A Burzum Story: Part V - Satanism

If people in Norway hear my name they normally think of Satanism and church fires. The press very successfully managed to do what the Judeo-Christians have routinely been doing since the early Middle Ages, and convinced people that the persecuted dissident in question (in this case me) was a mad and dangerous devil worshipper.

I could argue that I never was a devil worshipper, but I think it is better to simply prove that devil worship is a product of the imagination of the Judeo-Christians. When you know that there has never been devil worship in any form in Europe, then you must also understand that there has never been any devil worshippers. When you know that, it should become clear that I cannot possibly have been a devil worshipper either.

An English writer, Margareth Murray, published a book in 1921 called "The Witch-Cult In Western Europe". She claimed the devil worship was indeed not devil worship at all, but a Pagan cult, and although criticized her book has been used by pretend-witches (especially in the United Kingdom) in a feminist attempt to revive the cult of the witches. Although her book is pretty useless as a source, she has a point. The devil worshippers were indeed Pagans practicing the ancient religion. The whole "devil worship" idea as we know it is made up by the Judeo-Christians of the Middle Ages, most notably by people like the authors of "Malleus Maleficarum" ("The Witch Hammer"), Jakob Sprengler and Heinrich Kramer, both of them being Catholic priests and one of them being a Messianic Jew.

Just like we don't really know what Pagan means, nobody really knows why they called these particular people "witches" - or (German) Hexen or (Norwegian) hekser. What we do know is that this too is a Judeo-Christian term and that it was never used by the Pagans. The Sabbath is a Jewish holiday and has nothing to do with our European culture whatsoever.

That is the whole problem with this subject; everything people know about this cult is what the rotten Judeo-Christians have told us about it. They have demonized this cult to such a degree that we think of the so-called "Black Sabbath" as some crazy and disgusting scene, with the "evil witches" going to Blokkbeg or some other mountain to worship Satan. According to the Judeo-Christians they did this on Friday 13th to mock Jesus Christ, because there were 13 people present during the Last Supper; Satan himself was a demon with horns growing from his forehead and he walked with a limp, because his one foot was a goat's or horse's foot; "witches" were accused of sacrificing infants to the devil and having sex with him. So, because of this the Judeo-Christians hanged and burned the "witches", or executed them in some other manner, and until the XVIIIth century murdered hundreds of thousands of "witches" and other people they didn't like in Europe.

Instead of expressing what I think about all of this, I will tell You what this cult, and in particular the Friday 13th mystery, really was all about. It might surprise many, but we actually know perfectly well what these rituals were all about, why they practiced them and even who practiced them. Naturally I cannot describe all the mysteries of the ancient religion in an article like this one, but I can give You a brief and hopefully comprehensible explanation to the most demonized of all the mysteries, the so-called "Black Sabbath", that originally is a festival of fertility, celebrated the Friday 13th every month of the ancient calendar (consisting of a New Year's Day and 13 months, each made up of 4 weeks exactly).

The four phases of life are those of reincarnation, birth, life and death; night, morning, day and evening; winter, spring, summer and autumn, et cetera. The weeks in each month is divided into four phases too: the first week is the week of reincarnation, the second the week of birth, the third the week of life and the fourth the week of death. Each weekday has special meaning as well; the Sunday is the day of the Solar deities, the Monday the day of the Lunar deities, the Tuesday the day of the sky deities, the Wednesday the day of the deities of magic, the Thursday the day of the agricultural deities, the Friday the day of the deities of love and fertility and the Saturday the day of the deities of reflection (id est it was a day when they summed up the events of the week, before the next week began). The first Friday in each month of the ancient calendar is always Friday 6th, the second is always Friday 13th, the third always Friday 20th and the fourth always Friday 27th. So the second Friday of each month, Friday 13th, is a special day of love, fertility and birth. In other words it is the year's most important day of human fertility. That is what the "witches" celebrated on this day, and it naturally has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus or the number of people present at the last supper. Judeo-Christianity and its symbols have nothing to do with this ancient celebration what-so-ever!

The holiday known as (German) Walpurgisnacht, (Norwegian) Valborgsnatt, (Gaelic) Beltane, et cetera, is the Friday 13th of the 7th month of the year, when (the 6 months of) Winter meets and marries (the 6 months of) Summer in the middle (7th) month of the ancient 13-month calendar. According to the Judeo-Christians this is the night the "witches" go to the mountains to have sex with "Satan". This night is therefore called "the night of the witches", but it was originally the traditional day for weddings in the Pagan era. It was the day when people married on Earth, just like the gods (like Njörðr) and the goddesses (like Skaði) married in Heaven, and we therefore call this night the Honeymoon - the night when the gods united with the goddesses in heaven. (NB! Honey is a symbol of the æsir and ásynjur [the Scandinavian names of the gods and goddesses respectively].) Now, most people know that it is perfectly normal for married people to have sex on the night they marry, so there is nothing special about that.

