== Black Easter ==

Everyone has their weird traditions, one of my Easter traditions calls for listening to a few songs, among them Black Easter by Sol Invictus. This year I decided to listen to the song carefully and talk a bit about the lyrics and the following came out:

The song, from the album Lex Talionis (1989), starts off with a sample from the film "the curse of the demon" on the nature of occult powers, which the practitioner wants to attribute to the "power of the mind".
This effectively starts the song by rejecting a purely materialistic world view, and by suggesting that the aspects of life we attribute to the occult can- or should not be completely dismissed out of hand, nor should we look upon them with certainty; neither the certainty of a skeptic, nor the certainty of an adherent of a particular practice of faith. In essence it posits that we should embrace the ambiguity inherent to words like "darkness".
In its full context however (that is the whole movie) this message is somewhat undermined.

After this introduction the song starts in earnest with rather poetic lyrics.

> descending then ascending
> the fall then the call
> climb ever upward
> to join the world once more
> see the serpents rising
> angels on a chain
> come to meet together
> come to make their claim
>
> black Easter
>
> hear the chants of old powers
> the weak fall on their swords
> nature is above all morals
> destiny a shameless whore
> fallen angels, like black flowers
> bloom and are ripe
> gather round the lords and princes
> the bringer of a promised light
>
> black Easter
>
> God is dead
>
> we take death out of the village
> we bring summer into the village

To understand the central theme, it is worth expositing a bit non the term "black Easter".  This is a christian-occultist belief on the Antichrist as the opposite to Christ, in every possible way, in the same vein as satanists would supposedly have "black masses" as a mockery of the christian mass and Eucharist, some people believe that the black-Easter would be the end-times undoing of the divine redemption of Christ bestowed upon all humanity in the narrative of Easter.
This is portrayed in the first four verses:

> descending then ascending
> the fall then the call
> climb ever upward
> to join the world once more

Just as the fall of Satan (in the most mythical sense) can be said to have been completed in the redemptive act of Jesus' crucifixion, which would have mythically locked away sin in hell, it stands to reason due to the proliferation of sin in the post-crucifixion period that Satan would have thus begun an immediate climb back into the world with the ultimate intent to undermine the Easter in a black Easter.
The second part of the first stanza, reinforces this image further implying the intentions of Satan of staking his claim upon the world.

> see the serpents rising
> angels on a chain
> come to meet together
> come to make their claim

The only confounding element here, "angels on a chain" alludes either to the subservience of evil in the form of fallen angels to the power of the devil, or that this is in essence an act of rebellion against a nepotistic despot (God).
The second stanza starts by introducing a less literal challenger to the dominion of God in the form of the "old powers".

> hear the chants of old powers
> the weak fall on their swords
> nature is above all morals
> destiny a shameless whore

These "old powers" naturally allude to pagan religions, and the cult of nature, after all time is part of nature, and famously time defeats everything, in this way it foreshadows the very literal death of God proclaimed later, but I'll exposit on that when we get there. The second part of the stanza now echoes the second part of the first stanza and forms its culmination.

> fallen angels, like black flowers
> bloom and are ripe

Here, we go back to the central theme of the song, reinforcing the image of rising fallen angels, followed by what is ultimately the most ambiguous half stanza in the song.

> gather round the lords and princes
> the bringer of a promised light

Namely the use of the expression "the bringer of the promised light" in the song. This can either be directed at Jesus himself, or at Satan. The ambiguity is only reinforced by the previous sentence "gather round the lords and princes" since these are representatives of human power structures which are often seen in Christianity as opponents of God, but also have been throughout history the mouthpieces of Christianity itself, coercing people with force into the religion.

Finally the song climaxes in one famous sentence:

> God is dead

This is I hope is clear, is not the same "God is dead" as Nietzsche's "God is dead, and we killed him". Whereas Nietzsche was simply stating the fact that the centrality of religion in human life is no longer justified, that the old societal structures were due a lot of rethinking. Here "God is dead" serves as a call to the death of centralized organized religion itself.
Simultaneous to this repeated call, the chant:

> we take death out of the village
> we bring summer into the village

Is uttered repeatedly proposing what should take the place of the dead God we have on our hands. This is a chant directly lifted from "the wicker man" and is a call to a revival of paganism in the modern world. In this context we carry death (the christian God) out of the village (out of centers of spiritual practice) and bring summer (nature-centric spirituality) into the village (ibid.).

Sun Apr 17 2022 (Easter Sunday).