Confessions Of A Heretic: The Sacred And The Profane: Behemoth And Beyond

I remember a particular concert in Marseille. People ran amok there. I threw pages of the Bible at them and they ate them, burned them, or tore them apart. That was crazy. I felt that we had hit the spot. We had focused their anger. If people come to a show and explode with such madness, that happens for a reason. They saw religion and its influence on society as a form o repression, and you could say that our concert purified them. . . .

We have a very specific audience, remember. They like blasphemy. We once played  show at Stodola in Warsaw. After a few songs, the lights went out. When they came back on, I made a joke that apparently God was responsible for Warsaw’s electricity supply. All the people in the room started shouting ‘Fuck God! Fuck God!’ A few thousand throats were yelling. I just smiled. – Adam Nergal Darski, with Kryzysztof Azarewicz, Piotr Weltrowski, translated by Mark Eglinton, Confessions Of A Heretic: The Sacred And The Profane: Behemoth And Beyond, pp.43-44

Nergal In Concert With Behemoth

In the early 1990’s, a small group of musicians living in Norway took elements of heavy metal, specifically the more progressive forms of death metal, stripped them bare of their glossy, often over-produced heaviness, stealing only the speed and underlying rage to provide the “heavy” in the metal. Bands like Slayer, Morbid Angel, Possessed, and Venom had already played around with Satanic lyrics, sometimes as symbol, sometimes with a modicum of seriousness, and sometimes without caring one whit about the lyrics themselves. These young Norwegian bands – Darkthrone, Mayhem, Burzum, Emperor – were deadly earnest when writing lyrics that abounded with Satanic imagery. So earnest in fact that over the space of a few years, members of these bands and their fans burned about 50 churches, some close to a thousand years old, across the country. Two musicians were imprisoned for murder. Black metal, as the music called itself (after the title of a Venom album), was many things, but one thing it was not was “just music”.

To young Polish teen Adam Darski, Black Metal offered the final piece in the puzzle he was putting together, the puzzle that was both his identity and his desire to express the things he thought and believed as well as how to express them. Not only the power of the music – often missing on those early recordings from studio creations like Bathory, and Mayhem’s first album due to poor studio conditions – but the social and religious protest involved in adopting an overtly Satanic persona provided the vocabulary that Darski still uses to do more than just “play music”. On stage, Behemoth is an intimidating presence, still wearing corpse paint long after it’s gone out of style; the music is fast, complex, yet also raw. Listening to a piece like “Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer” feels like having thorns dragged over your skin. There’s also this horrid, dark beauty about this song; it’s anthemic with its sing-along “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory”. All the same, their stage presence is just a little overwhelming. I’m quite sure there’s always an air of danger at their shows, as if anything could happen. In this sense, Nergal is a true artist. He is provocative, a threat to the most basic, comforting notions we use to offer ourselves security. Far from a necessary evil, Darski and his band are a necessary social good, not just in their native Poland, but anywhere social and religious authorities tend to be just a bit too smug about their power.

Nergal interviewed

This memoir, however – the result of a series of interviews conducted by Nergal’s friends, originally appearing in Poland in 2012 as Spowiedz Heretyka – shows that as seriously as everyone should take both Nergal and the band Behemoth as artists and musicians, he is no simple-minded stereotypical heavy metal musician. Coming away from the book, I feel a real desire to go to Gdansk, look him up, and offer to buy him some beers so we could sit and talk. Not about religion, obviously; about art, though, and what it is to become a national celebrity while never compromising one’s art. He’s intelligent, very well-read, thoughtful, surrounded by good friends – much needed during his battle with leukemia in 2010 and 2011 – and family, and has a wry sense of humor.

More interesting than his long relationship with Polish pop star Dorota was his stint on the Polish version of the TV show The Voice. Having just come out of hospital, he took the offer both for the money as well as, it seems, the thought it would be fun. He admits being intimidated because he isn’t a “singer” and can’t in fact “sing”. All the same, he did a season and it was quite popular despite the producers worries he would . . . who knows? eat a puppy? . . . do something provocative. He did wear a figure of Baphomet around his neck, but it seems few people noticed. Already a figure of national renown both because of repeated attacks from the Catholic Church as well as living with Dorota for a year, the public now saw Nergal as far more than a spouter of blasphemies and extreme artist.

