This is my review/exegesis of the French avant-garde black metal band Deathspell Omega’s output, primarily focusing on the era from 2004 to 2012 (I originally wrote this as a review of a self-titled seven-LP anthology of that material). This box set centres around three concept albums about God, the Devil, and humanity’s relation to both: Si mon­u­men­tum re­qui­res, cir­cum­spi­ce (a 2-LP set); Fas – i­te, ma­le­dic­ti, in ig­nem ae­ter­num; and Pa­ra­cle­tus. (It figures that one of my favourite bands would love Latin just as much as I do.) Also included are three LPs’ worth of additional material from the same era that the band seems to consider appendices to its trilogy.

I posted a slightly earlier version of this to Rate Your Music and much earlier (and far less complete) versions to Prog Archives and Metal Archives; I reprinted it here on 2024-08-10 as part of an ongoing effort to collect my best long-form writing in one place. I’ve made several edits to it, primarily to divide the review into sections to make it easier to read and navigate. I’ve also cut out a few extraneous words here and there, but this remains a very long review, made longer by my addition of some information that has come to light since I wrote it.

Since these are reviews of music in a niche genre that I wrote for music websites, I felt comfortable assuming my readers were familiar with some of the band’s contemporaries and with music history in general. Since this review is already around 5,000 words long, I haven’t expanded it to fill in potential gaps in readers’ knowledge, but I could be persuaded to footnote it if you ask nicely.

Although it may not be especially obvious from my own musical output (I couldn’t mimic their compositional style in a million years), Deathspell Omega are one of my three favourite musical groups of all time (alongside Genesis and Godspeed You! Black Emperor), and Fas – ite, maledicti, in ignem aeternum is probably my favourite album of all time. They also rank alongside Pink Floyd and Brian Eno in the profundity of their impact on my thinking, and The Furnaces of Palingenesia (not included in this box set) ranks alongside Ashenspire’s Hostile Architecture as the most effective musical catalogue I’ve ever heard of the modern era’s ills.

I must warn, however, that their music most assuredly isn’t for everyone; upon first listen, it’ll seem extremely harsh and dissonant to those unaccustomed to black metal and/or avant-garde music. (When asked about their influences, they tellingly cited John Coltrane first [if the connection escapes you, go listen to The Olatunji Con­cert]; their long list also included Gy­ör­gy Li­ge­ti, Krzysz­tof Pen­der­ec­ki, Ivan Wysch­ne­grad­sky, Gia­cin­to Scel­si, and Di­a­man­da Ga­lás.) Subsequent listens can reveal complex, often gorgeous melodies beneath the apparent dissonance (the word polytonality is rarely far from my mind when listening to Fas or 2016-11-08’s The Synarchy of Molten Bones), but many people won’t feel inclined to listen that much. Which, to be clear, is fine. The band’s metaphysical stances and their decision to collaborate with certain unsavoury characters, both of which I address below, can also be sticking points for some listeners. Which is also fine.

Regardless, they’re among the few modern musical acts to whom I’d, without hesitation, ascribe the term genius, and even when I’ve disagreed with them (which isn’t especially often – the most obvious example that comes to mind concerns the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper’s concept of the paradox of tolerance), I’ve found their stances to reflect defensible reasoning.

As a final note before we begin in earnest, I’ll note that I’ve endeavoured to avoid personal religious beliefs to the extent that a review of an act such as Deathspell Omega can avoid them – I think matters of religion are interesting to think about, but I suspect I don’t have the gene required to engage with them on a deeper emotional level. While I don’t believe it’s especially relevant, I suspect some readers might, so I’ll clarify that my sole convictions (calling these beliefs might be understating their severity) of any sort concerning deities are that:

1. Omnipotence is logically problematic.
2. If free will exists, omniscience is equally logically problematic (barring possibilities such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics… perhaps).
3. If deities exist, mere humans cannot possibly hope to understand them. (In case anyone finds it ironic that I linked an article about quantum physics immediately before discussing what humans cannot possibly hope to understand, I must clarify that I did that entirely on purpose. Quantum physics actually is potentially comprehensible, but it does require clearing dualistic thoughts from one’s mind: you’ll never understand it if you can’t understand how, e.g., a photon can exist as both a wave and a particle at once.)

