship with death and decay to such an
extent that it is o en said that the only protagonists in Black Metal are
festering corpses. It is the ambivalent relationship of Black Metal with death
that gives rise to the most criticized aspect of Black Metal, namely,
necromanticism. As a part of vitalistic investment in death, necromanticism
involves a liberalist or hedonistic openness toward death in the form of a
simultaneously economical and libidinal synthesis between desire and
death. Capable of safeguarding the innermost political, economical and
libidinal recesses of vitalism, necromanticism simultaneously enchants the
necrotic Other with the charm of animation and romanticizes a vitalistic
escape through death. Yet Black Metal can also be approached from a more
twisted and colder intimacy with death, an impersonal realm where the
already-dead nds its voice in the living. e voice of the living, in this
case, bespeaks of dejection from a world for which vitalistic ideas are
spurious, yet they cannot be simply disillusioned or disenchanted by
recourse to death in the form of utter annihilation or solution as
termination. Black Metal, in its lyrics, sounds, and performances,
simultaneously presents the impossibility of this recourse and vitalism’s
precarious position through the concept of blackening or decay. Aside from
Black Metal’s necromanticism which usually takes on a medieval gloss,
Black Metal’s ambivalent relationship with death and decay corresponds
with medieval necrology which appears in commentaries of scholastic
theology and natural philosophy. More than just assuming a successive role
for the medieval commentaries on death, decomposition and macabre,
Black Metal can also be examined as a unique genre capable of disinterring
the necrological dimensions of commentary. It is in commentary that the
dead is impersonally animated according to its own laws and not by the
laws of the living. Both Black Metal and the commentary genre internalize
the concept of decomposition and in nite decay by putting to the test the
tolerance or the limit of the world, a text or an idea without completely
erasing or silencing it. Here, commentary and Black Metal respectively
correspond with an interminable – therefore a limit process – explication or
disintegration of a primary source. Such a limit process constitutes the basic
principle of decay in which the object degenerates to no end without
returning to its constitutive elements (a better and older world), or without
becoming silent and ceasing to exist.

Problematicity: Rather than seeking resolving solutions, both Black Metal

and the commentary genre operate as functions of the problem. eir
approach to their objects, themes, ideas and genres is characterized by
relentless problematization. ey do not resolve the problematic situations
but rather contribute to the internal tension of the problem. Quite literally,
they situate themselves as problematical entities. e internal duplicities of
Black Metal toward death, (anti-)humanism and extremities are the
consequence of such problematical nature which requires means of
investigation and commentary other than pejorative, purifying and
absolving. Where other musical genres are constantly tempted towards
justi cation and puri cation (musical, philosophical, aesthetical, etc.), Black
Metal tends to bask in the speculative glory of the problematic.

Praxis: Whatever their utility, commentary and Black Metal intersect in an

essential anti-instrumentality. Commentary and Black Metal make useful,
enjoyable products, but their production of them is determined by various
kinds of counterimpulses that would unmake production as such, that
would perform it freely, at once for itself and for nothing. For commentary,
anti-instrumentality shows up primarily in the way it is pursued as praxis,
as a way of being with a text that only produces the commentary as a
record or residue of an essentially relational ‘extra-textual’ experience, like
the reader’s marginalia, so o en not written to be read. But this negative
production, production as residue or waste, is exactly commentary’s fertility.
Formed of the accumulated impressions of innumerable actions and
reactions to the text, commentary accomplishes nothing and so becomes
capable of everything. As waves are to the stones that caused them, the
gloss is to what it glosses, spreading out in unending uniqueness from the
page’s unmarkable center, giving witness to depths the undisturbed,
undefaced surface cannot. Commentary thus materializes a form of
consciousness that may be understood as phenomenological, following
Gaston Bachelard’s understanding of the reverberation of the poetic image
as an experience whereby being realizes itself in a movement of reading
becoming writing: ‘ rough this reverberation, by going immediately
beyond all psychology or psychoanalysis, we feel a poetic power rising
naïvely within us. A er the original reverberation, we are able to
experience resonances, sentimental repercussions, reminders of our past.
But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface. And this is
also true of a simple experience of reading. e image o ered us by reading
the poem now becomes really our own. It takes root in us. It has been given
us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have
created it, that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our
language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is
at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here
expression creates being’ (Poetics of Space). For Black Metal, anti-
instrumentality shows up above all in its paradoxical nihilistic visions of
itself, in the identity of being a useless and alienated activity (given the
futility of all things and in particular pathetic humanity’s imminent demise)
that is yet ordered as agency towards the apocalypse and/or universal
transformation which renders its own production futile. Whence, for
instance, Mortifer’s account of Abonus Noctis’s latest release as producing in
the listener the event it narrates: ‘Penumbral Inorgantia is a chronicling of a
man’s journey to ancient underground kingdoms haunted by the inhuman
entities that once dwelt therein. He must seek their arcane instruments to
rid earth of all organic life a er sinking into the abysmal pools of their souls
to shed his human frame and assume an elevated, blackened, and
immortal state of being, enabling him to eternally reign over the desolation
he has created. Each song represents a speci c stage in his journey and shall
consequently engulf the listener in an experience of metamorphosis into
inhumanity’ (http://www.wraithproductions.net/bandpages.htm).

Possession: In Black Metal, all elements from musical to vocal and visual
must re ect the voice of the outsider, the indi erent or even the hostile and
the incompatible. e explicit distortions and to some extent theatrical
discordance of Black Metal are the outcome of the genre’s embracing of
possession as a conceptual and structural determinant. Referred to by
Oesterreich as the ‘terrible spectacle’ (Possession: Demoniacal and Other),
possession not only suggests the usurpation of one’s voice qua possession
but also draws a vector of determination that moves from outside to the
inside in order to dismantle the self or turn its zone of activity inside-out. It
has been objected that since commentary does not necessarily ground a
thesis of its own and is basically determined by an external thetic
framework (someone else’s possession), it is inherently de cient for hosting
radical thinking. Yet this is exactly what makes the commentary genre a
playground for ascesis of thought, for it determines thinking in relation to
that which does not belong to the thinker and is indeed exterior to it. In
doing so, commentary simultaneously disturbs the hegemonic harmony
between re ection and thinking-for-and-by-oneself, and aligns itself with
the true contingency of thinking for which the necessity of the thinker does
not have an anterior position or a privileged locus. It is in the commentary
genre that thinking transmits both voices and contents which are exterior to
the thinker yet they do not enjoy a pre-established status either, because
commentary entails the concomitant possession of the primary source by an
outsider’s voice and thereby, creates a speculative opportunity for thinking
and writing on behalf of no one. What is usurped in possession is belonging
per se – as an appurtenant bond between parties – rather than the
possession of someone else on behalf of another. Both Black Metal and
commentary regard possession as the true vocation of art and thinking.
 N M

INTERVIEW
(Miasma, August 2010)
1. What are the motives and agendas behind the book Hideous Gnosis?
How does it come into existence?

e book is based on the black metal theory symposium which I

organized last year. Being a compilation of papers and other documents
related to the event, the volume presents a variety of approaches to black
metal (theological, philosophical, political, cultural, journalistic, artistic) and
addresses many di erent topics: revelation, catholicity, non-knowledge,
apocalyptic humanism, the dissolution of the cosmos, decay, telluric
ideology, acephalicism, USBM, wolves, ritual, demonology, confession.
e basic impulse behind the project, which the contributions ful ll in
di erent ways, is a desire for a form of theoretical discourse about black
metal that treats it, not only as an object of intellectual understanding
(academia), nor only as a subject of emotional veneration (fandom), but
rather in a manner that messes up the boundary between black metal and
theory, vitalizing and necrotizing them for individual and collective needs. I
indicate this on the Black Metal eory blog with the following de nition:
‘Not black metal. Not theory. Not not black metal. Not not theory. Black
metal theory. eoretical blackening of metal. Metallic blackening of
theory. Mutual blackening. Nigredo in the intoxological crucible of
symposia’. e desire for black metal theory is a desire for a ‘third thing’
born from the intercourse of black metal and theory. On the one hand,
black metal theory is something new. On the other hand, it is only the
actualization of something that both theory and black metal already are
(particularly for the intellectual metalhead who practices them
simultaneously). e book is motivated by a desire to make something new
out of the recognition of this twin fact, namely, that black metal is a form of
thought and theory is a form of music at a mutually disclosable location.
 at this place appears both unintelligible and obvious to academics and
metal fans alike only con rms its worth. ( ese issues are also discussed in
the volume, especially by Scott Wilson.) If Black Metal ist Krieg [black metal
is war] (Nargaroth), black metal theory as I intend it is not so much the
theory of war, but theory as war, a blackened, genre-speci c battlezone for
mutual hostile metallic takeovers between music and philosophy.
Beyond this general intention, the project took on a vague life and
character of its own in the aura of its chosen name and related epigraphs.
Hideous Gnosis is borrowed from the title of a song by Caïna, a song which
expresses a kind of negative revelation near the disappearance or death of
God: ‘I’ve seen demons | And I’ve been shown things that no-one should
see | And I know why birds alight from cables with no-one beneath | Who’s
on the side of the angels | Who’s on the side of Satan | God’s not there
anymore | I know why birds y | No-one’s there anymore’ (Caïna, ‘Hideous
Gnosis’, Mourner [Profound Lore Records, 2007]). I associated this phrase
with several passages that seem to have helped ‘set the mood’ for the
project:

Why do you compel me to divulge things that would better remain

unknown to you? (Silenus)

He is not a return to the past; he has undergone the corruption of the

‘present-day man’ and nothing has more place within him than the
devastation which it leaves . . . the memory of Plato, of Christianity and
above all – the most hideous – the memory of modern ideas, extend
behind him like elds of ashes. But between the unknown and him has
been silenced the chirping of ideas, and it is through this that he is similar
to ‘ancient man’: of the universe he is no longer the rational (alleged)
master, but the dream. (Georges Bataille)

But suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had
opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness. (J.R.R.
Tolkien, e Fellowship of the Ring)
 e black tablet of vision, I hold dear for the sake | at to the soul, it is
a book of the picture of the dark mole of ine. (Ha z)

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know
of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a
thousandfold more hideous. (H.P Lovecra )

ese constellated around two images I used to present the event. One
was a painting my wife Heather made a couple years ago on behalf of
E.S.S.E. ( e Eternal Secret Society of Entities) entitled Murder Devour I:

It shows a humanoid monster or wild man gure rising out of a forest

with a large crystal piercing his right eye. In front of him is a bird perched
on two small crystals, with another crystal piercing its le eye. e image
signi es many things about the nature of animal/human existence that I
will not go into here, but in this context it provided two important things:
1) a picture of the voracious spirit of the black metal forest, an ancient
entity with an appetite for creative destruction; and 2) an image of a form
of vision that violently crushes and transcendently recon gures the eye,
which as the word-play of the title suggests, is also the ‘I’ or ego as the locus
of limited sight. In this form of vision, the eye/I is not what illuminates or
penetrates into its object. Rather the eye/I, guring mind or the intellectual
principle, is here penetrated by the impenetrable, pierced by an intense
crystal that in the same instant destroys and weaponizes the eye/I with its
own form, making it a projector of crystals. e other image I used to
orient the project was an inverted photograph of a Tower of Silence or
dakhma, the raised and enclosed structure used by Zoroastrians to dispose
of human corpses by exposure to vultures and the sun:

Inverting the photo imaginatively reverses the body-bleaching process into

one of blackening or nigredo, ‘the intial, black stage of the opus alchymicum
in which the body of the impure metal […] or the old outmoded state of
being is killed, putre ed and dissolved into the original substance of
creation, the prima materia, in order that it may be renovated and reborn
in a new form’ (Lyndy Abraham, Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery). I tend
to think of black metal in terms of nigredo in two ways: 1) musically, as an
aesthetic process of stripping heavy metal down to an essential and
incommunicable potent negativity; and 2) philosophically, as a stance
towards the world that insistently encounters it, seeks its ‘truth’, at its nadir
or lowest point. A relation between the tower of silence and metal is also
scarred into my mind because it is there that the spiritual master Meher
Baba banged his head as a young man during a process of coming down to
normal consciousness a er self-realization: ‘in 1915, Merwan started a grim
habit which was to last the entire seven years of coming down to normal
consciousness. Every day Merwan would regularly strike his forehead on
the stone oor of his room for hours. Some days in the a ernoon, between
one and ve o’clock, he would go to the Golibar district of Poona or to the
Tower of Silence where, sitting under a tree, he would continue this
gruesome ritual – knocking his forehead on a rock or against a stone wall!
He was not merely tapping his head on the stone surface, but with full
force would pound and pound his brow upon it – always in icting a bloody
wound. A er knocking his head hour a er hour against stone, Merwan
would collapse. He would then wipe the blood o his face and clean
himself, then tie a kerchief around his forehead to serve as a bandage and a
turban, thus concealing the wound from his family before returning home.
[…] Once when Merwan was banging his head on the oor at home, his
mother heard a thudding sound coming from his room. […] Merwan had
blood all over his face. Crying she asked, “Merog, have you gone mad? Are
you totally mad?” Wiping the blood o with a towel, he said, “I am not
mad! I have become something else!” […] [He later explained that] “ is
constant hammering of my head was the only thing that gave me some
relief during my real su ering of coming down – which I have repeatedly
said is indescribable”’ (Lord Meher). And in the Tower of Silence image
there are also birds, guring of course the chirping symposiasts, the
metallectuals, gathered in grim friendship around the feast of the black
metal corpus.
Perhaps this does not explain the motives and agendas behind the book,
mostly because the project for me is about doing it, rather than trying to
accomplish some objective result. As for what the volume does accomplish,
the individual essays speak for themselves. But at least this gives a sense of
the practical process I followed to help bring this black metal theory thing
about.

2. Is it even possible to compile so-called ‘black metal theory’?

is is a signi cant question which can only be answered with both ‘yes’
and ‘no’. Of course there can be, and must be, black metal theories of
various shapes and sizes, not only because people are prone to theorizing it,
but above all because black metal itself is rabidly and essentially theoretical.
Indeed, black metal is distinguished, independently of its themes and
styles, by a special kind of musical relation to theory, by which I mean
speculative thinking (from theorein, to look at, speculate). Black metal has a
‘sound’, but this sound is only hearable, it only lls your ears as black metal,
not only because of the powerful generic idea of black metal that makes it
recognizable as such, but more deeply and immediately because the sound
viscerally generates theoretical dispositions within the listener, in short, the
sound of black metal is heard as the sound of theory. is relates to the fact
that black metal is a musical form where the distinction between sound and
sense is simultaneously maximized and minimized to intensity. us on the
one hand black metal is a totally intrinsic immanence that transcends any
and all meaning. It is pure black fucking metal, something that simply
possesses your mind and displaces your soul. On the other hand black
metal is all about the ideas that de ne it. Which is why black metal is
typically judged and valorized and classi ed according to its informing
philosophies and ideologies, this black metal vs. that black metal. Black
metal is a self-contradictory substance, something paradoxically nothing
other and wholly other than the music it is. Listening to it – and the
musician is also listener and vice-versa, playing what he hears – one hears
the concept, not developed and elaborated the way systematic thinking
likes to have it, but broken and lacerated and disarticulated in a way that
makes it more alive. Black metal tortures the idea, the logos, and plays the
sound of its scream as a revelation exceeding all cognition of it. e ideas of
black metal are not properly themes or concepts that the music and its
adjunct cra s merely express or treat of, not something about which they
say something meaningful or useful. Instead the concepts of black metal is
black metal itself in a weird way that is di cult to express. is can be
de ned by saying that black metal is not a thing but a function that puts
humans into terrifying and ecstatic relation to the impossible identity of
thought and being. Now there are some people who want this relation to
remain individually and collectively unconscious, who uphold it precisely
by saying that black metal, like true love, is something one not only cannot
but should not talk about, as if to talk about it is to transgress and
contaminate its essence. In one sense they are correct, insofar as they are
upholding crucial ontological distinctions between what can be said and
what can only be shown, and more profoundly, between the nameable and
the unnamable. But most of the time, for the simple reason that most
humans are habitually self-deluding and narrow-minded, this position is
inauthentically upheld by persons with a vested egoistical and/or
materialistic interest in remaining unconscious about the nature of their
love of black metal, a love that is o en sadly covered over and confused in
the ‘metal culture’ with slavish lusts of various kinds. By contrast, I pursue
black metal theory, not as a way of explaining or clarifying what black metal
is, not as an ‘expert’ who would disclose its secrets, but as an art of
instensifying what it is, above all to the point of becoming pleasurably
bewildered as to the di erence between black metal and theory. is points
back to the deeper meaning of being a metalhead: banging your head in
the heavy sonic furnace until it becomes metal, a substance capable of
holding a real edge. Reza Negarestani, in the project description for the
volume of black metal commentary we are editing for the journal Glossator,
beautifully signals this process of intensi cation as ‘bask[ing] in the
speculative glory of the problematic’.

3. What is this hideous gnosis of black metal?

I do not know. Whatever it is, it is something that takes many forms. But
the manner in which black metal produces hideous gnosis may be
explained by comparing it to the Weirding Module in Dune (the David
Lynch lm, not the book). Black metal works like an inverted weirding
module. Where the weirding module ampli es the sound of a thought into
a destructive force, black metal translates antagonistic energy into the
sound of terrifying thought. is thought is not a concept or a meaning, but
a seeing or perception of something illuminated by a certain kind of fear,
hence hideous gnosis. Not the ordinary kind of fear that is only exacerbated
worry about an object. But a kind of total, objectless fear that suspends
everything in an all-pervading yet strangely calm ontological panic, the
experience of which assumes di erent imaginative forms, visions of
speculative knowledge. For example: seeing in a ash that the whole
universe is burning, burning, burning, and we and all other entities are
burning with it, like an enormous pyramid of aming severed heads
lovingly assembled by a great conqueror in the cosmic night.