The Catholic nuns are said to marry their deity, and this practice has its origin in the Pagan cult, where the Pagan priestesses married their deity. The big difference was that the Pagan deity was represented on Earth by a Pagan priest. The Pagan priestesses could in other words still produce children and be really useful to the kin and community, unlike the Catholic nuns, who reject life, by not having children. To be a Pagan priest you had to be chosen by the priestesses (in Scandinavia often called valkyries ["selectors of the chosen"]) to be their Freyr priest, and therefore they organized different types of competitions to find the man best suited for this task. The best known of these events is of course the Olympic games in Greece, that was originally a "meat market" for virgins (unmarried women), who demanded that the men competed against each other sky-clad (naked), so that they could see all their physical qualities before they decided whom to marry. It served no purpose for the women to participate in these games, as the purpose of the games was for the women to find the best man, or at least the man they liked the most. The games were organized every 4th year, two times for every perfect pentagram (the symbol of love) drawn on the sky by (the planet we know as) Venus (in ancient Scandinavia known as Freyja). Similar races were organized all over Europe, and the purpose was always the same; to separate the strong from the weak.

The winners of the different races were seen as the best men, and they were often given the role of the Freyr priest by different groups of women ("covens"). Because of this we, in Norway, still call weddings bryllup, that derives from Norse bruðhlaup and translates as "bride's race" - and I may add that "bride" is in Norway also the title of the groom (id est "bride-groom" ["bride" means "the promised one", "groom" means "man"]). He also had to be a Freyr priest, though, and had to go through different initiation rituals that I will not discuss here, to prove his spiritual strength as well (because physical strength alone was not enough to be chosen by the priestesses). He also had to participate in the spiritual battle that we know as Ragnarök, that took place every year on the 7th day of the 13 days of Yule - when the forces of Hel meet the forces of Ásgarðr (Heaven) on the battlefield (and because of that we still celebrate this day, today with fireworks, as a symbolic war, on what is the New Year's Eve of the Julian calendar).

In this battle the initiates have to, like the god Víðarr, kill the Fenrir wolf, and as we know this was done by placing one foot in the lower jaw of the wolf and then take its upper jaw and tear it apart. Víðarr had a special shoe for this purpose, to protect his foot from the teeth and fire of Fenrir's mouth. Now, when the priests did this - every year - they naturally hurt their feet, and the result of this was that they often started to walk with a limp, or they walked with a limp because they wore one special shoe. In other words, the Freyr priest who had sex with the Freyja priestesses on Friday 13th had no goat's or horse's foot or anything like that, but he simply was a Freyr priest with a limp or with a special shoe on one of his feet, causing him to walk with a limp!

The Freyja priestesses didn't really marry a man, but like I said they married a man who represented the god Freyr. We really know perfectly well that the Greek Pagans performed and impersonated their gods by putting on a mask, in the different plays and mysteries, but they did this in the rest of Europe too. When they put on a mask representing a deity they changed and became that deity. We know Freyr from Gaelic sources as Cernunnos, called "the horned god", and rock carvings from Scandinavia portray this deity as a man with a stag's horns. Contrary to popular belief, the Scandinavian warriors (like the Vikings) never wore helmets with horns, but the Freyr priests did, or they wore masks with horns, and therefore the "Satan" having sex with the Freyja priestesses on Friday 13th is described by the Judeo-Christians as a "horned demon".

The Freyja priestesses too represented a deity, and therefore they had special titles. A priestess named (for example) Helga would be called (in German) Frau Helga or (in Norwegian) Fru Helga, because Frau/Fru (id est "Mrs.", "madame") is an abbreviation of the name of Freyja (Germanic Fraujō). When married to (a) Freyr (priest) she was no longer just Helga, but Freyja-Helga, and she represented the goddess Freyja on Earth. Today Frau/Fru simply means "wife" or "married woman", but I dare say the widespread use of these titles bears witness to the size of this Pagan cult in the past.

The fact that the "witches" kissed the manhood of the Freyr priest, in the particular mystery I am discussing, is explained by their need to show humility in front of their god - just like Catholics today kiss the ring of the pope when they approach him (for the same reason). The Judeo-Christian accusation of child sacrifices is explained by the fact that the Freyja priestesses only wanted quality children, and therefore they removed the children with severe deficiencies, by placing them in the forest to be eaten by wolves, or something like that. They basically did what most pregnant women do today when they - if they find out there is something wrong with their unborn child - (usually) take an abortion. To a Pagan, and to all other healthy and sane human beings, the quality is all that matters.

So the covens of "witches" having sex with "Satan" were cults of love and fertility. It was an elitist cult, because only the best men were accepted as priests, and therefore the best blood of the different tribes was cultivated, unlike today. These cults were rarely large, and there were naturally many such Freyr priests all over Scandinavia and in the rest of Europe too. They were probably known as Cernunnos (-priests) in the Gaelic-speaking areas, as Veles (-priests) in the Slavonic areas, as Potrimpos (-priests) in the Baltic areas, as Dionysus (-priests) in the Greek areas, as Bacchus (-priests) in the Roman areas, et cetera.