In short, I’m agnostic: I neither believe nor disbelieve in the existence of deities themselves, and I hear the jury’s still out on science free will. But stance γ, at least, seems not entirely dissimilar from Deathspell Omega’s.

Feel free to contact me with questions, praise, constructive criticism, job offers, etc.

I’ll preface this by advising readers to sit down: this review is some 4,000 words long. But then, a review of nearly five hours of fantastic music with dense, philosophical lyrics has to be long to do proper justice to its subject.

I’m primarily reviewing a vinyl box set treatment of one of the twenty-first century’s most essential black metal bands that collects all their finest work up to its release date (2012-07-09). Picture discs’ fidelity is frequently lambasted, but much of the material here (namely, the contents of the first four discs) seems to have been separately mastered for vinyl, and certainly sounds substantially better than the typically brickwalled CD versions. It was also extremely reasonably priced when it went on sale, retailing for US$111, a shockingly low price for a seven-LP set, though second-hand vinyl’s price inflation means you’ll no doubt have to pay quite a lot more now.

Since Deathspell Omega write lyrics first and regard words and music as equal in importance, I’ll be addressing their lyrics and ideology before their music. But since it’s 2024, I’m starting with the matter of the band’s (presumed) membership. I say “presumed” because Deathspell Omega’s proud tradition of anonymity makes almost everything about their membership a matter of conjecture – thus the credits above.

In any case, if I were extremely generous, I’d say their presumed lead vocalist throughout this collection, Mikko Aspa, is not a particularly pleasant person – if I were extremely generous. But he also doesn’t write the music or lyrics. (Starting with “Chaining the Katechon”, there’s clearly a second vocalist on many of these tracks. The most common hypothesis for said vocalist is S.V.E.S.T.’s Spica. I must stress that neither Aspa nor Spica have ever been confirmed by any official source as having contributed to any Deathspell Omega track, but Aspa’s involvement in particular is generally treated as an open secret, owing to his distinctive vocal style.)

Presumably in reference to the controversy of Aspa’s presumed involvement, the French core of the band have indicated in interviews that they find it productive to work with people with whom they disagree ideologically, since they believe ideological conflict is beneficial to art. I’m not sure I agree with their stance on this, but I at least can respect it. (I’ll link to the band’s three most recent interviews in the “lyrics & ideology” section.)

Due to Deathspell Omega’s general secretiveness, no one knows for sure who’s speaking in their interviews. The most common hypothesis is guitarist Hasjarl, real name Christian Bouché, who has been listed on several streaming sites as their lyricist for several years, thus making him the only band member whose participation received any level of official confirmation from around 2002 to around 2019.

The bassist is believed to go by the pseudonym of Khaos and is suggested on Metal Archives to have been a past live member of Japanese band Barbatos, and the drummer is believed to be Hasjarl’s brother, but only they know for sure. Until Apple Music temporarily credited their songwriting to “Christian Bouché, Deathspell Omega, Stephane Bouché, Sylvain Ranger”, we didn’t even have conjectured names for the drummer or bass player. I ordinarily wouldn’t even bother listing hearsay, but I’m inclined to do so for the following reasons:

1. While a streaming service is a strange source to leak the band members’ identities, it’s also a relatively credible one – the residuals for plays of their music have to go to the songwriters, and someone has to have a record of that somewhere.
2. If true, it also all but confirms the above rumour about two band members being relatives. It isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility that they’re related in some way besides being siblings. (The likelihood that they’re unrelated and coincidentally share a surname strikes me as considerably smaller.)
3. As closely as they guarded their identities for some two decades, I also suspect they’d be the last people to ask for this information to be erased now that it’s out – given how much they know about technology, I suspect they could probably give an impromptu TED talk about the Streisand effect.