4. In your opinion what is black metal in the year 2010?

A fertile proliferation of heresies heralding the dawn of a new Dark Age.

5. What kind of di erences you see between black metal in 90?s and 2000?s
or between European black metal and North-American black metal?

My historical grasp of the genre is fairly weak, due in part to my

inclination to listen to black metal and other kinds of music from di erent
periods as if it is all being played right now, as if it is all my black metal.
is seems like a very American trait! – poor grasp of historicity, a
background sense of life as unconditioned by chronological necessities,
North American individualism-exceptionalism, inordinate and naïve
feeling of self-centered entitlement, etc. – so maybe there is a good answer
hiding inside of it. Namely, that North American black metal is deeply
syncretic, albeit in a historically predictable Eurocentric way. Like the still
more or less medieval people who settled these territories, the American
black metalhead tends to seek harmony rather than contradiction within
his departure from what he reinvents. Where the tendency of European
black metal is anti-ecclesiastical and fascist, the tendency of American black
metal is spiritual and apolitical – a tendency that also seems re ected in the
conspicuous ‘isolationist’ presence of solo artists, hordes of one: Absonus
Noctis, Crebain, Draugar, Idolator, Judas Iscariot, Leviathan, Lurker of
Chalice, Panopticon, Xasthur, Sapthuran, Woe, et al. An overgeneralization
of course, and I welcome all contradictory counterexamples. Perhaps now
there is a dri into new kinds of collective endeavors and events – a desire
to break from black metal as entertainment. e amazing Gathering of
Shadows event, held in the woods in the South Platte region of the Rocky
Mountains, is a striking example of esoteric redneck nature mysticism. And
then there are artsy urban actions, like Wold’s recent performance at
Matthew Barney’s waterfront studio warehouse, which was prefaced by a
wrestling match and a Nietzschean sermon/essay on the subject of the
screech owl. is question is also addressed from various perspectives in the
volume, especially by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Steven Shakespeare, and the
musicians interviewed in Brandon Stosuy’s oral history project.

6. What kind of context would you put black metal in, the music world or
the art world?

Black metal inhabits many contexts simultaneously. I do not see the need
for objectively placing it, like a curator or librarian, in this or that category.
Obviously, it is a multidimensional art form that includes music, images,
words, ideas, fashion, social rituals, commerce, etc. But as to whether it is
more proper to the music world or to the art world, de nitely the former. It
is art, but its authority in the ‘art world’, in the sense of the world that is
largely governed by galleries, curators, collectors, and critics, derives wholly
from its being a form of popular music, that is, of music produced and
consumed by individual people relatively independently of their social and
economic relation to each other. I think the fascination with black metal in
the art world has a lot to do with its appeal as a form of decadent ascesis, to
its o ering a kind of sonic-aesthetic hair-shirt one can virtually wear
without contaminating, and maybe increasing, the pleasures of an aimless
comfortable lifestyle.

7. What is your personal relationship to black metal?

I love black metal very much and listen to it all the time. Here are some
songs that have recently moved me in di erent ways, in alphabetical order:
Absu, ‘Four Crossed Wands’, Tara (Exhibit V); Absurd, ‘Mourning Soul’,
Facta Loquuntur; Adorior, ‘Ritualized Combat (Sin, Sin, Sin)’, Author of
Incest; Akitsa, ‘Prophétie Hérétique’, Prophétie Hérétique; Arizmenda,
‘Poison Yourself . . . With ought’, Within the Vacuum of In nity; Ash
Pool, ‘A Sacri ce Consumed by Fire’, For Which He Plies e Lash; Avsky,
‘Cleanse the World, Malignant; Be Persecuted, ‘Be Resented for Livelihood’,
I.I; Benighted, ‘Vibration of My oughts’, Avgrundshjarta; Bethlehem,
‘Aphel – Die schwarze Schlange’, Dictius Te Necare; Burzun, ‘Jesus’ Tod’,
Filosofem; Circle of Ghosts, ‘Morning Walk’, e Art of Decay; Defuntos, ‘A
Morbida Valsa da Loucura’, A Negra Vastidao das Nossas Almas; Gnome, ‘La
Foret (I/II)’, Under the Blackmoon; Heartless, ‘Journey to Eternal’, Suicidal
Engagement; In abitan, ‘Illusjonen’, Wanderer of Grief; Inquisition, ‘Unholy
Magic Attack’, Into the Infernal Regions of the Ancient Cult; Ludicra,
‘Userpent’, Hollow Psalms; Malign, ‘Sinful Fleshspear’, Divine Facing-
Fireborn; Mgła, ‘I’, Groza; Nargaroth, ‘Herbstleyd’, Herbstleyd and ‘Somer’,
Jahreszeiten; Nightbringer, ‘Feast of the Manes’, Death and the Black Work;
Osirion, ‘Sixieme Pilier’, Reconquista; Skagos, ‘Blossoms Will Sprout From
the Carcass’, Est; Xasthur, ‘Instrumental’, Xasthur; Zemial, ‘ e Tears that
Wet Gethsemane’, For the Glory of UR.

8. What kind of feedback has Hideous Gnosis received?

e book has received very positive feedback and two strong reviews, one
from Aquarius Records and another by Mark Fisher in e Wire. I am told
that other reviews are in the works from Culture Machine, Current
Musicology, Natt&Dag, Mute Magazine, and Lars Gotrich (NPR). e
symposium also received some negative online feedback before it took place
by persons who do not like the idea of intellectual engagement with black
metal. Many of their comments are included in the volume. As I said
above, their position holds a degree of philosophical interest. But overall
the fussing seems to be symptomatic of a consumerist culture wherein
persons nd themselves, like babies feeling forced to eat, resorting to
complaint as a way of maintaining a negative, pseudo-sense of self-worth.
Worry, and the useless criticism it generates, is an enormous waste of
personal energy that could be used for, say, more heroic purposes, a heady
form of mental su ering that is a natural, but not inevitable, counterpart of
material excess. Of course the criticism has only provided further matter for
valuable re ection. It will be interesting to see if the book receives any
attention among scholars who are not already into black metal. e book is
intellectual, but not exactly academic, more like para-academic, the result
of people doing what they do, but in an uno cial and more mobile
capacity. So far there seem to be four basic responses to black metal as
theoretical site: instant love, immediate hate, vague sense that it ‘sounds
cool’, total cluelessness.

9. ere will be a second Black Metal eory Symposium next year. What
we can expect?

e symposium, entitled Melancology, will take place in London on 13

January, 2011. It is being organized by Scott Wilson and Niall Scott and will
feature a lecture by Reza Negarestani as well as a performance by Abgott. I
am very happy to hear that the band is composing something speci cally
for the event. Scott and Niall also plan to edit and publish a volume based
on the symposium. Details, including a description of the environmental
and ecological concept of melancology, are available online. Now that the
rst seed (or mold-spore or worm) of black metal theory has been sown, I
expect the event to be bigger and blacker than the last.

10. Are there some other future plans too?

My hope and intention is for the black metal theory symposium to

continue as an annual winter event, hosted by di erent people in di erent
places. is will also be an alternative and more practical way of structuring
intellectual work. Rather than starting any kind of centralized association or
journal, we share the responsibility for organizing and publishing in a more
exible and open way. Also, the special issue of Glossator (glossator.org)
which I mentioned before will be published in Spring 2012. e volume
features seventeen individual commentaries on speci c black metal works,
mostly by philosophers. It will be amazing.
 N M

INTERVIEW
(Dominik Irtenkauf, Legacy, September 2010)
1. Black Metal and theory – that seems to be an adventurous enterprise.
What is this project all about?

e project began with a desire to experience and intensify the mutual

blackening of metal and theory, an impossible and inevitable annihilative
process that is already happening, not only in the obvious phenomenal
sense that metal is thought and thought is metal, but in the ‘esoteric’ sense
that music and philosophy have the same end: the psychic decapitation of
the individual subject. Black Metal, being at once the most intellectual and
most anti-intellectual of musical forms, the intensest mode of headbanging,
is a natural path to this end. As to what this mutual blackening is I do not
de nitively know. And if I did, I do not think it would be worth desiring.
So you are exactly right, an ‘adventurous enterprise’ in the original sense of
ad-venture: deliberately exposing oneself to the hazards of what happens.

2. What has the response to your rst symposium in Brooklyn, New York
City last December been like?

ere have been many responses, positive and negative, from instant
loving recognition to pure idiotic anger. But as everyone knows, the truth
divides. Black Metal ist Krieg. Like the famous appearance of God in
human form that it negatively loves and positively hates, Black Metal brings
‘not peace but a sword’. Likewise, if everyone liked or disliked Black Metal
eory, it would be a serious failure. However I would not be too
disappointed if everyone ignored it.

3. Some followers of Black Metal would argue that theory should step o
such an uncompromising musical style. What do you answer to such
argumentation?

I answer that those persons, by the very fact of their argumentation,

inhabit an important and profoundly traditional theoretical position vis-à-
vis the limits of discourse. I also call attention to the distinction between
the false silence of not-speaking and the deeper silence that is the sound of
language’s death. Truly signi cant criticism of Black Metal eory emerges
from persons who do not speak against it. I hope the thoughts and words of
Hideous Gnosis give them joy.

4. Your book Hideous Gnosis shows a rst way in getting more engaged
with the background topics of Black Metal. Although it seemingly appeals to a
select few. Is that perception correct?

Possibly. e book is not written or planned with any kind of audience or

market in mind. Nor is it designed to explain black metal or to translate it
into the topical, though of course it does address many well-known Black
Metal topics. Rather it is the collective product of persons who are ‘engaged
in the background topics of Black Metal’ from several di erent perspectives.
If Hideous Gnosis appeals to a select few, that is probably because formally
it is neither metal journalism nor academic scholarship as typically
practiced. It would have been extremely di cult to nd a press in either
area that would publish it.

5. ere is quite some movement in metal studies, so what do you think is

the contribution Black Metal eory could bring in?

e primary contribution of Black Metal eory to metal studies is to

creatively dis gure the current relations or boundaries between metal and
its study. As to whether this will really prove to be a contribution to the
eld of metal studies who knows. us far it seems that the project lives
more in the company of philosophy and the theoretical humanities than in
other disciplines where metal scholarship goes on, like musicology or
sociology. But what is a ‘contribution’ anyway? e word always reminds
me of manorial dues, or tithes, as if there were some big beautiful castle or
church o in the near distance that all our labor is building and
beautifying. at is a kind of instrumentality that I listen to Black Metal
refusing and would prefer its theoretic possession to do the same.
 N M

INTERVIEW
(Dominik Irtenkauf, Avant-Garde Metal 2011)
1. First of all, black metal theory could be understood as a special kind of
metal studies. Yet I can nd some traces of philosophy in it as well.

e impulse from the beginning has been for something that goes beyond,
without necessarily precluding, diagnostic or analytical discourse about
black metal. No one merely listens to music, without participating in it. It is
an object that infects and possesses the subject. So philosophy stands for the
practice of thought, for thought as participation, as more than just studying
or thinking about something. On this point, black metal theory opposes the
perverted secret identity between fan and philosopher in contemporary
culture, namely, the situation according to which the fan is an unconscious
or sleeping philosopher and the philosopher a mere fan. Black metal theory
expresses a need to reopen music to the philosophy of music and
philosophy to the music of philosophy in a black way. If philosophy is
thought practicing the love of wisdom (philo-sophia), black metal theory is
thought practicing the love of black metal.

2. It seems to be more about speculative interpretations of a musical sub-

culture than developing a coherent system of theory. Is that perception
correct?

Yes. And yet there is a ‘coherence’ to black metal. ere is a principle

according to which we rightly insist and argue that things are and are not
black metal. In this respect black metal theory territorializes the potentiality
of a non-systematizable coherence, a substance without law. Or we could
say that black metal is formally equivalent to Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness
theorem, that its topos or place is the black spaces or unreachable
interiors/exteriors that system, per se, cannot reach. As these spaces are
di erent with respect to di erent coherent or axiomatic systems, so black
metal is not something universally xed, but a virtually mobile unreachable
thing, like an unmineable mineral that weirdly relocates its inaccessibility
according to the equipment on the surface.

3. If so, can there be a speci c methodical approach to black metal theory?

Can it be relevant to develop such a method from the subject of research
itself, i.e. black metal and its connotations?

Nothing signi cant is produced without method, which simply means the
way of doing something. Arriving anywhere requires a speci c way. And it
is precisely in relation to the speci city of method, to its necessary
individuation, that there is no general way. As Nietzsche says, ‘“Das – ist
nun mein Weg, – wo ist der eure?” so antwortete ich Denen, welche mich
“nach dem Wege” fragten. Den Weg nämlich – den giebt es nicht!’ [‘“ is is
my way, where is yours?” – thus I answered those who asked me “the way”.
For the way – that does not exist’]. In other words, if black metal theory is
anything signi cant, it must exist within many speci c methodologies, the
truth or utility of which is absolutely indi erent to whether or not they are
followed or implemented.

4. What importance does black metal theory attach to the scene’s activists
such as musicians, journalists and followers of the cult?

is is a strange question to answer because it seems to address ‘black

metal theory’ as if it de ned a speci c viewpoint or set of values towards
persons and vocations. Perhaps the question is analogous to the kind of
questions that get posed to black metal artists regarding the importance of
the ‘fans’ or the ‘scene’ to their music, questions that spark responses of total
indi erence and  sincere delity. All I can say is that black metal theory is
neither for anyone nor for no one. I do not even want to say that it is for
the people who practice it. At a practical material level it does not seem to
be. More positively, I think black metal theory attaches importance not to
social identities and roles, but to the act of penetrating once again into the
essence of black metal, an act whose value might be compared to the
release of a kind of intoxicating atmosphere. Participants in the rst two
symposia included all the kinds of persons you mention, as well as people
not otherwise involved with black metal.

5. Can statements by black metal musicians help to start a rst

interrogation with the music’s material?

Of course. All statements about black metal are always already a form of
black metal theory.

6. Now let’s take a short rest: there were books like Lords of Chaos which
dealt with black metal in a journalistic way. ere is a new book in
Norwegian dealing with Scandinavian black metal’s evolution. Mostly, they
tell anecdotes and are not very interested in developing theoretical lines. In
these publications, respectively, the authors indulge in psychological
interpretations of seminal moments in the history of this musical style. Is that
a proper way to deal with black metal?

at is one way, though it is not necessarily ‘proper’, in the sense of

belonging to black metal. I can appreciate the generic utility of intelligent
factual accounts of black metal events. But I am much more interested in
‘accounts’ of black metal that are somehow also black metal events in their
own right.

7. In Hideous Gnosis, there were some philosophers mentioned in the

context of understanding black metal. Is there a certain tradition in the
history of ideas that could be easily linked to this kind of music?

ere are many traditions that are relevant, as well as several modern
thinkers with natural a nities to the genre. Too many to list here. More
importantly, black metal perpetuates itself via a satanic logic that corrodes
and occludes its own resources while allowing them to remain apparent.
You could say that black metal practices what Benjamin called ‘the art of
citing without quotation marks’. Rebelling against the logic or order
whereby the citation produces authority, black metal weaponizes citation
against its own authorizing aura. For black metal, repetition is the original.

8. Some contributors also published material in the experimental journal

Collapse from the UK. Is there a story behind this connection? e journal’s
editors seem to follow an approach to phenomena that helps to minimize the
distance to black metal music.

e intersection seems due to some overlap in tastes, and more

speci cally, to the obvious intimacies between noise and speculation. Reza
Negarestani’s involvement with the forthcoming volume of Glossator on
black metal, which was planned before the rst symposium, has also been
instrumental.

9. Considering metal music’s strive for direct speech, this might a ect black
metal theory. How much value are you willing to attach to this aspect?

Black metal theory will develop according to its own logic and the diverse
desires of the persons who practice it. I am not concerned with how it may
be a ected by the principle of ‘direct speech’, which is deeply ambivalent
anyway. More interesting to me are the signi cant parallels between metal
vocal styles and theoretical discourse, especially with regard to questions of
immanence and the aesthetics of impenetrability. Most of the discussion
around BMT has focused on one sense of the term, i.e. black metal theory
as the theory of black metal. e signi cance of the other equally important
sense, though more or less evident in the contributions, is less
acknowledged: black metal theory as the black metal of theory.

10. In the end, there is the question: why intellectualism anyway? Cannot
this music better do without questioning the core of its material?

Why not? Especially if black metal theory does improve the music, i.e. the
black metal in my head. I think an essential function of black metal theory
is to expose and explore the non-di erence between thought and metal.

11. It seems that black metal theory appeals to a certain circle of people. Is
there a long-time prospect for this movement? I nd it quite stimulating in
matters of creative renewal in the eld of writing. Plus there are vivid
connections to occultural studies as well.

What is the ‘circle’ to which black metal theory appeals? e ‘collision’

between black metal and theory certainly o ers many possibilities for
development and will appeal to di erent people for di erent reasons,
perhaps especially because of its newness and because of black metal’s
esoteric and anti-modern dimensions.

12. So far, most texts of black metal theory that I know of show strong links
to the genre of the essay. Let me outline this style more thoroughly in order to
nd out the tricks behind ‘how to talk about a music that refuses to be talked
about’, like Eugene acker puts it in Mute magazine. e essay bears the
attempt to try something new and hence unknown in it. Talking about a
beast that refuses to be tamed might bring a certain degree of aggression into
theorizing. You cannot get a grip on this topic other than using some
rhetorical violence. Can this be an option for theory?

