Posts tagged sad legend

The Devil has long been associated with secular music. The myth of the virtuoso fiddler who sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads was translated into American folklore with a long history of Blues players like Robert Johnson selling their souls for devilishly good musical abilities. My favorite music genre, heavy metal, has a close relationship to Satan and evil, from the somewhat silly urban legends arising from an incident in which the “Prince of Darkness”, Ozzy, inadvertently bit the head off a real bat to the more serious Black Metal church burnings and murders in the early 1990s. The relationship between metal and Lucifer is often very clear and explicit with many bands, Black and Death metal bands in particular, labeling themselves as Satanic. Yet even mainstream bubble-gum pop idols get labeled as doing the Devil’s work by some religious fundamentalists. Even innocently dancing in a family setting is viewed as deviantly sinful by some extremists. How did rock ‘n roll come to be the Highway to Hell?

"That's my niece Diane, and she's going to Hell... Why? Because she dances."

While reading an early (1981) Ken Wilber book called Up From Eden, I was struck by the depiction of the Devil’s place in Wilber’s model of the evolution of consciousness (a model of human development derived from the great philosophers and mystics from both the East and West) and immediately related it back to my love of devilish music. I believe this model provides a good framework for explaining the Devil’s manifestation in popular music and in Heavy Metal in particular.

Here, then, we must digress into the evolutionary model of human development laid out in Up From Eden to provide our theoretical background. I will paraphrase liberally from this book throughout this article.

The Great Chain of Being

There are a multitude of ways to divide up the evolution of consciousness into hierarchical stages. Perhaps the simplest way to do so is with the 3 stages subconscious, self-conscious and superconscious. Note that in our culture the distinction between subconscious and self-conscious is generally understood thanks to Freud et. al. However, there is deep confusion between the pre-personal subconscious and the trans-personal superconscious. This confusion is what gives you feel queasy when you hear new age babble that just doesn’t sit quite right. A lot of so-called spiritual paths and literature lead downwards into regression. A truly trans-personal understanding comes not only from being able to feel and experience directly, but also to interpret that experience in a meaningful intellectual way. The trans-personal transcends the mind and ego, but also includes it. The pre-personal simply abandons the mind to sensation alone.

In Up From Eden, Wilber further divides these 3 basic stages of the Great Chain of Being into the following 8 levels: Nature (uroboric, reptilian), Body (typhonic, magical), Early Mind (membership, mythical), Advanced Mind (rational, mental-egoic), Psychic, Subtle, Causal and Ultimate. We can see the first 7 levels of the Great Chain of Being represented in the Chakras of Kundalini Yoga as well as in the Caduceus.

Caduceus with corresponding Chakras (root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, crown)

It is no simple coincidence that the evolution of levels of consciousness have parallels in biological evolution (from matter/nature to life/body to mind) . It is also important to note that each level of consciousness transcends the previous level but also includes it in the unconscious. Thus, we, with our average level of consciousness at the mental-egoic level, have within our unconscious access to all the previous levels. This is easily seen in our unconscious dream life where the relationship between and to dream images is often understood symbolically (i.e. magically or mythically). This also manifests in psychoses. Suppose a child at an Early Mind level of development is traumatized by a woman in a red dress. As an adult, this may take the form of an irrational fear of the color red. At a rational level, he knows this is completely silly, but in terms of a magical understanding of the world, it makes perfect sense. Voodoo works along similar principles.

Repression and Indulgence

At each level of consciousness, Spirit (God or Godhead) is understood in different forms. For Body consciousness, it is the Typhon. For Early Mind consciousness, it is the Great Mother.

The Sorcerer of Trois Freres: A typhonic half-man, half-beast

Healthy development from one level to another involves both transcending and including the previous level. With the rise of the mental/egoic consciousness in the West, this did not happen and the body-level consciousness associated with the Typhon and Great Mother became disassociated from the modern psyche. With the exception of the Communion ritual (transcending and including the body by eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ), this body/mind split is clearly embodied by the dominant Western religious tradition, Christianity. Major sins are involved with indulging in the pleasures of the flesh: food, drink, sex, even dance and music. The feminine along with the Great Mother was also repressed in favor of the masculine Sun/Father God. While this disassociation between mind and body has historically taken the form of repression, more recently it has taken the form of over-indulgence. Yeah, Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll!

Paleolithic Venus: a Great Mother figure

Rock ‘n Roll: Indulging in the Senses

Rock music is very much a product of the 20th Century. Plainly, the amplification and sound technology had not existed before to create such walls of sound that embraced the listener with a kind of sonic physicality. But also new media (radio, tv, records) was available to unite the ambition and rebellion of a previously disconnected new youth culture and market freed from labor and poverty by the burgeoning wealth of the United States. Rebellion is naturally attracted to the repressed, the taboo. Foremost among such repressed desires was sexuality (what’s a clitoris??). Rock music incited youth to dance in obscene ways to the driving rhythm, mimicry of the sex act itself (see Dirty Dancing). Elvis Presley was infamously not televised below the waist for the obscene gyrations of his pelvis.

By the’ 60s, men were getting in touch with their repressed inner feminine, growing their hair long and “dropping out” of pursuing traditional social roles. For rock musicians, having long hair became almost a requirement (as it still is in the otherwise testosterone-dominated metal scene). The Great Mother was being unearthed into the consciousness of the counter-culture, from the Feminist movement to a deep desire to heal humanity’s estranged relationship with nature. Much of the counter-culture regressed back into sub-conscious indulgence in sensation (e.g. the drug culture), but sometimes you have to go backwards before you can go forward, right?

