BERGMETAL
Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond
by
Lieut. Nab Saheb of Kashmir
with
Introduction and Commentary
by
Denys X. Abaris, O.S.L.
HWORDE
Austin Ø New York
BERGMETAL: ORO-EMBLEMS OF THE MUSICAL
BEYOND BY LIEUT. NAB SAHEB OF KASHMIR,
WITH INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY BY
DENYS X. ABARIS, O.S.L.
© the authors and gnOme books
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
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HWORDE is an imprint of gnOme books
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Cover image: “The Bard” by John Martin (1789-1854),
public domain (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:The_Bard.jpg)
ISBN-13: 978-1494907204
ISBN-10: 1494907208
Where does Mont Blanc end, and where do I
begin? That is the question which no metaphysician
has hitherto succeeded in
answering. But at least the connection is
close and intimate. He is a part of the great
machinery in which my physical frame is inextricably
involved, and not the less
interesting because a part which I am unable
to subdue to my purposes. The whole universe,
from the stars and the planets to the
mountains and the insects which creep about
their roots, is but a network of forces eternally
acting and reacting upon each other. The
mind of man is a musical instrument upon
which all external objects are beating out infinitely
complex harmonies and discords.
– Leslie Stephen
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction: On Bergmetal xv
Emblems
I. Enter the Mountain 1
II. No Way 8
III. Slumber Killed 20
IV. Occult Rock 37
V. Abandoned Mine 50
VI. Scream of Stone 63
VII. Never to Descend 77
vii
Preface
By a way I came, but I went not by the way.
– Lal Ded
This book was sparked by an email message I received
ten weeks before my second deployment to Siachen
glacier, the highest altitude battlespace on the planet.
The message from came from Dr. Manabrata Guha of
the National Institute of Advanced Studies (Bangalore),
whose writings on Indian military strategy and
the SIMAD I had studied with great interest. My first
deployment to Siachen had resulted in torturous physical
depression and maddening psychic fatigue.
Thankfully, Dr. Guha’s delightfully abstract and theoretical
writings helped me understand how this
traumatic experience was not really traumatic, not a
wounding from which I needed to recover, but rather a
structurally necessary and most natural participation
in a geo-military situation “in which strategy decomposes
into pure tacticities and where combat has less
to do with destruction, and more to do with the alchemy
of decay” (Guha, “Introduction to SIMADology:
Polemos in the 21st
Century”). This sentence in particular
encompasses for me the strange form of
exhaustive terror that had settled in my soul at Siachen
and left me wondering whether it would be
possible for me to return. For living and fighting so
deep and high in the mountains is not only an arduous
task and venture, but a truly inhuman mode of
existence where, pinched between the eternal collapse
of the Himalaya and the self-fracturing stress of attritional
warfare, one’s life remains in a state of embering
frozen evaporation, as if the very forces responsible for
the consolidation and ordering of our material world
are way up there working against themselves to pro-
PREFACE
viii
duce a mode of being that is neither dead nor alive
and beyond both. Preparation for death is a relatively
easy matter, and I feel ready to die in whatever manner
God wills. But this scorched active existing as
something awfully in between, this in-existing as a
metaphysically exposed and blackened being, what
preparation can there be for that?
Dr. Guha, who is an ardent fan of Black Sabbath, referred
in his communications to a blog entitled
Bergmetal, consisting of sound clips of mountainthemed
heavy metal songs and accompanying annotations.
My imagination was captured by images like the
Propagandhi album cover pictured above and the al-
BERGMETAL
ix
bum cover for a lost Bergmetal album showing the
desiccated corpse and skull of a dead mountaineer:
Exploring the site of Bergmetal spontaneously became
for me a kind of insensible preparatory meditation on
my imminent return to combat at Siachen, a way to reproject
myself victoriously into the inhuman martial
grinding of the sacred glacial spheres. It helped me to
grapple and mount towards my destiny, both as an
individual spiritual being bound for obliteration into
the infinity of Reality and as an historical entity, a little
man from Kashmir caught up in the oropolitical
carnage of this unheroic age. Contemplating the harsh
strains and concepts of Bergmetal restored my senses
to the ancient spiritual significance of warfare and the
PREFACE
x
special occult force this alpine battle is exerting within
the subtle spheres—all the more so because of its
forgotten status—to steer our civilization away from
the materialism, dogmatism, and the false forms of
non-violence which keep humans cowardly and irresponsible.
Happily, I have since learned that my own
region has produced one death metal band called Zanskar
whose song titles are thematically confluent with
my discovery of Bergmetal—“Deployed,” Melting Ice
Caps,” “The Sun Shines Over the Forgotten Land”—
and whose first and only album cover shows a turbulent
mountain landscape.
Perhaps, when the violent blasts of heavy metal are
heard throughout our great range, when the modern
sonic metal of the Western youth is brought back to
the planet’s youngest peaks in the East, peaks which
BERGMETAL
xi
are themselves historically inseparable from the
West’s own belated and essentially modern fascination
with the alpine sublime, perhaps then we will lay
to rest our metal killing machines and let them sink
into the mountains from which their heavy matter
came. Something in me broods with strange hope that
the heroic demon-screams of heavy metal, like new
divine names spoken through the amplifying weirding
modules of a more holy war, will one day shoot down
the pathetic man-machines of poisonous conflict and
bring to earth not peace but nobler battles.
For then we might have remembered that the true war,
the war that so deeply delights the soul and sends it
fighting boldly across the secret chasms of cosmic
abyss, is the war within the soul itself, a war that
plays dangerous and free with its own indestructible
Life!
Indestructible,
Learn thou! the Life is, spreading life through all;
PREFACE
xii
It cannot anywhere, by any means,
Be anywise diminished, stayed, or changed.
But for these fleeting frames which it informs
With spirit deathless, endless, infinite,
They perish. Let them perish, Prince! and fight!
He who shall say, “Lo! I have slain a man!”
He who shall think, “Lo! I am slain!” those both
Know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain!
Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter II
Even though the musical styles of heavy metal sensibly
repel my person, the strange and regressively
Western formulation of Bergmetal blew into my spirit
trumpet blasts from our ancient mystical battlefields,
enchanting me into an unshakeable memory of the fact
that true love is not a game for the faint-hearted and
weak, but an arduous physical and spiritual battle that
demands strength and understanding: “Thus live your
life of obedience and war! What good is long life?
What warrior wants to be spared? I do not spare you, I
love you from the very heart, my brothers in war!”
(Nietzsche, Zarathustra). As I loved Bergmetal despite
my aesthetic disgust, the pure idea of Bergmetal
showed me in new form the great and noble difference
between loving and liking—a difference sadly lost on
the masses of this lost world where modernity makes a
mockery of life and traditionalism knows not the savor
of its own truth. So, after printing a few mountainmetal
images to pin to the bulletin board above my
desk, I was moved to inscribe them with short poems
written in English but following the classic quatrain
rhyme-scheme of Kashmir’s great mystical poetess Lal
Ded (Lalleshwari). It seemed that the verses might refashion
the Bergmetal genre into a quieter, more
pleasant lyrical form and at the same time furnish definite
inner entry into the true divine terror of worlddestroying
verbo-musical SOUND, a hidden lurking
BERGMETAL
xiii
fear of which was no doubt behind my reactive repulsion
towards the harsh musical style. Inevitably, my
words were infected with some of the alogical and
barbaric aspects of heavy metal lyric. Writing the little
poems became of way of travelling into the aesthetic
steepness and coldness of Bergmetal, a manner of tracing
the alien heavy metal mountain with new routes
and lines of ascent. The poems presented themselves
to me as a contemplative act of scripting fate, of facing
the mountain of Reality and never backing down.
Whether or not the lines have literary merit is beside
the point, though I do entertain hope that they please
the reader. That Mr. Abaris has found them worthy of
commentary is a surprising and welcome discovery,
all the more so as his elaborations give more attention
to the principles than to the superficial effects of my
words and often reveal ideas which my thought was
only dimly aware of from within the work of counting
syllables and finding rhymes. The labor of making this
book is entirely his. Under his intellectual hands the
Bergmetal concept has taken a reflective form I could
not foresee and the creative product of this fortuitous
collaboration instills me with certainty that we will
one day have the pleasure of meeting in person—in
this world or another! In fact, an experience of mine
two days before my return to Siachen confirmed the
fact that space and time are not at all obstacles to certain
kinds of freely willed endeavor. Restless about my
impending deployment and wanting distraction from
the numb tedium of inner and outer preparations, I
took a day trip down to the ancient solar temple at
Martand. Having by that time completed the set of
Bergmetal poems from which this small selection is
chosen, I brought the pages with me for final checking
and perusing. Sitting near the temple with my verses
in hand, verses whose Occidental weirdness silently
harmonized with the marked Greek styling of the tem-
PREFACE
xiv
ple stones and the fading golden light of the setting
sun, I saw a nearly naked disheveled but not unlovely
old woman approaching the temple from the east. I
could not tell whether or not she was looking at me, or
what she was doing there at all. At first I thought she
must be a beggar or madwoman, but she was not begging
and did not show the erratic self-enclosed energy
of the typical mad person. Instead she walked with a
slow purposiveness of total sanity which beggars and
madmen naturally cannot show, being consumed with
subjective phenomena and wants. As she walked
nearer to where I sat, with an inexplicable force of
presence accentuated by that supernaturally clean
kind of charismatic dirtiness found only on our omphalic
subcontinent, I observed that she was carrying
a smooth dark stone about the size of a grapefruit. For
a moment we made eye contact and she said in English,
holding out the stone without stopping on her
way, this is yours too. In the moment I turned to watch
her pass, she had vanished. Then no one had to tell
me who she was—it was clear. So in turn I trust that
the present reader will find in these words something
stony of their own, something hard and heavy as a
mountain and lighter than the wind.
Nab Saheb
Srinagar
2013
xv
Introduction: On Bergmetal
Denys X. Abaris
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore.
– Edgar Allan Poe, “Dream-Land”
Bergmetal is a supremely actual, mythical, and still-tobe-discovered
genre of musical experience, an aesthetically
retrograde alpine chain of ascent-portals
opening the flatness of present cultural presence into
multiverses of acosmic abyss. In its pure form, Bergmetal
always has, does, and will exist, even if there is
no one to listen to it. To the intrepid sonic-conceptual
explorer, the untouched peaks are innumerable,
stretching to horizons far beyond this world. To those
who prefer to remain generically where they are, these
peaks do not exist, or are at best pale projections of a
more familiar sphere. This book is neither a guide for
explorers nor an armchair entertainment. It is more a
frantic sketch from an intimate distance, a journal of
incomplete ascents and saturnine basecamp timepass
composed with leisurely intoxicated haste over the
course of two winter weeks when, sick with life and
self, something else had to be done. Peaks screamed to
be climbed and/or fallen from. “Here the bergmetal as
phonological event comes to us as the present tense of
a past adverbial eternity.”1
Historically speaking, the origins of the concept
of bergmetal are both obvious and obscure. The genre,
1
Kevin Murray, “286 Passages into the Logar : Lordship and
Bondage of the Provincial Ascent” (Bergmetal, 2012).
INTRODUCTION
xvi
which is simply the sub-category of heavy metal thematically
invested in mountains, predates by many
years Domink Irtenkauf’s seminal unpublished paper,
“To the Mountains, or, Rocking Against Melancholy:
The Implications of Black Metal’s Geophilosophy”
(Melancology, Black Metal Theory Symposium II,
London, 2011), as well the blog Bergmetal, initiated in
2012.2
The concept already finds overt expression, for
example, in Wallop’s Metallic Alps (Bone Breaker,
1985). Many metal bands now apply mountain adjec-
2
On the concept and theory of Bergmetal, see Tristan Vivian
Adams, “Interview with Nicola Masciandaro on Bergmetal,”
Notes From the Vomitorium, 2012); David Peak, “Return to
My Realms: Dungeonsynth, Fortification, and the Alpine
Sublime,” Basement: Studies in Seclusion 7 (2012): 1-13.
BERGMETAL
xvii
tives to their generic self-descriptors—‘mountain metal,’
‘alpine black metal’—and/or locate themselves in
artistic fidelity to specific alpine regions: Cascadia
(Wolves in the Throne Room, Alda), Rocky Mountains
(Schrei aus Stein, Deafest), Dolomites (Lorn), Sierra
Nevada (Valdur), Alps (Stormcrow, Rauhnacht,
Wacht), Bavaria (Draumar), Transylvania (Negura
Bunget), Himalaya (Ugra Karma, Weird Anxiety)—to
name only some obvious examples. Many more just
aesthetically and conceptually affiliate their metal
with mountains. To show but a few prominent examples
(Howling Wind, Into the Cryosphere; Aylwin,
Soil and Cold; Hammers, Orogeny; Battle Dagorath,
Eternal Throne; 深 山 , Deep Mountains; Horn,
Jahreszeiten; Draumar, Gebirge; Wacht, Indigen; Mgła,
With Hearts Towards None; Bergthron, E. A.):
INTRODUCTION
xviii
BERGMETAL
xix
Yet there is within this elevated field simultaneously a
slowness to address bergmetal as such, to own and
identify it as viable distinct genre, despite the massive
historical and cultural roots of the mountain-idea.
There is a strange sense in which bergmetal itself is
now necessarily persisting as an uncharted mountain,
one which hides behind the very figure of the mountain
as dependable backdrop of multifarious artistic
and intellectual purposes, especially those affiliated
with mysticism, romanticism, high fantasy, antihumanism,
cosmicity, anti-modernism, ecoapocalypticism,
and traditionalism. But as metal continues
to proliferate and ramify into ever more specific
faithful heresies of itself, this will likely change and
bergmetal will eventually emerge as its own distinct
heavy metallic topos. As this happens, the deeper,
psycho-tectonic forces behind the musical orogeny
will become more apparent and bergmetal will ascend
to colder elevation and brighter visibility as a distinct
alpine chain stretching into music’s deep metal future
and past, perhaps unveiling a wholly new, nowunimaginable
idea and reality of BERG. Until then, a
full typology or mapping of the genre would be premature,
despite the existence of several obvious readymade
formations, such as the misty ranges of MiddleEarth,
the hyper-alpine monstrosities of Lovecraftian
mythos, and good old-fashioned icy Hyperboreanism.
Such oro-constellations will remain significant, but
the coming emergence of bergmetal will not be determined
by them, being a flow of deeper-than-cultural
forces whose lines and patterns of evolution are yet
too profound and chaotic to admit clear rational cate-
gorization.3
3
See Samuel Forsythe, “Five Alpine Projection Maps of the
Coming Metal Cosmos,” Computational Sound Art & Theory
23 (2011).
INTRODUCTION
xx
Two complementary early proto-bergmetal moments,
however, do merit highlighting at this stage as
potential reference points for future measurements.
The first is the appearance of the mountain as object of
ludic post-futurality and mystical flight in Black Sabbath’s
“Supernaut”: “I want to reach out and touch the
sky / I want to touch the sun / But I don't need to fly /
I'm gonna climb up every mountain of the moon /
Find the dish that ran away with the spoon” (Black
Sabbath Vol.4, 1972). The subject of this song is the
darkly innocent paradox of a conquering spirit who
has left conquest behind, a pure climber-flyer who
summits everything without needing to fly, exceeds
all limits, yet is not in the least weighed down by the
accomplishment of doing so and who alpinely dwells
above all contingency and relation: “Got no religion,
don’t need no friends / Got all I want and I don’t need
to pretend.” The Supernaut is a mystically playful
mountaineer of telos and time itself, one who thus
ends up assuming the high apophatic topos of the old
God of Mt. Sinai whom none can see and live: “Don’t
try to reach me, ‘cause I’d tear up your mind / I’ve
seen the future and I’ve left it behind.” The appearance
of the mountain under these terms is significant
BERGMETAL
xxi
precisely in light of the general elision of the mountain
from Black Sabbath’s vision, an elision which is
conspicuous in light of the apocalyptic dimensions of
the mountain-figure in the Western imaginary, as famously
illuminated in John Martin’s [doom metal
album cover] End of the World (1851-3). What founds
this elision is precisely the cosmic planetary, aprèslunar-landing
scale of Black Sabbath’s apocalypticism,
wherein the whole earth is not to be made new—“And
I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven
and the first earth were passed away” (Revelation
21;1)—but left behind by a new humanity, the “sons of
freedom,” who rocket into the void on wings of “burning
metal through the atmosphere”: “Rocket engines
burning fuel so fast / Up into the night sky they blast /
Through the universe the engines whine / Could it be
the end of man and time? /Back on earth the flame of
life burns low / Everywhere is misery and woe / Pollution
kills the air, the land and sea / Man prepares to
meet his destiny” (Black Sabbath, “Into the Void,”
Master of Reality, 1971). Given this trajectory, the
mountain can only appear in Black Sabbath where it
does, after the overcoming of redemptive teleology
and salvationism by the absolute individual,4
the Supernaut,
who, mystically, is the Super-Naught or
Hyper-Zero of the rare one who self-negates, who is
eternally saved in the realization that there is no one
to be saved.5
“I would go down unto Annihilation and
Eternal Death, lest the Last Judgment come and fine
me Unannihilate, and I be seiz’d and giv’n into the
hands of my own Selfhood” (William Blake). “And the
kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich
men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and
4
Vide Julius Evola, Teoria dell’Individuo assoluto (1927).
5
See A. K. Coomaraswamy, “Ākiṃcañña: Self-Naughting,”
Metaphysics, ed. Lipsey (1977), 88-106.
INTRODUCTION
xxii
every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in
the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said
to the mountains and rocks, fall on us, and hide us
from the face of him that sitteth on the throne” (Revelation
6:15-6). Only for the Supernaut is the mountain
given in its universality and authentic modernity as
place for the free play of endless climbing.
Sabbat’s “Rage of Mountains” (Sabbatical Demon,
1990), in perfect counterpoint to Sabbath’s posttelluric
mountain, speaks for the mountain itself as
living earthly symbol of the immanent beyond and
calls down its wrath in warning upon all human scum
who mistake the mountain’s silence for indifference:
“We hear their screams, great mountains / By way of a
symbol of great ground / They tower over in your life /
They had been watching, defending you / Making
your water in heavy clouds / Giving greens to you, the
law for the living / But! Devils’re blighting for heartless
souls / You'll be touched with rage of mountains!!
/ They’re gutted and processed by your hands / But
they don't cry, keep silence / Silence is just warning of
screams of revenge / Everything is your sins.”