Absolutely. Nothing ventured, nothing won. As Gawain says in Chrétien

de Troyes’s  Knight with the Lion, ‘Now is not the time to dream your life
away but to frequent tournaments, engage in combat, and joust vigorously,
whatever it might cost you’.

13. Do you know of any ambitions for augmenting the single texts into one
big melting pot of theory? Is there a need for nding a systematic approach to
BMT or is it better to stay in the ow?

No, I do not know of any such ambitions. ough it is likely that the
encyclopedism of metal culture, evident in projects like Encyclopedia
Metallum, A.N.U.S, Black Metal Revolution, Transcix’s Metal Archive, will
eventually move in the direction of metal theory/studies. But systematic
synthesis is another matter. I do not expect a omas Aquinas of black
metal theory to arrive anytime soon.

14. Seemingly, some writers in this eld take quite a poetic stance. Can
black metal theory still be understood as critical then? Or does it turn into
some sort of art that is to be perceived in a di erent way?

I am very much in favor of black metal theory work that does violence to
the separative distinctions between poetry and philosophy, art and theory,
and so forth. Agamben is correct in claiming that modernity is conditioned
by a ‘scission of the word’, a kind of fatal gap within language that holds the
spheres of knowledge and pleasure apart. is is the condition for the birth
of criticism, as a distinctly modern way of knowing that ‘neither represents
nor knows, but knows the representation’. e problem, then, is precisely
one of going beyond and creatively destroying criticism, to explode from
within its suspension of the in nite immanence of the present.

15. Curiously enough, some musicians can relate to this philosophy and
they have started their own research some time ago. I think of bands like
Ulver and Emperor that seem to be the spearheads of an intellectual
movement in black metal. Yet there is a huge scene evolving under the tag
‘avant-garde black metal’ in Scandinavia and elsewhere. Will they maybe co-
work with you in future?

Anything is possible. I welcome the chance for such collaboration.

16. Will black metal theory lead to novels instead of booklets, to acoustic
experimentation instead of raw primitive sounds and nally to music’s
overlapping with books and lectures by the musicians themselves?

Surely such work is already taking place in various forms. I suppose the
question is about whether black metal theory is really a site for the real
mutation or migration of black metal into other media, into forms that
participate in and are not only about black metal. Right now it seems that
black metal can withstand the addition of any adjective placed before it
(this  black metal,  that  black metal), where the di erence is registered as
one of variety within the genre. Black metal theory engages this process
from the other side.

17. Any last words and comments on things that might have been le out?

Nothing comes to mind.

 N M

INTERVIEW
(Nina Scholz, Jungle World, 2012)
1. When did you became a Black Metal fan? And why?

I gravitated towards Black Metal around 2002 a er many years of

listening to other kinds of metal, above all Black Sabbath. It is hard to say
why. We do not recognize music according to evident reasons. Hearing the
call of a sound means listening to some kind of secret. But my fall into
Black Metal speci cally did coincide with thinking more and more about
metal, becoming consciously bound to it. In the twel h century, Andreas
Capellanus de ned love as ‘immoderate thinking [immoderata cogitatione]
about the beauty of the other sex’. I feel that there is a deep relation
between the darkly muted excess of the Black Metal sound and the
inordinate interior noise of obsessive-contemplative thought.

2. How did your love for Black Metal change over the years?

e more I listen to Black Metal the less I know about it. at is how it
has changed. I am a lazy fan, not very good at keeping up with what is new
or old. Now that I have paid attention to Black Metal for a few years, I feel
that Black Metal is something one can only catch glimpses of. No one really
knows what it is, or where it lives, because it moves around the world like a
demon, possessing now one song and now another. Of course this
perception is related to how I usually listen to Black Metal, working at my
computer or while going somewhere, moving between this song and that.

3. When did you start your Black Metal eory project and how did it
evolve?
 e Black Metal eory project started in 2009. e rst thing I wrote
about metal was a commentary on Black Sabbath’s ‘Black Sabbath’, out of
which grew a paper on metal and deixis, which I presented at the Heavy
Fundamentalisms conference in Salzburg in 2008. e necessity for a ‘Black
Metal eory’ started to take shape for me there, through conversation
with several people who contributed to the rst and later symposia. A er
that I organized an issue of Glossator (glossator.org) on Black Metal, which
provided a context for the formulation of theoretical approaches to the
genre. e issue will come out this year, though with less than half of the
contributions that were promised. Meanwhile there have been three Black
Metal eory symposia (Hideous Gnosis, Melancology, P.E.S.T.).

4. Why are you using modern philosophers to explain what Black Metal
is/can be?

Using modern philosophy to think about Black Metal and using Black
Metal to think about modern philosophy (and using both to think about
neither) is totally natural given how Black Metal and modern philosophy
mirror and oppose each other, and more generally, how metal and theory
are bound together by obscure and intimate con ictual relations. On the
one hand, there are the endless intersecting areas of concern/inspiration:
nihilism, existential negativity, death of God, anti-modernism, and so on.
On the other hand, Black Metal represents a kind of synthetic neo-
medieval anti-philosophy, doing to the Enlightenment what the
Renaissance did to the Middle Ages. e rst demo by Judas Iscariot, solo-
project of an American called Akhenaten, is entitled Heidegger (1992) –
that pretty much says it all.

5. Is it true that you are searching for the true essence of Black Metal? And
if so, why?

No. No one needs to search for the true essence of Black Metal. e truth
of Black Metal was always there and now it has found us. Anyone who is
searching for the true essence of Black Metal is totally lost. Black Metal
 eory simply elaborates upon the black essence into which metal and
thought mutually penetrate.

6. What is Black Metal to you?

According to what I have thus far written on the subject, Black Metal is
anti-cosmosis, worm, mysticism.

7. What is, in your opinion, the di erence between bands in America and
Europe?

American Black Metal bands are more in tune with nature mysticism and
the westward, solar path of Romanticism. e spirit of William Blake is
important to this. Most of Judas Iscariot’s lyrics are from Blake and I hear
that Liturgy are working on an opera based around Blake’s gure Ololon.
For me the essential feeling of American Black Metal is found in
Inquisition. ey truly communicate the dark cosmic power that becomes
present in the western mountains at night. My body is trapped in the
decadent impoverished cesspool of New York City. Chanting with
Inquisition, my soul ies to its throne. I have also recently started to
develop thoughts about bergmetal, a tradition to which the Cascadian and
Rocky Mountain Black Metal bands are increasingly important.

6. Can you listen to Burzum? Or does it con ict you?

I love listening to Burzum. No con icts there. e Black Metal ideal

pertains to the tormenting practice of self-honesty and annihilative spiritual
nobility. Black Metal truth inhabits an alpine domain of transcendent
disdain that is necessarily without fear of anything and far above stooping
to take o ense at anyone.

7. Your favourite band right now and why?

 My favorite band right now is Mgła. I like the driving, advancing, war-like
sound. Excellent soundtrack to the Bhagavad Gita.

8. Is there an upcoming symposium planned?

Not that I am aware of.

9. Are you satis ed how the others went and can you tell us a little bit about
them?

Each symposium was enjoyable in a di erent but similar way. It is a

pleasure to meet the people whom the events attract and to philosophize
with Black Metal while drinking beer. Work from the second symposium
will be published soon, as a book by Zero press. Work from the third
symposium will be published later this year.

10. How much do your studies and you being a Black Metal fan in uence
each other?

I have brie y written elsewhere about the idea of ‘headbanging exegesis’ –

that is the principle connection I think, a reversible hermeneutic
intersection between thought and metal. As of more recently, I am working
on a lecture about mysticism and the color black for the Dark Nights of the
Universe series at the end of this month. ere is some kind of mutual
in uence going on there. And it turns out that Inquisition are playing in
New York on the rst two nights of the Dark Nights event. So truly, this is
paradise.
 N M

METAL STUDIES AND THE SCISSION OF THE

WORD:
A Personal Archaeology of Headbanging Exegesis
[T]he problem of knowledge is a problem of possession, and every
problem of possession is a problem of enjoyment, that is, of language.
– Giorgio Agamben

My way into metal studies is bound up with desire for commentary as a

form of thinking and writing that not only interprets and analyzes its object
but belongs to it in a problematic and creative way. Although commentary
does not generally enjoy the status of a vital mode or genre of intellectual
production – a function perhaps of its own essential marginality – both its
deep history and its present proliferation in new forms (blogs, hypertext,
dvd, etc.) testify to its plastic potentiality, its ability to shape by being
shaped by its material. e creativity of commentary is legible in the word
itself which, from comminsici (to devise, invent), indicates the power of
thinking with (com-) something. Regarding the development of metal
studies, commentary may thus be deployed, practically and theoretically, to
productively engage the distinction between studying with and studying
about metal, as well as to hold metal studies formally open to the
commentarial currents of metal culture.1 Note that this distinction is
mappable onto the term ‘metal studies’ itself which can signify, not only the
study of metal, but a discipline that is metal, that has the attribute of, or is
inherently possessed by, metal.2 Not being at all a scholar of heavy metal,
but someone who (like most metal scholars) simply enjoys thinking and
writing with metal in a more or less intellectual way, my claim in these
comments is for the superior importance of this second meaning of ‘metal
studies’, not as one that precludes or prevents the former, but as a force that
complicates and propels it from within. is second, subversive meaning of
‘metal studies’ marks the enchanted space of heretical delity to metal, the
noisy and unpredictable poetic mosh-pit whereby metal studies cyclonically
both becomes metal and opens all disciplines to heavy metal complicity.
As its ancient legal, philosophical, and religious traditions demonstrate,
commentary is deeply related to the practice of an exegetical as opposed to
critical relation to texts: ‘What criticism does is to interpret a text by
explaining it in terms of more or less remote objective contexts. […]
Exegesis, on the other hand, is text interpretation not through explanation
derived from objective context alone, but through understanding derived
from the text’s as well as the subject’s own subjective context. […] Exegesis,
then, never loses sight of the self-understanding fundamental to the
constitution of its regions of meaning’.3 At once perpetuating and occupying
its texts, commentary is grounded in the experience of a dilated present
where ‘content of transmission and act of transmission, what is unique and
what is repeatable, are wholly identi ed’.4 Now, the weird personal fact I
must somehow account for is that my intellectual commitment to
commentary is actually causally related to my love of metal, according to
the following timeline of events.5 1986–7: I develop a habit of doing
calculus homework while listening to tapes of KCMU’s mostly death and
thrash metal show Brain Pain, convinced that it improved my thinking.
1988: During a unique dusk-to-dawn squid-cleaning shi , I am deeply
impressed by my co-worker’s subtle interpretations of Paranoid. 2000: A er
commenting philosophically on some metal lyrics, I joke with a fellow
medievalist graduate student about writing a metal gloss. 2006: I start
organizing a collaborative image and text metal commentary project that
never gets o the ground. 2007–8: I write a running commentary on the
‘ rst’ heavy metal song.6 2008: I present on deixis at the Heavy
Fundametalisms conference in Salzburg.7 2008: I start the journal
Glossator: Practice and eory of the Commentary (glossator.org). 2009: I
co-organize with Reza Negarestani the Spring 2012 volume of Glossator on
black metal.8 2009: I organize the black metal theory symposium Hideous
Gnosis.
Looking back, I can now see that this strange conjunction of metal and
commentary is twisted around the principle of exegesis, not in the manner
of orthodox responsibility towards the object o en associated with the
term, but as a mode of study that is aggressively for-itself and ‘irresponsibly’
faithful to its object. Such perverted exegesis can be compared, within
medieval culture, both to the condition of the heretic who willfully
(mis)reads Scripture for his own ends and to the inordinate a ection of the
courtly lover whose sel sh/transcendent obsession has little to do with the
beloved herself. So does it resonate with the ringing ears of the headbanger
who psycho-corporeally contemplates metal’s truth while obliterating the
avenues to its understanding. is means that the metal studies I want is a
discipline taking place on the other side, even breaking the back of,
criticism. As Agamben explains, ‘criticism is born at the moment when the
scission [of the word] reaches its extreme point’.9 By ‘scission of the word’ is
meant the fatal split between poetry and philosophy, between ‘a word that
is unaware […] and enjoys the object of knowledge by representing it in
beautiful form, and a word that has all seriousness and consciousness for
itself but does not enjoy its object because it does not know how to
represent it’.10 Unconsciously gluing the word back together, criticism
‘neither represents nor knows, but knows the representation’. By contrast,
metal studies in the essential second sense means a way of conscious
criticism, a truer, inverted criticism that is turned, like a Petrine cross ( ),
upside down. Namely: a discipline that both represents and knows by
unknowing the representation.11 Climbing the (un)holy mountain of the
logos, the headbanging exegete immolates himself in the infernal lava of
metal love, and lives to tell the tale.

1 Continuum’s 33 1/3 book series and the forthcoming Black Metal Revolution book
(<http://www.blackmetalrevolution.com>) are prominent examples of album-commentary
projects that move across this distinction.
2 I have formulated the rubric of ‘black metal theory’ as a third term that exploits and exacerbates
this distinction: Not black metal. Not theory. Not not black metal. Not not theory. Black metal
theory. eoretical blackening of metal. Metallic blackening of theory. Mutual blackening. Nigredo
in the intoxological crucible of symposia.
3 Richard A. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis, and Philosophy: Interpretation A er Levinas (West Nyack, NY:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 239.
4 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption’, in
Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999), p. 153.
5 See Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy’, Collapse VI:
Geo/Philosophy (2010), pp. 20–56, and ‘ e Severed Hand: Commentary and Ecstasy’, English
Language Notes, 50 (2013), pp. 89–98.
6 ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”: A Gloss on Heavy Metal’s Originary Song’, Reconstruction: Studies
in Contemporary Culture, 9 (2009)
<http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/092/masciandaro.shtml>.
7 ‘What is is that Stands before Me?: Metal as Deixis’, in e Metal Void: First Gatherings, ed. by
Niall Scott and Imke Von Helden (Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2010), pp. 11–23.
8 For our theorization of the relations between black metal and commentary, see ‘Black Metal
Commentary’, in Hideous Gnosis, pp. 257–66.
9 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. by Ronald L. Martinez
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. xvii.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
 N M

REFLECTIONS FROM THE INTOXOLOGICAL

CRUCIBLE
e experience of black metal theory I have in mind is a kind of mutual
intoxicating meltdown of thinking about metal and the thought which
metal itself is.

Metal is a musical form of thinking that turns thought against itself. In

doing so, it both rids thought of itself and realizes thought’s own substance,
touching it as something that exists beyond the head.

Feeling the curvature of this turning is the immediate, e cient cause of

headbanging, striking head against its own anvil (metal on metal) and
seeing the sparks y.

eory (intellectual vision) – insofar as it is practiced as a hammering of

thought into the real, as opposed to a merely instrumental or managerial
deployment of thought about the real – is another form of headbanging.

e experience of black metal theory is a coming out of and going

through (ex-per-ientia) its place: the zone of indistinction between banging
your head in these two ways.

eory is o en mistakenly conceived as abstract and somehow apart from

the ‘real world’ – an alienation or dissimulation that serves innumerable
false identities on both sides of the lie.

Metal is o en mistakenly conceived as concrete and somehow part of the

‘real world’ – an alienation or dissimulation that serves innumerable false
identities on both sides of the lie.
 eory and metal nd each other in black. Why? Because ‘a phenomenal
blackness entirely lls the essence of man’.1

e experience of black metal theory is the intellectual, imaginative, and

physical endurance or undergoing of a topological experiment in which
theory and metal are placed inside each other within a space of blackness.

One way to do this is to participate in a symposium on black metal theory

inside a metal venue, which I have done three times now: Hideous Gnosis
(Brooklyn, 12 December 2009), Melancology (London, 13 January 2011),
P.E.S.T. (Dublin, 20 November 2011).

ree days before the Hideous Gnosis event there was a spiral anomaly in
the Norwegian sky.2

Two days before the Hideous Gnosis event, the Glory of Christ Church in
the Bronx was looted and torched by a ‘Satan-loving arsonist’.3

Two weeks before the Hideous Gnosis event, I su ered a one-time seizure
in Union Square. For a few minutes, life and world were peeled away and
replaced like a super cial veneer over something much more solid.
Abdominal and back muscles took over a month to recover.

One week later, I presented a lecture on ‘Beheading and the Impossible’

for the Medieval Club of New York.

One week a er that, at the symposium, I talked about anti-cosmic black

metal and the dissolution of the universe.

e title of the symposium was taken from the title of a song by Caïna
which ends with the words, ‘No-one’s there anymore’.4
 Some people, who think that Caïna is lame, shoe-gazey post-black metal,
took the title of the symposium as proof that it too is lame, etc.

In an interview published three days before the P.E.S.T. symposium in

Dublin, Andy Curtis Bignell of Caïna said the following about the Hideous
Gnosis material: ‘I have a copy of this. I thought in principle it was an
interesting idea, but the execution was generally very “pseudy”, self-
obfusticating and dull. I’ve read both better academic analyses of pop
culture and better journalism on black metal. It’s dated undergraduate
readings of Deleuze mixed with university-newspaper prurience. e only
article of any interest was the one that collected a load of interviews from
USBM artists, purely because it was more like a zine and therefore a bit
more immediate and pure. I don’t really think that either Black Metal or
academia bene t from this kind of half-arsed discourse’.5

During the Hideous Gnosis symposium, there was an ice-machine in an

adjacent room that continued to make an annoying noise during the talks.
I did not appreciate the interruption, but I did like the fact that noise was
being made by ice, especially when Anthony Sciscione referred to
Leviathan’s ‘Fucking Your Ghost in Chains of Ice’ as ‘possibly the most
awesomely-titled song ever’.6

In my symposium talk, I criticized the ‘vulgar policing of the space of

authentic experience, which proceeds by holding forever closed the
meeting place of theory and practice, science and art, philosophy and
poetry, shutting them up in the minimally present and maximally
interviewable person of the master to whom alone is accorded the privilege
of a theoretical gnosis’.7

No one ever experiences anything beyond one’s own nature. As below, so

above.