It is, in any case, reasonable to conclude that three people are primarily or entirely responsible for the instrumental performances; Deathspell Omega have repeatedly cited a “core power trio” as being responsible for their songwriting, lyrics, and instrumentation. They’ve also referred to a core group of musicians based in France and a “second circle” of musical collaborators – not to mention the video evidence: on 2024-01-09, they posted rehearsal footage of the core trio practising “The Fires of Frustration” through their label’s YouTube channel. Although it isn’t possible to see their faces, it’s very clear that a single guitarist, a single bassist, and a single drummer are producing all the sounds heard on the recording.

A final name worth mentioning here is fellow Poitiers musician Franck Hueso (of synth­wave / elec­tro house act Carpenter Brut): Ghost’s Tobias Forge cited him as Deathspell Omega’s producer.

In the following thousand words or so, I’ll do my best to summarise the lyrical gist of the last eighteen years of recorded music and the contents of nearly sixteen thousand words in two interviews, but you’ll get a much clearer and fuller picture by reading the band’s own words – I’m omitting a lot by necessity.

For more on this, and a broader understanding of their ideology more generally, I strongly recommend reading at least the band’s June 2019 interview with Bardo Methodology’s Niklas Göransson, its December 2019 follow-up, and their 2020 interview with Cult Never Dies’ Roy Kristensen in their entirety, plus the lyrics to all their releases since at least Si monumentum, and the fable for The Long Defeat. If you have the patience to read a review this long, you may as well read some even longer interviews with one (?) of the smartest people in metal revealing what makes him (?) tick in unprecedented levels of detail. Even where I don’t agree with him (?) (and that’s not all that frequently), his (?) reasoning is at least engaging and thought-provoking. (The question marks are necessary because of the band’s anonymity.)

Regardless, DsO have repeatedly said their largest literary influence by far is the French Marxist Georges Bataille, an ardent critic of totalitarianism of all stripes who wrote several essays deconstructing the psychological mindset behind fascism. This was a major influence on the band’s 2019-05-24 album The Furnaces of Palingenesia, which stood alone as the sharpest musical catalogue I’d heard of the modern era’s ills until Ashenspire released Hostile Architecture on 2022-07-18 (which now ties it; see my review here). DsO have cited as a central goal:

“to shatter a myth that’s so central to stability both on an individual and civilisational level: the impervious necessity to believe that what we do is just, that we are just, that good and evil in intent and deed are as distinct as night and day. That what we do is condoned either by God or whatever man-made order that’s taken precedence – whose exceptionalism is of course indisputable and acts like a secular religion. Those who missed the religious nature of the ideology of progress, nationalism, Marxism, basically any discourse based on a human collective from an essentialist point of view, up to Milton Fried­man’s approach to capitalism and the potential of a good narrative to befuddle the masses, Pied Piper of Hamelin-style – haven’t been paying much attention to their surroundings. In short, one of the questions emerging at the end of the process reads as follows: how much have YOU already surrendered to the Devil? How many of the depicted mechanisms have YOU unconsciously made your own, thus how infected and corrupt are YOU? People often greatly overestimate their innocence – the louder the virtue signalling, the higher the odds – but it takes a frank and courageous character to admit to that.”

The antecedent here is ambiguous: they might merely mean Furnaces, but I take them to mean the totality of their work; and if we do so, this passage reframes this box set’s contents in quite a different light and makes DsO’s shift in subject matter with Furnaces feel far less sudden. They’ve called their work since Si monumentum:

“our Summa Diabolica, based on the idea behind Bataille’s Somme athéologique, which itself was an answer to Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.”

If the last of these effectively argued for man’s godliness, then Deathspell Omega are making the exact opposite argument: humanity is not godly or even benevolent.

In short, their argument within the contents of this box set has been interpreted as an endorsement of malevolence, but I think that’s a severe misreading. I read their intention not as prescription but as diagnosis. They’re not saying, “This is what should be,” but rather, “This is what is.”

