Table Of ContentMors Mystica: Black Metal Theory Symposium
M M
ORS YSTICA
Black Metal Theory Symposium
Edited by
Edia Connole & Nicola Masciandaro
First published in 2015 by
Schism Press
An imprint of Gobbet press
schismmsihcs.wordpress.com
MORS MYSTICA: BLACK METAL THEORY
SYMPOSIUM
© The authors and Schism Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0.
Cover image: Magdalena Gornik on Good Friday
(http://zupnija-sodrazica.rkc.si/MagdalenaGornik/
mistika_A.html)
ISBN-13: 978-0692492093
ISBN-10: 0692492097
CONTENTS
Introduction: On “Heroes/Helden” 1
Edia Connole & Nicola Masciandaro
Following the Stench: Watain and 53
Putrefaction Mysticism
Drew Daniel
Ablaze in the Bath of Fire 69
Brad Baumgartner
Mycelegium 81
James Harris
dying to find I was never there 99
Teresa Gillespie
On the Ecstasy of Annihilation: Notes 147
towards a Demonic Supplement
Charlie Blake
Autonomy of Death, Nothing Like This 169
Daniel Colucciello Barber
“It’s a suit! It’s ME!”: Hyper-Star and Hyper- 177
Hero through Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”
Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle
The Tongue-Tied Mystic: Aaaarrrgghhh! 201
Fuck Them! Fuck You!
Gary J. Shipley
These Flames Will Lick the Feet of God 215
Heather Masciandaro
Mystical Anarchism 219
Simon Critchley
Die Maske des Black Metals 257
Dominik Irtenkauf
Xenharmonic Black Metal: Radical 269
Intervallics as Apophatic Ontotheology
Brooker Buckingham
The Perichoresis of Music, Art, and 279
Philosophy
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix
On Darkness Itself 293
Niall Scott
Haemál 307
Jeremy Dyer
From Black Bile 317
Eugene Thacker
“This Place is a Tomb”: Infinite Terror in 325
Darkspace
Dylan Trigg
Seven Propositions On The Secret Kissing Of 333
Black Metal: OSKVLVM
Edia Connole
Wings Flock to My Crypt, I Fly to My Throne: 367
On Inquisition’s Esoteric Floating Tomb
Nicola Masciandaro
Symposium Photographs 383
Öykü Tekten
APPENDIX
Bound to Metal (Interview with Edia 399
Connole for Legacy)
Dominik Irtenkauf
Theoria e praxis del Black Metal (Interview 403
by Fabio Selvafiorita for L’Intellettuale
Dissidente)
Nicola Masciandaro
On “Heroes/Helden”
Edia Connole & Nicola Masciandaro
To be a hero—in the most universal sense of the word—
means to aspire to absolute triumph. But such triumphs
come only through death. Heroism means transcending
life; it is a fatal leap into nothingness.
– Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
Freedom? it’s my final refuge, I forced myself to freedom
and I bear it not like a talent but with heroism: I’m
heroically free . . . I don’t impart confidences. Instead I
metallize myself . . . I construct something free of me
and of you—this is my freedom that leads to death.
– Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
[I]n the seething blaze, you turned to ash. . . . Like a
forest fire the flame roared on, and burned your flesh
away. Next day at dawn . . . we picked your pale bones
from the char to keep in wine and oil. A golden amphora
your mother gave for this—Hephaistos’ work, a gift from
Dionysos. In that vase . . . hero, lie your pale bones . . .
We . . . heaped a tomb for these upon a foreland . . . to
be a mark against the sky for voyagers in this generation
and those to come.
– Homer, The Odyssey
Realization is for heroes who, while the knife is slashing
their throats, take pleasure in the pain of dying.
– Meher Baba
They who thus conquer / In the storm of love / Are
veritable heroes; / But they who take any rest / And do
not continue to the end / Are rightly condemned.
– Hadewijch
1
MORS MYSTICA
The idea of this commentary is to consider “Heroes/Helden,” a
cover of the famous Bowie song by Tombs,1 in light of the fires of
mystical death. In the weeks before the Mors Mystica symposium,
the music video by the Brooklyn-based black metal band
spontaneously suggested itself as an index of the event. Whatever
the secret or obvious links between black metal and Bowie—“I was
influenced by Bowie” (Necrobutcher of Mayhem)2—this seems
like an unlikely musical gloss on a black metal theory symposium
dedicated to self-annihilation. On further reflection, the setting of
the video by Tombs in New York City, the promise of a metallic
blackening of the pop romanticism of the original (“Bowie simply
glosses over the boundless idealism of his song called ‘Heroes’
[sic] by being ironic about it right from the start”),3 and above all
the profound spiritual connection between heroism and mystical
death, their unending cotermination in dying to oneself through
love—“Being is dying by loving” (MB)—show “Heroes/Helden” to
be a perfect song for this commentary (and proper way to
introduce this volume). If the “heroes” of the song are only heroes
“for one day,” all the more so does “Heroes/Helden” point the way
to the sword-path upon which true heroes “die daily” (1 Cor.