One more good reason to begin to stop being oneself.

1 François Laruelle, ‘Du noir univers dans les fondations humaines de la couleur’, La Decision
Philosophique, 5 (1988), pp. 107–12. English translation by Miguel Abreu published in Hyun Soo
Choi: Seven Large Scale Paintings (New York: read Waxing Space).
2 See ‘2009 Norwegian spiral anomaly’
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Norwegian_spiral_anomaly>.
3 ‘Satan’s handiwork: Goon torches Glory of Christ Church in Bronx a er leaving signs of devil
worship’, Daily News <http://articles.nydailynews.com/2009-12-
10/news/17941061_1_parishioners-soup-kitchen-satan>.
4 Caïna, ‘Hideous Gnosis’, Mourner (Profound Lore Records, 2007).
5 ROB, ‘An interview with Caïna’, Lurker’s Path <http://www.lurkerspath.com/2011/11/17/an-
interview-with-caina/>.
6 Anthony Sciscione, ‘Goatsteps behind my steps . . . : Black Metal and Ritual Renewal’, in Hideous
Gnosis, p. 174.
7 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya’, in Hideous Gnosis, p. 85.
 E C

INTERVIEW
(Dominik Irtenkauf, Legacy, November 2014)
1. You started with black metal theory a er you had rst gone through
much theory. When did you come across the rst black metal record and do
you still remember its impact on you?

I grew up listening to punk, but black metal was always there in the
background, forming part of the soundscape. Its foregrounding for me
coincided with my discovery of black metal theory – that was in November
2011, when the third black metal theory symposium, P.E.S.T., was held in
Dublin. I was fortunate enough to be co-hosting a dinner with Scott Wilson
for some of the participants at my house. As it happened, I had met Scott
rather obliquely at the second black metal theory symposium, Melancology,
over in London, and we formed a conceptual-culinary partnership,
MOUTH, following that. Anyway, at this time we were listening to a lot of
Cascadian black metal while we cooked. I was due to give a lecture on
black metal theory a day or so following that, and the principle reading
material for it was a collection of essays that emerged out of the rst
symposium, Hideous Gnosis (2010). All this goes to say, black metal was
really foregrounded for me at this time. I remember my aural experience of
Fauna’s Rain (2006) being very deeply a ected by Steven Shakespeare’s
commentary in that collection, ‘ e Light at Illuminates Itself, e Dark
at Soils Itself: Blackened Notes From Schelling’s Underground’.2
Shakespeare is a brilliant black metal theorist, he really knows how to think
with the music. His insights in that text, on the changing nature of black
metal, on deep ecology, and melancholy, particularly as it emerges out of
this con icted desire for a pre-modern pastoral world, really a ected my
aural experience. You once asked Nicola Masciandaro, why intellectualism
about black metal? And I remember he said to you, ‘why not? Especially if
[it] improve[s] the music, i.e. the black metal in my head’.3 Well, black
metal theory improved black metal for me, and it was foregrounded –
indeed became a central part of my life – from that experience of listening
to Fauna and WTTR and thinking with the music through Shakespeare’s
phenomenological reading, hence black metal theory’s essential function, as
Masciandaro would have it, of exposing and exploring ‘the non-di erence
between thought and metal’.4

2. Your work is guided by Georges Bataille. Do you see traces of his

philosophy in black metal and if so, is it rather random that black metal
musicians might come up with parallels to this Frenchman’s philosophy?

Yes, and no: I don’t think it is random at all, inchoate, perhaps, in

instances, but never random. Particularly in French black metal. Not
necessarily because Bataille himself was French, or because French black
metal has never been shy of intellectualism, but because it is more explicitly
mystical, sonorously and so on, and from there I think we can see traces of
Bataille’s thought in black metal more generally, especially as he is read
through Nick Land, for example, in e irst for Annihilation (1992),
which, of course, even sounds like a black metal album, instantly
intriguing, a sort of heretical inversion of the premise that ‘liking the way it
sounds without knowing what is meant is very metal’.5 Anyway, I’m
reminded of this here because you used the word ‘philosophy’, and this is
the key to answering this question correctly, or certainly as best I can. At
some point in this publication, Land, musing on our dead God, begins by
saying that ‘Bataille does not transmit a philosophy, but rather a delirious
negative evangile: “death can be tasted”.’6 It follows that, if death can be
tasted for Bataille, his gargantuan appetite or thirst for annihilation, if you
like, grows out of an attempt to link the sensuous and corporeal with an
ine able rst principle and this, coupled with a virulent disdain for the
Western metaphysical tradition, insofar as this tradition is understood to
have determined the sensational emptiness of modern life, is how he comes
to precede Masciandaro, however obliquely, as a highly unorthodox but
nevertheless key thinker in the contemporary retrieval of Neoplatonism,
particularly apophasis, which is a powerful, widely, and signi cantly
present, but little recognized feature of black metal.7
Most black metal theory and, of course, all of Masciandaro’s oeuvre, as its
inaugurator, is unknowingly driven by the de ning phenomenological
features of apophasis – the negative way of unknowing and unsaying – we
nd in black metal. e central feature is one of loss, or of losing, whether
that is in the sense of declarative meaning in the instrumental or vocal
orientation of the genre, or in those corresponding moments in interviews
where the black metal artist, ‘asked to articulate the deeper
meaning/philosophy behind their music and its philosophical/esoteric
references, retreats/advances into tautological reductiveness (its just fucking
metal) or some absolute emotion or stance (I hate everything, I just do
what I like)’.8 is kind of loss, or learned ignorance apropos of Nicholas
Cusanus, is both epistemic and existential. We nd the dysphoric a ective
quality of it in monstrosity – hence the masks/corpse paint of the genre –
and in self-violence, the much-maligned theatre of blood. And while this
divestment of certainty and of self is mostly painful, as we all (un)know, it
can be cause for positive emotion too. An o -cited passage from Bataille
that seems to capture this best, for black metal theorists, brings us back to
the death of God: ‘THE OBJECT OF ECSTASY IS THE ABSENCE OF AN
OUTSIDE ANSWER. THE INEXPLICABLE PRESENCE OF MAN IS THE
ANSWER THE WILL GIVES ITSELF, SUSPENDED IN THE VOID OF
UNKNOWABLE NIGHT’.9

3. Black Metal eory attempts at thinking with, rather than on, black
metal. us it is quite di erent from academic scholarship. I know some
scholars who work in the eld of Metal Studies who don’t have a very high
opinion of Black Metal eory as the writings seem too oblique and abstract,
not closely connected to the object of interest, that is black metal.

Amusing, since they couldn’t be closer, in fact: as a phenomenological

extension of the architecture of apophasis, the epistemic loss or learned
ignorance we nd in black metal. How to explain this further? One way to
broach the subject would be to agree with these scholars and say, yes, as it
stands, black metal theory is essentially a para-academic discipline and, as
such, has less to do with the humanities and more to do with humanism,
what Masciandaro would call ‘an apophatic humanism, one grounded in
the passion of the question as the substance of human being’.10 One might
then add that, in its methodological commitment to materialize the
question, black metal theory is necessarily oblique and abstract.

4. Still another side of the coin might be musicians playing this style of
metal music. Keith Kahn-Harris wrote about their ‘anti-re exive re exivity’ in
his monograph on extreme metal, that the musicians oppose against too
much theory involved in their creation of black metal songs. e style is
understood as pure instinct and simultaneously involved in a history of metal
music that asks for progressing provocation. What do you think about their
resentments?

I’m not exactly sure what Keith intends with his employment of the term
‘anti-re exive re exivity’, but I’m lecturing alongside him in Denmark in
Spring so can quiz him on it then. For now I’ll say there is a signi cant
di erence between the re exive and the instinctual. If by instinct we
understand a behavior or an action that is performed without being based
on prior experience, that is, in the absence of learning, black metal theory’s
commentarial method may be similarly construed as pure instinct and is
simultaneously involved in a history of metal music, as an extension of the
lyric tradition Masciandaro traces ‘from the troubadour anthologies of the
thirteenth century […] to Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of album
commentaries’.11 Consider black metal theory’s emergence in Masciandaro’s
commentary on heavy metal’s originary song, the commentary is literally
and literarily running ‘on a feeling deep inside | at drives you fuckin’ mad
| A feeling of a hammerhead | You need it oh so bad’ (Metallica).

5. Your own work revolves around the MOUTH and culinary consumption.
In black metal an open mouth enables the singer to shape screams – it helps
to express anger at the world and disgust. What other options of opening and
shutting mouths do you see in black metal?

I see the buccal mouth, what Mark Fisher would call the ‘unheard
material pre-condition’12 of screaming, of eating, of spitting, or of speaking.
I discuss this in the context of Les Légions Noires and Vordb’s conception of
Gloatre in the book I’m currently co-authoring with Masciandaro, Floating
Tomb: Black Metal eory (Mimesis, 2015).

6. Eugene acker was doing research on prevailing horror motives in black

metal. He also consulted demonological treatises to approach black metal as
apocalyptic culture. Do you think that these cultural researches will grow in
number? So far, other sub-genres have been preferred in metal studies. Do
you see any reasons for this?

I consulted a demon myself recently. She said ‘my foresight close[s] the
world to me’.13

1 For ‘BOUND TO METAL feature’, Legacy Magazine, no. 95, vol. 02 (2015), p. 143.
2 Steven Shakespeare, ‘ e Light at Illuminates Itself, e Dark at Soils Itself: Blackened Notes
From Schelling’s Underground,’ in Hideous Gnosis, ed. by Nicola Masciandaro (New York: n.p.,
2010), pp. 5-31.
3 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Interview (Dominik Irtenkauf, Avant-Garde Metal 2011)’, in this volume.
4 Masciandaro, ‘Avant-Garde Metal’, in this volume.
5 Nicola Masciandaro, comment on Karl Steel, ‘Satan Laughing Spreads His Wings’, In e Middle
<http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2007/03/satan-laughing-spreads-his-wings.html>
(accessed 02/04/15).
6 Nick Land, e irst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge,
1992), p. 69.
7 I expand on this claim (sans the black metal aspect) in Edia Connole, ‘Bataille: Exhuming
Animality’, in e Accursed Book: Essays On and With Bataille, ed. by Will Stronge (Bloomsbury,
forthcoming).
8 Nicola Masciandaro, comment on Valter, ‘Black Metal Sound Poetry’, Surreal Documents
<http://surrealdocuments.blogspot.ie/2009/02/black-metal-sound-poetry.html> (accessed
02/04/15).
9 ‘L’OBJET DE L’EXTASE EST L’ABSENCE DE RÉPONSE DU DEHORS. L’INEXPLICABLE
PRÉSENCE DE L’HOMME EST LA RÉPONSE QUE LA VOLONTÉ SE DONNE, SUSPENDUE
SUR LE VIDE D’UNE ININTELLIGIBLE NUIT [Oeuvres complètes, 5:20]’, translated in Georges
Bataille, e Bataille Reader, ed. by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 45.
Cf. Nicola Masciandaro, ‘What is is that Stands Before Me?: Metal as Deixis’, in this volume.
10 Nicola Masciandaro, Su cient Unto the Day: Sermones Contra Solicitudinem (London: Schism,
2014), p. 121. Cf. Edia Connole, ‘Les Légions Noires: Labor, Language, Laughter’, in this volume.
11 Nicola Masciandaro, commentary on Ben Woodard, ‘ e Blackish Green Of e Greenish Black,
Or, e Earth’s Coruscating Darkness’, in Glossator 6: Black Metal (2012), pp. 73–88; p. 84.
12 Valter, ‘Brenoritvrezorke – Four Demos’, Surreal Documents
<http://srrealdocuments.blogspot.ie/2009/02/br.html> (accessed 02/04/15). Cf. K-punk,
‘Phonograph Blues’, Abstract Dynamics
<http://kpunkabstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.html> (accessed 02/04/15).
13 Clarice Lispector, e Passion According to G.H., trans by Idra Novey (London and New York:
Penguin Books, 2014), p. 9; with thanks to Alina Popa.
 E C

WHAT IS BLACK METAL THEORY?

acatena/acatenae/aconcatenation1

Chained book. John Sintram, collection of moralized exempla, Germany, eenth century. 22.3 x
15cm. BL, Add. Ms. 44055.

Not black metal. Not theory. Not not black metal. Not not theory. Black
metal theory. eoretical blackening of metal. Metallic blackening of
theory. Mutual blackening. Nigredo in the intoxological crucible of
symposia.
– Nicola Masciandaro2

Already, with the notion of a symposium there is the expectation that

music and speech will conjoin and, moreover, conjoin ‘with drinking’
(sum-posion). Most famously of all, Plato’s Symposium records a
somewhat drunken dialogue on love and beauty from the fourth century
BC. Given the misanthropy that characterizes Black metal, we might
suppose that the Black Metal eory Symposium will be more concerned
with hatred, but one does not come without the other […] It is indeed a
question of love and hatred and precisely not of judgement, for there is
no possibility of conjunction between Black metal and [theory] in any
other way.
– Scott Wilson3

Black metal theory […] presupposes the philial, the epidemic, the
strategic tryst.
– Michael O’Rourke4

[... and] opposes the perverted secret identity between fan and
philosopher in contemporary culture, namely, the situation according to
which the fan is an unconscious or sleeping philosopher and the
philosopher a mere fan [of the music].
– Nicola Masciandaro5

Black metal theory expresses a need to reopen music to the philosophy

of music and philosophy to the music of philosophy, in a black way. If
philosophy is thought, practicing the love of wisdom (philo-sophia), black
metal theory is thought practicing the love of black metal.
– Nicola Masciandaro6

e love of black metal is an inside-out mysticism, not only in the sense

of a profanation of mysticism, but in the deeper sense of a mystical
inversion of mysticism, an unconscious occult recording or perverse
intuitive preservation of the heterodox love of God […] black metal
truths remain backwardsly legible within medieval mystical discourse,
above all in places where the ordered and integrative movement of the
return to the One is reversely accented toward individual reality.
– Nicola Masciandaro7

As below, so above.
– Nicola Masciandaro8

I pick up the guitar play until I’ve found a ri that makes me either
shudder in fear, cry with pain, tremble with anger and I will play that ri
many times over […] I am never content or never will be with the
restrictions set upon me. I will destroy cosmos and return to freedom!
– Donn of Teutoburg Forest9

is is the essential reality of black metal as mysticism, its being a

musical materialization of the mystical relation in which the transcendent
subject and object, self and God, are equally dislocated and secreted in an
immanent and blackened inter-becoming of metal with everything, an
amorous pestilential alchemy that nigredically melts being into an ancient
cosmic essence that cannot be, taking ight through clouds of chaos
where stars die, into the darkest divine body, named by Eruigena as ‘that
which neither creates nor is created […] [which] is classed among the
impossibles, for its essence lies in not being able to be [cuius di erentia est
non posse esse]’.
– Nicola Masciandaro10

[Black metal theory] is an irruption of thought, an irregular expansion

taking inspiration from Black metal, but also from medieval philosophy,
[from] extreme noise to extreme silence. Some of it has nothing to do
with Black metal at all.
– Niall Scott11

[Indeed] if black metal theory is to be worthy of the name then it ought,

must even, be a theory of everything.
– Michael O’Rourke12

[…] neither for anyone nor for no one […] the act of penetrating once
again into the essence of black metal.
– Nicola Masciandaro13

[Here] black metal theory is forged through the process of its ‘tools’ being
placed in the icy furnace of blackened a nities and a ections, giving itself
over to the power of modi cation to which black metal is itself an e ect,
heterogenous no doubt, but one that opens onto the same Night […] of
non-knowledge.
– Scott Wilson14

e experience of black metal theory […] is [then] a kind of mutual

intoxicating meltdown of thinking about metal and the thought which
metal itself is.
– Nicola Masciandaro15

[It] is the intellectual, imaginative, and physical endurance or

undergoing of a topological experiment in which theory and metal are
placed inside each other within a space of blackness.
– Nicola Masciandaro16

eory and metal nd each other in black. Why? Because ‘a

phenomenal blackness entirely lls the essence of man’.
– Nicola Masciandaro17

You have become the cancer

YOU are the dis-ease …
Pitch black death is all that is le …
FILL THE VOID WITH BLACK!
– Blood of the Black Owl18

e darkness in the music does not have to consume the listener, but it
is dark – bleak, angry, violent.
– Andrew White19

[…] an inchoate experience that nevertheless provides the groundless

ground of self-re ection in a speculation that re ects, interminably, on
the im-possibility of inde nite and limitless being.
– Scott Wilson20
 Bleakness manifests most o en when […] faced with what is distinctly
impersonal: with cloudscapes and dimmed, wet treescapes. Or better yet,
anytime [one] witness[es] a stark dis gurement of the real by our species.
And owering from this is a bleak outlook correlated with the immense,
consistent, and mostly hidden, su ering that is our history – our being.
– Paul J. Ennis21