Bergmetal is here the scream of the mountain itself as
BERGMETAL
xxiii
betrayed (a)cosmic source and law of life. Mountain is
majestic throne of the noble demon who sits in black
judgment of stupid evil idiot self-centered man. Unheeds
he the fraudulent counsel of any interrupter
who would have his ear, enforcing with perfect inescapable
scepter of human skull on pole. HAIL SATAN!!!
Together these two early moments of bergmetal—
symbolically differentiated by the presence/absence of
an h, the letter which marks the human in continuity
with earth (homo-humus)—provide a charged pole for
measuring the avenir of bergmetal as a dynamic transhuman
geo-tectonic musical system harshly impinging
upon the identity of man in relation to this weird
earthly place. The pole symbolically forms the axis of
the mountain, a screaming vertical vibratory silence
which essentially says: Man, be yourself, or not, the
choice is yours.
By unexpectedly transforming found moments of
bergmetal into poetic emblems, Lieut. Nab Saheb has
with remarkable insider-outsider intuition authentically
received the genre along this axis, finding in it
variegated heavy metallic images of deep alpine decision
and will. His spontaneous poetic responses to
bergmetal icons thus fulfill the practico-theoretcial
truth of the emblem, which is all about looking out
into an impossibly clear landscape of semiotic bodies
and living signs within a con-templative autoallegorical
poetic frame, so that to properly decide the
emblem will be to pro-duce (poiein) or bring into real
presence, this day or the next, its truth. That the
man/mountain relation is itself emblematic of this auto-allegorical
situation of decision, that the emblem is
oro-topology or place where one paradoxically authentically
decides by presently judging oneself as another
(allegoria, lit. other-speaking, speaking about something
else—‘je est un autre’), is evident from the 8th
of
INTRODUCTION
xxiv
Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata (1531), which concerns
the divine guidance of the mountain:
VIII. QUA DII VOCANT, EUNDUM
[WHERE THE GODS CALL, THERE ONE MUST GO]
In trivio mons est lapidum: supereminet illi
Trunca Dei effigies, pectore facta tenus.
Mercurii est igitur tumulus: suspende viator
Serta Deo, rectum qui tibi monstret iter.
Omnes in trivio sumus, atque hoc tramite vitae
Fallimur, ostendat ni Deus ipse viam.
[At the crossroads is a mountain of stones; the shortened
figure of a god rises above it, figured as far down
as his chest. This then is the hill of Mercury. Traveller,
raise up garlands to the god, that to you he may
show the proper road. We are all at the crossroads,
and we mistake our course in life, if the God himself
does not show the way.]
BERGMETAL
xxv
Look to the mountain!6
This is the perfectly hopeless
hope of bergmetal—a looking that I hold to be worthy
of commentary regardless of what that looking seems
and does not seem to see. Such is the power of bergmetal,
to provide a way of seeing in the evident
absence of way. The very fact that we are looking to
the mountain is proof of this.
Revering this evident eighthness of the SahebAlciato
emblematic oro-complex and its unmistakable
horizontal correspondence to the infinity beyond time
and space (∞), I have delimited this volume to commentary
on only 7 of Nab Saheb’s emblems which the
Bergmetal authors kindly provided me upon request.
No doubt you could have done better. “In the shadows
of its craters / On the mountains of its ruin / Solar rays
carve its valleys / Endless graves reign in caves” (Inquisition,
“Force of the Floating Tomb,” Obscure
Verses for the Multiverse)
Caveat ascensor!
6
Cf. Wallace Stevens’s “The Poem that Took the Place of a
Mountain”: “There it was, word for word, / The poem that
took the place of a mountain . . . Where he could lie and,
gazing down at the sea, / Recognize his unique and solitary
home.”
INTRODUCTION
xxvi
1
I. ENTER THE MOUNTAIN
Bathory, “To Enter Your Mountain,” Twilight of the Gods (Black
Mark, 1991)
⧍
Shining in the crimson distance of ancient days,
Summoning itself in cosmic cold immanence,
The mountain remains so indifferent to all ways
That silence itself is absorbed by its presence.
Sad mobs applaud, knowing nothing of this ascent,
The blissful pain of blind effort past yes and no.
Desolate crystal worlds burn in dire black lament
For they who into their mountain refuse to go.
I. ENTER THE MOUNTAIN
2
THE CRIMSON DISTANCE OF ANCIENT DAYS: The crimsonness
of alpine distance concerns the temporal
depth of geologic being as primal analogical flow of
life, the stygian blood of being itself as a stream between
irreconcilable worlds—“The hills, which, as
compared with living beings, seem ‘everlasting,’ are,
in truth, as perishing as they: its veins of flowing fountain
weary the mountain heart, as the crimson pulse
does ours; the natural force of the iron crag is abated
in its appointed time, like the strength of the sinews in
a human old age; and it is but the lapse of the longer
years of decay which, in the sight of its Creator, distinguishes
the mountain range from the moth and the
worm” (John Ruskin, Of Mountain Beauty, XII.3)—and
the deathly powerful feeling of this being: “the summits
of the rocky mountains are gathered into solemn
crowns and circlets, all flushed in that strange, faint
silence of possession by the sunshine which has in it
so deep a melancholy; full of power, yet as frail as
shadows; lifeless, like the walls of a sepulchre, yet
beautiful in tender fall of crimson folds” (Ibid.).
COLD IMMANENCE: A temperature of immanence? Immanent
is that which remains, what perdures within.
Coldness, as privation or absence of heat/movement,
remains in things in the mode of entropy. Entropy,
inevitable decay and passing away, operates as an unshakeable
coldness. You can warm yourself up, but
you are always already getting colder. And yet the unceasing
permanence of entropy is itself a kind of heat,
a constant movement that never stops effecting coldness.
In these terms, the cold immanence of the
mountain, which always presents itself under the paradoxical
sign of eternal decay, touches the cosmos as a
hot fading and unfadable heat, a diminishment which
always returns with a mysterious spontaneous surplus
of movement. Things fall apart, because they never
BERGMETAL
3
really do. The self-summoning of the mountain, the
magnetic extra whereby it compels attention uponbeyond
itself and though dying has already outlived
you, is an index of this surplus. Likewise, the corporeal
perfection of mountain experience is found in the
body’s ability to live in the ‘dead zone’, in temperatures
of its own internal beyond: “In this great disaster
I remained in utter solitude / The falling snow in the
year’s-end blizzard / Fought me, the cotton-clad, high
on Snow Mountain, / I fought it as it fell upon me /
Until it turned to drizzle. / I conquered the raging
winds-- / Subduing them to silent. The cotton cloth I
wore was like a burning brand” (The Hundred Thousand
Songs of Milarepa, “Song of the Snow Ranges”).
INDIFFERENCE TO ALL WAYS: “[U]pon the Jungfraujoch
[ridge top], there is a turning point that does not know
the lower world at all . . . This landscape has never
entered into human history, not even as a symbol—
like the moor, the heath, the forest—capable of mediating
between humanity and its secrets. The ancient
Persians believe the moon to be a mirror hung at an
oblique angle above the earth, reflecting it from beyond,
the high mountain, however, belongs neither to
this world nor to the one beyond. It lies at the Styx,
which flows between both worlds—indeed it is this
river’s mouth: the sea where the Styx arrives and
freezes solid” (Ernst Bloch, “Alps Without Photography”).
The indifference of the mountain is thus not
an indifference of something merely removed, but an
indifference of that which stands in the very midst of
ultimate difference (between this world and its beyond),
an absolute in-difference. So a mountain both
constitutes and is wholly removed from the ways up
it. Cf. “High above all sorrow: yes, but not unwitnessing
to it” (Ruskin, Of Mountain Beauty, XIX.3).
I. ENTER THE MOUNTAIN
4
SILENCE ITSELF IS ABSORBED BY ITS PRESENCE: “O dread
and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still
present to the bodily sense, / Didst vanish from my
thought: entranced in prayer / I worshipped the Invisible
alone” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Hymn Before
Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni”). As the silent presence
of the mountain here absorbs its very objecthood
before intellectual vision, splitting the mirror of spirit
and matter and thus opening the expansive solitude of
pure prayer or being alone with the alone, so the alpine
mysterium shows forth as power to return and
sink silence back towards itself, revealing silence as
mountain’s own musical dictation.
SAD MOBS APPLAUD, KNOWING NOTHING: The Bathory
lyrics begin by contrasting the blind dumbness of the
crowd with the individualized visionary path of the
one who enters the mountain: “Blind fools who see
only what they tell you to / Open up your eyes you
might see it too / See there is a lot to see within you
too / Don't be like the rest and let them take it from
you / Dumb fools who say only what they tell you to /
Speak up and find that there is more truth within you
than you knew” (Bathory, “To Enter Your Mountain”).
The low mute stupidity of the masses must be exited
for the higher blindness and speechlessness—the
‘blind effort’ of the next line—found by entering the
massively inhuman and exalted depths of the mountain.
Cf. “my advice to you as look for a sight of the
mysterious things, is to leave behind you everything
perceived and understood, everything perceptible and
understandable, all that is not and all that is, and with
your understanding laid aside, to strive upward as
much as you can towards union with him who is beyond
all being and knowledge” (Dionysius, Mystical
Theology). The crowd’s applause of alpine feats
proves ignorance of their true nature—both the nature
BERGMETAL
5
of the feat and their own nature. World-flattening humanity
huddles together, makes of itself a dumb mass,
precisely in willful blindness to the terrifying fact that
the transhuman orogenic body of cosmos is already
within the soul. This is the meaning of your mountain
in the song—“To enter your mountain Go into your
mountainside / To enter one's mountainside / Will
take its man” (Bathory, “To Enter”)—namely, that entering
the mountain coincides with climbing into the
depths of oneself and falling towards a summit of the
absolute individual: “my essential being is above God
. . . I am my own cause according to my essence,
which is eternal, and not according to my becoming,
which is temporal” (Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical
Works, Sermon 87). Bergwerk is a single double
movement encompassing brutal manual labor of mining
the abyss and noble conquest of glorious summits.
What the ‘blind fools’ cannot comprehend is exactly
this simple conjunction of transcendent achievement
and immanent humiliation wherein “the successful
climber does not quite feel himself to be one” (Bloch,
“Alps”), not because he is not one, but because has
experienced the pacific freedom of being lived by another
self: “This ascent requires pure strength and a
pure, calm, and uncompromising will. Slowly but
steadily, something arises in us: that automatic, almost
supernatural state of security, lack of tiredness, and
lucidity that arises at great heights and in the face of
mortal danger, after one’s initial strength and sensations
have been depleted” (Julius Evola, Meditations
on the Peaks). The psychic economy of society screens
this beyond within: “See there is a lot to see within
you too / Don't be like the rest and let them take it
from you” (Bathory, “To Enter”). Here lies the key to
the hidden meaning of this song’s obvious musical
failure. Speaking the very function of the song, these
lines, which conclude the first stanza, are set as a
I. ENTER THE MOUNTAIN
6
warning against the inane choral aesthetics of the song
itself, which paradoxically demands affectively that
you not sing along. The song is intentionally sung in a
manner that makes you feel stupid if you join the chorus,
re-exposing the listener to the very blindness one
must refuse and see through. The social sound of the
refrain is an instructive stupidity pushing the will
away into its own mountain, a movement perfected in
the song’s conclusion where a single voice repetitively
dilates mountain-entering into self-opening: “Mountain
/ He who enters his mountain / He who enters his
mountain / He who enters his mountain / He who enters
his mountain / He who enters his mountain / He
who enters his mountain / Into one’s mountainside”
(Bathory, “To Enter”). The seven song-fading repetitions
framed by the spatial distinction between the
deep transcendental body of mountain itself and its
immanent surface (“mountain . . . mountainside”)
mark a staged mystical ascent-descent by means of
voice into the root meaning of mountain (mons, from
PIE root *men- ‘to stand out, project’), into the truth
that stands there and needs no calling out to: “there
He stands patiently awaiting whoever is ready to open
up and let Him in. No need to call to Him from afar:
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” (Meister
Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 4). To enter
your mountain signifies to truly stand with what
stands, to mount through form to the sublime (sublimen)
threshold or infinite side of what is beyond
form, and thus, to step into the omnipresent mutual
inclination of summit and home: “To return to the
mountaintop: it is not given emphasis or developed in
advance by anything human, and yet, as not only
quantitative but also qualitative sublimity, it is not
BERGMETAL
7
turned away from the category of home, which expressly
inclines towards it” (Ernst Bloch, “Alps”).
BLISSFUL PAIN OF BLIND EFFORT PAST YES AND NO: The
effort is not an opposition but a negation of opposition:
“we should not conclude that the negations are
simply the opposites of the affirmations, but rather
that the cause of all is considerably prior to affirmations,
beyond privation, beyond every denial, beyond
every assertion” (Dionysius, Mystical Theology). The
distinction between true superessential negation,
which goes beyond the opposites, and false ontological
negation, which stays within them, is correlative to
the true and false greatness of the mountain, respectively:
“The alpine mountain is a real cipher, almost
already a symbol of that which strives upward: beyond
this cipher, however, such nature, as merely
reified and fetishized greatness, represents precisely
that which obstructs” (Bloch, “Alps”). The ‘blissful
pain of blind effort’ is the paradoxical ecstasy of
dwelling in the cipher of the mountain, the mountain
of the cipher.
LAMENT / FOR THEY WHO INTO THEIR MOUNTAIN REFUSE
TO GO: “I love those who do not first seek behind the
stars for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, but
who sacrifice themselves for the earth, that the earth
may some day become the overman’s” (Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
8
II. No Way
Darkthrone, “Black Victory of Death,” Total Death (Monfog, 1996).
⧍
Evil black peaks scream piercing ice-shards from above,
Way more malevolent than gunship, tank, or drone.
Here the way is lost, lost all hope and every love
As total death flows down the God-forsaken throne.
We always knew nothing makes it, nothing survives,
That only death wins the cosmos where life is war.
Bleakest death, the cryptic ruler of all your lives,
Wastes mankind, earth, and universe forevermore.
BERGMETAL
9
EVIL BLACK PEAKS: There is a spatio-temporal zone, at
the limits of space and time, where pathetic fallacy,
reaching a terrible height, darkly inverts at the very
summit of hyperbole into something palpably and indubitably
true. Consciousness here reaches a kind of
maximal separation from itself, an intellectual limit
that, ceasing to reflect back anything for thought, suddenly
becomes sharp and wounding. Like an archer
whose arrow shot to the heavens returns to penetrate
his eye, like a finger reaching out to touch a mirror
that is really a cutting blade, experience here finds
that there really is something evil out there, precisely
at the point where evil seems scientifically and realistically
most impossible, as shown in the malevolent
accidentality of mountain experience, in the evils perpetrated
by no one and everything, by forces
omnipresent and nowhere. Given the momentary,
piercing and formally unsustainable nature of such
noetic auto-trauma, its event is typically represented
in terms of terrible glimpse or fatal flash of horribly
exterior insight, as in Danforth’s final maddening vision
of the Antarctic hyper-mountains, “highest of
earth’s peaks and focus of earth’s evil”: “It was not, he
declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves
of echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains
of madness which we crossed; but a single
fantastic, daemonic glimpse, among the churning zenith
clouds, of what lay back of those other violet
westward mountains which the Old Ones had
shunned and feared” (H. P. Lovecraft, Mountains of
Madness, chapter 12). Such glimpsing of something
terrifyingly behind the far reaches of the visible is
simply a blind unveiling of the identity between matter
and the thought of evil, the primal and seemingly
permanent and inescapable positing of there being
something matter with things, a malevolence coincident
with being-there itself. Wounding itself upon this
II. NO WAY
10
impenetrable point, consciousness here finds itself
trapped within the true untruth of Gnostic materiality,
inside the fact that matter is evil precisely because
neither exist, because the inexistence of both is the
same thing. Yet this inexistence is not nothing. There
is something there. The mountain is trying to kill you.
And it will. “[O]mnis qui tetigerit montem, morte
morietur” (Exodus 19:12) [All who touch the mountain
by death will die].
. . . THAN GUNSHIP, TANK, OR DRONE: The simple point
of the comparison is that there is greater evil than
man’s own, that the cosmic malevolence seen in the
mountain is a malevolence more than war. This implies
a critique of man’s narrow and solipsistic claim
to war as his own evil, a critique prosecuted in the
experience of mountain warfare, in which human
agency is coldly delimited by telluric facts in the
midst of exploiting them for tactical advantage, where
hubristic ursurpation of the alpine powers, a violation
of the source of life, is buried under avalanche. The
dwarfing of human war by the mountains figures the
double bind of war’s nature as simultaneously man’s
responsibility and instrument of higher, meta-human
designs. Man goes to war in the mass psychotic insanity
of self-interest, only to find that war is already
there, at war with man from the very beginning. Man
takes up war, but War already owns him, and uses
man’s little wars to fertilize its own earth: “Go ahead!
Achieve all your goals! Break all the damns! Faster!
You are unbound. Go ahead and fly with faster wings,
with an ever greater pride for your achievements, with
your conquests, with your empires, with your democracies!
The pit must be filled; there is a need for
fertilizer for the new tree that will grow out of your
collapse” (Guido De Giorgio, “Crollano le torri”). The
waste of war does not destroy humanity, but drives it
BERGMETAL
11
onwards toward “the knowledge that man, instead of
being a limited, separate individual, completely
bound by the illusion of time and space and substance,
is eternal in his nature and infinite in his
resources” (MB, Early Messages to the West). Far from
being a justification for war, the understanding of
war’s fiery creative-accelerative force, a force the admission
of which is heretical both to the reductive
reification of war as misfortune and its ideological glorification—expression
of the forces that want war for
themselves—is the very understanding that would
open man to higher and nobler war, to better war by
more glorious means: “May your work be a battle, may
your peace be a victory! (Nietzsche, Zarathustra). Similarly,
we find in the Darkthrone lyrics an invocation
of the Earth that out-survives its own violation and by
death becomes fertile with a new fiery blackened humanity:
“Gaia! / Once mother of all life / Now raped
by death / To breed the brethren of black fire”
(Darkthrone, “Black Victory”). This necrotic breeding,
earth’s dark motherhood of meta-human man, is totally
her own doing. See that she is not a victim, not
death’s wasted plaything or mere place for
“Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame” (Shakespeare,
Sonnet 129), but a divinely transgressive
goddess, a blackly transcendent whore who freely
takes death as her lover and plays his game better than
himself. And in case you are worried and upset about
all those bad men who need to be punished for their
crimes, in case you are concerned that the hyperchaotic
Universe does not know how to handle the
evil of false warriors (never mind your own falseness):
know that Kali knows too well what to do with all the
lost leaders and followers, the war pigs and pillaging
soldiers, not to mention the base slaves who lose their
heads butchering in the name of the One whose mercy
grants only their wish and erases them from the book
II. NO WAY
12
of life—“He governs the world through itself” (Ibn
Arabi). Mourn neither man nor earth—your Dark
Mother does not want you to cry. After all, today is
her party, today is her age! Correlatively, at the geologic
level, the obscure pre-solar dark divinity of earth is
what one first faces coming into the cold deathly altitudes,
where immediate reality destroys expectation
in spectacles of elemental confusion: “Our first view
of the glacier proper was absolutely contrary to our
imagination. We had imagined a white frozen mass
where reflecting sunrays might make us blind, as we
had seen in the movies. What confronted us at the
snout of the glacier was a black mass of mountainside,
full of debris and black dust, making it very difficult
for us to distinguish between the mountain and the
glacier” (Shammi Arora, “Siachen,” SRISHTI – Creativity
in Nature). The violence of man is pre-exceeded,
preemptively struck down by the purer elemental violence
of archaic sacred earth, churning with Life
beyond death and life, with holy DEATH—“sang en
formation d'hyperbole” (Julius Evola) [blood in hyperbolic
formation], the swerve of life into infinity . . .