This book does for English-speaking readers what his television appearances did for people in Poland. Nergal is many things, by his own admission. He is always a work in progress. Yet planet Nergal revolves around a sun called “Music” that looks an awful lot like four guys playing extreme music to fans around the world. I won’t pretend that Behemoth’s music, which I hear always balancing this sharp edge between Death Metal and Black Metal, is for everyone. On the contrary, if it were for everybody, it wouldn’t be as provocative or dangerous as it is. It wouldn’t be art. That it is, and that at its best  – “Lucifer”, “Furor Divinus”, and “Amen” along with the aforementioned “Ora Pro Nobis Lucifer” – becomes something beautiful without losing its threat or danger or provocation, is deafening testimony to Nergal’s efforts to create something both unique and powerful.

Much like the man himself. I won’t pretend to agree with him. I also won’t pretend that this memoir doesn’t present a human being like all of us, yet unlike anyone you’d encounter. Which is what makes the book a more than worthy read. At the end of the day, for all the Satanic fury of his music, I feel like if Nergal and I met, we’d probably get along, as long as we didn’t talk about religion.

Please Take My Hand

As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer
Cause I’m in need of some restraint
So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I’ll lay your soul to waste, um yeah – “Sympathy For The Devil”, lyrics by Mick Jagger

—–

God hates us all – “Disciple”, lyrics by Tom Arraya

—–

You and I are intimately acquainted with hell, with the place where God is not, and no one comes out of that unscathed or unscarred. – Fragment of a private Facebook conversation

To linger too long with thoughts of hell leaves one seeing oneself as Hell’s Mirror sees you.

Hell. The place where God is not. Yes, I understand that in a visceral way. Despite the promise of Scripture, that even should we make our bed in Sheol, the dwelling place of the dead, the LORD’s presence will be there with us, I also know there are places and circumstances where God just doesn’t visit. The emptiness of the experience, the utter horror of continuing to be even as all around there is no sense, no feeling of love, or protection – it is more horrifying precisely because it is not something we human beings need to die to experience. The idea of eternity as timelessness, as existing equally at all times, as something from which you cannot escape precisely because it is at all times and places . . . and knowing it is your own lot . . . Nothing prepares you for that.

After a discussion this morning, it occurred to me that I was far more acquainted with the reality of spiritual evil, the existence of the devil, and the domain of hell than I cared to admit. The reasons for this are far too personal to discuss. Suffice it to say that, over the years, I’ve pretended to forget my too-intimate experience of this reality. Which, perhaps, is understandable if not excusable, particularly as I’ve pretended to speak with anything like authority and honesty. Particularly egregious, I think, is to insist that our many earthly experiences of hell, from political tyranny through mass murder to confronting the various devils and demons that are so disruptive of our lives are qualitatively distinct from something I’ve been calling “spiritual evil.” To the women raped and tortured by ISIS, such a distinction is the result of privilege rather than true empathy with their horror. Consider a person living their lives under a political tyranny so all-encompassing that any word, or even thought, could cost you your life? To speak of rationality and irrationality without recognizing how meaningless those terms are to millions of people is to deny their lived experience of real hell on earth.

Now I have you with me, under my power
Our love grows stronger now with every hour
Look into my eyes, you will see who I am
My name is Lucifer, please take my hand – “N.I.B.”, lyrics by Terry Butler

More than that, however, I am ashamed that I have pretended ignorance of something with which I’m more familiar than I would admit to anyone, including myself. That photo above? That’s what you see when you’ve lived even a moment outside the circle of God’s Providence. It’s more than terrifying; knowing that it is an image from which you can never – really – escape because hell is eternal can tear hope from your life without any possibility of it returning. That this journey I’m taking has plunged me back to a time and place I’ve preferred to forget, to pretend never existed is both curse and blessing. It’s a curse because who would want to re-enter a place from which there is no exit promised? Who would willingly go to a place without God, without hope, without love? It’s a blessing, however, because living, loving, hoping, all are possible. Hell may well be that place where God is not; it’s eternality, however, is a lie. The claim that there is no exit, that once outside the circle of God’s Love and Providential care you can never go back are tricks to further your stay. They are the dark whispers of hellish mouths.

Hell is real. Not just for me. For all those who believe themselves beyond hope, beyond the place where God either can or will reach them, whose lives have become empty, whose graves go unmarked, whose names are forgotten – these are all the lies of those who pretend to be people, but strive far more to be something both more powerful, yet less than fully human. The promise is true: There is no place from which we can flee God’s presence; that lie, too, is one we come to believe because of the pain and loneliness through which we live. Part of our job as Christians is to go to those places of Godforsakeness and shine our light of love, of light, and best of all – hope.