Their second-largest literary influence, Marquis de Sade, is another tell. Sade remains a controversial, sometimes problematic writer whose work has been subject to numerous widely varying interpretations, but few literary critics believe he’s endorsing his characters’ depravity. His political writings – the vast majority of which aren’t easily available in English – make his better-known fiction come across very differently and the term sadism as nothing less than defamatory. Sade stood on the far-left of the French Revolution and supported a property-free utopia, making him a sort of proto-anarcho-communist. In this context, his writings thus read not as endorsing his characters’ depravity, but as condemning a system that allows the rich and powerful to get away with all kinds of untold abuses, up to and including rape, torture, and murder. (That said, Sade was himself accused of numerous abuses. It remains unclear how many he truly committed, if any.)

Their 2022-03-23 album The Long Defeat’s fable may provide further context here. The Devil, in one of his more sincere moments (and paraphrasing arguments the band have made throughout their interviews), says:

“You revel in inequity. Inequity is your womb! How dare you even speak? Your hand has been too busy casting stones when, all the while, it should’ve covered your shameful face. Yes, I saw you! What you call civilisation is merely a fleeting attempt at taming the primordial beast. As you cannot fend off that ageless urge, how sly you are to channel it instead!” He pauses. “And even so, your entire species is a miser when it comes to mercy. It extends no further than what you have within your immediate sight. You are the direct descendant of perpetual discord. When your kind tries to impose sense upon the absurd, it is carried out through hierarchy. And since your hierarchies are ironclad, it must be enforced with arms. Tribe, class, caste, creed… words worth their weight in gold to whomever acquires a taste for blood and tears. Golden keys to swing wide open the very gates of Hell.”

Between The Long Defeat, The Furnaces of Palingenesia, and their most recent published interviews, Deathspell Omega have rejected violent revolution, capitalism, communism, the state, and hierarchy itself. The only political philosophy that does not endorse at least one of these things is nonviolent anarchism, and in condemning the inequities in human society, the hierarchies that cause them, and our species’ history of enforcing the latter through violence, the Devil is making a textbook anarchist argument – and, since it mirrors several statements in Deathspell Omega’s interviews, it’s one their core members clearly agree with.

Deathspell Omega’s core argument in this collection, I would posit, is thus along the lines: We’ve historically treated (and still treat) the natural environment (more on this when I discuss Drought) and each other like dirt, yet we persist in seeing ourselves as the heroes of our own stories and our species as benevolent. We need to stop both of these; these illusions actually make us worse people. To make positive changes, we must first recognise and accept the need to do so – which in turn means admitting to our own faults. Of course, Deathspell Omega also express deep scepticism that any such changes are forthcoming, a scepticism I must admit I share.

The latter deserves further discussion. It samples in full a performance by the Monks of Chevetogne from their release La Divine Liturgie of Rentarō Taki’s (Kanji: 滝 廉太郎) “Kōjō no Tsuki” (Kanji: 「荒城の月」; English: “The Moon Over the Ruined Castle”) with words from the Hymn of the Cherubim. Père Maxime Gimenez, the Monks of Chevetogne’s musical director, made the unusual decision to pair a Japanese Meiji-era song with Old Church Slavonic words. He commented in the liner notes of a collection of arrangements of “Kōjō no Tsuki” (machine translated from Japanese, then cleaned up a bit⁽¹⁾):

“The choice to pair Japanese music and the Byzantine-Slavic liturgy may seem somewhat arbitrary and bold. But no external, formal criteria can determine whether such music is sacred. Often, it is enough to follow a heartfelt feeling to discern the universal and religious character of a work’s aesthetic conception. Examining the musical essence of the melody of ‘The Moon over the Ruined Castle’ in this way leads us to feel that it has the pure, straightforward footprint of the great artists’ sketches. Above all, its melody is in tune with the deepest movements of the soul: without using words, it proclaims the graceful nostalgia that constitutes the Japanese spiritual delicacy, and the graceful humility and modesty that show the way to love all things.”

Even after the butchery I’m sure Google Translate has done to it, that quote strikes me as beautiful.

The chant is deservedly one of the album’s most iconic moments – one of black metal’s most iconic moments, in fact; in the context of the album, it’s absolutely heartbreaking (though some listeners also reportedly find it frightening, especially its ending). It’s one of many reasons SMRC is a landmark album in the field of black metal whose stature has only grown with time. “Carnal Malefactor” in particular remains a career highlight.