There is also a secondary, more subtle meaning to
the comparison in this line, pertaining to the continuum
of shared reference to aerial military might and the
vocal power of heavy metal death from above echoed
in the first line (‘scream piercing . . .’). Here the superior
malevolence is the higher spiritual will and
dark/hidden cosmic forces channeled and controlled
in sonic metal voice itself.
HERE THE WAY IS LOST: In contrast to the previous emblem,
which emphasizes the individual attainability of
the mountain via a movement of setting forth into it,
the meaning here focuses on the waylessness of seeking
the mountain, and furthermore, mountain as itself
what prevents and impossibilizes the taking of any
BERGMETAL
13
way towards it. “God is the one who leads me and elevates
me to that state. I do not go to it on my own, for
my myself, I would not know how to want, desire, or
seek it” (Angela of Foligno, Memorial). There is no
way to the mountain, as the mountain is both the
transcendent terminus of all ways and their imminent
impossibility. The way to the mystical mountain is
perforce mystical, a physically and spiritually deathly
passage found in darkness and not asking the way:
“There is a Mountain situated in the midst of the earth
or center of the world, which is both small and great.
It is soft, also above measure hard and stony. It is far
off and near at hand . . . In it are hidden the most ample
treasures, which the world is not able to value . . .
To this Mountain you shall go in a certain night—
when it comes—most long and most dark . . . insist
upon the way that leads to the Mountain, but ask not
of any man where the way lies” (Thomas Vaughn,
Lumen de Lumine). Cf. “The territory in question must
be able to exist in any region on the surface of the
globe” (René Daumal, Mount Analogue). The dark way
to the mountain is a self-secret abyss opening to a vast
wilderness whose grand inhumanity is mysteriously
more home than anywhere else: “in darkness the soul
not only avoids going astray but advances rapidly . . .
To reach an new an unknown land and journey along
unknown roads, travelers cannot be guided by their
own knowledge . . . the soul, too, when it advances,
walks in darkness and unknowing . . . persons who
tread this road . . . are unable to describe it . . . this
mystical wisdom occasionally so engulfs souls in its
secret abyss that they have the keen awareness of being
brought into a place far removed from every
creature. They accordingly feel that they have been led
into a remarkably deep and vast wilderness unattainable
by any human creature, into an immense
unbounded desert, the more delightful, savorous, and
II. NO WAY
14
loving, the deeper, vaster, and more solitary it is”
(John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul). The way to
mountain is necessarily by means of being lost, abandoned,
derelict—not just a a categorical fact but the
terribly actual ontological intensity of seriously not
knowing or feeling how or where one stands, of being
lost. “For whoever would save his life will lose it”
(Matthew 16:24). Mountain is the wayless way of implacable
entry into impenetrable death: “for man shall
not see me and live . . . Behold there is a place by me
where you shall stand upon the rock” (Exodus 33:20).
The place where you grow silent and finally stop asking,
but how does this help me? It does not. “Only that
person who says: My soul chooses hanging, and my
bones death can truly embrace this fire . . . Let us die
then, and enter into this darkness. Let us silence all
our care, desires, and imaginings” (Bonaventure, Journey
of the Mind into God). Only being undone in the
black victory of totally disorienting death, only ascending
the “skeleton throne” will one “Reign . . . /
The realm of the beast” (Darkthrone, “Black Victory):
“Son of a giant, I have never / From the wrathful run. /
Son of a lion—of all beasts the king— / I have ever
lived in the snow mountains. / To make a task of life
is but a joke to me” (The Hundred Thousand Songs of
Milarepa, “Song of the Snow Ranges”).
AS TOTAL DEATH FLOWS DOWN THE GOD-FORSAKEN
THRONE: Traditionally, the mountain summit figures at
once the presence and the absence of God, the paradoxical
topos theou or place of God, where God is and
is not, where all that is found is a place and in that
place the All. So Ruskin, reinventing this place in the
context of the geo-romantic sublime, paints the alpine
height as kind of lofty monument of perishing divinity:
“Higher up, the ice opens into broad white fields
and furrows, hard and dry, scarcely fissured at all . . .
BERGMETAL
15
and forming a silent and solemn causeway, paved, as
it seems, with white marble from side to side; broad
enough for the march of an army in line of battle, but
quiet as a street of tombs in a buried city, and bordered
on each hand by ghostly cliffs of that faint
granite purple which seems, in its far-away height, as
unsubstantial as the dark blue that bounds it;—the
whole scene so changeless and soundless; so removed,
not merely from the presence of men, but even from
their thoughts; so destitute of all life of tree or herb,
and so immeasurable in its lonely brightness of majestic
death, that it looks like a world from which not
only the human, but the spiritual, presences had perished,
and the last of its archangels, building the great
mountains for their monuments, had laid themselves
down in the sunlight to an eternal rest, each in his
white shroud” (Of Mountain Beauty, XVI.1, my emphasis).
As much as the mountain presences the
immanence of transcendent divinity, or earthliness of
the heavenly, so does the mountain, precisely by
pointing beyond itself, prove its separation and distance
from the divine realm. This negative divinity of
the mountain is the foundation of its modern sublimity,
just as the scientific geological vision of mountains,
which Romanticism permutes into the matter of poetry,
rests upon the idea of mountain as miscreation, as
a thing that should not be, a fundamentally fallen elevation
that God could not have made, as per Thomas
Burnet’s proto-geologic concept of the mountains as
sacred ruins, remnants of the Deluge: “There is something
august and stately in the Air of these things, that
inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions;
We do naturally, upon such occasions, think of God
and his greatness: and whatsoever hath but the shadow
and appearance of INFINITE, as all things have
that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and
over-bear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a
II. NO WAY
16
pleasing kind of stupor and admiration. And yet these
Mountains we are speaking of, to confess the truth, are
nothing but great ruines” (Sacred Theory of the Earth,
I.11). The deathliness of mountains is thus connected
to the sense of their durable impermanence, their inverse
indexing of the whole universe/creation as
gloriously passing away. The ‘total death’ flowing
down from the mountain as abandoned throne merges
with the very deathliness of life, not life’s essential
connection to death as intimate opposite, but life itself
as death or fate worse than death, as a terrible waking
dream and fall into a too-solid empty becoming, a
never-ending still birth into the black tomb of the
cosmic egg. The decaying immobile substantiality of
the mountain is the dead life of mortality itself, the
horrible lifelessness out of which life is beautifully
made by means of its own hopeless wounding. In
these terms the deathliness of the mountain is for
Ruskin providentially resolvable to the paradox of
stone as substantial mortality, compound dust: “A
harder substance had to be prepared for every mountain
chain; yet not so hard but that it might be capable
of crumbling down into earth fit to nourish the alpine
forest and the alpine flower; not so hard but that, in
the midst of the utmost majesty of its enthroned
strength, there should be seen on it the seal of death,
and the writing of the same sentence that had gone
forth against the human frame, ‘Dust thou art, and unto
dust thou shalt return.’ And with this perishable
substance the most majestic forms were to be framed
that were consistent with the safety of man; and the
peak was to be lifted, and the cliff rent, as high and as
steeply as was possible, in order yet to permit the
shepherd to feed his flocks upon the slope, and the
cottage to nestle beneath their shadow” (Of Mountain
Beauty, VII.3). But the concept of ‘total death’ in this
line clearly goes further, towards a non-dual realm
BERGMETAL
17
where life is overcome in total death, in a death so
absolutely extensive and intensive that it ‘is’ its own
kind of superessential life-flow. The line ought thus to
be read as a dark mystical inversion of Ruskin’s vision
of mountain as life source: “And thus those desolate
and threatening ranges of dark mountain, which, in
nearly all ages of the world, men have looked upon
with aversion or with terror, and shrunk back from as
if they were haunted by perpetual images of death,
are, in reality, sources of life and happiness far fuller
and more beneficent than all the bright fruitfulness of
the plain” (Of Mountain Beauty, VII.10). As a double
sense of alpine superiority is established in this statement—that
mountains are both the essential source of
horizontal earthly life and a higher source of vertical,
spiritual life—so the flowing total death here figured
carries a double sense as both the cosmic ruination
that falls on all things from beyond and the selfannihilation
or mors mystica that alone makes life
worthy of itself and which more than bread all beings
willy-nilly, consciously or unconsciously, need. In the
context of the Darkthrone lyric, the primal terror of
radical oblivion shadowed in the mountain, the terror
which at time’s end weak humanity at last calls on for
comfort and safety—“Then the kings of the earth and
the great men and the generals and the rich and the
strong, and every one, slave and free, hid in the caves
and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the
mountains and the rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from
the face of him who is seated on the throne’” (Revelation
6:16)—is, far from something to be fled, in reality
something infinitely brighter, a hidden flame that
earthly man will never understand: “Fire I greet Thee /
Give life to shadows grim / So that they may writhe
where you dwelt / In life, now dead within”
(Darkthrone, “Black Victory”). Such is the terrible
crystal fire man finds reflected in looking into stone:
II. NO WAY
18
“This almost menacing perfection—for it rests on the
absence of life, the visible stillness of death” (Roger
Caillois, The Writing of Stones).
CRYPTIC RULER OF ALL YOUR LIVES: The pun on ‘cryptic’
must be taken seriously as a reflection upon the obscurity
of the individual evolutionary-transmigratory
path which is governed by the tomb as fit terminus
and goal of each event of life. Death is a coffin cut to
measure. A life dies (except in instances of improper
or non-illumined self-murder) when its life is finitely
complete, when it reaches the crypt, a terminus
which, far from being a truncation or mere perishing,
is the very fulfillment of a position on the arch-vault
of the transitory cosmic tomb (crypta, ‘vault, cavern’,
from PIE *krau ‘to conceal, hide’). Death hiddenly
governs all life within the non-Euclidean cosmic curvature
by means of cryptic points of perfectly
individuated death, driving all things onward to the
absolute freedom of ultimate dissolution. To the one
who knows and feels this, crypt is not enclosure but a
locale of airy or astral homeward flight: “Tunnels of
death are invisible wings / Mystique moons are floating
tombs / Black cosmic sea, I sing to thee / Open the
path, oh! Majesty / Infinite universe as /silent as
death/ In this coffin I lay to rest / Astral bodies guide
me to the throne / Now I have joined the cosmic
crypts” (Inquisition, “Astral Path to Supreme Majesties,”
Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical
Macrocosm). Death’s cryptic rulership is the life-storm
of cosmic holocaust, found by those who, feeling its
windy touch, are made to float upon and above the
cold mountain flow: “My hair blows in the winds of
reap / Still I float with the cold diabolical massacre
winds / On the bestial wings of evil / Above the
mountainside / And into cryptic winterstorms” (Immortal,
“Cryptic Winterstorms,” Diabolical Fullmoon
BERGMETAL
19
Mysticism). Mountain and metalhead here reveal their
mutual lithic resonance and shared lingamic significance,
the flesh-made-mountain conceived by one
black hworde as “Sarcophallic Metal Of Mystic Ancient
Desolation” (Sarcophallus, “Mahapralaya”).
WASTES . . . FOREVERMORE: “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. There 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” (MB, Discourses). The inhumanity
of the mystical mountain is inescapable: “I
saw a great mountain the color of iron, and enthroned
on it One of such great glory that it blinded my sight.
On each side of him there extended a soft shadow, like
a wing of wondrous breadth and length. Before him, at
the foot of the mountain, stood an image full of eyes
on all sides, in which, because of those eyes, I could
discern no human form” (Hildegard of Bingen, Scivi-
as).
20
III. SLUMBER KILLED
Sleep, “Holy Mountain,” Sleep’s Holy Mountain (Earache, 1993)
⧍
Eyes wide shut to old Earth’s sacred conspiracy,
The doomed masses stray like ants around the map.
Probing the mountain-planet without true theory,
Losing free will to ascend and falling into trap.
Sleep wants to wake life, plunge lonesome entity back
Into the superessence of its infinite sea.
Alpine monolith emits, droning primal lack
Of first silence, calling with quantum OM: there is no we.
BERGMETAL
21
EYES WIDE SHUT: The phrase denotes the unconscious
sleep of waking experience, a sleep that does not
know it is sleeping because it thinks that it is awake:
“know that your present state of consciousness which
you call being awake, when compared to the Real
Awake State, is nothing but a dream state. Your life is
a dream within the mighty Dream of God which is the
Universe” (Everything and the Nothing). Spiritual
sleep is the auto-hypnosis of self-centered being: “As
desires aim at self-satisfaction, the whole consciousness
becomes self-centred and individualised. The
individualisation of consciousness may in a sense be
said to be the effect of the vortex of desires. The soul
gets enmeshed in the desires and cannot step out of
the circumscribed individuality constituted by these
desires. It imagines these barriers and becomes selfhypnotised
(MB, Discourses). ‘Eyes wide shut’ also
applies to the socio-political sleep of the masses, as
signaled in the title of Stanley Kubrick’s secret-society
film Eyes Wide Shut (1999). There the phrase alludes
both to the internal principle of cultic secrecy, which
operates by enforcing conscious blindness to its own
misdoings, and to the opiated slumber of hoodwinked
masses. As Ziegler tells Harford in the film, “If I told
you their names, I don't think you'd sleep so well.”
These two levels of waking sleep are not separate.
Each operates through the other. The tyrant is one’s
own inner usurping self-possession, your routine hostile
take-over by forces that do not have your best
interests in mind because you do not care for you own
real self: “You care only for what happens to your
sleepwalking personality, as when you force a smile to
try to appear pleasant before others. It is this slumbering
self that makes you feel so bad. See the tragedy of
abandoning your own life. Start true self-caring by not
caring for your dangerous sleep-walking self that cares
nothing for you” (VH). So society at large is ruled by
III. SLUMBER KILLED
22
its own soporific mixture of material convenience and
misuse of available means of spiritual liberation: “But
look at the unfathomable spinelessness
of man: all the means he’s been given to stay alter he
uses, in the end, to ornament his sleep. We wear a hair
shirt the way we would wear a monocle, we chant
matins the way other people play golf. Ah, if only today’s
scientists, instead of endlessly inventing new
ways to make life easier, would put their ingenuity
into fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor!
There are plenty of machine guns, but . . .” (René
Daumal, Mount Analogue). The opening of Sleep’s
“Holy Mountain” slices through the death of sleep
with the double-edged phrase “Slumber killed,”
which at once heralds the murder of slumber via spiritual
awakening and expresses the paradox of spiritual
awakening as itself a mode of slumber, a higher falling
asleep in which one falls asleep to the dreamy selfworld
correlation and the sleep of false consciousness
is finally put to sleep by the universal (s)word.
OLD EARTH’S SACRED CONSPIRACY: The secret sacredness
of Earth here evoked concerns its being the
hidden, spiritual center of the universe. Earth is not
only one of many evolving planets in the cosmos, but
the planet where one is initiated into the inward involutionary
path of existential adventure, where the
“Dreamer wakens to spectral gaze of light rays shining”
and is up-beamed by the anagogic “Sunbound
spacepod rising faster” (Sleep, “Holy Mountain”).
“Thus 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-realisation. Earth
is the centre of this infinite Gross sphere of millions of
BERGMETAL
23
universes, inasmuch as it is the point to which all
human-conscious souls must migrate in order to begin
the involutionary Path” (MB, Everything and the Nothing).
This is Earth’s secret, the individual evolutionary
meaning of the ‘journey to the center of the Earth’, a
secret sensed by many but known only to those who
tear the veil of thrownness and perceive the absolute
individual Force which brings you here in the first
place: “If one can allow one’s mind to dwell on a bold
hypothesis—which could also be an act of faith in a
higher sense—once the idea of Geworfenheit [thrownness]
is rejected, once it is conceived that living here
and now in this world has a sense, because it is always
the effect of a choice and a will, one might even
believe that one’s own realization of the possibilities I
have indicated—far more concealed and less imaginable
in other situations that might be more desirable
from the merely human point of view, from the point
of view of the ‘person’—is the ultimate rationale and
significance of a choice made by a ‘being’ that wanted
to measure itself against a difficult challenge: that of
living in a world contrary to that consistent with nature,
that is, contrary to the world of Tradition” (Julius
Evola, Ride the Tiger).
THE DOOMED MASSES: The pun reinforces the apocalyptic
vibe of doom metal in light of its cosmist
trajectory: “Rocket engines burning fuel so fast / Up
into the night sky they blast / Through the universe
the engines whine / Could it be the end of man and
time? / Back on earth the flame of life burns low/ Everywhere
is misery and woe / Pollution kills the air, the
land, the sea / Man prepares to meet his destiny /
Rocket engines burning fuel so fast / Up into the black
sky so vast / Burning metal through the atmosphere /
Earth remains in worry, hate and fear / With the hateful
battles raging on / Rockets flying to the glowing
III. SLUMBER KILLED
24
sun / Through the empires of eternal void / Freedom
from the final suicide” (Black Sabbath, “Into the
Void,” Master of Reality).
