Satanic Music & The Dionysus Mandate

Meanwhile on the home front, Satanic black metal music points ignorant youth, young adults, and older adults who should know better not toward Mount Sinai, but up Mouth Cithaeron, the realm of Dionysus. In Northern Virginia, "Jaxx" -- a dive-concert venue in a strip mall -- offers such bands as Sweden's Dark Funeral.

In The Dionysus Mandate – A Fable of Desire & Death, I try to bring to life in narrative form the anthropological insights of René Girard regarding the recrudescence of the "primitive Sacred," as he calls it, in such efforts as the above. The lyrics are patently obvious about the final destination of such "entertainment" -- "The day you die is the day I smile."

Of utmost importance is to realize that Dionysus is not the cherubic god of wine and laughter handed to us in Disney-esque images from Fantasia. Rather, in the words of Wallace Gray, the dionysiac consisted of the following:

"The plague that struck Athens in the first years of the Peloponnesian War, the unnecessary butchery of both friends and enemies, and the total loss of self-control led many Athenians to return to the earlier and more primitive Dionysiac celebrations. The religion, complete with rituals of animal or human sacrifice, lasted well into the second century of the Christian era." [Homer to Joyce, 72]

This is what Euripides limned so clearly in The Bacchae: Dionysus, a young, wrathful, vengeful god who delights in his followers' blood sacrifices of animals and humans.

Such practitioners of black metal had best remember that the devil uses his followers as tools. And then he destroys them.