Humanity as a pestilence upon the earth is clearly standard black metal

fare. Cancer, in its obsessive struggle to live, turns into its own negation.
Disease becomes the purity of pitch black death. However, it is in the
reverberating void of this death that a curious a rmation is born, formed
from the very stu of negativity but no longer de ned by and as death.
To paradoxically ‘ ll the void with black’ is to a rm di erently, perversely
creating a new mode of subjectivity that disregards teleological and
providential striving away from death: a sovereign indi erence to the
machine that generates the boundary between human/inhuman,
pure/diseased, living/dead. In Fauna’s words:

Under a ragged cloth of sky

And the moon’s blazing eye –
Burrow deep in blackest earth
And break further.
– Steven Shakespeare22

e listener realizes the music as a force rising within their own being, a
being that demands expression through ritual destruction of one’s own
head, the auto-decapitation or self-martyrdom of the self seeking
simultaneous release from and deeper entry into the world.
– Nicola Masciandaro23

‘Head’ here should be taken in its full range, for the acephalic is a
fantasy both of the leaderless (the ‘body’ of the people rules alone,
brought about by that revolutionary act of beheading the sovereign,
materially or in principle) and the irrational (headless, the body rules in
its singularity and decides on the basis of the a ective, and phenomenal,
taking on unreason as its shared principle). As such, the acephalic
condition of black metal must surpass itself and extend this to a total
condition […] In other words, you can’t a ord to throw away the head. It
must be picked up, made open use of. Not to resuture a lost order to the
mediated despair of the present, not to stitch the head back on. Rather, to
make its absence and dislocation visible, to make something better of the
inherited atrocity […] To strike a totality by becoming a negative totality
together, […] To take on the abortive passage of the apocalyptic as
mandate and injunction, not to do right, but to do wrongly to a wrong
world. Never to fall into sadness or dejection at the prospect, but to rage
with joy […] And above all to do this together. To become totally singular
and negatively universal is to take on the acephalic mess that we are – by
becoming cephaloric, by not just severing but picking up the pieces – and
to undo the idiocy of any nostalgia for a purer time. Only from there do
we forge Luciferian […] collectivity: knowing very well that we can’t take
the thrown, and doing it all the same. Such is the decisive core of black
metal refusal, for better or for worse. ere’s a reason that it isn’t Wolf in
the rone Room. It’s Wolves, that strident, impure, unwanted pack of
inhuman negativity, the absent crown shattered into knives for and
against all.
– Evan Calder Williams24

[In this fashion, black metal theory] treats black metal as a mythology
rather than a canon: respectful of its origins, but open to its
unpredictable, vermicular development.
– Niall Scott25

It is [ergo] more about speculative interpretations of a musical sub-

culture than developing a coherent system on black metal music [itself ].
– Niall Scott26

And yet there is a coherence to black metal music. ere is a principle

according to which we could rightly insist and argue that things are or are
not black metal. In this respect black metal theory territorializes the
potentiality of a non-systematizeable coherence – that its topos or place is
the black spaces or unreachable interiors/exteriors that systems per se
cannot reach.
Because these spaces are heterogenous with respect to di erent coherent
or axiomatic systems, so black metal is not something universally xed,
but a virtually mobile unreachable thing: an un-mineable mineral that
weirdly relocates its inaccessibility according to the equipment on the
surface [whether that be art, design, music, maths, literature, science,
philosophy, theology etcetera].
– Nicola Masciandaro27

is is the very condition and principle of black metal theory’s politics

[…] its nal non-determinability and unrealizability, its bursting open.
Not not black metal, not not theory, yes yes black metal, yes yes theory.
– Michael O’Rourke28

Instead of the power of prohibition and censorship black metal theory

serves to increase and expand more and more on that which has been
forbidden.
– Niall Scott29

[It is] a site for the real mutation or migration of black metal into other
media, into forms that participate in and are not only about black metal.
Right now it seems that black metal can withstand the addition of any
adjective placed before it (this black metal, that black metal), where the
di erence is registered as one of variety within the genre. Black metal
theory engages this process from the other side.
– Nicola Masciandaro30

Black metal and academic discourse are no doubt heterogenous and

cannot be conjoined, but in bringing one into proximity with the other it
is essential that this clash should result less in the academic illumination
of black metal than in the blackening of discourse itself wherein the
 forces of black metal restore some of the powers and dangers of discourse
which the procedures of academic institutions seek to ward o and
master by controlling and delimiting them.
– Scott Wilson31

It ‘works’ as follows […]

– Paul J. Ennis32

Nothing comes to mind.

– Nicola Masciandaro33

is is what we are looking for: black metal theory fucks up academic

discourse. SHOCK!
– Scott Wilson34

acatena/acatenae/aconcatenation

I begin, opening (/wounding/ openly wounding) discourse on Black metal

theory with a catena (pl. catenae), literally a ‘chain’, from Greek δέω,
meaning ‘to bind’, a medieval form of exegetical commentary composed
entirely of a concatenation or ‘linking together’ of singular responses.
Traditionally (and to some extent here), this consisted of a series of extracts
or quotes from the (Black metal) Church Fathers, the Catena Patrum
(metallum nigri) or ‘chain of the (Black metal) Fathers’. ese extracts were
arranged, with trivial authorial additions, to elucidate portions of Scripture
(/Black metal theory) concerned. Representing what Masciandaro terms
‘textual signi cance as a plenitude spanning the voices of multiple
authors’,35 this textual form is exempli ed by St. omas Aquinas’ Catena
Aurea, a thirteenth-century commentary on the four gospels, so contrived
that it consists wholly of extracts from other writers, dexterously dovetailed
together to form a ‘Glossa Continuum’ on Scripture. In some cases (as in
Masciandaro’s own ‘Anti Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya’), a catena (really an
acatena – where the a marks the intimate exteriority of Scripture, and of
theory to Black metal music) will form (conceptually, at least) the major or
central part of the text, in other cases, the catena (/acatena) occupies the
minor or peripheral part of the text, occupying the top and side or only the
side margin. It has been proposed that, depending on the way and purpose
for which they are chained together, catenae (/acatenae) can be divided
into ve di erent types of classi cations, ranging from the authenticating to
the parabolic (see, for example, Steven Shakespeare’s ‘ e Light that
Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils Itself: Blackened Notes from
Schelling’s Underground’ and ‘Of Plications: A Short Summa On e
36
Nature Of Cascadian Black Metal’). In all of these cases or classi cations,
however, catenae (/acatenae) are linked together with only such minor
adjustment of words as to allow the whole (catena/acatena) to form a
continuous commentary. e composer of catenic (/acatenic) form is, then,
as Timothy W. Seid suggests, more of an editor or compiler than an author,
with very little to add to the work (on this point see the Codex Zacynthius,
or Niall Scott’s ‘Black Confessions and Absu-Lution’: ‘[Black metal/theory]
is to repeat words to repeat words: glossan homologein’.37 A truth that
stretches from the genre’s sonic inception in second wave ‘necro’ or ‘corpse’
sound, sonorously generated through the worst possible equipment to
create a dissonant facsimile of the original, to its aesthetic inception in the
photocopy, the degraded duplicate that adorns Darkthrone’s Transylvanian
Hunger [Peaceville, 1994]; as Masciandaro notes: ‘For Black metal
repetition Is the original’).38
In light of Alastair Minnis’ Medieval eory of Authorship (1984),
however, Seid’s (/Masciandaro’s) remark must be understood in the context
of what Graham D. Caie conceives more generally as a resistance to the
assertion of authorship in the Middle Ages.39 As Caie notes in ‘“I Do Not
Wish To Be Called Auctour, But e Pore Compilatour” […]’, the ‘absolute’
or ‘primary e cient cause’ was God, the auctor, ‘author’, and auctoritas,
‘authority’, one with the cognate term authenticus, ‘authenticity’.40 is
belief is borne out in the very logic of the catena (/acatena), itself an ocular
analog ‘for the cosmic spectacle that held sway during the thousand or so
years when catenae were written, namely, the vision of the universe as
constituting a great chain of being’,41 a concept which marries Plato’s idea of
the Good (/God), bound by its own principle of plenitude to generate every
possible idea and temporal being (ergo Plotinus, ‘It is precisely because
there is nothing within the One that all things are from it’),42 to Aristotle’s
Scala Naturae or ‘Ladder of Nature’, where God (/the Good) is conceived as
the Prime Mover a ecting the world through a series of links, each
constituting an individual genus or species of being distinguished by a
greater or lesser share in reason and spirit. As Masciandaro explains
through Macrobius, pointing to what he calls the latter’s ‘properly
consequential syntax (re. “dregs”)’,

since Mind emanates from the Supreme God, and Soul from Mind, and
Mind, indeed, forms and su uses all below with life, and since this is the
one splendor lighting up everything and visible in all, like a countenance
re ected in many mirrors arranged in a row, and since all follow on in
continuous succession, degenerating step by step [degenerantia per
ordinem] in their downward course, the close observer will nd that from
the supreme God even to the bottommost dregs of the universe [a
summa deo usque ad ultimam rerum faecem] there is one tie [conexio],
binding at every link and never broken. is is the golden chain [catena
aurea] of Homer which, he tells us, God ordered to hang down from the
sky to the earth.43
 Deathspell Omega, Fas – Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum
(Norma Evangelium Diaboli, 2005).

Mathew 25:41; ‘Go, Accursed, into Everlasting Fire’.

Supporting the much celebrated aphorism of hermetic philosophy, ‘as

above, so below’, the catena aurea situates man in a universe authored by
God in which the structure of the microcosm re ects that of the macrocosm
through a series of links or succession of secondary causes. (Consequently,
as Masciandaro – who exactly reverses this formula – will note: ‘[a]s the
rst link and primal mirror produced in this ecstatic [cosmic (a)catenic]
emanation, Satan, second only to God, becomes archival, alonely, on the
basis of being arch-other, the original subject of the most intimate and
intolerable intersection between the absolute fact of God and something’s
being other than God’.)44 As Minnis makes plain, this fact was evident in
the most characteristic and representative Scriptural exegesis of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.45 Here, the respective roles of God and
man (/Satan: God ‘inverted in the voice of an ego’46 [‘(where) inversion (is)
recognized as a universal logical operator for transpositionally revealing-by-
concealing and concealing-by-revealing the essence of something […]
inversion repeats without repetition, without recording, keeping the old as
the shadow of the new’,47 ergo Marguerite Porete, ‘this soul in herself
knows only one thing, that is, the root of all evil, and the abundance of all
sins without number, without weight, and without measure’]),48 in
producing Holy Scripture, were described precisely, due to new conceptions
of authorial role and literary form adopted and developed in prologues
based on Aristotelian theories of causality (as Masciandaro mentions, ‘[the]
impulse, materialized in the initial scream of Teutoburg Forest’s Anti-
Subhuman Scum, “Seeing God’s Creation, and Despising it,” is explicable as
absolute refusal of [this] originary causality that the chain of being
manifests, and more precisely, as hatred of the essential weakness or
impotence of the absolute one who cannot not make others, the no-thing
[Ein Sof] perfectly incapable of not creating many things’).49
e technical philosophical details of these theories (what Masciandaro, in
his commentary on Shakespeare’s ‘Of Plications’, would term ‘God’s theory:
e theory whose image is life itself’,50 cf. ‘Anti Cosmosis: Black
Mahapralaya’, in which ‘Chaos [is] the ultimate expression of the most
horrible heresy: the fact that anything is happening at all’,51 ergo Black
metal artist Shamaatae of Arckanum’s cosmos-collapsing self-de nition: ‘I
am a living and a revolving cosmos of Kaos. I can’t stay as one and in one
way’,52 or Donn of Teutoburg Forest’s invocation: ‘I will destroy cosmos and
return to freedom!’ As Masciandaro makes plain: ‘ e chain principle is an
ontological wholism. It threads the fact of universe itself […] e cosmic
catena is the necessary point of identity, piercing every entity, between
essence and existence, the invisible thing making it so that everything is
next to something else and part of everything itself. It is thus in a full and
total sense the chain of being, the fact of being’s being a chain or binding’.53
Hence, Masciandaro’s own ‘cosmic dissolution’, what he terms ‘Black
Mahapralaya’, which begins in Black metal, in Black metal’s ‘eternal quest
for an infernal tone [Dagon]’54 that, contra the ear-pleasing sound of the
celestial spheres so contrived as to inspire order in the sub-lunary realm,
tends toward in nite chaos and cosmic exteriority, and ends with
Mahapralaya: ‘the real termination of the evolutionary process […] the
nal annihilation of the world, when the world becomes what it was in the
beginning, namely nothing [Meher Baba, Discourses]’.55 ‘ e anti-cosmic
structure of such metallic factical blackening of experience, which makes
the whole moment of life immediately ful ll Quentin Meillassoux’s
de nition of facticity as the narrow passage through which thought is able
to exit itself [and] we are able to make our way toward the absolute [A er
Finitude (2008)]’,56 is perfectly explicit, not only and less, in terms of Black
metal shaman Shamataae’s cosmos-collapsing self-de nitions viz. ‘[…] I am
my own in uence’,57 but in terms of Masciandaro’s own Master Meher
Baba’s analysis of the structure of individuality and its development through
the course of evolution, reincarnation and involution in e Divine eme.
Cf. ‘God, the Oversoul, alone is real. Nothing exists but God. e di erent
souls are in the Oversoul and one with it. e processes of evolution,
reincarnation and realisation are all necessary in order to enable the soul to
gain self-consciousness. In the process of winding, sanskaras become
instrumental for the evolution of consciousness though they also give
sanskaric bindings; and in the process of unwinding, sanskaric attachments
are annihilated, though the consciousness which has been gained is fully
retained […] “A” soul becomes “Z” soul a er going through evolution,
reincarnation and the process of realisation. It is only in the God-state that
consciousness is free’58 Or, as we read elsewhere: ‘ e process of perception
runs parallel to the process of creation, and the reversing of the process of
perception without obliterating consciousness amounts to realising the
nothingness of the universe as a separate entity [Meher Baba, Discourses]’.59
In ‘Remembering everything’s nothingness today’ [Aluk Todolo, ‘Occult
Rock VIII’, Occult Rock (Ajna O ensive, 2012)], bergmetal theorist Denys
X. Abaris too has recourse to Meher Baba and the concept of Mahapralaya,
in his commentary on the trisonic intersections of mountains, mysticism
and metal [Bergmetal: Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond (2014)]. Of
Aluk Todolo, a band which takes its name from Indonesian animism, the
‘Way of the Ancestors [Aluk To Dolo]’ followed by the Torajo [literally,
‘people of the highlands’], he says that they subject ancestrality itself to
ritual abuse, ‘transposing the Cold Black Metal of the Occidental Alp into
the steamy equatorial volcano of Occult Rock […] a mountain of metal
prediscursivity, the site of a musical mass wherein a metalhead stays
without a rming any delity of identity, where he may say, “I know where
I am if no one asks me.” Hence the manner in which the question of metal
identity is answered: “Aren’t you afraid that people will think you’re fuckin’
hippies […] ? [to which Aluk Todolo respond:] Not really no, and we don’t
care. If someone thinks that well I think the album shall clear everything
up. And I see no di erence between a hippie and a Black Metal head by
the way. ey both have long hair and drink booze and smoke pot the
same way.”’60 Having acknowledged that ‘this answer is at once,
indi erentially, both very true and very stupid’,61 Denys X. Abaris seizes on
the issue of the metalhead’s long hair, a sign of protest shared with and
stemming from the countercultural movement of the 1960s, but more
presciently understood as the desired look for maximal e ect in
windmilling or beat-per-ri head banging. In likening the planet’s magnetic
eld lines which ow from the spherical ‘head’ of Earth like hair and beard
to the innumerable universes that ow out of the mystical head of man, he
quotes Meher Baba again: ‘“ ere are [countless] universes, which are
interlaced with one another. One universe creates another in a chain
reaction. ese universes are so numerous that even Sadgurus cannot count
them […] It is astonishing that though the chains of these universes come
out of the Sadguru and then merge back into him, they are still
uncountable through his physical eyes […] ese universes come out of the
Sadguru and merge back into him a er aeons. is is called Mahapralaya
[…] Each individual being is a universe unto himself […] So rst try to get
hold of the head, because out of it comes everything. [Baba drew a man’s
head and hair.] e barber’s work is to shave the head. And who is the
barber in this case? Mahapralaya. For when it occurs, all the hairs –
universes – on God’s head are shaved o . It is said that the universes pour
out of the Godhead. ey are like God’s hair. Your head may symbolise
God, and your hair the universes” (MB)’.62 Baba’s symbology, which o ers
the possibility of a teratology – God as severed head with hair; melancholic
metalhead weighed down by the dross of the multiverse, until the coming
of Mahapralaya, self-styled cephalophore who, taking the head in hand,
shaves it – is pre gured by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, ‘mystical ur-
cephalophore’63 of the Middle Ages [cf. ‘Leave Me In Hell’, re. the
eponymous Black Metal (Success, 1992) album]) derived from generations
of commentaries on Aristotle’s Physica and Metaphysica.64

Meher Baba, God Speaks, Chart X (1943).