PROBING THE MOUNTAIN-PLANET WITHOUT TRUE THEORY:
The theory in question here is the intellectual vision
of Earth as mountain, as a vertically scalable site upon
which one may ascend to ultra-mundane heights or
sink to infernal depths. Metaphysically, Earth as
mountain is proportional to the traditional concept of
spatio-temporal existence as a way or bridge or middle
(middan-geard, ‘middle-earth’) between non-Being
and Being (or between being and its beyond), hell and
heaven, such that existence on Earth is by definition
not a dwelling but a task of passing through, as per
Dante’s vision, which passes through the Earth,
ascends a mountain, and is beamed up to God. To lack
the theory of Earth as such a site of passage, to mistake
your being here for home, is dumbly to not get, to
simply be stupid toward the traditional warning born
from millennia of experience, “surely it is the height
of folly for you to linger on this bridge” (Hakim Sinai,
The Walled Garden of Truth), i.e. to think that
paradise (lit. walled garden, from Old Persian pairi
‘around’ and daeza or diz ‘wall, brick, or shape’) is
somehow not a walled garden, that you do not have to
climb to get to it. So the traditional concept of the
mountain is essentially paradisical, as repeated in
Dante’s Edenic summit, the medieval Prester John
myth—“And a three journeys long from that sea be
great mountains, out of the which goeth out a great
flood that cometh out of Paradise” (Mandeville’s
Travels)—and the modern idea of ‘Shangri-La’.
Paradise—“today you will be with me in paradise”
(23:43)—is precisely not something anyone ever has
coming to them, but a mystical or hidden now reached
only by self-crucifying ascent in the present of today—
BERGMETAL
25
a fundamental concept repeated in modern climbers’
use of the word crux to denote the hardest technical
moment of a climb, the movement one typically, with
paradoxical clarity and confusion, knows precisely
how and not how one did it. Mountain is the
foundation and site of paradise, the originary wall of
the perfect world: “the Sanskrit word paradesha
means ‘elevated site,’ or ‘high region,’ and therefore,
in a specific material sense, mountain peak. But
paradesha may be etymologically associated with the
Chaldean word pardes; hence the term paradise,
which has been turned into a dogmatic theological
concept by the later Judeo-Christian faith. In the
primordial Aryan idea of paradise, we find an intimate
association with the concept of heights, of mountain
peaks; this association . . . is formulated in a clear
manner in the Doric-Achaean notion of Olympus”
(Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks). In light of
this imperative to recognize Earth as mountain—a
topos-event which perforce includes your being on
it—the cover image of Sleep’s Holy Mountain takes on
special meaning vis-à-vis its psychedelic echoing of
the iconic ‘blue marble’ image of Earth, an image
which, perverting the first (now passé new-age)
intuition and reception of the image as index of the
immediate universal unicity of life and being, now
governs the governing global-progressive idea of earth
as preciously fragile ground of eco-gravitational
nostalgia (cf. the 2013 film Gravity). There is nothing
essentially novel, representationally, about the bluemarble
image, insofar as earth has been poetically and
scientifically imaged for centuries from above. What is
novel about it is its technic fact, that it is a photograph
and thus a record of ultra-mundane physical human
presence and an instance of the techno-materialistRomantic
‘heroism of vision’ in line with the highaltitude
summit photography of the 1860s (e.g. Charles
III. SLUMBER KILLED
26
Soulier’s “Sommet du mont Blanc”). In and among the
many senses floating on its surface, the perilous
seduction of the blue-marble image lies both in its
ideological/rhetorical displacement of the tradition of
representation to which it belongs and the coincident
alienation of human vision from the immanent power
of the imagination. Paradoxically, the image shows the
ultra-mundane gaze as inaccessible to individual
consciousness, as instead only generically available to
a techno-scientific human we, a we of cosmo-eccentric
as opposed to cosmo-centric subjects. Saying in effect
that we occupy the summit and you do not, the image
reinforces the separation of summit and center so
centerlessly central to the modern world and flattens
further the imperative for individual ascent into the
curvatures of earthly concern and anxious
anthropocentric responsibility, as indexed by the
contemporary eco-ideologization of climbing sport as
form of earthly care or stewardship—as if the human
will for ascent and psycho-physical self-overcoming
were in need of socio-political justification! Replacing
Earth-as-mountain with Earth-as-globe, the blue
marble icon forgets the telic alpine unity of activity
and contemplation: “because of the correspondence of
‘center’ with ‘summit,’ there is an analogous
interpretation of mountain climbing; the radiating
powers of the soul are so many paths converging to
the mountain top (ad eminentiam mentis, in the
words of St. Bonaventura, who likewise assimilates
mons to mens), by which paths the Comprehensor can
reach their source . . . climbing the ‘slope’ (ucchrayam
. . .) that corresponds to the Platonic and Hermetic
anodos. Of all the ways that lead to the summit of the
mountain, those of the active life are on its outwards
slopes, and that of the contemplative is an inward and
vertical ascent, while the point at which they meet is
one and the same” (A. K. Coomaraswamy,
BERGMETAL
27
“Traditional Psychology,” Metaphysics). More
specifically, the blue marble image absolutizes what,
in the pre-modern world, is only one brief moment on
the path to and beyond the stars, the moment when
the soul (as in the Somnium Scipions and the passage
through the sphere of the fixed stars in Dante’s
Paradiso), in the midst of transcending earthly
existence, looks back towards it and superiorly laughs
or smiles at its littleness and insignificance vis-à-vis
the greater universal Reality. Symbolically and
metaphysically, the significance of Earth-as-mountain
is that the planet is but the lower slope of a universal
cosmic mountain of which the Earth-sphere, in this
moment seen as a kind of nested or fractal mountain,
an orogenic mass that is itself a single mountain each
point of which is summit, is but a beautiful gross
image.
III. SLUMBER KILLED
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BERGMETAL
29
As if countering this erasure of the alpine from our
iconic global ‘selfie’, the cover of Sleep’s Holy Mountain
reprojects the blue-marble gaze back towards its
pre-modern framing, as seen in the above examples of
Athanasius Kircher’s drawing of the interior of the
Earth and the frontispiece to Thomas Burnet’s The
Sacred Theory of the Earth which, diagrammatically
harmonizing the theory of geologic history within a
Christianized Neoplatonic schema of creation as a sacred
seven-fold procession of emanation and return,
places the present form of the planet as one stage of
the cosmically descending and ascending Earth, that
which, being literally antipodal to the Creator, marks
the conversional space of turning return to God, or,
earth as cosmic center of initiation into the involutionary
journey to divine Selfhood. For Burnet,
mountains were the key to understanding the spiritual-hierarchic
meaning of Earth. As mis-creations of the
Deluge defining a phase between the destruction of
the planet by water and its future refashioning by fire,
mountains here mark the present historical Earth-age
as both at the furthest remove from the divine origin
and centripetally bound to return to it. Sleep’s psychedelic
refiguring of planet Earth as a Holy Mountain
named Sleep reinvents this order of telluric sacred
theory. The planetary form on the cover stylistically
evokes both a comic literalization of Earth as a blueorange
marble—a literalization with its own paradisical
mystic meaning as per Julian of Norwich’s homely
vision of all creation as a little thing “the size of a hazelnut”
and Dante’s vision of earth as aiuola (small
area of ground, flowerbed)—and our Earth as nadirintermezzo,
a blue-orange aqua-magmic mess always
somewhere between flood and fire, a geo-liquid blob
caught in the circus of the angelic and demonic forces
represented in the upper-left and lower-right quadrants,
respectively. Indeed the seven leaves emanating
III. SLUMBER KILLED
30
from earth may be correlated to Burnet’s seven spheres
with the 8th
eternal stage now taking the lower position
of the solar form at bottom-center. Sleep’s globe
may thus be seen as a single 7-in-1 image of the whole
sacred process of Earth-as-mountain, a hierarchical
place of spiritual descent and ascent. Ultimately, this
mystical Earth, uncannily coincident with the material
planet we now happen to inhabit, is the inner abyss
which is crossed in sleep itself, namely, “that invisibile
mystical earth and dark intelligible abyss”
[mystica illa terra invisibilis ipsaque tenebrosa abyssus
intellectualis], i.e. the domain of the primordial
causes of all visible things which “perceived by no
intellect except that which formed it in the beginning”
(Eriugena, Periphyseon). But this creative intellect is
nothing but one’s own absolute self. WHY DO YOU
NOW HESITATE TO STOP THINKING—WHY DO
YOU INSIST—THAT THERE IS SOMETHING OTHER
THAN YOU WHO CREATED THE UNIVERSE? The
invisible mystical earth and dark intelligible abyss is
what you cross all the time, what you fall asleep and
wake up through every day and night, that by which
everyone, unknowingly playing God way more than
they know, create, preserve, and destroy the whole
world: “when man wakes up every day, then what is it
that unfailingly creates for him his universe and all
the things that are of it and in it? . . . God in the man
state as man, consistently asserts Himself as the Creator
of His own Creation through the dormant
impressions of man; as the Preserver of His own Creation
through man’s leading the everyday life in the
awake state, procreating the impressions of creation;
and as the Destroyer of His own Creation through the
opposite impressions of man when he falls asleep and
ultimately passes away in the sound sleep state. Every
day, finally destroying the very creation as individualized
by his consciousness, man once again creates,
BERGMETAL
31
preserves and destroys the whole creation through the
play of impressions. Even through the very being of
everything and of every creature, God consistently asserts
His infinite triune attributes as the Creator, the
Preserver and the Destroyer (MB, God Speaks).
SLEEP WANTS TO WAKE LIFE: Sleep expresses need to
fall asleep to waking life and wake up into God:
“There is a profound and very real relationship between
God-realization and sound sleep. The eternal
desire of the soul is to become one with God, but because
consciousness attaches itself to the gross, the
soul seems to become one merely with the gross. In
the stone state, for instance, gross consciousness
makes the soul identify itself with the stone although,
in reality, the soul is all the time one with God. To
make this clearer, let us suppose that you take opium
or an intoxicating drink. You feel elated or depressed,
although there is no radical change in your body, and
it is only the consciousness that is affected and gives
rise to your feelings. Thus you, as an individual soul,
are twenty-four hours within and one-with God, although
you feel merely gross-conscious. Again, let us
suppose that you feel tired and fed up and that you go
to sleep. What is it that you are trying to do? It is nothing
but to try to take refuge in God—your natural and
inherent state. The whole Creation therefore has this
conscious or unconscious tendency to take shelter in
God the Over-Soul by entering the state of sound sleep
for a time” (MB, God Speaks). Sleep is unconscious
God-realization: “Every time you go to sleep you are
unconsciously united with the Infinite Reality. This
unification involves the extension of unconsciousness
over consciousness. It thus bridges over the chasm
between the unconscious and the conscious. But being
unconscious of this union, you do not consciously
derive any benefit from it. This is the reason why,
III. SLUMBER KILLED
32
when you wake up again from deep sleep, you become
aware of the self-same hum-drum individual, and you
begin to act and experience exactly as you acted and
experienced before going to sleep. If your union with
the Supreme Reality had been a conscious union, you
would have awakened into a completely new and infinitely
rich life” (MB, Discourses). God-realization is
perfect sleep, as intimated in the quietist asceticism of
the Hesychasts of the Mt. Athos (see Eugene T. Cosmas,
“Falling Asleep on the Holy Mountain”): “When
the individual mind is dissolved, the whole universe
which is relative to the mind vanishes into nothingness,
and consciousness is no longer tied to anything.
Consciousness is now unlimited and unclouded by
anything and serves the purpose of illumining the
state of the Infinite Reality. While immersed in the
bliss of realisation the soul is completely oblivious of
sights or sounds or objects in the universe. In this respect
it is like sound sleep, but there are many
important points of difference which distinguish Godrealisation
from sound sleep. During sleep the illusion
of the universe vanishes, since all consciousness is in
abeyance, but there is no conscious experience of God,
since this requires the complete dissolution of the ego
and the turning of full consciousness towards the Ultimate
Reality. Occasionally, when the continuity of
deep sleep is interrupted by brief intervals, the soul
may have the experience of retaining consciousness
without being conscious of anything in particular.
There is consciousness; but this consciousness is not
of the universe. It is consciousness of nothing. Such
experiences anticipate God-realisation in which consciousness
is completely freed from the illusion of the
universe and manifests the infinite knowledge which
was hitherto hidden by the ego” (MB, Discourses).
Sleeping man and sleeping God are literally the same:
“This sound sleep state of man is literally the same
BERGMETAL
33
original divine sound sleep state of God. God in the
God-Is state is eternally in the original divine sound
sleep state, whereas God in the human state daily experiences
alternately the sound sleep state and the
awake state” (MB, God Speaks). “I sleep, but my heart
is awake” (Song of Songs 5:2).
ALPINE MONOLITH EMITS, DRONING PRIMAL LACK / OF
FIRST SILENCE, CALLING WITH QUANTUM OM: Like a
thundering vibrating facture of the original word
(OM), doom-drone metal (⦶M) takes place within the
massing and amounting of deep geo-cosmic sound into
primal negative silences that point back to the
infinitely deafening orders of Silence which simply
and superessentially ARE before the beginning and
after the end of all things, earlier than the original
noise of the ‘big bang’ and older than the perfect quiet
after the cosmic death. Doom and drone are connected
as mountain and earth, being more or less sculpted,
more or less prominent forms of the same stony sonic
substance. ⦶M is sonic mapping of the universal
mountain of silence. See Owen Coggins, “Mountains
of Silence: Drone Metal Recordings as Mystical Texts.”
The geo-cosmic sonicity of ⦶M—as named in the constellation
of Sleep, Earth, Sunn O))), Om, and (early)
High on Fire—occurs at the triune mystical thresholds
of abyss-earth-heavens and human-sound-mountain. It
is the heavy musical shore, the grave sonic field of
Mount Analogue: “For a mountain to play the role of
Mount Analogue . . . its summit must be inaccessible,
but its base accessible to human beings as nature has
made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically.
The gateway to the invisible must be
visible” (René Daumal, Mount Analogue). ⦶M partakes
apocalyptically-pacifically in the il-y-a or thereis
order of sound calling towards restoration of world
to ancient-futuristic primalness: “Earth drenched in
III. SLUMBER KILLED
34
black under starless sky above / Man on the mountain
sets free the holy dove” (Sleep, “Holy Mountain”).
⦶M’s mountain of silence is a mystical holy mountain
whose western archaeology moves back into Christian
monasticism and desert/wilderness spirituality refracted
through modern post-Romantic nature
mysticism’s literalizations and cultural artifactualizations
(hippe/sci-fi/fantasy) or stoning of the ancient
principles, which is why the monolith, as hyperartifactual
man-made mountain, is ⦶M’s de facto emblem.
⦶M aims to be at once inhuman discourse and
natural text, the sound of the words written by no one
on the mountain of silence: “. . . a place, Mount Carmel,
a physical and mythical presence to which the
entire Western and Eastern monastic tradition was
related since its origin, a fortiori the Carmelites born
on its slopes in the thirteenth century; and also a long
line of Jewish contemplatives. Earlier, in the ninth
century B.C., that mountain received Elijah into its
silence, or protected him after he had cut the throats
of the enemies of Yahweh with his sword, and then it
drew him out of his cave ‘by the noise of a light
breeze.’ In the Vulgate, a ‘whistling’ of the breeze
[‘sibilus’] is the song of the mountain by which the
Voice speaks to the wild prophet. In the sixteenth century,
the same sound again seized the host who had
withdrawn into the (Teresian) ‘castle’ (that mountain
of crystal) a ‘whistling’ [silbo] so soft that one could
scarcely hear it’ and yet so ‘penetrating’ that ‘the soul
cannot not hear it.’ It was the spirit of the place. John
of the Cross also unfurled upon Mount Carmel the ‘ascent’
of his discourse and he has drawn the map of
this Dantean heaven in the form of a fantastic body,
the lungs of which chant (like biblical verses) ‘neither
this nor that’ [‘ni eso, ni eso, ni estro, ni estro’], a body
divided by the central ravine [⦶M] in which the ‘nada’
(‘nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing’) is repeated,
BERGMETAL
35
its base covered with a vegetation of writings that become
more rarefied as they go up. The site becomes
the mute hero of the story. The foundation of mystic
science is indeed that mountain of silence” (Michel de
Certeau, The Mystic Fable). Cf. “The Great Silence is
something outside of yet including all nature sounds,
which all nature feels and vainly strives to understand
and express. On the high mountain tops and in the
vast stretches of desert and plain, one seems to touch
something that is more than silence; for silence, dead
and ominous, broods over the ‘bad lands’ and brings
no inspiration. But in the mountains one seems to feel
the brooding of the creative Breath of Divinity, and in
awe asks, Is this the Temple of Silence, and can we
enter it? The mountains rear their heads in mighty
grandeur or in fantastic ridges, as if bathing themselves
in the mystic Silence, yet are dumb before that
awful calm which seems like a living presence embracing
all” (The Temple of Silence). The cosmically
ancient silence is the (un)earthly mountain out of
which ⦶M, in deadening stupefaction and assassinating
wonder (assassin, from Arabic hashishiyyin
‘hashish-users,’ a fanatical Ismaili Muslim sect of the
time of the Crusades, under leadership of the ‘Old
Man of the Mountains’), cuts its heavy stone, quarrying
a sound that carries life towards new forms of
living petrifaction or conscious sleep loud enough to
‘wake the stones’ in cosmic dawn: “Look onto the rays
of the new stoner sun rising / Sonic Titan rides out on
clouds of new horizon” (Sleep, “Holy Mountain”).
This new horizontal sun is simply the psychic quantum
alba in which the universal dimensions of
sphericity are unveiled, the bright dawning of the light
globes: “Suppose: A (Infinite) has its opposite term E
(Finite); B (Light) has its opposite term F (Shadow); C
(Yes) has its opposite term G (No); D (One) has its opposite
term H (Innumerable). Now taking B x D = One
III. SLUMBER KILLED
36
Light, we get F x H = innumerable shadows. As the
opposites are always the outcome of the originals, it is
clear as daylight that innumerable shadows are the
outcome of One Light = God. The shadows are innumerable,
countless, and numberless. Let us first
consider the light-globes with millions of light-points
in each. The light-globes are innumerable and their
existence is not a matter for idle speculation. Some of
them are actually seen by one who, entering upon
Path, reaches the first cosmic plane. What scientists
with their powerful telescopes worth thousands of
dollars are unable to see, the spiritual aspirant, though
advanced as far as only the first plane beholds with
his spiritual sight, without the help of any earthly instrument”
(MB, Meher Message). For “the stone is
God, but it does not know it, and it is the not knowing
that makes it stone” (Meister Eckhart). The evident
corollary to this is that stoners are humans who, stirring
with unsilenceable sense that their life is also
lithically asleep, neither want to wake up nor not
wake up, and so losing themselves in a strange assassination
of the difference between the two senses of
“slumber killed,” feel preferably more or less alive
being stoned: “Can't find a key to the sleepy silver
door / I'm washed up on the shore of reality” (Dead
Meadow, “Sleepy Silver Door,” Deadmeadow). As the
first evolutionary leap of consciousness is from stone
to metal (the others being: metal to vegetable, vegetable
to worm, worm to fish, fish to bird, bird to animal,
animal to human being), a passage between the two
kingdoms in which “life and energy are dormant”
(MB), so is ⦶M a regressive, metal-to-stone movement
of heavy metal that sonically drowns consciousness
toward origin, because stone is “the shore of dreaming”
[l’orée du songe] (Roger Caillois).