In the ’70s, bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath lay down not only heavy metal’s powerful sound, but also it’s fascination with the epic, darkness and the occult. KISS donned ritualistic costume and makeup echoing pagan ritual (Gene Simmon’s character was in fact named the Demon). Heavy metal surfaced in the ’80s and ’90s, offering not only repressed sexuality, but also the repressed aggression and blood of bodily violence (embodied by the mosh pit). The music itself, loud and powerful, has a physical quality that reverberates throughout the body.

Metal and the Typhon

Popular music presents a cultural space where we may indulge in bodily senses of lower levels of consciousness that had been disassociated and repressed during the past few hundred years of Western culture (raves and dance clubs, for example, are modern send-ups of pagan rituals with the imbibing of mind-altering substances, the courtship between youth and the expression of the body moving to the driving rhythm). As these lower levels are only now beginning to be reintegrated into our cultural consciousness, most of us overindulge in physical pleasures: food, drugs, sex, alcohol. In Heavy Metal, this indulgence is made explicit and clear and is often celebrated. Our lusts come out of a place of darkness (the subconscious). A close relationship between metal and the master of indulgence, Satan, is only natural.

Album artwork for Symphonic Black/Death Metal band Dimmu Borgir's In Sorte Diaboli

The album artwork for Dimmu Borgir’s In Sorte Diaboli album features a classic depiction of the Devil that is almost exactly identical to figure 24 in Up From Eden. From the caption to that figure:

[T]he god(s) or sacred images of one stage of development become the demons, devils, demiurges, or disparaged gods of the next stage of evolution…What is natural and appropriate at one stage becomes archaic, regressive and infantile at the next.. the lower stage–which was once worshipped and revered–is now looked upon as something to struggle against, to subdue, even to scorn…

[The Devil as depicted] is clearly typhonic, half man, half animal…In fact, it is strikingly reminiscent of the Sorcerer of Trois Freres [see Sorcerer image above]. That Sorcerer, which was the supreme god to the typhonic hunters, is now the supreme demon to the mental-ego… Second, this figure also shows the serpent-uroboros, and it is correctly portrayed as having evolved only through the lower three chakras–food, sex, and power [or root, sacral and solar plexus, see Caduceus image above]—which is perfect typhonicism. And third. it is hermaphroditic or Great Mother infused…

Only in the West, then where the disassociation of ego-mind and body-typhon was often severe, did the typhon (now cut off form conscious participation) assume truly menacing proportions (as Satan) and appear to take on an ultimately and absolutely evil significance….”Give the Devil its due” really means that the typhon serves an appropriate if limited function, and when exercised in an appropriate if non-obsessive fashion, serves the reproduction of the pranic level of the human compound individual. The typhon disocciated, however, shows up in obsessive overindulgence, on the one hand, and repressive puritanism and life blockage, on the other…Psychologically it manifests itself, on the one hand, in hedonism, obsessive genital-sexuality and the perversions, exclusive aestheticism, dominance of the pleasure principle, degenerate emotionalism; and on the other hand, in hyper-intellectualism, schizoid mentality, arid abstractionism, history divorced from nature, ego terrified of body.

Death Metal: Nightmares Made Flesh

Thematic material for extreme forms of metal clearly land on the side of hedonism and perversion. Death Metal, rather being “terrified of the body”, revels in its base, material nature, a celebratory orgy of blood and gore. Most Death Metal subject matter revolves around three main themes: death, Satan or otherwise anti-Christian themes, and gore. This is readily evident from skimming over band names alone: Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Carcass, Deicide, Decapitation, Vital Remains, Bloodbath, Death and so on.

Black Metal: Digging Into the Grave of The Subconscious

While the lower level themes are well-represented in Death and other genres of Heavy Metal, they are not as clearly differentiated as they are in the sub-genres of Black Metal. The thematic progression (or regression) of Black Metal beginning in the 90s Scandinavian scene in particular, offers a fascinating depiction of the unearthing of subconscious levels of the Great Chain of Being.

Many bands then delved deeper into their mythological past, creating sub-genres of Viking Metal (Enslaved, Thyrfing among others) and Folk Metal (Finntroll, Ensiferum, Korpiklaani).

Other bands then branched further back into paganism, expressing a fascination with nature (Neofolk bands like Tenhi, Nest and Agalloch).

This progression of thematic interest is strikingly similar to exploring the Great Chain of Being backwards from Advanced Mind (Satanic individualism) to Nature.

Spiritual Metal

As a side note, not all metal bands are thematically linked to lower levels of the Great Chain of Being. Cynic and Aghora are both excellent bands that lyrically explore themes of higher levels of consciousness over their hybrid genre of Extreme (i.e. Death and Thrash) Metal and Jazz Fusion.

Scratching the Surface

I have essayed to show that Heavy Metal and popular music in general is representative in the cultural consciousness of the over-indulgence/repression of the Great Chain of Being’s lower levels. However, there are many more unanswered questions than insights raised in this cursory overview. Of particular interest to me are the following. Why is Heavy Metal so overwhelmingly masculine in both style and participation? Where are the feminine aspects of the Great Mother (or are they simply manifest as obsession with sexuality and the female body as celebrated by mainstream pop music)? Why did Japanese Visual Rock bands reach back thematically not to their own ethnic past, like the Scandinavian metal bands or even Korean Black Metal bands Oathean and Sad Legend, but to 17th and 18th Century Europe? Is their feminized look representative of their cultural emasculation? Perhaps the most intriguing question is what popular musical culture would be like in a healthy, integrated cultural consciousness.