In explaining the Metaphysica shortly a er 1270, St. omas Acquinas’

teacher Albert the Great had, for example, distinguished between those
who believed there were ve kinds of causes and those who believed there
were only four (‘[1] that from which, as immanent material, a thing comes
into being, […] [2] e form or pattern, i.e. the de nition of the essence,
the classes which include this, and the parts included in the de nition. [3]
at from which the change or the resting from change rst begins […] [4]
 e end, i.e. that for the sake of which a thing is’).65 Partisans of the four-
cause theory were identi ed by Albert as ‘Aristotelians’ because, unlike
Plato and his followers, who had arrived at a ve-fold division of causes by
di erentiating between an ‘e cient cause’ of being and a ‘moving cause’ of
generation and change, Aristotle did not posit an ‘e cient cause’ that was
not a ‘moving cause’ also (ergo the angelic rst link in Masciandaro’s own
acatenic emanation delivered at the inaugural Black Metal eory
Symposium, Hideous Gnosis [Brooklyn, 2009]: ‘God or the good or the
place does not take place, but is the taking place [aver-luogo] of the entities,
their innermost exteriority’).66 Cf. Aristotle, ‘One might suspect that Hesiod
was the rst to look for such a thing – or someone else who put love or
desire among existing things as a principle, as Parmenides, too, does; for he,
in constructing the genesis of the universe says: “Love rst of all the Gods
she planned.” And Hesiod says: “First of all things was chaos made, and
then […] Broad-breasted earth, […] And love, ‘[a]mid all the gods pre-
eminent,” which implies that among existing things there must be from the
rst a cause which will move things and bring them together’, namely, ‘the
rst mover […] itself unmoved’ [Metaphysica I. 3. 23-31, IV. 8. 30-32].67 In
this, as in Masciandaro’s evaluation, ‘the satanic principle is in essence the
inversely maximal experience of the most minimal negation performed in
the double ecstasy of creation, following Pseudo-Dionysius, who writes that
“the very cause of the universe […] is also carried outside of himself […]
He is […] enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to
abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and
ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself ”’ [DN 4.13]),68
thus we arrive at a four-fold causal theory of things: the e cient and
moving cause, the material cause, the formal cause, and the nal cause.
Facsimile of the Codex Zacynthius with catena, in which scripture is repeated, sixth–seventh century.

is view won wide acceptance and provided the paradigm for

Aristotelian prologues which became popular in arts and theology faculties
in the thirteenth century. While the prologues of the artistrae typically
began with a discussion of the material cause (namely, ‘[2] e form or
pattern, i.e. the de nition of the essence, the classes which include this,
and the parts included in the de nition’),69 their primary interest and aim
being in comprehensive de nition, subdivision, and analysis of the subject
matter therein, they usually ended with a discussion of the e cient cause
(namely, ‘[1] that from which, as immanent material, a thing comes into
being’)70 which received only cursory treatment. For as Minnis does well to
relay, ‘[a] er the auctour of one’s textbook had been identi ed as Priscian,
Aristotle or whoever, there seemed to be little more to say’.71 Correlatively,
while the artistrae were overtly concerned with the formal cause of the
science in question (namely, ‘[3] at from which the change or the resting
from change rst begins’)72 as it pertained to the proper modes of
procedure and correct order of study therein, they paid little or no
attention to the formal cause the auctor, in writing his book, had brought
into being. In contradistinction, the theologians, who were working with
divinely-inspired texts, had a special interest in the e cient and formal
causes of the books of the Bible, and they tailored their Aristotelian
prologues accordingly. From this derived discussions of authorial role and
literary form which possess a degree of complexity and sophistication not
found in prologues to texts produced by merely human agency.
In one such prologue, to the rst commentary on Peter Lombard’s
Sentences to be issued from Oxford (c. 1241–8), the Dominican, Richard
Fishacre, di erentiated between the diverse instrumental e cient causes of
theology, namely, its human auctores, and its primary e cient cause, God:
‘Although therefore some part of sacred Scripture seems to have been
written by Moses, and similarly some part by the prophets, some by the
Evangelists, and some by the Apostles, yet not they themselves but God
both spoke and wrote by them, as the principal e cient cause by the
instrument’.73 While the Aristotelian prologue had already made its
appearance in Scriptural exegesis in the commentaries on St. Mark and the
Acts of the Apostles produced by Hugh of St. Cher at St. Jacques in Paris
during the period 1230-1236, it was rst applied in exegesis of the Old
Testament by Guerric of St. Quentin, who held the chair of philosophy
there between 1233 and 1242. In the commentary of this young exegete,
we read:

e e cient cause is twofold, namely moving and operating. e

operating cause is Isaiah, which is understood by the supposition of this
word, ‘he saw’. But there is also a cause which is e cient and not
operating, which is noted here: ‘by the spirit’, namely the Holy Spirit,
which moved Isaiah that he should write. e Holy Spirit itself did not
write, which is noted in that it says ‘by the spirit’.74

is concept of a twofold e cient cause (duplex causa e ciens) became a

popular formula for summary description of the inspired authorship of
Biblical texts, whereby God was regarded as the principle auctour or
‘unmoved mover’ of such a book, and its human auctour as both ‘moved’
by God and ‘moving’ in producing the text; a point punctuated in prologues
to the Psalter and the Apocalypse mistakenly ascribed to Albert the Great:

From these statements it is clear what are the e cient causes of this
 book, because the cause which is moving and not moved is the holy
Spirit, while the cause which is moving and moved is David himself.
e e cient cause which is moving and not moved was the entire
Trinity, revealing to Christ the man […] e cause moving and moved
was the man Christ, and the angel, and John.75

Human feelings and emotions also played a part in the via causalitatis,
and these came under the heading ‘causes moving to write’ (causae
moventes ad scribendum). In the prologue to his commentary on Romans,
for example, St. omas analyzed the emotions of fear and love as possible
causal forces. In like fashion, his teacher Albert had, in his commentary on
the prologue to Lombard’s Sentences (written c. 1245-1250), distinguished
between the auctour and the causae moventes ( nal cause, material cause
and formal cause) which moved the author to write; in analyzing the same
prologue St. omas would provide a similar explanation.76 Writing much
later, in the fourteenth century, omas Waley, an Oxford Dominican,
divided the e cient cause, of De civitate Dei, into the causa e ectiva
librorum, attributed to St. Augustine, and the causa movens ad scribendum,
attributed to the Saint’s personal reasons for writing. Other texts were taken
to have had an even more complex motivation and, in these cases,
commentators were not content to speak of a merely double but triple even
quadruple e cient causality. St. Bonaventure, for example, in his
commentary on St. Luke’s Gospel (c. 1254–7), de ned a triplex causa
e ciens: the Holy Spirit, divine grace and the evangelist, and the Paris
Dominican, Nicholas Goran, and the Cambridge Dominican, John Russel,
both spoke of a quadruplex causa e ciens at work in the Apocalypse: God,
Christ, the angel who visited St. John on Patmos, and St. John himself.77
e element of comparison indicated by these accounts of double, triple
and quadruple e cient causality is important because it not only shows the
exegetes’ belief in the basic unity and a nity of the roles of God and man
in producing Holy Scripture, but the attention paid to discriminating
between what was perceived therein to be the primary e cient cause and
the instrumental e cient causes meant that all involved received due
recognition, with important consequences for the development of literary
theory.78

As applied in literary analysis, Aristotle’s four-fold theory of causality may

seem to us a feigned framework (cf. ‘I am my own cause according to my
essence, which is eternal, and not according to my becoming, which is
temporal’ [Meister Eckhart, Sermon 52].79 is ‘exuberant sacrilegious
signi cation of divinity in excess of deity’, essential to which ‘is the
principle, contra Aristotle, that negation is not the opposite of assertion, but
the assertion of what is beyond it’,80 is [as Masciandaro maintains], ‘the
upside down truth on which the Christian ecclesia and black metal kvlt are
both founded: “I pray to God to make me free of God,” says Eckhart’,81 ergo
Teutoberg Forest’s Anti-Subhuman Scum: ‘[in itself ] a statement of
absolutizing elitism, a hate-exhausting psychic engine for transhumanation.
e human [oneself-as-human] is overcome by including itself in that
which it refuses as beneath itself. One hates God’s creation to become god –
a trajectory spelled out in the album notes: “DO YOUR EYES SEE ALL
THAT IS? | ARE WE MERE SLAVES BOUND BY EARTH? | OR GODS?”’82
It is in following this trajectory that, as Eckhart would assay, ‘man enters
into that eternal essence that once he was, that he is now and evermore
shall remain’), but from the thirteenth century the via causalitatis
(conversely) brought medieval exegetes signi cantly closer to their human
auctores and was a central force in the re-shaping of literary values of the
later Middle Ages.
At stake here is the centrality of scholasticism and, in particular, the
centrality of scholastic scriptural exegesis to the development of (Black
metal) theory (i.e. ‘the terrifying discontinuous continuities and continuous
discontinuities between the reality of what is thought and the image of
thought […] [which] points the way [backwards or forwards?] into the
superior, more pleasurable su ering wherein the noble lover, […] the one
who loves thinking about the loved one [Black metal], […] knows full well
the reality of the thought-image he loses himself in and wholly enjoys its
actualization of the original dark out of which it and his own being
strangely appear […] Here we see the lovely, speculative hideous gnosis of
an essentially citational erotic consciousness, the unnamable entity who,
sitting in the medieval chained library of the body, practices loving things in
the intellectual mirror of his own most cosmic abyss’ [Masciandaro, ‘Anti-
Cosmosis’]),83 the decisive event of which, was the shi ing of focus, in the
Aristotelian prologue, from the divine to the human realm: di erent levels
of authorship were acknowledged – the e cient cause could be double,
triple, even quadruple, contingent on the speci c causal process, and
di erent motivations were recognized – personal reasons were perceived to
play a crucial part, now operating in tandem with the all-important (but
seldom overbearing) aspect of divine direction. In short, Aristotle’s theory
of causality, as interpreted by late medieval scholasticism, ‘helped to bring
about a new awareness of the integrity of the individual human auctour’.84
Whereas secular and scriptural exegesis up to the twel h century, in
keeping with the medieval veneration of the past, had really only been
interested in an auctour insofar as he was an auctoritas – someone to be
believed and imitated, in the thirteenth century, with the unique scholastic
tailoring of the Aristotelian prologue, a new type of exegesis emerged, in
which was recognized the moral, didactic, and stylistic strategies one could
call his own; in sum, the human auctores individual literary activities began
to receive more attention.
 Behexen, By e Blessing of Satan (Woodcut Records, 2004).
Charles de Boulle, depiction of an ascending linear order in nature
(with ‘metal’ and ‘mud’ curiously positioned at the summit),
from the Physicorum Elementorum (1512).

Eminently aware of the similarities and distinctions that could be drawn

between the Bible and secular texts, medieval theologians stressed, on the
one hand, the unique status of the Holy Book, and on the other, their
belief that young exegetes should be trained in the natural arts before
attempting to understand the in nitely more complex (supernatural) sacred
page. Such accentuation became, in the twel h century, a regular trait in
the debate regarding the true hierarchy of the branches of knowledge and
the proper order in which the di erent arts and sciences should be studied.
As if literally climbing Aristotle’s ‘Ladder of Nature’, Hugh of St. Victor held
that ‘all natural arts are related to divine science in such a way that the
inferior science, correctly organized in the hierarchy, leads to the superior’,
correlatively, the declared purpose of his Didascalicon is to prescribe
pro ciency in the natural arts within a course of study culminating in the
explication of sacred Scripture.85 In like manner, Conrad of Hirsau’s
Dialogus super auctores warns that secular texts are not to be studied for
their own sake, but as requisite priming for the (climbing to) more di cult
texts of Holy Writ.86
Traceable back to the Church Fathers, these attitudes and priorities can be
found ourishing in the Biblical exegesis of St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and
St. Gregory the Great: despite what has been identi ed as the in uence of
late-antique schooling and methods of grammatical training on the exegesis
of Augustine, he himself professed a preference for substance over
expression.87 Jerome, who had been taught by Donatus, the famous Roman
grammarian and teacher of rhetoric, similarly insisted on the primacy of
sense over words, and in a dedicatory letter to his Moralia in Job (c. 580–
95), Gregory, who had retained (from Jerome) his teacher’s concern for
content over form, warns the reader not to seek out ‘literary nosegays’,
because in interpreters of Holy Writ, he says, ‘fruitless verbiage’ is
repressed.88
Gregory, who once quipped that it was ‘unbecoming’ to think that he
should ‘tie down the words of the heavenly oracle to the rules of Donatus’,
altered traditional techniques of textual commentary to meet the demands
of divinely inspired Scripture.89 Whereas the Roman grammarians had been
interested solely in the literal (also called historical) sense of the text, the
exegete was obliged to concentrate on the spiritual senses of the books of
the Bible. To this end, Gregory o ered a three-fold method of exposition –
literal, allegorical, and moral (also called tropological) – which, along with
John Cassian’s four-fold method, remained the dominant model for Biblical
interpretation in the Middle Ages.90 e four-fold method was summarized
and survives in a rhyme attributed to Augustine of Dacia:

Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria,

Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia91

[ e letter shows us what God and our ancestors did;

e allegory shows us where our faith is hid;
e moral meaning gives us the rule of daily life;
e anagogy shows us where we end our strife.]92

e foundations for this approach to Scripture, already forti ed in Greek

philosophy and rabbinic exegesis, were articulated as early as the third
century by the Biblical scholar Origen. Informed by the belief that ‘the
treasures of Scripture were to be unlocked primarily through the action of
the mind upon them’, Origen’s literary activity exerted a profound in uence
on the Latin Fathers, who, while balancing the literal meaning of the text
against the myriad of extended meanings it could support, generally
preferred the latter.93 In explaining Origen’s popularity, Jean Leclercq has
observed that ‘what was sought in him was not so much a doctrine as a
mentality and, most of all, a way of interpreting Holy Scripture’.94 is is
aptly captured in Jerome, who, in praising the speculative ights of his
expansive imagination, in the preface to his translation of Origen’s homilies
on Ezekiel, speaks glowingly of the way in which the author ‘surrendered
all the sails of his genius to the blowing winds and, departing from the land
(or “literal” sense), launched out into the open sea’.95 Origen tirelessly
sought out the spiritual meaning concealed in the Scriptures, and though
they resist easy classi cation, his methods, which, in keeping with the
Neoplatonic tradition, maintained that not every scriptural expression (e.g.
anthropomorphic terminology applied to the divinity) had a genuinely
‘literal’ sense (ergo Pseudo-Dionysius, who writes: ‘[the literal sense] could
well mislead someone into thinking that the heavenly beings are golden or
gleaming men, glamorous, wearing lustrous clothing, giving o ames
which cause no harm or that they have other similar beauties with which
the word of God has fashioned the heavenly minds. It was [precisely] to
avoid this kind of misunderstanding among those incapable of rising above
visible beauty that the pious theologians so wisely and upli ingly stooped to
incongruous dissimilarities [‘But I am a worm, and no man’. – Psalm 22:16]
for by doing this they took account of our inherent tendency toward the
material and our willingness to be lazily satis ed by base images. At the
same time, they enabled that part of the soul which longs for the things
above actually to rise up. Indeed the sheer crassness of the signs is a goad so
that even the materially inclined cannot accept that it could be permitted or
true that the celestial and divine sights could be conveyed by such shameful
things. And remember too that there is nothing that lacks its own share of
beauty, for as scripture rightly says, “Everything is good” [CH 141B-
141C]’.96 Cf. ‘ e worm stands for not standing for anything. It even knows
how to bite o its own head, to swallow itself whole. “What should I do
now?” And a voice said, “Eat! Eat Yourself !” He had no choice but to eat,
so He ate Himself ! At that moment He found that He was Everything’),97
embodied, and proposed therein, what were to become the de nitive
principles guiding biblical interpretation in the Middle Ages: the spiritual
(also called ‘allegorical’) exegesis of the Alexandrian school.98

One of the main straits by dint of which Alexandrian-Origenist principles

penetrated Western scholasticism was through the writings of the
aforementioned John Cassian, in the h century. Cassian had
encountered Origen’s teachings in Egypt, where he lived as a monk for
een years. Some time later, living in France, Cassian wrote the Institutes
(De instituionibus coenobiorum) for the bene t of monks in his newly
adopted land. is contained descriptions of the spiritual practices of
Egyptian and Syrian monks, directions for communal prayer, and cures for
the principle vices. For those on the monastic path to perfection his twenty-
four Conferences (Conlationes) o ered further guidance. In the
Conferences, Cassian distinguished, as Origen had, between historical
interpretation and spiritual insight, and he systematized the four ‘senses’
that were present in essence in Origen’s writings: the literal (or historical),
the allegorical, the moral (or tropological), and the anagogical. In quoting
Galatians 4:22 , he provided an example of how Scripture could be
interpreted in these four di erent ways, with his test-case of the word
‘Jerusalem’. is test-case, which was profoundly in uential in the Middle
Ages and, indeed, beyond – as late as Luther and Melancthon – was
cogently paraphrased by Guibert of Nogent, who wrote a short treatise in
the eleventh century on the way a sermon ought to be composed. ere are
four ways of interpreting Scripture, he says here,
 e rst is history, which speaks of actual events as they occurred; the
second is allegory, in which one thing stands for something else; the third
is tropology, or moral instruction, which treats of the ordering or
arranging of one’s life; and the last is [anagogy] or spiritual
enlightenment, through which we who are about to treat of lo y and
heavenly topics are led to a higher way of life. For example, the word
Jerusalem: historically, it represents a speci c city; in allegory it represents
holy Church; tropologically or morally, it is the soul of every faithful man
who longs for the vision of eternal peace; and anagogically it refers to the
life of the heavenly citizens, who already see the God of Gods, revealed in
all His glory in Sion.99