37
IV. OCCULT ROCK
Aluk Todolo, “Occult Rock VIII,” Occult Rock (Ajna Offensive,
2012).
⧍
Shrouding ancient ways in obscenely solid mists,
Our primitive lie overflies both poles. No gold
Is found in these wastes, nor truth among growing lists
Of things left, ruins of vertical days of old.
Fight centrifugal forces with cold inversion!
Love in nigredo, the blackening of all ways!
Live the perverse transcendence of all perversion!
Remembering everything’s nothingness today.
IV. OCCULT ROCK
38
SHROUDING ANCIENT WAYS: The band takes its name
from Aluk To Dolo (‘Ways of the Ancestors’), the megalithic
and animist religion of the Toraja (lit. ‘people
of the highlands’), an indigenous ethnic group from
the mountainous region of South Sulawesi, Indonesia,
which is a geologically complex subequatorial region
defined by “the convergence between three lithospheric
plates: the northward-moving Australian plate, the
westward-moving Pacific plate, and the southsoutheast-moving
Eurasia plate” (The Geology of Indonesia).
One expects the cover image to be of a
mountain from this region, but its identity is not readily
recognizable, accentuating the ‘occult rock’ concept.
The peak appears to be part of a volcano, like the
strange formations found upon Ol Doinyo Lengai,
“Mountain of God,” in Tanzania, which is also just
south of the equator. The conjunction of vapor and
rock, in which the elements of earth and water mingle
in the air through fiery reformation, is analogous to
the mythical origins of Toraja rulers in the union of
sky men and water women: “In Tana Toraja, the idea
of the to manurun, mythical beings who descended
from the heavens on mountain tops and became local
rulers, may have been borrowed from the Bugis . . .
Toraja to manurun are always paired with an equally
supernatural spouse, a woman who rose out of a river
pool” (Roxana Waterson, “The Contested Landscapes
of Myth and History in Tana Toraja”). Proportionally,
Toraja entomb their dead at height, returning them to
stony vertical dimensions in rituals involving the
slaughter of river buffalo. Investing in this mythic imaginary
in an intentionally obscure occult-primitivist
way, Aluk Todolo found their music in the form an
infective psychoactive force capable of elemental reconfigurations
along the continuum of energy
(vibration) and matter: “Consisting of eight hypnotic
tracks of timeless and unclassifiable instrumental mu-
BERGMETAL
39
sic, this quintessential double album summarizes and
transcends all preceding aspects of the band's discography
and offers new insight into the fundamental
principles and formulas of Aluk Todolo, permeating
through other forms and resulting in an ultimate entheogenic
ceremony. The production takes the side of
fidelity in the transcription of the power trio's live energy
and osmosis, revealing the individuality and
roughness of each instrument, and emphasizing the
inter-penetration of all the components of an organic
and tetanizing trance ritual. This opus recounts the
alchemical transformation of the primordial vibration
into matter, through all its elemental phases, leading
to the sonic manifestation of the forces of the universe
into the octagonal prism of Occult Rock” (Norma
Evangelium Diaboli). Far from expressing either fidelity
or ethnographic interest in Aluk To Dolo, Aluk
Todolo, as per the upside down lettering of the cover,
represent a profanation and inversion of the ‘Ways of
the Ancestors,’ yet one whose embrace of non-clarity
and overt imprecision, contrary to classic Black Metal’s
satanic inversions of traditional Christianity, does
IV. OCCULT ROCK
40
not blacken but rather blurs tradition into new greys.
Paradoxically, Aluk Todolo attempt a truly messed-up
neo-primitivist stoner metal that claims forward stoneto-metal
evolutionary and visionary unveiling of “the
forces of the universe” in dark mi(d)st of rock. The
obviously late European impulse is towards a primitivization
of metal that alchemically purifies—not
objectively but in the psycho-visionary space of its
own confusion—metal’s becoming from rock of genealogical
binding to African-American tradition. If the
cover image does indeed show an African rather than
an Indonesian volcano, this would further demonstrate
this impulse. Aluk Todolo stand for, or state
themselves as, a total blurry or self-shrouding immanentization
of ancient ways that can only be followed
by not following them. Thus, asked to comment on an
accusation of abusing Aluk To Dolo tradition, the
drummer responds, “I don't remember that one, but I
agree, ‘abusing the tradition’, that's exactly what we
do” (“Channeling the Internal Divine,” Avantgarde
Metal). Whereas the Toraja triennially venerate and
care for ancestors by redressing and processing their
corpses in vertical living posture, Aluk Todolo subject
ancestrality itself to ritual abuse, transposing the cold
Black Metal of the Occidental-Hyperborean alp into
the steamy equatorial volcano of Occult Rock. Occult
Rock is a mountain of metal prediscursivity, the site of
a musical mass wherein a metalhead stays without
affirming any fidelity 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 with Aluk Todolo? AH: Not really
no, and we don’t care. If someone thinks that well
I think the album shall clear up everything. And I see
no difference between a hippie and a Black Metal
head by the way. They both have long hair and drink
BERGMETAL
41
booze and smoke pot the same way” (Cooking with
Satan). Note how this answer is at once, indifferentially,
both very true and totally stupid, a mist that clears
up everything. Such is the playful logic of profanation,
which both neutralizes what it profanes and returns it
to free practice, “open[ing] the possibility of a special
form of negligence, which ignores separation [of men
and gods] or, rather puts it to a particular use” (Giorgio
Agamben, Profanations). As the mountain stands
inviolable within the mists that occlude it, so the integrity
and truth of the ancient ways, their still, polar
center, is not only something that survives all inversions
and transposition, but something that freely
permits and authorizes its own significant (ab)use,
giving to coming generations their task: “the profanation
of the unprofanable.”
OBSCENELY SOLID MISTS: The ways of the ancients are
today veiled in vapors so thick as to seem solid, tangible,
material. Everywhere the wisdom of the ages is
subject to gross interpretation, to forms and kinds of
understanding that are fat, overgrown, full of themselves.
The simplicity of truth is denied in favor of
convoluted twists and knotting of its subtle golden
thread, convolutions that temporarily provide illusory
sensations of being in contact with truth’s solidity,
transporting self-images of being up on the mountain.
Mist and mountain, the impermanent and permanent,
are hermeneutically confused in the vulcanism of intellectual
activity, in thought that thinks itself as
already within the mountain, or as the mountain itself,
but which actually stays comfortably far way, thinking
about the mountain but not upon it, gesturing towards
it but not according to it, forgetting of the spiritual
necessity of entering the image: “If the Spectator could
Enter into these Images in his Imagination approaching
them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative
IV. OCCULT ROCK
42
Thought if he could Enter into Noahs Rainbow or into
his bosom or could make a Friend & Companion of
one of these Images of wonder which always intreats
him to leave mortal things as he must know then he
would arise from his Grave then would he meet the
Lord in the Air & then he would be happy. General
Knowledge is Remote Knowledge it is in Particulars
that Wisdom consists & Happiness too” (William
Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment). Cf. “I would not
speak of the mountain but through the mountain”
(René Daumal, Mount Analogue). Appropriately, the
etymology of obscene is itself notoriously unclear,
misty, so that the verbal concept harmonizes with the
very quality of obscenity as a phenomenon wherein a
noxious fume of self-righteous thought, in the general
sense of any thought that is blind to the fundamental
distinction between truth itself and the thinking of it,
grounds its illusion of truth and rectitude by means of
fixation upon an external object, an object which is
thus rendered grossly material by the fixing itself. In
this sense the originary scene of obscenity is seeing
and judging another’s sin: “For the contemplation of
other men’s sins makes as it were a thick mist before
the soul’s eye” (Julian of Norwich, Showings).
OUR PRIMITIVE LIE OVERFLIES BOTH POLES: Global aerial
flight over the poles signifies departure from the cosmo-planetary
hierarchy and disregard for the polar
principle of metaphysical stability, as figured in the
world-mountain of Meru/Sumeru, the Sufi concept of
the perfect human or Man-God as Qutub (axis, pivot),
and the Vedic formulation of regal being: “Remain
steady and unwavering . . . Do not give in. Be strong
like a mountain. Stay still like the sky and the earth
and retain control of power at all times. The sky, the
earth and the mountains are unmoved as unmoved is
the world of living beings and this king of men” (Rg
BERGMETAL
43
Veda 10.173, cited from Julius Evola, “Polar Symbolism,”
Revolt Against the Modern World). ‘Our primiprimitive
lie’ signifies both the uncivilized nature of
present civilization and the primal lie of temporal finite
identity into which human nature is supposedly
born, birthed heedless of the “Truth [which] consists
in the knowledge that man, instead of being a limited,
separate individual, completely bound by the illusion
of time and space and substance, is eternal in his nature
and infinite in his resources” (MB, Messages to
the West). The wayward flight of present civilization,
flying everywhere in endless fleeing from itself, is
fueled by this primal lie, such that socio-economic
orders are outrageously predicated on the illusion of
separate, limited identity—the gobbet which each bite
of consumerism swallows whole. The world runs, on
the left and on the right, upon this lie, such that the
imperative to convincingly perform the lie to oneself
and others—above all via fear, worry and all the familiar
sad hypocrisies of concern about the world—
appears nigh inescapable. “Due to worry, this universe
came into being. And now man is unable to realise his
own real self due to engaging his mind in worry”
(MB). Little do you know that there is absolutely nothing
to fear—“This whole universe, with all its
vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer
imagination”—that fear is not only entirely in you, but
is you, so that real strength, the very power of the invisible
cosmic poles, eternally flows to the one who
lets the dead bury the dead and leaves self behind:
“Black Metal knows that, somehow, magically, the
less of YOURSELF you put into it, the stronger it is.
The playing is FOR THE SONG. Not FOR THE SELF”
(“Show No Mercy,” Pitchfork). Such a one becomes
beyond Man and God: “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
IV. OCCULT ROCK
44
but what that man wills” (M. E.). That the lie ‘overflies’
the poles signifies a futile form of movement that
both overreaches and completely mistakes its proper
end, that both flies too high and has no idea where it
is going, the self-congratulatory movement of they
who fail to feel the terrible verticality and refuse to
open life to the absolute inner hierarchy of the acosmic
infinity. As the planet’s magnetic field lines flow
from the spherical ‘head’ of Earth like hair and beard,
so the innumerable universes flow out of the mystical
head of man: “There are innumerable universes,
which are interlaced with one another. One universe
creates another in a chain reaction. These universes
are so numerous that even Sadgurus cannot count
BERGMETAL
45
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 . . . These universes come
out of the Sadguru, and merge back into him after aeons.
This is called Mahapralaya . . . Each individual
human being is a universe unto himself . . . So first try
to get hold of the head, because out of it comes everything.
(Baba drew a man's head and hair.) The 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 off. It is
said that the universes pour out of the Godhead. They
are like God's hair. Your head may symbolise God,
and your hair the universes” (MB). See “Invisible portals
let sun’s wind blow through Earth’s hair,” Astro
Bob.
NO GOLD / IS FOUND IN THESE WASTES: ‘Wastes’ signifies
both the ruining conditions of civilization and the
vastness of destructive expenditure which misspends
the natural excess and surpluses of life along selfserving
luxurious circuits which aggravate rather than
lighten the burdens of man, that increase labor rather
than intensify joy. “Woe to those who, to the very end,
insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them
with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a
tire” (Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share). Nor are
the intellectuals exempt from this joyless wasting:
“Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in
even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended
to make glad the heart of man” (Ezra Pound,
ABC of Reading). The missing ‘gold’ signifies the misrelation
between mountain and man, unconscious and
conscious, God and the individual: “There is a mountain
of gold. Unless you excavate it, take out the gold,
use it and sell it, you cannot get money for it. You
IV. OCCULT ROCK
46
without gold are helpless, and gold without you is of
no use. You dig it out, sell it, and with it you get what
you want. So used gold is conscious – unused, unconscious.
Now the flaw is that gold is a metal and you,
however, are human. The mountain is gold (God) and
you are gold (God) – the one and the same God in all”
(MB). What makes a person settle for so little, sell
himself so short? What makes man think the metal
must be mine? Bang your head till it bleeds! Seek revelation,
not comfort. Nothing can hurt you. Become
what you are, metalhead! As Aluk Todolo is ordered
towards elemental, alchemical self-transformation, so
the inversion of the letters on the album cover reveals
the hidden source of gold: **** **D’ORO (for obvious
reasons, the meaning of the other letters must remain
undisclosed).
VERTICAL DAYS OF OLD: As displayed in the traditional
architecture of the Toraja: “The tongkonan is traditionally
seen as the navel of the universe and a
miniature cosmos . . . it is the meeting place of the
north-south and east-west axes. It faces north, to the
‘head of the sky’ . . . The tongkonan is vertically divided
into three levels: the attic where the regalia and
family heirlooms are kept; the living area; and the
space under the floor where domesticated animals are
kept. These compare with the upper world, the middle
world, and the under world” (“Tongkonan,” Wikipedia).
Such old-fashioned coordination of the ways of
life communicates and mediates spiritual access to the
invisible worlds which are vertically above the material/gross
plane which everywhere dominates modern
man’s imagination: “The worst type of materialism . . .
is not a matter of an opinion or of a ‘theory,’ but consists
in the fact that man’s experience no longer
extends to nonphysical realities. Thus, the majority of
the intellectual revolts against ‘materialistic’ views are
BERGMETAL
47
only vain reactions against the latest peripheral effects
stemming from remote and deeper causes . . . The experience
of traditional man used to reach well beyond
these limits, as in the case of some so-called primitive
people, among who we still find today a faint echo of
spiritual powers from ancient times. In traditional societies
the ‘invisible’ was an element as real, if not
more real, than the data provided by the physical
senses. Every aspect of the individual and of the social
life of the people belonging to these societies was influenced
by this experience” (Julius Evola, Revolt
Against the Modern World). Correlatively, the marked
unrest of the materialistic world, the radical inability
of modern man to sit in his cosmic hut (tongkonan,
from tongkon, to sit), demonstrates the immanence of
the invisible realms: “The condition of the world, the
strife and uncertainty that is everywhere, the general
dissatisfaction with and rebellion against any and every
situation shows that the ideal of material perfection
is an empty dream and proves the existence of an
eternal Reality beyond materiality” (MB, The Everything
and the Nothing). As the ship-like roof of the
Toraja home mirrors the horns of the buffalo which
IV. OCCULT ROCK
48
decorate it, pointing with inverted earthly curvature to
the planetary poles, so the raised horns of the metalhead
newly reaffirm the anciently vertical, metavisible,
and mountainous stature of reality.
FIGHT . . . LOVE . . . LIVE: The second stanza calls the
reader forward to a braver, spiritually war-like way of
being. Cf. “I have known many gods. He who denies
them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I
seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness
averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of
ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls
of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I
care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the
rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate,
the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation
of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and
I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers
brood over questions of reality and illusion. I
know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion,
and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I
burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content” (Conan
the Barbarian). That the lines take the imperative form
of command means that they are, in the firmness of
‘barbarian’ stance, directed primarily to the will rather
than to the intellect, for it is the will that wields understanding:
“The intellect, as the will’s mere tool, is
as different from ti as the hammer from the smith. So
long, in a conversation, as the intellect alone is active,
it remains cold. It is almost as if the person himself
where not involved . . . Only when the will comes into
play is the person actually involved: now he becomes
warm” (Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and
Presentation). So ‘cold inversion’ here signifies not
intellectualization, but the profaning transposition of
false warmth—the trans-valuation of values—around
the icy polar truth of spiritual fire, a flame which by
BERGMETAL
49
definition and necessity is cold, hostile, inhuman towards
the upside down world of illusory existence
and identity. Likewise, the perpetually worried and
self-haunted state of modern, capitalist man (business,
from Old English bisig, ‘anxious, worried, occupied’)
is ultimately a form of mass self-annoyance, a crowded
sick addiction to fraudulently self-convincing
forms of life that one’s heart is not really in: “Nothing
is more annoying than when we are disputing with a
person, giving grounds and arguments, and take all
pains to convince him, under the impression that we
are merely addressing his understanding—and then
finally discover that he is not willing to understand . . .
for grounds and proofs applied against the will are
like blows of a phantom in a concave mirror against a
solid body” (Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and
Presentation).
REMEMBERING EVERYTHING’S NOTHINGNESS TODAY: The
last line redirects memory to the present as the immanent
truth of a transcendent nihilism. “Above all else,
be content with your lot, rich or poor, happy or miserable
. . . Remember the present in the frame of the past
and the future. You eternally were and always will be”
(MB, Not We But One).
50
V. ABANDONED MINE
Omega Massif, “In Der Mine,” Geisterstadt (Radar Swarm, 2007)
⧍
The silence unearthing from this shaft is stronger
Than death and harder than the black it breathes is dark.
Man’s labor here is no matter, nothing longer
Than a low sigh, a self-erasing question mark.
Delving so deep in pit that the world becomes one,
We at last forget ourselves in a final way,
Finding in the diamond light of this black sun
That all stars are blind shadows in a timeless day.
BERGMETAL
51
THE SILENCE UNEARTHING: The stony depths of mined
mountain earth emit unearthly silences—subtle forms
of echo quietly porting voices from beyond and spatiointensive
intimate magnifications of unheard voidal
screams. “Abandoned mine shafts are metal as fuck”
(Lord Ghengis, Metal Archives). As the mountain-body
occupies space so massively and absolutely as to presence
itself in terms of cosmically durable vacuum, so
deep openings into the mountain-body inversely provide
real and imaginal airs of continual, breathless
breathing. “The breath of the unmoved . . . Mighty is
the silence in stone” (Georg Trakl, “Night Song”). Inside
itself the mountain is an ocean of stone, a
pressured expanse our very impossibility of being and
breathing in opens the mind to occult sublevels of
breath, spiritual flows that precede life and point to
eternal deathlessness, inescapably immanent principles
of being ultimately able of being anywhere. “Once
my understanding was led down into the bottom of
the sea, and there I saw green hills and valleys, with
the appearance of moss strewn with seaweed and
gravel. Then I understood in this way: that if a man or
a woman were there under the wide waters, if he
could see God, as God is continually with man, he
would be safe in soul and body, and come to no harm.