Of course, this acknowledgment doesn’t absolve me of continuing this journey. It just means I need to stop pretending I’m entering terra incognito. The truth, far more horrifying, is I am going back to places I know too well. Here’s hoping I have the strength to continue.

The Demonic

Demons by FASSLAYER. This image captures my impression of the horrors of hell and the demonic.

I feel more than a little like I jumped in to the deep end yesterday. Diving in to the story of the Gerasene Demoniac raised as many questions as it could have answered. It just seems far too easy to accept the reality of personal evil of the kind I discussed yesterday. To say I’m hesitant on this matter is an understatement. The truth is I just don’t want to become one of those who sees demons in every bump in the night, every person who commits an evil act, every event that is explainable by perfectly mundane yet certainly horrific circumstances.

Earlier this morning, as I considered how to continue this internal journey through the darkness, I wondered if I hadn’t begun in the wrong place. For all we Christians seem to think the Bible is the best place to begin any kind of spiritual study, the phenomenon of demonic possession has so many layers both of religious and popular thought, art, careful consideration as well as too casual nonsense makes it difficult to make sense of the matter. Coming to a subject like this in which careless, thoughtless acceptance mixed with just a bit too much gratuitous fascination, both religiously and secularly, makes it impossible for me to take it seriously, even as I recognize both the reality of the Scriptural testimony as well as the reality of evil as something distinct from other human phenomena, individually and communally.

Which is why I wanted to take a step back today. Any kind of interpretive and appropriative act involves being clear before hand about what one believes, if anything, about the subject in question. It might seem odd that someone who has never really accepted the whole Devil/Hell/Demons business would have his own set of images about what such might look like. I do, though. For me, hell would appear very much like the above illustration. The whole air of darkness; creatures whose appearance defies any reasonable understanding; the deep fear seeing something like this approaching me would hold. It’s madness, really, but not clinical mental illness. Rather, the surreal and impossible made real. The worst part of it all wouldn’t be the individual parts, or even their sum total. It wouldn’t be the fear it would hold over me. No, what would end up making me scream in terror would be the realization that this would be my lot forever. That, more than any individual experience would leave me bereft of any hope, any sanity, any desire even to resist.

This has little to do with conventional religious or secular ideas or images of spiritual evil, hell, or the demonic as real things and experiences. It is, rather, perhaps my most deeply rooted fear. The fear I think we all have of losing one’s mind, of never being able to see any light, any life, anything that makes any sense. This is why I hated Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. That wouldn’t be an interesting place to explore; on the contrary, I would spend most of my time trying to find a way out and never return.

Our culture, on the other hand, is filled to overflowing with images, ideas, thoughts, even distinct theological and otherwise religious approaches to matters of spiritual evil. Whether it’s kids puking pea soup or floating above their beds; whether it’s the rite of exorcism or the or a blessing of a house or person seemingly oppressed by dark forces; from the horrific appearance of those allegedly possessed to the demon calling out our deepest held secrets, fears, and sins, dragging them to the light of day to frighten us from sending it away. All of these and each of these are stock features both of sectarian and secular thoughts about the demonic.

And all of it, to me, is nonsense. I refuse to buy it. It doesn’t accord with any experience I have ever had, or any experience of anyone I’ve known. Whether it’s the appearance of a horrific smell, violent actions on the part of a particular person, or the appearance of scratches or other marks on people – I just don’t buy it. Indeed, I have yet to see a popular film about exorcism in which the phenomena shown on screen can’t be explained by far more mundane causes, not the least of them incipient mental illness, folie a deux, and feeding delusions of vulnerable minds (particularly children and religious fanatics) to create even more elaborate fantasy lives. Even Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy would work well for some of the popular portrayals of demonic possession, including The Exorcist.

Which leaves me in a quandary. What, exactly, am I to do with all this? It all seems so big, both comprehensible yet incomprehensible. Acknowledging the reality of evil . . . does that necessitate acknowledging the reality of the demonic as a spiritual reality? What about the thousands of years of accrued baggage, of legend and myth and theology and popular tripe? Which is the point at which I began.

This is a serious journey I want to undertake, yet it seems I can’t get past the starting line.