Session 2: Religion/Spirituality

Session 2: Religion/Spirituality
Chair: Rebecca Forrest

The Sacred Immersed in Heavy Metal
Natalia Motos
IASPM, Spain and Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona-Catalonia), Spain

The sacred transcends even the religious practise on the present theological model. Heavy Metal uses hymns on its language to connect its followers with the own music, with its essence, with the own Heavy Metal as a social and cultural movement which goes away the borders of the real world where we are living. This way, we can identify the divinity with all collection of musical notes, while bands would act as xamans who connect divinity (the music) with the audience.
Apart from mantaining a connection with Greeck culture, Metal also connects with other ancient civilizations and cultures. The fact that it uses hymns on its language is a feature that has been along to the centuries on the majority of cultures.
Hymns are a sacred element that unite person with divinity; ethimologicaly comes from the verb “to adore”, and we can find it in the most ancient civilizations and cultures. This way we have to emphasize the Egyptian as it influenced outstandingly the Greek thought and in consequence all the Eastern world.
Heavy Metal tends towards religions that considers religious fact as a mythological and mystical entity generating initiation rituals. This is the case of cultures as Greek or Egyptian.In this sense I can relate Heavy Metal with the Egyptian religious fact because both give a matter importance to the energy. Energy is the basis of any existencial element. Metal also uses the energy as a transgressor element considering it as a resource that goes beyond the senses. This way, we can also find a connection with xamanism on this aspect.
By one hand we must think that as Heavy Metal has been take root and expanded around the Eastern World, it is common the influence of Judeo-Christian tradition, although it has not been connected with it directly and voluntarily. The fact of conceiving the Evil related to Satan or Lucifer denotes the influence of Christian religion. Certainly, Heavy Metal takes this element from the Bible, concretely from the Revelations book on direct or indirect way. But we have to emphasize that the treatment given by Classic Metal is different from the treatment given by Extreme Metal.
The devil’s figure is treated in Classic Metal metaphoricaly from the mythological viewpoint, not from the monotheistic thought as a figure which transcends the human history. According to the sociologist Deena Weinstein, Metal uses the figure of the devil as a vehicle to justify the Chaos that rules the world as consequence of the present government system.
Heavy Metal bands use Satan’s and Lucifer’s figure without thinking the transcendent importance that the Evil has for theological field. SKY LARK is an italian band of power metal from the ‘90s who uses the Evil on this sense. In its work Divine Gates Part I is it perceived perfectly, and also the figure of Divinity as a supreme and Creator.

Turn or Burn? The Peculiar Case of Christian Metal Music
Marcus Moberg
Department of Comparative Religion, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

Christian metal music emerged in the late 1970s as a means of evangelism within the wider metal community. In recent years it has grown significantly and developed into a transnational Christian music scene in its own right, including a highly independent infrastructure of record labels, promotion and distribution channels, specialized media, and festivals. However, Christian metal is as much about religion as it is about music. Thus, it remains a peculiar, and often ridiculed, case within a wider metal culture partly characterized by its antagonism and sometimes outright hostility towards Christianity in particular. This paper aims to provide a general overview of today’s transnational Christian metal music scene. In addition, it also aims to highlight what Christian metal is all about from the perspective of its artists and fans through focusing on its discursive construction within various forms of Christian metal media.

Download Draft Conference Paper –

The Call of Cthulhu: Narrativity of the Cult in Metal
Kathleen McAuley and Elizabeth Clendinning
Independent Scholar and Florida State University, USA

The works of H. P. Lovecraft are a common trope in many genres of metal.   References to his work often focus especially on the dark deity Cthulhu, typically represented as summoned by priests of the Old Ones.  Although references to Cthulhu and his priests take on many forms in these songs, one common format is for the song to narrate or directly represent the summons, often quoting specific chant passages from Lovecraft’s works themselves.  However, given the nature of vocal timbre and instrumental accompaniment used, it is often difficult to understand the incantations or the passages describing them.  This performed conflict introduces a question: for whom are these chants executed?  Are they intended for the singer, the audience, or as a means to communicate with some sort of dark power internal or external to the listeners?
This paper explores the interplay between voice and symbolic musical representation in various works about Cthulhu, such as “Shackled To The Trilithon Of Kutulu” by Bal-Sagoth and “Thy Cosmic Horror” by Black Dahlia Murder.  We focus on the mediation and creation of the insider/outsider perspectives through levels of accessibility of sung text and musical representation of text, drawing comparisons between this and other “cult chant” music.  Ultimately, we will suggest that many works on Cthulhu echo patterns found in world religious traditions, where the aural representation of “sacred” events is used to communicate with an uninitiated audience while the language of performance itself is reserved for the “priests,” or stage performers and “initiates,” those audience members who have learned the words before the performance.