(If you’re curious about the sources of other samples on the album, /r/DeathspellOmega’s wiki has you covered for several of them; it also includes citations for many other literary sources to which the band refers.)

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2005-05-08: Kénôse

That said, DsO arguably surpassed SMRC as a whole almost immediately: they quickly followed it up in 2005 with an additional two LPs’ worth of material between the EP Kénôse (French for kenosis, derived from the Greek κένωσις, a doctrine in Christian theology referring to Jesus’ “emptying himself”) and two side-length pieces that were released on split albums the same year. Kénôse, released 2005-05-08, is even more dissonant and complex than SMRC, and shows the band’s growing musical maturity. It’s also philosophically more sophisticated than the band’s previous works, showcasing a thorough examination of Christian redemption.

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2005-07-11: “Diabolus absconditus”

The next LP in the collection, also released as a standalone LP, collects two side-length pieces from the same era. The first, the twenty-two-minute “Diabolus absconditus” (Latin: “Hidden Devil”; first released on 2005-07-11’s six-way split Crushing the Holy Trinity) lyrically examines existentialism and the concept of Deus absconditus (Latin: Hidden God, the idea that God is unknowable or has abandoned the world) while musically it alternates between blasting dissonance and, oddly, a lengthy acoustic guitar segment accompanied by whispered vocals. The band gives “credit for tremendous revelation […] in all humility” to the French surrealist Georges Bataille, whom they’ve been citing as their largest literary influence for over two decades; many of its lyrics are verbatim quotes from his works. It effectively see-saws between existentialism and pornography that is played more for horror than for titillation, which is roughly par for the course where Bataille is concerned.

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2005-05-31: “Mass Grave Aesthetics”

“Mass Grave Aesthetics” (first released on 2005-05-31’s four-way split From the Entrails to the Dirt) does the least for me lyrically of all the pieces in this set, but makes up for it musically with one of the band’s finest compositions to date; arguably, it’s black metal’s closest equivalent to Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” (from Meddle).

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2007-2008: The Trilogy, Part II

2007-07-16: Fas – ite, maledicti, in ignem aeternum

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2008-12-08: “Chaining the Katechon”

The band fol­lowed this up with the EP “Chain­ing the Ka­te­chon” (in­clu­ded on LP 7 so as not to break up Pa­ra­cle­tus ac­ross two LPs, also re­leased as a split with fel­low tra­vel­lers S.V.E.S.T. called Ve­ri­tas di­a­bo­li ma­net in ae­ter­num, La­tin for The De­vil’s Truth Re­mains in E­ter­ni­ty). Once ag­ain, DsO con­trib­utes a twen­ty-two min­ute slab of head-spin­ning black me­tal, and this time ar­ound, they ex­plode out of the gate. The EP large­ly main­tains the sty­le of Fas, though it’s slight­ly less dis­so­nant and lacks Fas’ al­most in­au­di­ble pas­sa­ges. The EP also clo­ses with clean sing­ing, a ra­ri­ty for Death­spell. An­oth­er strong work from re­li­ab­le black me­tal stal­warts.

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2010-2012: The Trilogy, Part III

2010-11-08: Paracletus

This col­lec­tion’s fi­nal full-length al­bum, Pa­ra­cle­tus (a La­tin­ised form of the Greek πα­ρά­κλη­τος or pa­rá­klē­tos, mean­ing pa­ra­clete, com­for­ter, or ad­vo­cate), looks from the track list like it sim­pli­fies the band’s sound some­what, which to a cer­tain ex­tent is true re­la­tive to Fas, but ap­pear­an­ces can al­so be de­cei­ving, as it’s es­sen­tial­ly two slabs of con­tin­u­ous mu­sic av­er­ag­ing rough­ly twen­ty-one min­utes each. The al­bum is slight­ly more me­lo­dic than Fas, and the riffs are slight­ly sim­pler, but this is no prim­i­tive Dark­throne worship here. (Though if you want not-so-prim­i­tive Dark­throne wor­ship, this set still has you cov­ered: Ké­nô­se’s “III” opens with a light­speed trib­ute to Tran­sil­va­nian Hun­ger’s ti­tle track.) You’re still get­ting mu­sic­al­ly and in­tel­lect­u­al­ly so­phis­ti­ca­ted mu­sic of the high­est or­der. Poin­ting out track high­lights is es­sen­tial­ly point­less, though the clos­ing track “Ap­o­ka­ta­sta­sis pan­tôn” (an­cient Greek: “Ἀπ­ο­κα­τά­στᾰ­σις πάν­των”, mean­ing “Re­birth of Ev­er­y­thing”) bears men­tion for its sub­stan­tial­ly more me­lo­dic, al­most post-rock take on black me­tal; it is one of se­ve­ral tracks pre­sag­ing the di­rec­tion of The Long De­feat some twelve years la­ter. A ca­reer high­light for sure.

