Dungeons of Darkness

Magyar. Russian.

First some rather appropriate music. 

Many think of Burzum as being originally a Black Metal band, and thus also – because of all the lies that have been spread about what Black Metal was all about – automatically think that it must at some point at least have been Satanic.

DarkThrone had a lyric on their “Soulside Journey” album that, I think, included this line: “If you call me evil I shall only stand proud”, with reference to how Judeo-Christians see all those who oppose their Hebrew gibberish as “evil”. Many other Death Metal musicians in Norway embraced this idea too, and in 1991 started to use Satanic imagery and Satanic terms, to simply express contempt for Judeo-Christianity. They were not “Satanists”, and they all strongly opposed e. g. the so-called “Church of Satan”, founded and then still led by the Jew Anton Szandor LaVey. They too were in oppsition to all of this, and as some might know “Satan” translates as simply “the opponent/adversary”, so it actually made sense.

Burzum did not fall into this pit; there were no inverted crosses (apparently believed to be a Satanic symbol…) on any Burzum artwork and no Satanic lyrics, save perhaps with one exception; a song, just titled “Dominus Sathanas” (basically meaning: “the opposition (to Judeo-Christianity) is dominant”), with the lyrics consisting of the title of the track being repeated a few times.

Burzum was my musical extension to my fascination for fantasy. Burzum was experimental sorcery and escapism, alternative philosophy, a way to systematize dreams and thoughts and also in a sense an aid for day-dreaming or even meditation. Each album was in fact made to be a “sleeping spell”, lulling the listener into sleep – and into the dream world, where everything is possible and where you are truly free. The name Burzum itself is, as many already know, a word (translated as “darkness”) from the poem written on the inside of the One Ring from Tolkien’s universe.

Night is the death of the day, when our world is sent into darkness, and just like I was an “adversary” (a “Satan”) to Judeo-Christianity my darkness was not at all something bad. My darkness was an opportunity, not only to drift off into fantastic dreams, but also to start appreciating what is often seen as “evil” by “the Church”.

If you want examples of how I expressed this you can read the lyrics of the debut album, and perhaps even better exemplified by the lyrics of the second album. I can add that the cover artwork was (obviously) heavily inspired by this AD&D adventure module, which serves as a good example of just how important pen & paper fantasy RPGs were to me at the time.

If you want examples of how I still express these same ideas 22 years later you can read e. g. this and this post.

PS. Maybe I should have called this post “Advanced Dungeons of Darkness”…