Cassian maintained that, a er the suppression of unreasonable desires

and the cultivation of virtue or ‘practical knowledge’, there is a ‘theoretical
knowledge’ that terminates in the most profound understanding of divine
and sacred truths.100 Here, he does not mean ‘theoretical’ in the modern
sense of the word, but in the sense of an eminently ‘contemplative’
knowledge that persisted in medieval times, and that had passed from
ancient Greek philosophy and Neoplatonism, with a modi ed meaning
adapted to the Christian (Triune) system, into the terminology of Christian
mysticism. e Triune God, to quote Paul, is the being in which ‘we live
and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). From a Triune perspective,
then, all knowledge of God is necessarily assimilative. To put it in omist
terms: ‘all [knowledge of God] is produced by an assimilation of the
knower to the thing known, so that assimilation is said to be the cause of
knowledge’.101 Importantly, in the Scriptures, knowledge of God does not
allow for a separation between knowing and doing. In following Scripture,
medieval exegetes did not distinguish between theory and practice as the
Greeks did (hence how the meaning of theoria is modi ed and adapted).
Rather, those who live in sin are said to have no knowledge of God (Hos
4:1; 1 Cor 1:21; Gal 4:8; 1 ess 1:8), while those who live virtuously are
said simply to know God (Hos 6:6; Rom 11:3; Gal 4:9). From this
perspective, knowledge of God is not a precondition for salvation, as theory
is sometimes said to be a prerequisite to practice. Instead, knowledge of
God is coeval with our salvation.102 All goes back to Paul’s words in
Galatians: ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me’ (Gal 2: 20). Varieties of
this claim can be found throughout the mystical tradition, wherein
theoretical (or ‘contemplative’) knowledge is understood to be knowledge
acquired through love, per amorem agnoscimus (Gregory, Moralia
31:101),103 ‘You know, I say, not through faith, but through love’, ‘[w]hen
we love supracelestial realities, we begin to know what we already love,
since love itself is knowledge’ (Gregory, In Evangelia 14.4, 27.4),104 ‘Being
united in love in this way […] the soul becomes, as it were, changed into
God’, ‘the spirit dies and yet it is alive in the marvels of the Godhead’
(Catherine of Sienna, e Dialogue),105 ‘I and God are one’, ‘I am an
unmoved cause that moves all things’ (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 52),106
‘restored to [...] the primal fact that her existence and mine are coeval, that
we go way back’ (Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’).107 (Or, as Masciandaro
would say, di erently, in opining the love of Black metal as the love of that
which materially makes, and perceptually does, what mysticism spiritually
is: ‘All love is a re, but a spiritual re. What a corporeal re does for
[metal], this re [...] does for an impure cold and hardened heart [...] and
the mind changes into the similitude of Him who in ames it. e whole
mind becomes white hot, ares up, and lique es in the love of God’).108

Sleep, Jerusalem (from the unauthorized Rise Above release [1999] designed by Doug Ebright of
Visual Flight).
 Hence, when Peter the Venerable writes of the then Prior of Cluny,
Mathew of Albano, ‘Non relinquebat partem aliquam theoriae intactum’, it
should not be translated, as Leclercq notes has been done, ‘[t]here was not
a single point of theory that he neglected’.109 For at issue in this sentence is
not a theory of monastic life, but rather the very nature of theory itself,
which, understood in its fullest sense, as ‘divine contemplation’ (theorica
contemplatio), cannot be comprehended in terms of an extrinsic reality,
since God is not an object to be known extrinsically. De Lubac captures this
perfectly when he describes our knowledge of God as an inter-Trinitarian
reality wherein the beati c vision (understood as the telos of all knowledge
of God) is not conceived as ‘the contemplation of a spectacle, but an
intimate participation in the vision the Son has of the Father in the bosom
of the Trinity’.110 Cassian was instrumental in the transmission of this
conception and its expression to the West, where the word theoria is o en
accompanied by adjectives which prove that it is understood as a
participation and an assimilation, a knowledge arising not through
domination, but through attentiveness to the object in contemplation; as
Murray Rae notes in ‘Incline Your Ears So at You May Live’, ‘[s]uch
attentiveness conforms the knower to what is known rather than the other
way around’.111 is gives rise to terms like theoricus and theoreticus in
expressions like theorica mysteria, and theorica studia, ‘which [like theorica
metallum nigri] must not be understood in the modern sense of the word,
as “[Black metal] theoretical studies,” but in the medieval sense of theoria
as amorous a nity [quite literally, then, as “love of Black metal”)’.112
Masciandaro, for example, is combining all of these ideas when he says:

I love black metal. In secret. In the secrecy wherein black metal keeps its
own secret, above all from itself, and below. ‘Love sets on re the one
who nds it. At the same time it seals his lips so that no smoke comes out.
Love is meant to be experienced and not disclosed [MB]’ […] So it is true
what e Scapegoat said, that ‘the rst rule of black metal is that YOU
 DO NOT FUCKING TALK ABOUT BLACK METAL.’ About, from OE
onbutan, means ‘on the outside of, around.’ No one speaks about black
metal – they do not know what they are talking about, nor what they are
doing [forgive them]. Discourse on black metal is blasphemy, heresy,
sacrilege […] Do not talk about it. We will speak in black metal, there,
where the secret of black metal is, wherever black metal is the secret of
itself. Into the Infernal Regions of the Ancient Cult. Because black metal
is love.113