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2012-06-22: Drought

The band’s most recent EP (by recording date, at least), Drought, closes out the set. Like Paracletus, this one consists mostly of continuous music (there are brief gaps between a few sets of tracks here) and musically, this may be the lightest material on this set. Their music barely has anything left in common with traditional black metal by this point, but that’s hardly worth complaining about when what’s here is so good. The band fills every proper song with truly mind-boggling riffs, and the album’s intro and outro are unique in their catalogue, with the former sounding like a mix between Led Zeppelin and Earth and the latter including a particularly nice groove on the bass guitar. As the band themselves have commented, the EP’s lyrical concept is an allegory for humanity’s self-destructive treatment of its natural environment, a topic they’ve addressed perhaps even more overtly on their three albums (as of this writing) since its release.

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Conclusion

I can’t recommend this box set highly enough to anyone attuned to its vision. The music is flawless, and my only complaints with its presentation are that it wasn’t pressed on black or clear vinyl, and that the last three discs aren’t remastered for vinyl. Still, those are minor complaints, especially since its price tag when it was released was startlingly low given how much music it contains (US$111 + shipping for nearly five hours of music on vinyl is a hard price to beat – of course, given the inflation of second-hand vinyl prices, good luck getting it that cheaply now). This band’s work has been a landmark in the field of black metal, and this box set collects the best of it up to the time of its release. Unconditionally recommended for anyone remotely into heavy, experimental music.

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The Obligatory Latin (and Greek) Appendix

“If you’ll seek a monument, look around”

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Deī nostrī templum terrārum [orbis/orbum?] est

Si mon­u­men­tum re­qui­res, cir­cum­spi­ce’s final track, “Malign Paradigm” (an instrumental cover of Swedish black metal band Malign’s “Ashes and Bloodstench”, incidentally) is associated with the phrase “Dei nostri templum terrarum orbus est,” often seen translated as “The house and church of our Lord is childless.” This is also wrong; none of these words mean house. Possible translations include:

1. “The temple of our Lord’s lands is (bereaved, childless, orphaned, widowed, destitute),” correctly written “Dei nostri templum terrarum orbum est” – orbus (which has several possible meanings) should be neuter to match templum.
2. “The temple of our Lord is Earth,” correctly written “Deī nostrī templum terrārum orbis est” – terrārum orbis or orbis terrārum (literally orb of the lands) is a common phrase meaning Earth.
3. My crackpot theory, however, is that they mean both; thus, both seeming mistakes are intentional sources of ambiguity. It’s easy to imagine the core band members agreeing with either statement: antinatalism seems right in line with their philosophy, given the pessimism they’ve expressed about humanity’s future; and they’ve also made it plain that they think nature is the closest thing on this planet left to a divine experience. Their few expressions of genuine enthusiasm or optimism in their interviews relate mostly to:
   1. artistic endeavours (especially, but not exclusively, music), and
   2. mountaineering.