And furthermore, he would have more consolation
and strength than all this world can tell” (Julian of
Norwich, Showings). Whence the motif of the spiritually
pure air of sacral mountain caves: “Now it only
remains for me to explain one or two matters connected
with the Presence Chamber, before we return,
particularly the purity of the atmosphere in a cave in
the heart of the mountain with no apparent communication
with the outside air; and the secret of its
illumination . . . the pure air we breathe here is a gift
of nature, and is due in part, so far as I have been able
to determine, to its large body, enabling it to purify
V. ABANDONED MINE
52
itself, in a manner, the same as the outer air; and to
numerous rifts in the solid rocks, communicating with
the external world through the porous material with
which they are filled. In a word, the mountain
breathes! While the walls of this vast cavern present
the appearance of ledges of solid rock, numerous torturous
pores evidently open into them on every side
through the mountain breathes like a living thing, exhaling
air during the heat of the day, and inhaling it
during the cool night, thus taking one long breath every
twenty-four hours. That is the whole mystery of the
cool, dry, pure air you breathe here” (Thaddeus Warsaw
Williams, In Quest of Life, or, The Revelations of
the Wiyatatao of Xipantl). Closer to Omega Massif’s
cultural topos, Novalis, whose “poetic project crystallized
around a philosophy of mining” (Catherine E.
Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred), presents the miner
as bathed in primal air and light: “Der Vorwelt
heil'ge Lüfte / umwehn sein Angesicht, / und in die
Nacht der Klüfte / strahlt ihm ein ew'ges Licht”
(Bergmannslied) [The holy breath of ages past / Wafts
about his face, / And in the night of the abyss / A light
eternal shines upon him]. As silence is a positively
negative or superessential sonic state and quality inseparable
from the sense of spatial vastness and
depth—“There is nothing like silence to suggest a
sense of unlimited space” (Bachelard)—as silence is in
essence the voice of light and word of darkness just as
darkness and light are themselves unseverable from
the concept of their own extensity, so Omega Massif’s
ponderously advancing instru-metal doom, in whose
process the felt absence of human voice communicates
the relentless movement of laboring bodies, is musical
bergwerk as excavation of unearthly silence—a negative
cutting of sound from silence figured in the verbal
reordering of this well-worn term (‘unearthly silence’)
by the poem’s opening phrase, ‘silence unearthing’.
BERGMETAL
53
The term ‘unearthly silence’ is conspicuous in its pervasiveness
and seems very likely to be a currency dederived
from Romantic sensibility, something bound
up with the geologic sublimes and the modern experiential
opening of inhuman time scales. The classic
‘unearthly silence’ in this context is the expansive aerial
silence which hangs over spatially vast vistas of
wilderness, as per Cliffe’s translation of “sovrumani
silenzi, e profondissima quiete” [superhuman silences
and profoundest quiet] in Leopardi’s L’infinito: “But
as I sit and gaze, a never-ending / Space far beyond it
and unearthly silence / And deepest quiet to my
thought I picture, / And as with terror is my heart
o’ercast / With wondrous awe.” Cf. “This mountainmeasured
distance! This unearthly silence!” (George
H. Calvert, Scenes and Thoughts in Europe); “I can
only say that there is something almost unearthly in
the sight of enormous spaces of hill and plain, apparently
unsubstantial as a mountain mist, glimmering
away to the indistinct horizon, and as it were spellbound
by an absolute and eternal silence” (Leslie
Stephen, The Playground of Europe). Correlative to
such upper, liminally celestial unearthliness, there is
a gothic subterranean unearthliness which recasts the
medieval infernality of the underworld, Dante’s lower
blind world [cieco mondo] and dolorous abyss [abisso
dolorosa]. “ . . . the mephitic vapour and unearthly
stenches always found in vast subterranean hollows.
In the painful silence that pervaded the place . . .”
(James Augustus St. John, Tales of the Ramad’han). In
the paradoxically supremely literal unearthliness of
the subterranean, unearthliness signifies not supramundanity
or what is beyond world, but rather a tooproximate
other world, a world horrifically not like
this one, or too much like this one, an infernal fixing
of the world to itself (which is what hell is—being
yourself forever): “And then there was silence over
V. ABANDONED MINE
54
everything, silence so profound that it startled me, and
I got up and looked out of the window. All was dark
and silent, the black shadows thrown by the moonlight
seeming full of a silent mystery of their own. Not
a thing seemed to be stirring, but all to be grim and
fixed as death or fate” (Bram Stoker, Dracula). The
master of fusing and confusing these two modes of
unearthliness is Lovecraft: “For a second we gasped in
admiration of the scene’s unearthly cosmic beauty,
and then a vague horror began to creep into our souls”
(At the Mountains of Madness). Here we find an upper
unearthliness which is otherworldly—“this whole unearthly
continent of mountainous mystery” (Ibid.)—
and a (sub)terranean sublime which is silently and
apophatically beyond world: “there was in the air and
in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me
to the very core . . . Perhaps I should not hope to convey
in mere words the unutterable hideousness that
can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.
There was nothing in sight save a vast reach of black
slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and
the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with
a nauseating fear” (Dagon). Similarly, ‘silence unearthing’
points towards to the excavated nature of the
cosmos, to mining as gnostic revelation of the celestial
vastness as only the interior of a cave, as per Plato’s
Allegory of the Cave and Kabbalistic concept of
tzimtzum. The lesson of being ‘in der mine’ is that the
entire singular universe visible within the path of
one’s propriety, inside the immanence of the selfpossessive
mine, is a mine, a bergwerk whose shaft
penetrates to the OUTSIDE: “‘Take my advice, Elis
Froebom; be a miner.’ The old man’s words caused
him a sort of fear. ‘What?’ he cried. ‘Would you have
me leave the bright sunny sky that revives and refreshes
me, and go down into that hell-like abyss, and
dig and tunnel like a mole for metals and ores, merely
BERGMETAL
55
to gain a few wretched ducats? Oh, never!’ ‘The usual
thing,’ said the old man. ‘People despise what they
have had no chance of knowing anything about! As if
all the constant wearing, petty anxieties inseparable
from business up here on the surface, were nobler
than the miner’s work. To his skill, knowledge, and
untiring industry Nature lays bare her most secret
treasures. You speak of gain with contempt, Elis
Froebom. Well, there’s something infinitely higher in
question here, perhaps: the mole tunnels the ground
from blind instinct; but it may be, in the deepest
depths, by the pale glimmer of the mine candle, men’s
eyes get to see clearer, and at length, growing stronger
and stronger, acquire power of reading in the stones,
the gems, and the minerals, the mirroring of secrets
which are hidden above the clouds. You know nothing
about mining, Elis. Let me tell you a little . . . Elis
listened intently. The old man's strange way of speaking
of all these subterranean marvels as if he were
standing in the midst of them, impressed him deeply.
His breast felt stifled; it seemed to him as if he were
already down in these depths with the old man, and
would never more look upon the friendly light of day.
And yet it seemed as though the old man were opening
to him a new and unknown world, to which he
really properly belonged, and that he had somehow
felt all the magic of that world, in mystic forebodings,
since his boyhood. 'Elis Froebom,' said the old man at
length, 'I have laid before you all the glories of a calling
for which Nature really destined you. Think the
subject well over with yourself, and then act as your
better judgment counsels you” (E. T. Hoffman, The
Mines of Falun). In other words, all real choice, the
essential act of anyone not bent on fating themselves
to laborious self-slavery, demands desire for truly buried
treasure—“The most important requirement for the
satisfactory resolution of conflict is motive power or
V. ABANDONED MINE
56
inspiration, which can only come from a burning longing
for some comprehensive ideal. Analysis in itself
may aid choice, but choice will remain a barren and
ineffective intellectual preference unless it is vitalised
by zeal for some ideal appealing to the deepest and
most significant strata of human personality” (MB,
Discourses)—and the commitment to dive deep: “The
deeper secrets of a spiritual life are unravelled to
those who take risks and who make bold experiments
with it. They 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” (MB, Discourses). “There is
in his way of living and thinking a refined heroism
which disdains to offer itself to the veneration of the
great masses, as his coarser brother does, and tends to
go silently through the world and out of the world.
Whatever labyrinths he may stray through, among
whatever rocks his stream may make its tortuous
way—if he emerges into the open air he will travel his
road bright, light and almost soundlessly and let the
sunshine play down into his very depths” (Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human).
MAN’S LABOR HERE IS NO MATTER: This communicates
both ephemerality of human labor and its immaterial
depth, the sense in which the only thing that remains,
in the negative space of the mine, is the spirit, the
breath of the labor itself. Nostalgia for human labor,
for all the energy spent and lives lost in the depths,
has no real place here. Dwarfed in the spatiotemporally
deeper life-death of the mountain itself,
the spans of human achievement and suffering are restored
to the ZERO that they are. “If you dive deep in
the realm of thoughts and think seriously for just a few
minutes, you will realise the emptiness of desires.
BERGMETAL
57
Think of what you have enjoyed all these years and
what you have suffered. All that you have enjoyed
through life is today nil. All that you have suffered
through life is also nothing in the present. All was illusory”
(MB, Discourses). As much as the mountain
analogically indexes the absolutely durable and immovable
status of Reality, so does it, in its own
accelerated decay at the hands of puny man, point
back to the immanent abyss of its own zeroness: if the
mountain does not remain, how much more ephemeral
is this life, how much more truly zero is it in
relation to Reality: “The infinity of the Truth remains
unaffected by any changes in the universe. All that
happens in the universe is phenomenal, and as such
amounts to zero from the viewpoint of the Truth. An
earthquake, for example, is regarded as an appalling
and disastrous calamity by the worldly-minded because
of the immense destruction of life and property
which it brings. However, even a calamity like this
cannot in any way touch the infinite Truth which is at
the heart of Reality” (MB, Discourses). The mine is a
ghost town (Geisterstadt), precisely of an order one
cannot get historically sappy over, whose lesson is
always that this life and labor is no less ghost. “Then a
new idea took possession of me, and I shifted my
thoughts to a consideration of time rather than place”
(Petrarch, Ascent of Mt. Ventoux). Thus the abandoned
mine, no less than the summit whereon
Petrarch modernly reinvents via Augustine the memorial
depth of time as reverse index of the ignored
alpine inner depth—“And men go about to wonder at
the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of
the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit
of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves
they consider not” (Ascent of Mt. Ventoux,
citing Confessions by sortes)—is a mirror, a reflection
of the abyssal selfless self you have still to uncover yet
V. ABANDONED MINE
58
which is already present, right there and here as the
(in)visible khoric container and acosmic cave of all
that passes through the mind: “Great is the power of
memory, a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless
manifoldness; and this thing is the mind, and this
am I myself. What am I then, O my God? What nature
am I? A life various and manifold, and exceeding immense.
Behold in the plains, and caves, and caverns of
my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable
kinds of things, either through images, as
all bodies; or by actual presence, as the arts; or by certain
notions or impressions, as the affections of the
mind, which, even when the mind doth not feel, the
memory retaineth, while yet whatsoever is in the
memory is also in the mind- over all these do I run, I
fly; I dive on this side and on that, as far as I can, and
there is no end” (Augustine, Confessions). Abandon
mine! Abandon place! You want so badly for this to be
a place, for you to be somewhere. I am telling you it
does not exist—there is NO SUCH THING: “place exists
in the mind alone” (Eriugena, Periphyseon). Cf.
“We live in the description of a place and not in the
place itself” (Wallace Stevens). The world is not a
place: “For none of those who rightly consider and
distinguish the natures of things confuses places and
bodies in a single genus, but separates them by a rational
distinction. For bodies are included in the
category of quantity, but the category of quantity differs
widely by nature from the category of place.
Therefore body is not place since a locality is not a
quantity; for, as we said before, quantity is nothing
else but the definite measuring out of parts which are
separated either by the reason alone or by natural differentiation,
and the rational extension to definite
limits of those things which extend in the dimensions
of nature, I mean length, in breadth, and in depth;
while place is nothing else but the boundary and en-
BERGMETAL
59
closure of things which are contained within a fixed
limit. Therefore if this world is a body it necessarily
follows that is parts are bodies too. But if they are bodies;
therefore they are not place. Do you then see how
it is concluded from the foregoing arguments that this
world with its parts is not a place but is contained
within place, that is, within the fixed limit of its definition?”
(Eriugena, Periphyseon). So the romanticism
of the mine is a modern reinvention of the medieval
mysticism of place, a re-excavation of topos toward
the eternal novelty of immanent, corporeally-nested
bottomlessness, the fractally infinite hidden minerality
of all things: “For descend as low as we may, even
to the reputed regions of Tartarus and Pluto, we never
find the course of our passage any one thing absolutely
similar to another. We are always meeting
something new, something different; and every new
and different substance is only an indication of some
different change. Look at the vegetable kingdom; how
varied! how pleasing! how delightful! because of this
variety! And why so varied, but in consequence of the
variety prevailing in the mineral kingdom, which contains
its origin, root, and essence?" (Emmanuel
Swedenborg, cited from Lars Bergquist, Swedenborg's
Secret).
DELVING SO DEEP IN PIT THAT THE WORLD BECOMES ONE:
“What is outer is what is inner, raised to the level of a
secret—Perhaps also vice versa” (Novalis). Deep delving
restores the specular nature of the uni-verse, the
mysterious transposability of inner and outer, within
and without, above and below. The immanentization
of world as pit discloses the non-Euclidean montane
curvature of the ineradicably Unity: “Mind you, the
area around Mount Analogue must offer no perceptible
spatial anomaly, since beings like us must be able
to subsist there. We are dealing with a large, impene-
V. ABANDONED MINE
60
trable ring of curvature, which surrounds the land at a
certain distance with an invisible, intangible rampart—thanks
to which, in short, everything takes place
as if Mount Analogue did not exist” (René Daumal,
Mount Analogue). Cf. “Su-meru is heard to be in the
middle of the Earth, but is not seen there” (Narpatijayacharyā).
Just as mining process phenomenally
invisibilizes the alpine within its own immanent
depth, delving is the inverse movement which knows
the non-visibility of the ultimate mountain as its very
apparency: “What is properly divine is that the world
does not reveal God” (Agamben, Coming Community).
Mining mines the doubly-ecstatic subsurface ( )hole
connecting immanence and transcendence: “the very
cause of the universe . . . is also carried outside of
himself . . . He is . . . beguiled by goodness, by love,
and by yearning and 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” (Dionysius, Divine Names). In terms of consciousness,
tunneling down the mountain pit means
reversal of the projective trajectory of perception—
“The 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” (MB, Discourses)—and the reversal of time itself:
“"If . . . the Soul withdrew, sinking itself again
into its primal unity, Time would disappear: the
origin of Time . . . is to be traced to the first stir of the
Soul's tendency towards the production of the sensible
Universe (Plotinus, Enneads).
THE DIAMOND LIGHT OF THIS BLACK SUN: “I knew that
all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new
realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white
BERGMETAL
61
void of unpeopled and illimitable space. So, happier
than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again into
that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which
the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate
hour” (H. P. Lovecraft, Ex Oblivione). Lights and
sight are for those who do not see the EYE: “No light
has ever seen the black universe” (Francois Laruelle,
On Black Universe). “The eye with which I see God is
the same eye with which God sees me” (Meister Eckhart,
Complete Mystical Works, Sermon 57).
THAT ALL STARS ARE BLIND SHADOWS: “Now, gross, subtle
and mental bodies are nothing but the shadows of
the soul. The gross, subtle and mental spheres
(worlds) are nothing but the shadows of the Over-Soul
. . . Therefore when the soul with its gross, subtle and
mental bodies experiences the gross, subtle and mental
worlds, the soul actually experiences in reality the
shadows of the Over-Soul with the help of its own
shadows. In other words, the soul with its finite and
destructible form experiences falsity, zero, imagination
and a vacant dream” (MB, God Speaks). Cf.
“Truths are illusions whose true nature has been forgotten”
(Nietzsche). This forgetting which hangs over
everything, the blindness of the apparently luminous
shadows, resolves back to the blindness of ultimate
will: “This whole, including both [subject and matter],
is the world as representation, or the phenomenon.
After this is taken away, there remains only the purely
metaphysical, the thing-in-itself . . . the will”; “for
those in whom the will has turned and denied itself,
this our so very real world with all its suns and galaxies—is
nothing” (Schopenhauer). The blind elemental
drive of heavy metal is the sound whereby one must
or cannot not keep digging, the musical noise of the
universe as one own mine: “One's own self is well
hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure,
V. ABANDONED MINE
62
one's own is the last to be dug up” (Nietzsche). 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 fit, you pass out the residue as excrement.
But do you ever shed tears for the waste you eliminate?
Do you ever think about it, or feel regret over it?
Not at all. Then, 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. The 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). Cf. “Übermensch Undermined: Mine Proposal
Threatens Nietzsche's Grave” (Der Spiegel). Do not be
fooled, then, by the loud outward shows, the shiny
metal scenes. This is not some poser circus; it is a
ghost town and bergwerk, a dark place where miners
see through the hollow world: “Most of the glories of
the world are mere outward show, like the scenes on a
stage: there is nothing real about them. Ships festooned
and hung with pennants, firing of cannon,
illuminations, beating of drums and blowing of trumpets,
shouting and applauding—these are all the
outward sign, the pretence and suggestion,—as it were
the hieroglyphic,—of joy: but just there, joy is, as a
rule, not to be found; it is the only guest who has declined
to be present at the festival. Where this guest
may really be found, he comes generally without invitation
. . . Joy is like the gold in the Australian
mines—found only now and then, as it were, by the
caprice of chance, and according to no rule or law”
(Schopenhauer, “Counsels and Maxims”).
63
VI. SCREAM OF STONE
Schrei aus Stein, “Dawn,” Cervin (Crucial Blast, 2013)
⧍
Peak transmits to peak in this mourning astral light,
Sings bleak aubade of fiery intel for the few.
Fourfold decrees encompass, divide left and right,
Fusing above below with isotopic dew.
Leave no hope in things, exhaust it all in quick sleep.
We leave before tomorrow without faith or doubt
For summit and return, trusting only this leap
Into celestial earth, this abyss inside out.