1 ‘I begin with a catena, really an acatena – a broken scriptureless exegetical chain – as the only
conceivable way of opening discourse on anti-cosmic black metal, an art that proceeds in principle
against the universe as the principle of order, which is what cosmos means, and thus against the
very possibility or ground of discourse’ (Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis: Black
Mahapralaya,’ in Hideous Gnosis, ed. by Masciandaro [New York: n.p., 2010], pp. 67-92; p. 73).
2 Nicola Masciandaro, as cited on the inaugural Black Metal eory blog
<http://blackmetaltheory.blogspot.ie/> (accessed 20/01/12).
3 Scott Wilson, ‘BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum’, in Hideous Gnosis, pp. 33–51; p. 34.
4 Michael O’Rourke, ‘ e Mutual Pestering of Black Metal and eory’, in P.E.S.T., ed. by Michael
O’Rourke and Karin Sellberg (forthcoming).
5 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Interview (Dominik Irtenkauf, Avant-Garde Metal 2011),’ in this volume.
6 Ibid.
7 Nicola Masciandaro ‘On the Mystical Love of Black Metal’, in this volume.
8 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Re ections from the Intoxological Crucible’, in Black Metal: Beyond e
Darkness, ed. by Tom Howells (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012), pp. 72–5; p. 75.
9 ‘Interview with Teutoburg Forest’, cited by Nicola Masciandaro in ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 70.
10 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Mystical Love of Black Metal’.
11 Niall Scott, Metal Hammer (June, 2012), p. 148.
12 Michael O’Rourke, ‘What Does Black Metal eory A rm?’
<www.academia.edu/3387107/What_Does_Black_Metal_ eory_A rm> (accessed 21/10/2012).
13 Masciandaro, ‘Interview (Dominik Irtenkauf, Avant-Garde Metal 2011)’.
14 Wilson, ‘BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum’, p. 45.
15 Masciandaro, ‘Intoxological Crucible’, p. 72.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Blood of the Black Owl, ‘Void’, A Feral Spirit (Bindrune Recordings, 2008), cited in Steven
Shakespeare, ‘Of Plications: A Short Summa On e Nature Of Cascadian Black Metal’, Glossator 6:
Black Metal, ed. by Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani (New York: Punctum, 2012), p. 21.
19 Andrew White, ‘Letter from Andrew White’, in Hideous Gnosis, pp. 277–80; p. 280; italicization
mine.
20 Wilson, ‘BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum’, p. 45.
21 Paul J. Ennis, ‘Bleak eory’, in P.E.S.T., (forthcoming). Cf. Paul J. Ennis, ‘Bleak’, in A Spell to Ward
O the Darkness, directed by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell (2013; London, UK: Soda Pictures, 2014),
DVD, as treated in Edia Connole, ‘ e Missing Subject of Accelerationism: Heavy Metal’s Wyrd
Realism’, in this volume.
22 Shakespeare, ‘Of Plications’, p. 21; Fauna, Rain (2006).
23 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”: A Gloss on Heavy Metal’s Originary Song’,
Reconstruction 9.2 (2009) <http: //reconstruction.eserver.org/092/masciandaro.shtml> (accessed
13/04/2013).
24 Evan Calder Williams, ‘ e Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, in Hideous Gnosis, pp. 137–42.
25 Scott, Metal Hammer, p. 148.
26 Ibid.
27 Masciandaro, ‘Interview (Dominik Irtenkauf, Avant-Garde Metal 2011)’.
28 O’Rourke, ‘ e Mutual Pestering’ (forthcoming).
29 Niall Scott, ‘Black Confessions And Absu-Lution’, in Hideous Gnosis, pp. 221–31; p. 224.
30 Masciandaro, ‘Interview (Dominik Irtenkauf, Avant-Garde Metal 2011)’.
31 Wilson, ‘BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum’, p. 35.
32 Ennis, ‘Bleak eory’, see concluding paragraph and footnote regarding Masciandaro.
33 Masciandaro, ‘Interview (Dominik Irtenkauf, Avant-Garde Metal 2011)’.
34 Scott Wilson, ‘Pop Journalism and the Passion for Ignorance’, in Hideous Gnosis, pp. 247–50; p.
250.
35 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 70.
36 Philip LeRoy Culbertson, A Word Fitly Spoken: Content, Transmission, and Adaption of the
Parables of Jesus (New York: SUNY, 1995). Cf. Beryl Smalley, ‘ e Bible in the Medieval Schools’, in
e Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2: e West from the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. by G.
W. H. Lampe (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 197–220; Shakespeare, ‘ e Light that Illuminates Itself, the
Dark that Soils Itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling’s Underground’, in Hideous Gnosis, pp. 5–31;
Shakespeare, ‘Of Plications’, pp. 1–45.
37 Timothy W. Seid, ‘Origins of Catena in Gaza’ <http://legacy.earlham.edu/-seidti/iam/catena.html>
(accessed 21/10/12). Scott, ‘Black Confessions and Absu-Lution’, p. 223.
38 Masciandaro, ‘Interview (Dominik Irtenkauf, Avant-Garde Metal 2011)’. Cf. Varg Vikernes on
Black metal’s ‘corpse’ or ‘necro’ sound in Until e Light Takes Us, directed by Aaron Aites and
Audrey Ewell (New York: Factory, 2012) DVD; band member Gyle ‘Fenriz’ Nagell comments on
this Darkthrone album: ‘ e photo was taken in 1991 in an abandoned house, in the forest not far
from the house I grew up in, but by the time we got round to using it in 1994, the photo was
nowhere to be found. I had photocopied [it] to give out to magazines worldwide, but I couldn’t
nd the negative, nor the photo itself, so, devil may care as we were in those days, I just sen[t] a
photocopy and said, THIS WILL BE THE COVER. Hence the iconic look’, as cited in e Art of
Metal, ed. by Martin Popo and Malcome Dome (London and New York: Omnibus Press, 2013), p.
147.
39 Alastair Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle
Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 73–117; Graham D. Caie, ‘“I Do
Not Wish To Be Called Auctour, But e Pore Compilator”: e Plight Of e Medieval
Vernacular Poet’, in Miscelanea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 29 (2004), pp. 9–21.
40 Caie, ‘ e Medieval Vernacular Poet’, p. 10.
41 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 71.
42 Plotinus, Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna (Burdett, NY: Larson, 1992), V.2.1., cited in
Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 76.
43 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. by William Harris Stahl (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 14–15, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 71.
44 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 76. As envisioned on the cover of Deathspell Omega’s Fas – Ite,
Maledicti, in Ignem Aeternum (pictured above).
45 Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, pp. 73–117.
46 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 77.
47 Masciandaro, ‘Mystical Love of Black Metal’. See also Nicola Masciandaro’s commentary on
Eugene acker, ‘Day of Wrath’, in Glossator, pp. 113–15: ‘Already an inversion: Inversion of the
divine is identically internal to Christianity and Black metal […] e inverted cross of Black metal
is not a reversal of the upright Christian cross, but a profanation of the Petrine cross that
reestablishes confusion between human and divine’ (p. 113). Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations,
trans. by Je Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007): ‘ e term religio does not derive, as an insipid
and incorrect etymology would have it, from religare (that which binds and unites the human and
the divine). It comes instead from relegere, which indicates the stance of scrupulousness and
attention thst must be adopted in relations with the gods, the uneasy hesitation (the “re-reading
[rileggere]”) before forms – and formulae – that must be observed in order to respect the
separation between the sacred and the profane. Religio is not what unites men and gods but what
ensures they remain distinct. It is not disbelief and indi erence toward the divine, therefore, that
stand in opposition to religion, but “negligence,” that is, a behaviour that is free and distracted
(that is to say, released from the religio of norms) before things and their use, before forms of
separation and their meaning. To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of
negligence, which ignores separation or, rather puts it to a particular use’ (p. 75). Hence, the rst
amongst seven black metal truths that remain backwardsly legible within medieval mysticism: ‘1)
Irreligion. e principle that divine truth lies beyond religion, an institution that separates rather
than unites world and God. “[T]his soul is above the law, | Not contrary to the law,” says Porete, in
the voice of the Holy Church [Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 196]. As opposed to such persons she calls
“donkeys, [who] seek God in creatures, in monasteries for prayer, in a created paradise, in words
of men and the Scriptures” [Mirror of Simple Souls, p. 144]’ (Masciandaro, ‘Mystical Love of Black
Metal’). Agamben aligns this special form of negligence, or that which amounts to irreligion, with
play. As he goes on to say: ‘ e passage from the sacred to the profane can, in fact, also come about
by means of an entirely inappropriate use (or, rather, reuse) of the sacred: namely, play. It is well
known that the spheres of play and the sacred are closely connected. Most of the games with which
we are familiar derive from ancient sacred ceremonies, from divinatory practices and rituals that
once belonged, broadly speaking, to the religious sphere. […] In analyzing the relationship
between games and rites, Emile Benveniste shows that play not only derives from the sphere of the
sacred but also in some way represents its overturning. e power of the sacred act, he writes, lies
in the conjunction of the myth that tells the story and the rite that reproduces and stages it. Play
breaks up this unity: as ludas, or physical play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as iocus,
or wordplay, it e aces the rite and allows the myth to survive […] is means that play frees and
distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it. e use to which
the sacred is returned is a special one that does not coincide with utilitarian consumption’ (pp.
75–6). Hence, the playful, purposefully obfuscating methodology employed herein: BLACK
METAL THEORY IS ‘LUDIC’ (Nicola Masciandaro, cited in Ben Ratli , ‘ ank You, Professor,
at Was Putrid’, in e New York Times [December 14, 2009]
 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/arts/music/15metal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>
[accessed 21/12/12], my emphasis). Cf. Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani, ‘Black Metal
Commentary’, in Hideous Gnosis: ‘Haunted by the principle of ignotum per ignotius as its own
logical spectre, the clarifying-by-complicating and explicating-by-obfuscating movement of
commentary, which is captured in Montaigne’s complaint that “everything swarms [fourmille]
with commentaries,” is analogous to Black metal as a motion/anti-motion of artistic expression
that articulates from and through enclosure, or, as Dante knew, bubbles to the surface from black
depths: “Fixed in the slime they say: ‘We were sullen in the sweet air gladdened by the sun, bearing
within us the sluggish fumes [accidioso fummo]; now we are sullen in the black mire’. is hymn
they gurgle in their throats [si gorgoglian] ne la strozza, for they cannot speak it in full words”
(Inferno 7.121–6)’ (pp. 257–66; p. 261, my emphasis).
48 Marguerite Porete, e Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. by Ellen L. Babinsky (New York: Paulist Press,
1993), pp. 88–9, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Mystical Love of Black Metal’.
49 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, pp. 74–7.
50 ‘[…] as indiscrete animation of the Real. Cf. “Every life is some form of thought […] while men
may recognize grades in life they reject grades in thought; to them there are thoughts (full and
perfect) and anything else is no thought. is is simply because they do not seek to establish what
Life is … Contemplation (theoria) and its object constitute a living thing, a Life, two inextricably
one” (Plotinus, e Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna [Burdett:, NY: 1992], 3.8.8). Cusa’s
understanding of the human as living image of in nite art “marks a crucial link between medieval
mysticism and modern conceptions of human creativity” ( omas A. Carlson, e Indiscrete
Image: In nitude and Creation of the Human [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008], 114). As
such Cusa may be an especially useful gure for reopening the question of the ontology of theory
in relation to creative evolution, for reinventing theory as art of becoming, and more speci cally,
for the development of Black Metal eory as contemplative practice of Black Metal’
(Masciandaro, commentary on Shakespeare, ‘Of Plications’, p. 36).
51 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 74.
52 Shamaatae of Arckanum, cited in ibid., p. 82.
53 Ibid., pp. 71–2. Cf. Connole, ‘Heavy Metal’s Wyrd Realism’, in this volume.
54 Inquisition, Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm (Hells Headbangers Records,
2011), sleeve.
55 Meher Baba, ‘ e Beginning and the End of Creation’, Discourses, 6th ed., 3 vols. (San Francisco:
Su sm Reoriented, 1973), I, p. 46.
56 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, pp. 80–2; Quentin Meillassoux, A er Finitude: An Essay on the
Necessity of Contingency, trans. by Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 63. Cf. ‘Not how
the world is, is the mystical, but that it is’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
trans. by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness [London and New York: Routledge, 2014], p. 88: ‘6.44 It is
not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’, or regarding ‘things [that] are
in: not in the original, which runs, ‘[Tr. 6.44] Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is’
[Max Black, A Companion to Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1971), p. 375]), as Masciandaro would go on to note, ‘Id est, facticity is God.’ (‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p.
86, note 34).
57 Shamaatae of Arckanum, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 83.
58 Meher Baba, ‘ e Divine eme’, in God Speaks: e eme of Creation and Its Purpose, 2nd ed.
(Oakland, CA: Su sm Reoriented, 1997), pp. 220–8; p. 220; Chart IX. ‘“A” soul becomes “Z” soul’.
59 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, p. 98, cited in various places throughout Masciandaro’s oeuvre, most
notably in ‘Absolute Secrecy: On the In nity of Individuation’, in Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in
Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: e Enigmatic Absolute, ed. by Joshua Ramey and Mathew
Harr Faris (forthcoming). Cf. Meher Baba, ‘ e Removal of Sanskaras: I’, in Discourses, I, pp. 68–
79, re. the Vedantic formula of ‘Neti, Neti’ or ‘no, no’ that Masciandaro mapped onto the rubric of
black metal theory: ‘Not black metal. Not theory. Not not black metal. Not not theory. […] [‘thus
gaining ground towards the enlightened state of “I am God”’ (p. 79)]’.
60 Lieut. Nab Saheb of Kashmir and Denys X. Abaris, O.S.L, Bergmetal: Oro-Emblems of the Musical
Beyond (Austin and New York: HWORDE, 2014), pp. 40–1.
61 Saheb and Abaris, Bergmetal, p. 41.
62 Saheb and Abaris, Bergmetal, pp. 44–5; no citation, pagination, or reference to a speci c Meher
Baba text is given, but cf. ‘Love is weeping’ <http://www.lordmeher.org/rev/index.jsp?
pageBase=page.jsp&nextPage=867> (accessed 08/03/15).
63 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Decapitating Cinema,’ And ey Were Two In One And One In Two, ed. by
Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene acker (London: Schism, 2014), p. 85.
64 Edia Connole, ‘Leave Me In Hell,’ in this volume. See Masciandaro’s discussion of chirality and
evolutionary biosemiotics with respect to the what/that structure of the question in Martin
Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, in ‘Unknowing Animals’, Speculations II, ed. by Michael Austin, Paul
J. Ennis, Fabio Gironi, and omas Gokey (New York: Punctum, 2011), pp. 228–44; see also
Masciandaro’s discussion of chaos as ‘anticosmic impulse’, but note Masciandaro’s understanding
of chaos vis-a-vis inversion and profanation regarding what he terms, in relation to Reza
Negarestani, an ‘original whim from beyond [ergo Meher Baba, on “ e Whim, or Lahar,” in God
Speaks, pp. 78–87: “ e cause which led the most nite Nothing, latent in the in nite Everything, to
manifest itself as in nite Nothingness, is the original cause called the ‘CAUSE’. is Cause is just
nothing but the WHIM or lahar of God. is original whim can also be called the rst ‘WORD’
uttered by God – ‘WHO AM I?’” (p. 78), namely]’, ‘Icognitum Hactenus’, in ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 74.
Cf. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press,
2008), p. 49 (the evental analog of which is the spiraling anomaly seen in the predawn Norwegian
sky three days before the inaugural Black Metal eory Symposium, Hideous Gnosis [Brooklyn,
2009]; on this point see Masciandaro, ‘the Intoxological Crucible’, p. 72; image in Hideous Gnosis, p.
92). Compare, for example, Quentin Meillassoux, ‘ e Immanence of the World Beyond’, in e
Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition, and Universalism, ed. by Conor Cunningham and Peter
Candler (London: SCM Press, 2010), pp. 444–78, with Baba’s concept of Mahapralaya, wherein, as
Masciandaro notes, we witness ‘the unveiling of a fourth world beyond the triplex domain of this
one, which is composed of the nested intersection of gross, subtle, and mental spheres, or in
Meillassoux’s terms, matter, life, and thought’, in ‘Silence: A Spell To Ward O All Darkness’, in this
volume.
65 Aristotle, Metaphysica V. 1. 24–34, in e Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. by Richard McKeon (New
York: e Modern Library, 2001), p. 752.
66 Giorgio Agamben, e Coming Community, trans. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 14, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 67.
67 Aristotle, e Basic Works, p. 696 and p. 75, respectively.
68 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis, pp. 76–7; Pseudo Dionysius, e Complete Works, trans. by Colm
Luibheid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), Divine Names, 4.13 (712B, p. 82).
69 Aristotle, Basic Works, p. 752.
70 Ibid.
71 Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, p. 77.
72 Ibid.
73 As cited in Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, p. 78.
74 As cited in ibid., p. 79. Cf. Beryl Smalley, e Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), pp. 388–9.
75 As cited in Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, p. 79.
76 Ibid., p. 80.
77 Ibid., p. 81.
78 Ibid., pp. 81–4, cf. Smalley, Bible in the Middle Ages, pp. 281–355.
79 Meister Eckhart, Sermon 52, in e Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, ed. by Bernard
McGinn (New York: Modern Library, 2006), pp. 438–43; p. 442.
80 Masciandaro, ‘Mystical Love of Black Metal’, in this volume.
81 Ibid.
82 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, pp. 75–6, note 16.
83 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, pp. 86–7; Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath.”’ Cf.
Masciandaro and Negarestani, ‘Black Metal Commentary’, in Hideous Gnosis, pp. 257–66; Nicola
Masciandaro, ‘Nicola Masciandaro said’ in ‘Comments’, in ibid., pp. 269–71: ‘ … perpetually
exchanging places with Satan, at the mediating position between the possible and impossible’ (p.
271).
84 See Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, p. 84; pp. 73–84.
85 As cited in Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship’, p. 35; De sacramentis christanae dei, prologus,
cap.vi (pr. PL, clxxvi, 185C); Didascalicon, ed. C. H. Buttimer, Catholic University of America,
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Latin, x (Washington, 1939), pp. 1–3. Cf. Henri de Lubac,
Medieval Exegesis: e Four Senses of Scripture 4 vols (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), I, pp. 74–
94.
86 See Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, p. 35; R. B. C. Huygens, ‘Notes sur le Dialogus super
auctores de Conrad de Hirsau et le commentaire sur eodule de Bernard d’Utrecht’, Latomus 13
(1954), pp. 420–8. On the emergence of theology as a discipline and medieval views on its position
within the hierarchy of the sciences, see G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New eology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980).
87 See Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, p. 34; H. S. Marou, Augustine et la Fin de la Culture
Antique (Paris, 1938), pp. 9–26; pp. 47–83.
88 As cited in Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, p. 34; Patrologia Latina, ed. by J. P. Migne (Paris,
1844–64), Ixxv, pp. 515–16.
89 As cited in Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, p. 33, no source given. Cf. Patrologia Latina,
lxxv, pp. 5–16.
90 I follow Minnis here, but this is a bit of a misleading statement, because even though the four
senses of scripture were largely recognized, while Minnis claims that their consolidation occurred
in Cassian, and that of the three senses in Gregory, Origen is undoubtedly the well-spring,
Augustine too, as he speaks of four senses in chapters 5–6 of De utilitate credendi, but he gives
them di erent names than the medievals do. For a much more detailed (though somewhat dated)
study than Minnis’ own, see Smalley, Bible in the Middle Ages, pp. 281–355. For his ne treatment
of Origen’s in uence in relation to setting the four-senses as foundations for the Christian
 approach to scripture, see Joseph Dyer, ‘ e Psalms in Monastic Prayer’, in e Place of the Psalms
in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages, ed. Nancy Van Deusen (Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 1999), pp. 68–72. For a helpful study on the issue of method in relation to the
four senses, see de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: e Four Senses of Scripture, II, pp. 207–16. And for a
good chronological summary of medieval exegesis, beginning with Gregory the Great, and taking
into account the fact that others, such as Andrew of St.Victor in the twel h century, did not focus
entirely, if at all, on the four senses, see Mary A. Mayeski, ‘Early Medieval Exegesis: Gregory I to
e Twel h Century’, in A History of Biblical Interpretation, Volume 2: e Medieval through the
Reformation Period, ed. by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009),
pp. 86–112.
91 As cited in Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, p. 35. Minnis does not provide an English
translation, but attributes this distich to Augustine of Dacia through F. Chatillon; see
‘Vocabulaire et prosodie du distique attribué à Augustin de Dacie sur les quatre sens de l’écriture’,
in L’Homme devant Dieu: Melanges o ertis au père Henri de Lubac (Lyon, Fourviere, 1963–4), ii, pp.
17–28. Cf. Dyer, ‘ e Psalms in Monastic Prayer’, p. 69; Dyer locates it more speci cally in the
latter’s Rotulus Pugillaris (1260).
92 Robert M. Grant with David Tracy, A Short History of Biblical Interpretation (New York: Fortress
Press, 1984), p. 85. Cf. Henri de Lubac, ‘On an Old Distich: e Doctrine of the “Fourfold Sense” in
Scripture’, in eological Fragments (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), p. 109; de Lubac
translates this quite literally as ‘the letter teaches us what took place, the allegory what to believe,
the moral what to do, the anagogy what goal to strive for’. Ergo Masciandaro’s methodology of
hyper-literal anagogy: ‘Just as anagogy – the proverbial “foretaste of paradise” wherein the
sensing of the text transforms into actual participation in the truth – is characterized by an
inversion of agency whereby what you thought was pulling you down is really pulling you up
[Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, in e Complete Works, 3.1, 680B–680D, pp. 68–9], hyper-
literal anagogy nds the profoundest meaning already and inexplicably present within its tactile,
manipulative surface’ (Nicola Masciandaro, Su cient Unto e Day: Sermones Contra
Solicitudinem [London: Schism, 2014], p. 3).
93 As cited in Dyer, ‘ e Psalms in Monastic Prayer’, p. 69.
94 Jean Leclercq, e Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. by
Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), p. 96.
95 As cited in Dyer, ‘ e Psalms in Monastic Prayer’, p. 69. Cf. ‘Is not transcendental philosophy a fear
of the sea? Something like a dike or sea-wall? A longing for the open ocean gnaws at us, as the land
is gnawed by the sea. A dark uidity at the roots of our nature rebels against the security of terra
rma, provoking a wave of anxiety in which we are submerged, until we feel ourselves drowning,
with representation draining away. Nihil ulterius. Incipit Kant: We are not amphibians, but belong
upon solid earth. Let us renounce all strange voyages. e age of desire is past. e new humanity I
anticipate has no use for enigmatic horizons; it knows the ocean is madness and disease. Let me
still your ancient tremors, and replace them with dreams of an iron shore. Reason in its legitimate
function is a defence against the sea, which is also an inhibition of the terrestrial; retarding our
tendency to waste painstakingly accumulated resources in futile expeditions, a “barrier opposed
to the expenditure of forces [II 332]” as Bataille describes it. It is a forti ed boundary, sealing out
everything uncertain, irresolvable, dissolvant, a sea-wall against the unknown, against death’
(Nick Land, e irst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism [London and New
York: Routledge, 1992], p. 107).
96 Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy, 141B–141C, in e Complete Works, p. 150.
97 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘WormSign’, Melancology: Black Metal eory and Ecology, ed. by Scott
Wilson (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2014), pp. 81–101; p. 80. See Edia Connole and
Scott Wilson, ‘“[os mentis] mouth to mouth” with Nicola Masciandaro’, in Weaponising
Speculation, ed. by Caoimhe Doyle (New York: Punctum, 2014), pp. 43–60: ‘Born of matter, and at
the very bottom of the universe [cf. Aristotle’s Scala Naturae, typi ed by de Boulle’s depiction of
an ascending linear order in nature in the Physicorum elementorum (1512)], “worm” is best suited
to represent matter, but just as it can represent matter in its badness, it can also represent matter
in its substantial goodness, thus serving as the living substantiation of the biblical statement,
“everything is beautiful”’ (pp. 55–6). Cf. Saheb and Abaris, Bergmetal, p. 62: ‘As a worm eats itself
through earth, body is instrumental food and excremental casting of a more hidden movement:
“You eat food, and to keep yourselves healthy and t, you pass out the residue as excrement […]
do you ever shed tears for the waste you eliminate? Do you ever think about it, or feel regret over
it? Not at all […] if someone dear dies, why do you weep for that discarded body, which is like
food to the soul? You preserve and protect your body to feed your soul. e body is the medium
for the soul’s progress. When your excrement is eliminated, you eat fresh food. Similarly with the
disposal of the old body, you take a new body. So why worry and weep over that which is the law of
nature and cannot be altered?” (MB)’.
98 See Dyer, ‘ e Psalms in Monastic Prayer’, p. 69.
99 As cited in Minnis, Medieval eory of Authorship, p. 34; Patrologia latina, clvi, 25D–26A, in
Readings in Medieval Rhetoric, ed. by J. M. Miller, M. H. Prosser and T. W. Benson (Bloomington
and London, 1973), pp. 170–1. Cf. John Cassian, Conferences, xiv.8, trans. by Colm Luibhead (New
York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 160: ‘And if we wish it, these four modes of representation ow into a
unity so that the one Jerusalem can be understood in four di erent ways: in the historical sense of
the city of the Jews, in allegory as the church of Christ, in anagoge as the heavenly city of God
“which is mother to us all” (Gal 4.26), in the tropological sense as the human soul which under
this name, is frequently criticized or blamed by the Lord’.
100 Cassian, Conferences, xiv. 2, pp. 155–73; p. 157–8.
101 omas Aquinas, Summa eologiae, I, q. 12, a.9. <http://www.sacred-
texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/> (accessed 21/10/14).
102 Cf. Saheb and Abaris, Bergmetal, p. 60: ‘“ e process of perception runs parallel to the process of
creation, and the reversing of the process of perception without obliterating consciousness
amounts to realizing the nothingness of the universe as a separate entity” (MB, Discourses) – and
the reversal of time itself: “If the soul withdrew, […] again into its primal unity” (Plotinus,
Enneads)’.
103 Gregory, Moralia, 31:101, as cited in Leclercq, e Love of Learning’, p. 33.
104 Gregory, In Evangelia, 14.4, 27.4, cited in ibid., p. 33–4.
105 Catherine of Sienna, Little Talks with God ( e Dialogue of Catherine of Sienna), trans. by Henry
L. Carrigan Jr. (Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2010), p. 3.
106 Meister Eckhart, Sermon 52, in e Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, ed. Bernard McGinn
(New York: Modern Library, 2006), p. 443.
107 Masciandaro, ‘Anti-Cosmosis’, p. 80.
108 Masciandaro, ‘Mystical Love of Black Metal’.
109 As cited in Leclercq, e Love of Learning’, p. 99.
110 Henri de Lubac, e Mystery of the Supernatural (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 1998), p. 228.
 Cf. Saheb and Abaris, Bergmetal, p. 61: ‘Lights and sight are for those who do not see the EYE […]
“ e eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me” (Meister Eckhart, Complete
Mystical Works, Sermon 57)’; Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 708D, in e Complete Works, p.
80: ‘And the same happens with our intelligent powers which, when the soul becomes divinized,
concentrate sightlessly and through an unknowing union on the rays of “unapproachable light”’.
111 Murray Rae, ‘Incline Your Ear So at You May Live’: Principles of Biblical Epistemology’, in e
Bible and Epistemology; Biblical Soundings on the Knowledge of God (Milton Keynes, U.K.:
Paternoster, 2007), p. 161.
112 Leclercq, e Love of Learning, p. 100.
113 Masciandaro, ‘Mystical Love of Black Metal’. Cf. Masciandaro’s commentary on Shakespeare’s ‘Of
Plications’, regarding the line, ‘which only I have seen and will keep forever a secret: “Seul le secret
voit dans le secret, comme Noir en Noir” (François Laruelle, Du noir univers) [Only the secret sees
into the secret, like Black in Black]. Nor does one see the color black without seeing black itself.
Black is the universal essential mirage. In a universe where the geologic and elemental domain
recedes and melts into spectra, like the meteorite in Lovecra ’s e Color Out of Space, black is the
visible secret place where the primordially novel – something “from unformed realms of in nity
beyond all Nature as we know it” – emerges, something whose obscurity is at once the veil of an
unknown clarity – “this new glow was something de nite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up
from the black pit like a so ened ray from a searchlight” – and the bewildering vista of even deeper
black, the unimaginably intimate vision of something “whose mere existence stuns the brain and
numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes” (Lovecra , At
the Mountains of Madness). Or, in the words of Isaiah, “Secretum meum mihi, secretum meum
mihi, vae mihi” (Isaiah 24:16) [My secret to myself, my secret to myself, woe is me]’ (p. 33).
 PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED CONTENTS
Connole, Edia, ‘Interview’, Legacy Magazine (2015).
Masciandaro, Nicola and Reza Negarestani, ‘Black Metal Commentary’, in Hideous Gnosis: Black
Metal eory Symposium I, ed. by Nicola Masciandaro (New York: n.p., 2010), pp. 257–66.
Masciandaro, Nicola, ‘Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya’, in Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal eory
Symposium I, ed. by Nicola Masciandaro (New York: n.p., 2010), in Ibid., pp. 67–92.
—., ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”: A Gloss on Heavy Metal’s Originary Song’, Reconstruction:
Studies in Contemporary Culture, 9 (2009)
<http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/092/masciandaro.shtml>.
—., ‘Black Metal eory’ [interview, by Dominik Irtenkauf], Avantgarde Metal (2012)
<http://avantgarde-metal.com/content/stories2.php?id=245>.
—., ‘Interview’, Legacy Magazine (2010).
—., ‘Interview’, Miasma Magazine, 36 (2010).
—., ‘Re ections from the Intoxological Crucible’, in Black Metal: Beyond the Darkness, ed. by Tom
Howell (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012), pp. 72–5.
—., ‘Metal Studies and the Scission of the Word’, Journal for Cultural Research, 15 (2011), pp. 247–53.
—., ‘What is is that Stands before Me?: Metal as Deixis’, in Re ections in the Metal Void, ed. by Niall
Scott (Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2012), pp. 3–17.
—., ‘WormSign’, in Melancology: Black Metal eory and Ecology, ed. by Scott Wilson (London: Zero
Books, 2014), pp. 81–101.
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