Did Satan become a musician? Is Black Metal really Satan's music?

RESCHEDULED!  June 13th.  Guests MUST RSVP to ronni@themidnightarchive.com - very limited seating available - Live Streaming will also be available (same date and time) on The Midnight Archive facebook page.

Massimo Introvigne, who devoted an important part of his monumental book Satanism: A Social History (Brill 2016) to Black Metal, will guide us into a multimedia experience about Satanism and music, starting before Black Metal with the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil and Coven's Satanic Mass. Subgenres of Heavy Metal are different, and references to Satan started in non-Black Metal groups such as Black Sabbath, Slayer, and Deicide.The origins of Balck Metal date back to the British band Venom. Some groups had real contacts with Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, including Mercyful Fate, Hellhammer, and Beherit. TheBlack Metal then became globalized, with examples from such unlikely countries as Morocco and Saudi Arabia. A second wave of Black Metal originated in Norway with groups such as Mayhem and Burzum, which repudiated LaVey's humanistic Satanism in favor of an aggressive "anti-cosmic" worship of Satan as the god of hate, death, and destruction. Some bands got involved in criminal activities and leading musicians killed each other. Others, like Gorgoroth, created scandal with extreme Satanic shows or had connections with neo-Nazism, in Poland and elsewhere. In France, Les Légions Noires tried a secretive and short-lived experiment of communal Satanist living in a remote forest. In some countries, the satanic Black Metal became strictly connected with new Satanist movements, including the Swedish Temple of the Black Light, of which the band Dissection was for several years the musical arm. Finally, some Black Metal groups replaced Satanism with Nordic neo-Paganism and others became so mainstream that one, Satyricon, did a concert with the Norwegian National Opera. Was all this real Satanism or just Satan's sideshow? It was both, but in some cases Satanism was very much real.

Massimo Introvigne is a professor of Sociology in Torino, Italy  and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR). In 2011, he served as Representative for Combating Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians and members of other religions of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of which the U.S. are also a member. He is the author of some sixty books about religious pluralism and esotericism, including the monumental Satanism: A Social History (Brill 2016), and of more than one hundred articles in academic publications.