VI. SCREAM OF STONE
64
PEAK TRANSMITS TO PEAK: Mountains are networked
communications nodes, with the higher peaks functioning
as intelligence generation and organization
centers via natural contact with subtle geo-celestial
powers and fit service as meeting-sites for members of
spiritual hierarchy. “The rocks and stones and mountains
and earth are living camouflage, interlocking
psychic webs formed by minute consciousnesses that
you cannot perceive as such” (Seth). See also René
Guénon on Shambala-Agartha, “a spiritual center existing
in the terrestrial world by an organization
charged with preserving intact the deposit of sacred
tradition, which is of ‘non-human’ origin
(apaurusheya), through which primordial Wisdom is
handed down across the ages to those capable of receiving
it” (King of the World). The status of
mountains as points of occult transmission is reflected
in the traditions of revelation at height (Sinai, Alverna,
Kailash, et al.), the religio-political concept of the
‘summit meeting’—“I will sit on the mount of assembly
in the far north” (Isaiah 14:13); “On a mountain
one day, I will explain who I am and how I created the
universe” (MB)—and folk-poetic notions of mountains
as discursive entities: “No doubt there were many
things that watched me in the night . . . They must
have been talking to each other. The stones talk to
each other just as we do, and the trees too, the mountains
talk to each other. You can hear them sometimes
if you pay close attention, especially at night, outside”
(Angulo, Achumawi Life-Force); “Henson’s idea [for
The Dark Crystal] was for a world that had a life of its
own, where plants could communicate and mountains
talk to each other” (Heavy Metal, vol. 8). Peak to peak
transmission is a transhuman seeing-though mediated
paradoxically (at least to the blabbermouth human
mind) by the intersection of silence and distance: “To
speak quietly at such distance, to speak / And to be
BERGMETAL
65
heard is to be large in space, / That, like your own, is
large, hence, to be part / Of sky, of sea, large earth,
large air. It is / To perceive men without reference to
their form” (Wallace Stevens, “Chocorua to its Neighbor”).
That is, inter-mountain communication is a
perfection of the participatory intimacy-at-a-distance
that characterizes logos at height: “I am often astonished
at the almost incredible distances at which
people amongst these mountains talk to each other,
and appear to be heard distinctly. They will frequently
give the most minute directions across enormous glens
and gorges, without one word being either lost or understood”
(C. G. A Fortnight’s Tour amongst the Arabs
on Mount Lebanon). Cf. “The first characteristic [of
persons who have the ‘habit of the mountain’] is sparsity
of words and reduced verbal communication. The
mountain teaches silence . . . In an alpine environment,
gestures and signals are more eloquent than
long speeches. This is especially true when one is
busy climbing, or making holes on the mountain’s
face, or crossing ravines; in these circumstances one
instinctively adopts a military style and terseness in
warning, giving instructions, or confirming” (Julius
Evola, Meditations on the Peaks). Sparsity of words is
not ponderous slowness to speech but belongs to the
profounder and clearer continuum of selfcommunicative
action at once theoretical and practical:
“Another way to put it is to be simultaneously
alone and with other people—a connection occurring
essentially through action. Maybe only some forms of
camaraderie, forged during wartime on the battlefield,
may bring about, like the experience of the mountain,
this special sense of active solidarity, which keeps
distance between people and yet presupposes the full
harmony of their forces of because of the precise assessment
of and trust in each member’s potential”
(Ibid.). Real communication is alpine, proverbial; it is
VI. SCREAM OF STONE
66
not a matter of for ‘readers’ and ‘writers’: “He who
knows the reader will do nothing more for the reader .
. . Whoever writes in blood and proverbs does not
want to be read, but to be learned by heart. In the
mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but
for that one must have long legs. Proverbs should be
peaks, and those who are addressed should be great
and tall. The air thin and pure, danger near and the
spirit full of cheerful spite: these fit together well”
(Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
Schrei aus Stein channel the loud silence of
commanding peak-to-peak transmission via a minimalist
atmospheric musical style which lets
mountains speak for themselves across inter-alpine
conceptual figurations, the first of which is the band’s
name itself, which translates the title of Werner Herzog’s
1991 bergfilm into the topos of Rocky Mountain
Black Metal. This ideology of this translation has a
descent-ascent structure. As the film itself concerns
the saga of European mountaineering in Patagonia and
the generational drama of alpinism’s twin degeneration
or fall into gymnastic sport and brutal
technologization (‘the murder of the impossible’), so
Schrei aus Stein spiritually invest in personal experience
of American mountaineering as a local site where
the European alpine sublime is reinvented and reascended
in purer form, a purity which is evoked primarily
in terms of terms of bleakness and solitude of
an order no longer directly perceivable in the Old
World, as per their artist’s statement: “This project
explores a meditative black metal style, inspired by
the experience of climbing in bleak alpine terrain in
Colorado and seeking to recapture the profound isolation
amidst such an imposing and difficult
landscape.” The logic of peak-to-peak transmission is
also evident in the processive trajectory of Schrei au
Stein’s discography, which conceptually ‘re-builds’
BERGMETAL
67
the European alp out of
American earth. First,
Talus (2009) establishes
alpine sublimity on a
culturally-neutral geological
base, yet one whose
very song names inescapably
point back to the
European, LatinGermanic
origins of geologic
science: “Serac,”
“Lenticulars,” “Couloir,”
“Foehn,” “Crevasses.”
Allegorically, the album
title and cover image
herald conscious emergence of bergmetal as an artistic
and cultural formation sited on the now obscure
slopes and forgotten detritus of the Western alpine
sublime. Nothing screams bergmetal per se that a title
word like talus, which cannot be confused with merely
metaphorical or lyrical invocation of mountain.
Second, Tsisnaasjini (2010) moves backly forwards
into the Navajo identity
of the Spanish-named
Blanca Peak in the Sierras,
which marks the
eastern boundary of the
Navajo homeland Dinetah
and whose name
means ‘Dawn Mountain’
or ‘White Shell Mountain’.
As Blanca is the
highest mountain in the
Sangre de Christo Range,
the cover image bathes
the white peak in a
bloody red which both
VI. SCREAM OF STONE
68
signals the violence of European conquest and moves
the mountain into a more Black Metal atmosphere of
medieval alpine malevolence. Third, Cervin (2013),
reflecting the eastern white dawn of Tsisnaasjini back
to the dark whiteness of the iconic Cervin/Cervino/Matterhorn,
refocuses the ‘dark glow of
the mountains’ upon the fading light of a further eastern
dawn—a movement accentuated by the fact that
Whymper’s first ascent of Cervin, the last of the highest
peaks in the Alps to be climbed, marks the end of
the ‘Golden Age of Alpinism.’ The temporal conjunction
of the Matterhorn’s first ascent, the death of the
Civil War and Lincoln (and the consequent rise of U.S.
as a proto-imperial power), the end of the Colorado
War against the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, and the
African geological origin of Cervin’s peak accentuates
the hidden self-communicative logic whereby Rocky
Mountain bergmetal opens new occult lines of ascent
into the globally haunted atmospheres of the alpine
sublime, lines which call the listener forward and
away from all forms of false conquest. In sum, Schrei
BERGMETAL
69
aus Stein occupy the musico-cultural continuum of a
peak-to-peak transmissiveness in which mountain solitude
experiences not only intimations of absolute
immanent transcendence but the high white reflectiveness
of the material alp (alp, from altus, ‘high’ or
albus, ‘white) as a discursive entity in touch with its
own self-otherness and the meanings or words of other
mountains. As a climber characteristically finds the
meanings of the mountain, the conceptual ‘mountains
of the mind,’ to at once recede and intensify within
the immediate chasmic experience of being on the
mountain itself, Schrei aus Stein summon a scream of
stone which is neither human nor inhuman, a voice
that neither inordinately idealizes the man-mountain
relation nor stupidly longs for an impossible naturewithout-us.
Evading the paths of both eco-progressive
nostalgia and neo-fascist alpine pseudo-mysticism,
Schrei aus Stein aim towards the uncompromising
voice of an alpine, alter-humanity which is essentially
apolitical (and for that reason not without authentic
political truth), as articulated by Reinhold Messner:
“Politics is the opposite of mountaineering. On a
mountain you are on your own, in a world of anarchy,
with a chance to experience what it was like a hundred
thousand years ago when humans were wild
animals and not dependent on the social world. The
strongest figure of the climbing team decides what to
do, how to go forward. As climbers, we are inventors
of our own goals, and must decide on our own how to
achieve them. There is nobody else there. Nobody to
control. We do extreme, dangerous things, and nobody
else can say what is right or wrong. There is no moral
loathing. We have only our instincts about human behavior,
and in the end we are our own judges. The art
of politics is compromising, and if you are compromising
every minute on a mountain, you won’t go far”
(Rock & Ice).
VI. SCREAM OF STONE
70
THIS MOURNING ASTRAL LIGHT: The mourning/morning
pun resonates with the ‘bleak aubade’ of the next line,
recasting the medieval-Apennine lovers’ dawn lament
into extra-human cosmic terms and blending it with
the topos of pre-dawn restlessness in which foreboding
or pre-emptive mourning is combined with the
strange joy of imminently-passing-away preoperational
anxiety, anticipating the dreamy electric
moment of relief and free action when you finally get
to forget everything and go. Cf. “Many a dawn-cold
spear must be grasped, / Hefted on high” (Beowulf).
Before the rising of the sun, the no-longer-nighttime
stars, who are really secret agents of amor fati, offer a
subtle m( )urning which laments the passing of night
and lovingly opens the day to its own special or
weird/fated brand of possibilistic pallor. Coleridge
blackly covers this moment as follows: “Hast thou a
charm to stay the morning-star / In his steep course?
So long he seems to pause / On thy bald awful head, O
sovran BLANC! / The Arve and Arveiron at thy base /
Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form! / Risest
from forth thy silent sea of pines, / How silently!
Around thee and above / Deep is the air and dark,
substantial, black, / An ebon mass: methinks thou
piercest it, / As with a wedge!” (Coleridge, “Hymn Before
Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni”). Whereas
Wallace Stevens finds in the mountain morning a reverse
veneration centered on the arrival of an alterhumanity:
“At the end of the night last night a crystal
star, / The crystal-pointed star of morning, rose / And
lit the snow to a light congenial / To this prodigious
shadow, who then came / In an elemental freedom,
sharp and cold. / The feeling of him was the feel of
day, / And of a day as yet unseen, in which / To see
was to be. He was the figure in / A poem for Liadoff,
the self of selves: / To think of him destroyed the
body’s form” (“Chocorua to its Neighbor”).
BERGMETAL
71
SINGS BLEAK AUBADE: There is a syllabic knife here,
the piercing sense of almost hearing ‘blade’ in the
voicing of ‘bleak aubade.’ Uncannily, this sharply
touches Wallace Stevens’s representation of mountain
logos as cutting (s)word, “acutest speech”: “To say
more than human things with human voice, / That
cannot be; to say human things with more / Than human
voice; that, also, cannot be; / To speak humanly
from the height or from the depth / Of human things,
that is acutest speech” (“Chocorua to its Neighbor”).
True song cuts you to the quick and frees one from
sympathy. “I no longer sympathize with you; this
cloud beneath me, this black and heavy thing at which
I laugh—precisely this is your thundercloud. You look
upward when you long for elevation. And I look down
because I am elevated” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zara-
thustra).
FOURFOLD DECREES ENCOMPASS: Cervin’s four faces
address the four planetary directions. “He governs the
world through itself” (Ibn Arabi). “The Matterhorn
situated on the border between Switzerland and Italy
with a height of 14,690 feet is said to be by some (?) to
be the compass that the gods use to find their way
around our planet.” The ‘fiery intel’ understood only
by the few yet encompasses all and can be glimpsed
by the few more who practice sensing the inapparent
‘drifts’ of thinking, the slight atmospheric swerves
wherein thoughts nearly betray their being-thought by
something other than you, i.e. contain traces of the
mental world in which all thoughts exist, the ideal
realm in which earth-bound thinking blindly gropes.
The directionality of the peak is aesthetically enhanced
by its pyramidal form: “those firm grey
bastions of the Cervin,—overhanging, smooth, flawless,
unconquerable! For, unlike the Chamouni
aiguilles, there is no aspect of destruction about the
VI. SCREAM OF STONE
72
Matterhorn cliffs. They are not torn remnants of separating
spires, yielding flake by flake, and band by
band, to the continual process of decay. They are, on
the contrary, an unaltered monument, seemingly
sculptured long ago, the huge walls retaining yet the
forms into which they were first engraven, and standing
like an Egyptian temple,—delicate-fronted, softly
colored, the suns of uncounted ages rising and falling
upon it continually, but still casting the same line of
shadows from east to west, still, century after century,
touching the same purple stains on the lotus pillars;
while the desert sand ebbs and flows about their feet,
as those autumn leaves of rock lie heaped and weak
about the base of the Cervin” (Ruskin, Of Mountain
Beauty, XVI.16).
ISOTOPIC DEW: The phrase builds on the fact that isotope
literally means ‘the same place’. Dew fuses above
and below, adding an almost nothing that makes all
the difference. Like the presence of extra neutrons
which do not alter elemental identity but do effect reaction
and make the same different, the influence of
mountains on life, the “generosity, or instruction of
the hills” (Ruskin) is a mass effect, a processually
hidden-open influence which alters everything by apparently
doing nothing. Cf. “My first sight of the
Matterhorn . . . ! When I think of it I seem to grow
young again; a host of memories crowd into my mind
and strive to free themselves as if each one desired to
be the first to find an issue, and I must needs throw
the door wide open and let them force their way out
en masse” (Guido Rey, The Matterhorn). Mountains
are simply there, and in simply being there, do nothing,
yet do nothing in a massive manner that alters
everything, as shown in the historical conjunction of
mountainous regions and civilization: “There is not a
single spot of land in either of these countries [Greece
BERGMETAL
73
and Italy] from which mountains are not discernable”
(Ruskin, Of Mountain Beauty, XX.11). See also Geoffrey
Winthrop Young, Influence of Mountains upon
Development of Human Intelligence (1956). Mountain
in-fluence is about how mountains inhabit consciousness
in a dewy, subtly seminal way, speaking to
consciousness in the language of the habit process itself,
whose tiny-massive syllable is the water drop:
“The importance of the results thus obtained by the
slightest change of direction in the infant streamlets,
furnishes an interesting type of the formation of human
characters by habit. Every one of those notable
ravines and crags is the expression, not of any sudden
violence done to the mountain, but of its little habits,
persisted in continually. It was created with one ruling
instinct; but its destiny depended nevertheless, for
effective result, on the direction of the small and all
but invisible tricklings of water, in which the first
shower of rain found its way down its sides. The feeblest,
most insensible oozings of the drops of dew
among its dust were in reality arbiters of its eternal
form; commissioned, with a touch more tender than
that of a child's finger,—as silent and slight as the fall
of a half-checked tear on a maiden's cheek,—to fix for
ever the forms of peak and precipice, and hew those
leagues of lifted granite into the shapes that were to
divide the earth and its kingdoms. Once the little
stone evaded,—once the dim furrow traced,—and the
peak was for ever invested with its majesty, the ravine
for ever doomed to its degradation. Thenceforward,
day by day, the subtle habit gained in power; the
evaded stone was left with wider basement; the chosen
furrow deepened with swifter-sliding wave;
repentance and arrest were alike impossible, and hour
after hour saw written in larger and rockier characters
upon the sky, the history of the choice that had been
directed by a drop of rain, and of the balance that had
VI. SCREAM OF STONE
74
been turned by a grain of sand” (Ruskin, Of Mountain
Beauty, XV.23).
. . . THIS ABYSS INSIDE OUT. The stanza alludes to an
‘alpine start,’ which Leslie Stephen describes as follows:
“You are cold, miserable, breakfastless; have
risen shivering from a warm bed, and in your heart
long only to creep into bed again. To the mountaineer
all this has changed. He is beginning a day full of the
anticipation of a pleasant excitement. He has, perhaps,
been waiting anxiously for fine weather, to try conclusions
with some huge giant not yet scaled. He moves
out with something of the feeling with which a soldier
goes to the assault of a fortress, but without the same
probability of coming home in fragment; the danger is
trifling enough to be merely exhilatory, and to give a
pleasant tension to the nerves; his muscles feel firm
and springy, and his stomach—no small advantage to
the enjoyment of scenery—is in excellent order. He
looks at the sparkling stars with keen satisfaction,
prepared to enjoy a fine sunrise with all his faculties
at their best, and with the added pleasure of a good
omen for his day's work. Then a huge dark mass begins
to mould itself slowly out of the darkness, the sky
begins to form a background of deep purple, against
which the outlook becomes gradually more definite;
one by one, the peaks catch the exquisite Alpine glow,
lighting up in rapid succession, like a vast illumination;
and when at last the steady sunlight settles upon
them, and shows every rock and glacier, without even
a delicate film of mist to obscure them, he feels his
heart bound, and steps out gaily to the assault” (Playground
of Europe). There is a certain kind of sober
intoxication that occurs in the pre-morning hours and
which resonates in a special way with the leap into
imminent challenging tasks. This intoxication is structured
around a unique combination of, on the one
BERGMETAL
75
hand, purposiveness, promise, having the whole
world before oneself, etc., and, on the other hand, an
intimate and certain feeling of the transience of all
things, knowledge of everything as passing show. Here
is found the rush of returning to reality as a risky adventurous
game, one that frees the given itself from
fixity, so that even if you do die today, your whole life
will already have been unaccountably different. This
ecstatic knowledge of the astral morning is connected
to how the mountain spiritually stabilizes human consciousness
by destabilizing it, by exposing its
precarity and lack of self-possession in a manner that
reorients and renews self-reliance and ontological
freedom. Mountain, as ‘abyss inside out’—a formulation
which compares to Dante’s design of the
mountain of Purgatory as the positive negative of Hell,
the portion of earth punched out when Satan fell to
earth—offers a kind of surplus habitation of uninhabitability,
a zone for spiritual dwelling that provides a
real place (physical, imaginal, and intellectual) for
advancingly being in the world but not of it. Hell is
the chthonic-abyssal world where one stays, where
one dwells without movement in change without becoming
and in sick self-repetition. Everyone is at
home in Hell, eternally themselves, which is precisely
what makes Hell fundamentally uninhabitable. Purgatory
is the habitable, superior positively negative ‘hell’
of the world as bridge, a steep testing ground between
Pit and Paradise, where one is purified by passing
through. Dialectically, habitation needs the uninhabitable,
dwelling needs the mountain. So the spiritual
and material habitability of the earth is predicated on
the positively negative presence of these inside out
abysses, the positive voids and massive silences of the
mountain peaks: “The whole earth is not prepared for
the habitation of man; only certain small portions are
prepared for him,—the houses, as it were, of the hu-
VI. SCREAM OF STONE
76
man race, from which they are to look abroad upon
the rest of the world, not to wonder or complain that it
is not all house, but to be grateful for the kindness of
the admirable building, in the house itself, as compared
with the rest. It would be as absurd to think it
an evil that all the world is not fit for us to inhabit, as
to think it an evil that the globe is no larger than it is.