Although these Pagan cults seemingly ceased to exist in Southern Europe as early in Antiquity, they survived in Northern Europe well into the XVIIIth century and even into the XIXth century, and because of that people like me¹ can know so much about this. We are not fooled by the lies of the Judeo-Christians, because we know the truth!

So what the Judeo-Christians call "Satanism" or "devil worship" is really our own European religion! My attraction to this must be seen in the light of this. Also my teenage will to briefly use the term "Satanist" to describe myself must be seen in this light. Yet, I have never been a "Satanist", just like our forefathers never were "Satanists" either. I am and have always been a Pagan. "Satanism" or "devil worship" as described by the Judeo-Christians has simply never existed. The belief in the existence of "Satanism" or "devil worship" is just ignorance and a result of lie-propaganda. The "witches" were murdered by the church not because they worshipped "Satan" or any other fictional Hebrew deity, but because they kept practicing our European religion, against the will of the Judeo-Christians. The only reason they stopped murdering these noble women and men is the fact that they ran out of people to burn, or they failed to find any more of them. This also explains why so many "witches" were murdered in Northern Europe and in Germany in particular, compared to the numbers murdered in Southern Europe. Southern Europe was generally speaking Christianized as much as five hundred or even a thousand years before Northern Europe and Germany, and naturally there were far more Pagans in the parts of Europe that were Christianized last. More women than men were murdered simply because there were more priestesses than priests. Each coven only had one man, but most often several women - from a few to as much as sixteen.

I don't know much about the persecution of Pagans in Europe, but I know that just like in Northern Europe Paganism remained strong in Eastern Europe for a long time, and the last bands of bards (often consisting of "crippled" people [like men with a limp...]) didn't stop spreading their lore in Russia until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. They traveled around, often like beggars, telling people stories, giving prophecies or singing songs in return for food and lodging. Many of the traditional Russian holiday songs still used in Russia are actually such songs (!).

In Norway one bard's song was recorded in the XVIIth or XVIIIth century. An old woman traveling around in Telemark came to a farm and offered to sing a song to them in return for food and lodging, as was custom. She sang 52 verses of a song that is known as Draumkvædet ("the dream song"). The song describes in detail how an initiate, Olav Åsteson (Olav, "the son of love"), travels in the spirit world in the 13 days of Yule, and meets the deities in Heaven. The song is somewhat Christianized, something the bards had to do in the Judeo-Christian era in order not to be persecuted or even murdered by the church, but it is still very interesting and descriptive. The old woman was one of the last known bards in Norway.

Paganism is not dead and we don't even need to reconstruct it. It never really died. It survived underground, in Norway and in other corners of Europe too. Like the Sun rises in the East, every morning, Paganism will rise again. The European light will inevitably banish the Asian darkness we know as Judeo-Christianity, and the pure amongst us will find the runes (id est secrets) of Óðinn. - but only if they choose to walk on the overgrown paths of our forefathers.

¹ As a curiosity I can add that my great-great-grandmother's family name was Quisling (often spelled Quisling or Qvisling), that derives from Norse Kvíslingr and translates as "branch of Ingr". Ingr (Proto-Norse InguR, Germanic Inguz) is a name of Freyr (and both "Freyr" and "Ingr" translates as "love", but it also means "lord" and "chieftain"). Naturally I do not descend from the god Freyr, but from a priest impersonating the god Freyr. (My great-great-grandmother's whole name was Susanne Malene Qisling, by the way. She was from Telemark in Norway and was born in 1811 and died in 1882).

Varg Vikernes
"Picketed and Pilloried"
(June 2005)

PS. Anybody understanding Norwegian (or rather the rustic Telemark's dialect) can get their hands on Draumkvædet in any decent library, and I think it would be worthwhile for Russian-speaking people interested in the subject to read books like Vladimir Propp's "Istoritjeskie korni velsjebnoj skazki" (Исторические корни волшебной сказки), published in Leningrad 1946, and perhaps even Olga Frejdenberg's "Poétika sjuzjeta i zjanra: period antitsjnoj literatury" (Поэтика сюжета и жанра: период античной литературы), published in Leningrad 1936. I haven't read these books myself, so naturally I am not sure if they are any good or even relevant, but they might be. German-speaking people could find some few clues in F.W. Nietzsche's "Die Geburt Der Tragödie Aus Dem Geiste Der Musik" (1872). English-speaking people could perhaps read James Frazer's "The Golden Bough". Don't expect to find any secret Pagan lore, but don't be surprised if You find something in these books that might be interesting anyhow. If You are only interested in the ancient religion and Pagan lore I will simply advice You to read my own book, "The Mysteries And Mythology Of Ancient Scandinavia", when (if?) it is published.

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