15:31).4
1 Tombs, “‘Heroes’ (Official Music Video),” directed by Jacyln Sheer and
Samantha Astolfi (Relapse Records, 2014), https://vimeo.com/
108837545.
2 Dayal Patterson, Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult (Port Townsend,
WA: Feral House, 2013), 150.
3 Tobias Rüther, Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin (London: Reaktion
Books, 2014), 135.
4 “This Path is strewn only with hardships, and only heroes can tread it.
Many pundits are there to give lectures and speak about philosophy, but
only a hero can tread the Path. It is like balancing oneself on the edge of
a sword. What am I to do? I have to keep you alive while jabbing my knife
in your chest, which causes you to cry out. What can we do? This is our
situation” (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, 1027, http://
http://www.lordmeher.org). Cf. “Life with Meher Baba was like walking
on the edge of a sword—walking on it even though crippled in one leg!
Such a life cannot be imagined. Daily, one had to bear lightning-like
blows; yet, strangely, one would be in such a condition that, although
paining from the wounds, one would not like to be left ‘unharmed’
without them! On the one hand, the mind would reel under the attack,
but on the other, the heart would desire more punishment! Thus, because
of the continuous shower of ‘blows to the ego,’ the mind was becoming
2
CONNOLE & MASCIANDARO – ON “HEROES/HELDEN”
“Heroes / Helden”
As seen in the closing credits of the music video, Tombs dispense
with the quotation marks which conspicuously enclose the title of
Bowie’s original in an “ironic distance”—a distance nonetheless
always already closed by the sonic immanence of the love of music
(music of love) wherein the twin correlational hallucination of the
for-us and the in-itself is inversely overcome: “There is no outside!
But we forget this with all sounds; how lovely it is that we forget!”5
Counter to the critical reception of Bowie’s self-citing title as a
camp gesture whose sophistication the naïve listener or believer
in heroism must be instructed in,6 Tombs erect an unadorned
powerless and the heart strong” (Lord Meher, 3669). On the traditional
significance of the sword bridge, famously traversed by Sir Lancelot,
Doña Luisa Coomaraswamy writes, “It is because the Thread of the Spirit
is at once so tenuous and of such wiry strength that the Bridge is so often
described in the traditional literature either as a ray of light, or as
consisting of a thread or a hair, or as sharper than a razor or the edge of a
sword” (“The Perilous Bridge of Welfare,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 8 [1944]: 196–213).
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 175.
6 “Bowie was slap-bang in the middle of what Susan Sontag defined as the
sensibility of camp . . . ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It is not
a lamp but a “lamp”.’ Or, in Bowie’s case it is ‘Heroes’, not Heroes,
implying an ironic distancing lost in its live power-pop renditions” (David
Buckley, “Still Pop’s Faker?,” in The Bowie Companion, ed. by Elizabeth
Thompson and David Gutman [London: Macmillan, 1993], 4–5). “For all
of its latter-day recognition . . . ‘“Heroes”’ is still widely mistaken to be an
anthem to fist-pumping optimism, when in fact Bowie is singing about
the self-delusion of clinging to a relationship that might last, at best, ‘just
for one [more] day.’ The title, moreover, is framed in what Bowie would
3
MORS MYSTICA
heroic monument and monument to heroism under cover of the
cover itself, over the aegis of the undying artist-hero whose
epigraphically present name now both signs the work’s authentic
saying and serves as the ur-quote mark presiding over its freedom
from “the vicious circle of authority and citation.”7 This is Tombs’
“Heroes/Helden,” not “‘Heroes/Helden’” by David Bowie. The
cover’s interment of the song as writing—not “by” but “written
by”—puts to rest its unsung, musically invisible quotation marks.
Activating the principle of the cover as citation in toto, Tombs
encrypt “‘Heroes’” in a tomb of total citation that resurrects the
song from semantic suspension, paradoxically restoring it to itself
in a new version which always-never existed, a lyrical hybrid of
“‘Heroes’” and “‘Heroes/Helden’.” Such is the order of black
metal: “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 And
such is the real point, the whole point, of Bowie’s original marks,
which is not to be ironic about heroism but to get it by knowing
that the joke is on you if you do not presently die to yourself and
become who you really are, i.e. be a hero—whatever the artist and
critics say about the song, or what anyone says about anything for
that matter. As Sir Gawain must remind Yvain, lest he become
“one of those men . . . who are worth less because of their wives,”
“Now is not the time to dream your life away but to frequent
tournaments, engage in combat, and joust vigorously, whatever it
later refer to as ironic quotation marks—suggesting that the ‘only true
heroic act’ available, as he told Melody Maker’s Allan Jones shortly after
the song’s release, was to enjoy ‘the very simple pleasure of being alive’”
(Thomas Jerome Seabrook, Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New
Town [London: Jawbone, 2008], 179).
7 Giorgo Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture,
trans. Ronald L. Martiez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), 74.
8 Nicola Masciandaro, “Black Metal Theory: Interrogation I: Nicola
Masciandaro,” Avant-garde Metal (2012), http://avantgarde-
metal.com/content/stories2.php?id=245.
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