As much as we shall ever need is evidently assigned
to us for our dwelling-place; the rest, covered with
rolling waves or drifting sands, fretted with ice or
crested with fire, is set before us for contemplation in
an uninhabitable magnificence; and that part which
we are enabled to inhabit owes its fitness for human
life chiefly to its mountain ranges, which, throwing
the superfluous rain off as it falls, collect it in streams
or lakes, and guide it into given places, and in given
directions; so that men can build their cities in the
midst of fields which they know will be always fertile,
and establish the lines of their commerce upon
streams which will not fail” (Ruskin, Of Mountain
Beauty, VII.6).
77
VII. Never to Descend
Sapthuran, “Astigan Se Beorg (Journey Up the Mountain),” The
Wanderer (Wraith Productions, 2008).
⧍
To step now into the freedom of pure ascent,
I walk through no matter what—forest-maze my guide.
With blind confusion left behind, all that was lent
To life lies dead in a death that long ago died.
The dark heart trapped in my brain starts to weep faster
As cold blood of morning flows at last to its goal.
Icy truth-silence that I AM my own master
Fills everything and nothing with new forms of soul.
VII. NEVER TO DESCEND
78
TO STEP: ‘Astigan se beorg’ means ‘to ascend the
mountain,’ so that the infinitive opening captures the
sense of immediate beginning, the irrevocable towards
of starting up the mountain. And as the provided gloss
in the title suggests, this is a one-way, full-day (journey)
upward movement that ends in never descending:
“And he stepped out upon its apex / Looking over
the forests below / He stood atop the highest mountain
/ And, finally, he was alone / Here he learned true
peace / And he vowed never to descend” (Sapthuran,
“Astigan Se Beorg,” The Wanderer). The decision never
to descend does not prevent returning from the
summit, but only returning to the world, a return that
would equal ‘descent’ or reversal of the ascent. Even
in conventional experiential terms, people speak of
leaving part of themselves on mountain peaks and of
spiritually remaining up there after coming down. So
the unidirectionality of the journey traced in this song
signifies the durable, non-contingent, and thus always
ascending independence of freedom, of the absolute
life which is its own principle and remains forever
above and unaffected by what it transcends. “Only
that which is without principle properly lives” (Meister
Eckhart). “The just person is in service neither to
God nor creatures, for such a person is free, and the
closer they are they are to justice, the more they become
freedom itself and the more they are freedom”
(Meister Eckhart). This is what it means to remain on
the apex, to live seated on the mountain. “Now I will
tell you who it is who is seated on the mountain above
the winds and the rain. They are those who, on earth,
have neither shame nor honor, nor fear on account of
something which might happen. Such folk . . . are secure,
and so their doors are open, and yet nothing can
disturb them, and no work of charity dares to penetrate.
Such folk are seated on the mountain, and none
other than these are seated there” (Marguerite Porete,
BERGMETAL
79
Mirror of Simple Souls). Thus freedom is (semantically)
found already and fully in to step, in the stepping
itself before whatever stepping steps into. In this sense
the stepping of ascent is both what liberates walking
from horizontality, what turns walking into climbing,
and also what brings verticality back into walking itself,
so that one may also ascend without climbing,
which is part of the desire within climbing itself, to
climb climbing, to climb out of climbing. Indeed astigan
may mean ‘to go, come, step, proceed, climb, rise,
ascend’ and also descend, a sense which typically requires
a correlative preposition, as in the Anglo-Saxon
translation of “ascendunt montes et descendunt campi
in locum” (Psalms 103:8): “Astígaþ múntas, and niðer
astígaþ feldas on stówe.” Just as climbing moves up
and down (down-climbing), so one may ascend down
or step downwards without descending. The continuity
of ascending and stepping thus captured in the song
title’s astigan may be compared to Reinhold Messner’s
[and Herzog’s] dream of climbing transformed into
walking at the end of Dark Glow of the Mountains:
“Herzog: Can you imagine not climbing anymore and
doing something else? Messner: I occasionally have
the desire to stop mountain climbing and imagine that
I just keep walking, for decades, maybe forever, just
walking, with pack animals, or a few porters, from one
Himalayan valley to the next, across deserts, through
forests, without ever getting anywhere, without looking
back, without looking ahead, just keep on walking
until the world stops. Herzog: That’s strange because I
have exactly the same fantasy . . . just keep walking
until I have gone everywhere and there is nothing left.
Messner: Yes it’s very interesting, and I keep imagining
. . . that sooner or later in my life I don’t look back
anymore, I don’t need anything behind me and I don’t
go anywhere in particular, I have no destination, I just
keep going and going until the world just stops. And I
VII. NEVER TO DESCEND
80
don’t think of the world as round or flat, to me the
world is never-ending and at some point in time it just
stops, that is, either my life or the world stops, presumably
it will be that as my life ends so will the
world. We could follow in each other’s footsteps!
Mountain climbing isn’t that important to me anymore,
not the climbing part. What counts is just to
keep on going and going and going.”
NOW: The accentuated presentness of the stepping implies
the power to begin life ‘all over again’ in each
moment. The stepping of ascent is continuous starting,
unending initiation. Knowing life is over now,
start it over. To step now is to be new, as fresh as
when one was not: “'Virgin' is as much as to say a person
who is void of alien images, as empty as he was
when he did not exist . . . If I were possessed of sufficient
understanding so as to comprehend within my
own mind all the images ever conceived by all men, as
well as those that exist in God Himself—if I had these
without attachment, whether in doing or in leaving
undone, without before and after but rather standing
free in this present Now ready to receive God's most
beloved will and to do it continually, then in truth I
would be a virgin, untrammeled by any images, just as
I was when I was not” (Meister Eckhart, Complete
Mystical Works, Sermon 8).
THE FREEDOM OF PURE ASCENT: As the mundane,
worldly concept of race concerns the descent of the
individual from others, the spiritual concept of race
concerns the ascent of the individual above others and
himself: “Nothing is created out of nothing; thus, the
present considerations do not apply to the completely
bastardized modern man who has been reduced to a
work and sporting animal. These considerations apply
instead to those in whom the sense of race (race in a
BERGMETAL
81
spiritual, higher sense) still means something and, rather,
represents the main departing point for a will
oriented toward liberation and awakening. In this
people, the mountainous milieu awakens a primordial
legacy and possibly contributes to the gradual emergence
of a transcendent sense of freedom—which does
not signify escapism, but is instead a principle of pure
strength. This sense of freedom finds its most perfect
expression within one’s limited self, in concentration,
in a deliberate action, in the complete, lucid domination
of the irrational part of the human being, and
finally, in the readiness to be freely transformed into
an element of solid action, in which the goal is located
above everybody and everything else” (Julius Evola,
Meditations on the Peaks). Cf. “I am not from here”
(Cioran). Modern culture and society, despite the general
rejection of racist ideologies, remains thoroughly
and more profoundly racist in its insistence on the
individual’s belonging to or being a ‘member’ of the
human race. “Identity is the primal form of all ideology”
(Adorno). This is simply an invisible form of
slavery, the enforcement of self-slavery upon the individual,
who generally accepts it though conscious and
unconscious expectation of rewards, as if to say, ‘I
serve humanity by serving myself, by serving myself I
accomplish things, by accomplishing things, I become
someone, by being someone, I serve humanity’—all of
which is sheer lunacy and lowest selfishness: “For
when one is a servant of oneself, one wills that God
accomplish His will to one’s own honor. The one who
wills this only wills that the will of God be accomplished
in him and in another. To such a one, says
Love, God refuses His kingdom” (Marguerite Porete,
Mirror of Simple Souls). If anyone truly and actually
wants to ‘belong’ to the human race and serve it in
some fashion, the first thing to do is to not be the soand-so
limited self. The height of egoism: to believe
VII. NEVER TO DESCEND
82
that you owe the world something (and that your own
good lies in your fulfillment of the obligation!). The
only thing you owe is your own sanity, precisely what
‘you’ cannot give yourself. Only in not being a slave is
it possible to serve, for something higher to find expression
through the lower, for the “lucid
domination” of freedom to descend. The limited does
not become unlimited, slavery does not become free,
by cooperating with and relating to itself. Freedom is
achieved when limitation is opened to its already being
the spiritually sportive instrument and testing
ground of the unlimited: “Evolution . . . is a divine
sport, in which the Undonditioned tests the infinitude
of His absolute knowledge, power and bliss in the
midst of all conditions” (MB, Discourses). Hence Evola’s
critique of the reduction of mountaineering to
mere sport (“The Mountain, Sport, and Contemplation”).
Freedom is not the absence of slavery, but a
matter of what is done despite slavery, of the power
that ascends in the gravitational midst of fear and
moves forward without guarantee or attachment to
results. Such is the meaning of ‘pure ascent,’ the ascent
that ascends anyway. “Well, I can admit now,
even while asking myself these rather disagreeable
questions, that deep down, in spite of everything, I felt
that some part of me firmly believed in the material
reality of Mount Analogue” (René Daumal, Mount An-
alogue).
I WALK THROUGH NO MATTER WHAT—FOREST-MAZE MY
GUIDE: “I am the one who walks your dreams / the
wanderer who leaves no trails behind” (Sapthuran).
As per the above articulation of freedom as movement
despite, this line expresses the sylvan situation of ascent
toward the peak in which the woods that impede
and disorient the path upwards simultaneously cloak,
shelter, and even direct it by subtle signs. As ascent is
BERGMETAL
83
a stepping through, there is no imperative that it follow
a particular path. Indeed following a path is a sure
way not to pass through. “By many a trail and manner
I came to my truth; not on one ladder did I climb to
my height, where my eye roams out into my distance.
And I never liked asking the way—that always offended
by taste! I preferred to question and try the ways
myself . . . ‘This—it turns out—is my way—where is
yours?’—That is how I answered those who asked me
‘the way.’ The way after all—it does not exist!” (Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Sonically, the song
communicates this idea of ascending individual waywardness
with a fast and thick texture which
paradoxically pushes the listener forward into upward
directional striving by pushing against listening, like
an ice-wind blowing into your face that only makes
you burn with more strength: “The warm breeze
turned to ice / Its bite invigorated his spirit / As he
walked onward / The pain turned steeply upward”
(“Astigan Se Beorg”). The four musical changes in the
song mark four stages of ascent: 1) Continuing—“He
continued his journey . . .” 2) Difficulty—“The winds
began to blow . . .” 3) Ascendance—“The pain turned
steeply upward . . .” 4) Peace—“Here he learned true
peace.” Overall, Sapthuran express a solitary, woodsy,
Appalachian alpinity, a truly blackened bergmetal in
which ancient glorious altitudes of the Central Pangean
peaks are occulted in the unknown wanderings
of free unconquerable intoxicated spirits who have
nothing to do with your so-called society and history.
ALL THAT WAS LENT: In the context of the Anglo-Saxon
title, lent resonates with læne, ‘transitory, fleeting’ (i.e.
ephemeral is what is loaned). “Her bið feoh læne / her
bið freond læne / her bið mon læne / her bið mæg
læne / eal þis eorþan gesteal / idel weorþeð” [ Here
money is fleeting, / here friend is fleeting, / here man
VII. NEVER TO DESCEND
84
is fleeting, / here kinsman is fleeting, / all the foundation
of this world / turns to waste!]. The elegiac tone
of the tracklist—“Write My Words Upon the Winds,”
“Wailing Blackwinds,” “The Weave and Will of Fate
and Time, “Forever a Wandering Spirit”—confirms
Sapthuran’s inspiration by the Old English poem The
Wanderer.
THE DARK HEART TRAPPED IN MY BRAIN: Signified here is
some species of awakening spiritual organ occupying
the degree of elevation of affectus over intellectus,
feeling over understanding. This hidden heart of the
mind is dark both in the sense of being obscure to understanding
and in the sense of being mysteriously,
inexplicably in touch with what is beyond mind itself.
“Just as a stone pulled by its own weight is naturally
drawn down to its own center, so the apex of
the affectus by its own weight is carried up to God
directly and unmediatedly, without any oblique
tangientiality” (Hugh of Balma). This hidden apex is
the summit of the soul, that secret, acosmically capacious
point of you that weeps while you are sleeping,
outflies all demons and angels, and knows more than
you ever will: “There is something that transcends the
created being of the soul, not in contact with created
things, which are nothing; not even an angel has it,
though he has a clear being that is pure and extensive:
even that does not touch it. It is akin to the nature of
deity, it is one in itself, and has naught in common
with anything. It is a stumbling block to many a
learned cleric. It is a strange and desert place, and is
rather nameless than possessed of a name, and is more
unknown than it is known. If you could naught yourself
for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant,
you would possess all that this is in itself. But as long
as you mind yourself or any thing at all, you know no
more of God than my mouth knows of color or my eye
BERGMETAL
85
of taste: so little do you know or discern what God is”
(Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works, Sermon
17). The mountain is not knowable, but it is loveable:
“the scientific mind goes on up the mountain until its
heart freezes and dies. But this mind is becoming so
staggered by the vastness still beyond it that it will be
forced to admit the hopelessness of its quest and turn
to God, the Reality” (MB, Everything and the Nothing).
The dark heart is trapped, which also means that is
can be let out. As the wanderer ascends, something
unheard of in him awakens. Real Black Metal, such as
Sapthuran wills, is the musical channeling of this unheard
of.
ICY TRUTH-SILENCE THAT I AM: ‘Truth-silence’ implies
a hyper-ontological mode of discourse in which the
sanity of not-speaking makes total superessential
sense, absolute sense of everything. This may be construed
in terms of an absolutely bewildered ‘alpine’
logic which stays in touch with a key it cannot hold:
“What do those do who are in being above their
thoughts? They are amazed by what is from the top of
their mountain, and they are amazed by the same
thing which is in the depth of their valley—by a thinking
nothing which is shut away and sealed in the
secret closure of the highest purity of such an excellent
Soul. No one can open the closure, nor break the
seal, nor close it when it is open, if the gentle Farnearness
from very far and from very near does not
close it and open it, who alone has the keys to it, for
no one else carries them, no one else could carry
them” (Marguerite Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls).
Bergmetal is like the resounding of the key, carved
into a horn: “It is during this journey, and in alpine
wanderings, that the Stormcrow soul and music has
been forged and shaped, become powerful as hundreds
of rockfalls, penetrating as the sinister creak of
VII. NEVER TO DESCEND
86
an ice sheet, melancholic as a horn that resounds its
calling from the lonely summit, waiting to be replied”
(Stormcrow, Disposition to Tyranny).
WITH NEW FORMS OF SOUL: This world—as if it even
exists—sickens and saddens itself in expectation of
what it will not seize, of what it refuses to be. Be not
so. Plant the flag of your NO on the highest peak. “The
spiritual Path is like climbing up to the mountain-top
through hills and dales and thorny woods, and along
steep and dangerous precipices. But on this Path
THERE CAN BE NO GOING BACK OR HALTING. Everyone
must get to the top, which is the direct realisation of
the supreme Godhead. All hesitation or sidetracking
or resting in the halfway houses is but postponement
of the day of true and final fulfillment. You cannot be
too alert on this path. EVEN THE SLIGHTEST OF LINGERING
IN THE FALSE WORLD of shadows is necessarily an invitation
to some suffering which could have been avoided
if the eyes had been steadily fixed on the supreme goal
of life. If there is one thing which is most necessary for
safe and sure arrival at the top, it is love. All other
qualifications which are essential for the aspirants of
the highest can and must come to them if they faithfully
follow the whispers of the unerring guide of love,
who speaks from within their own hearts and sheds
light on the Path. If you lose hold of the mantle of this
guide, THERE IS ONLY DESPAIR IN STORE FOR YOU. The
heart without love is ENTOMBED IN UNENDING DARKNESS
and suffering. But the heart which is restless with love
is on the way to realisation of the unfading light and
the unfathomable sweetness of life divine” (MB, Messages).
Is there anything more wonderful than walking
away into the heights? More thrilling than freely paying
the price you are always already paying the price
for not paying, that you are unfreely paying for anyway,
the price of yourself? Is anything more
BERGMETAL
87
worthwhile than becoming lighter with each step?
“GORAATH: It’s really hard to point a singular theme
in our music, but, especially regarding ‘Disposition to
Tyranny,’ the world of the mountains is certainly one
that most inspired us. When you climb a mountain or
just wander into alpine environments, your body and
your mind are exposed to enormous pressures, you are
forced to reconsider the concepts of greatness, of life,
death, of what is necessary rather not. Every journey
channels towards the perception of what the human
being is, and is not, every step towards the summit
frees the man from the burdens under which the humanity
is sinking. Maybe those are the reasons that
brought authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Renè
Daumal, both great inspires for us, to consider the life
among mountains as a chance to surpass the human
being, to regain the purity of the lost and dusted instincts.
We never had the will to instruct or teach
anybody, and besides we’re quiet jealous of the
knowledge we gained in our lives. This is why many
of the concepts we express are set into strongly metaphoric
lyrics, accessible to whom has yet made a
certain evolutionary path. Paraphrasing Daumal:
‘Nothing I want to know which I have not paid for . . .
‘And you, have you paid yet?” (“Stormcrow Interview,”
Core of Brutality). “Questa montagna è tale, /
che sempre al cominciar di sotto è grave; / e quant' om
più va sù, e men fa male. / Però, quand' ella ti parrà
soave / tanto, che sù andar ti fia leggero / com' a seconda
giù andar per nave, / allor sarai al fin d'esto
sentiero; / quivi di riposar l'affanno aspetta. / Più non
rispondo, e questo so per vero” (Dante, Purgatorio,
IV.88-96) [This mountain is such that ever at the beginning
below it is toilsome, but the higher one goes
the less it wearies. Therefore, when it shall seem to
you so pleasant that the going up is as easy for you as
going downstream in a boat, then will you be at the
VII. NEVER TO DESCEND
88
end of this path: hope there to rest your weariness; no
more I answer, and this I know for true]. Or at least do
yourself and everyone a favor and quickly fall into a
crevasse: “In the bottom of an abyss oppressed with
haze—myself in this pit confusing myself with the
horror of things, humble and sad crevasse cracking the
planet, my presence here is like a cry, without hope,
the cry of a blind beast calling a beloved . . . shattered
by desire for the ungraspable” (Georges Bataille,
Guilty).
⧨