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Other Latin Phrases

• “Sōla fidē” is sometimes translated as “only faith”, but it uses the ablative case (which has no direct equivalent in English), so a more accurate translation is “by faith alone” or “with faith alone”. Deathspell Omega cite James 2:20 (from the King James Version, of course) to rebut the idea that faith alone can earn salvation: “Wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?”
• “Odium nostrum” can mean “our hatred”, “our being hated”, or “the object of our hatred”, since odium means hatred (the abstract concept), the condition of being hated, and (metonymically) an object of hatred. It can also mean, in weaker senses, boredom, weariness, or impatience.
• The band helpfully translates “Jūbilāte Deō” in the subtitle of the song: “O Be Joyful in the Lord”. This is an entirely defensible (albeit archaic – thus, perfectly in keeping with the rest of the album’s lyrics) translation, though we should note that the command is in the plural form. Iūbilō translates as I sing or shout joyfully or I cheer; Deō is the dative/ablative singular of Deus, meaning God. (The dative case is often, though not always, comparable to an indirect object in English.) Thus, it means roughly rejoice to God.
• “Diabolus absconditus”, meaning “hidden devil”, is a play on the concept of Deus absconditus, or hidden God, which posits that God is now unknowable owing to humanity’s sinful nature causing him to abandon the world. Deathspell Omega later used this as a major concept of Drought.
• Fās – īte, maledictī, in īgnem aeternum means Divine Law – Depart, Ye Cursed, into Everlasting Fire. All of this except Fās comes from the Vulgate translation of Matthew 25:41 (part of the Sheep and the Goats); at the risk of stating the obvious, I’ve used the King James Version’s English translation (nothing else would aesthetically match Deathspell Omega’s language so perfectly). Note that īte is a clipping of discēdite (which the KJV translates as “depart from me”) and is again plural.
• Paraclētus is a Latinized form of the Ancient Greek παράκλητος (romanized: paráklētos), meaning advocate, comforter, protector, defender, or one called to help. The English form of the word is paraclete. It is commonly used as a reference to the Holy Ghost.

The blog Heavy Latin has far more on the band’s use of Latin on Si monumentum, Kénôse, Fas, and Paracletus.

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Ancient Greek Words & Phrases

• “Hétoïmasia” (Greek: ἑτοιμασία) means “preparation” and is commonly used to mean preparing the throne of Jesus Christ for the Second Coming.
• Kénôse is French for kenosis (Greek: κένωσις; romanized: kénosis), meaning “emptying”. It refers to a controversial theological preposition about Jesus “emptying himself”. The less controversial meaning is that he simply emptied his desires; the more controversial proposition is that he actually became human in order to experience life as a mortal. Deathspell Omega explicitly address this theological controversy on the EP.
• An epiclesis (Greek: ἑπίκλησης, romanized: epíklēsis) is an invocation, especially a prayer invoking the Holy Spirit in the context of the Eucharist so as to transsubstantiate bread and wine.
• “Apokatastasis pantôn” (Greek: “Ἀποκατάστᾰσις πάντων”; English: apocatastasis of all things) means “restoration of all things”, which can have two specific meanings:
  1. Restoration of all things to a condition of perfection. In Christianity, this means a form of universalism that teaches the ultimate salvation of everyone, including the damned and the Devil. Acts 3:21 uses this exact phrase, though it is not usually understood as teaching universal salvation. However, some Eastern Orthodox fathers, such as Gregory of Nyssa, taught apocatastasis and were never condemned. Nowadays, this is the more common usage of the term.
  2. An apocalypse that leads to the remaking of the world rather than a Final Judgement.
  Ironically, the Synod of Constantinople condemned both these meanings in 543 CE.
• The phrase κλέος ἄφθιτον, found in “Standing on the Work of Slaves”, means, as the band suggests in the song, immortal glory. (It’s usually romanized as kléos áphthiton, but kléos áfthiton is both less ugly and far less confusing. [Don’t even get me started on diphthong, ophthalmology, Nephthys, etc., constantly being mispronounced and misspelled – if you pronounce any of those words with a p, you’re pronouncing it wrong. The ph is pronounced f. Romanizing φθ as phth is Objectively Bad Orthography – far too often, people’s brains simply refuse to process the first h because it looks like a mistake.])
• “Enantiodromia” is derived from the Greek ἐναντιοδρομίας, enantiodromias, a compound word meaning opposite running course that was apparently coined by Johannes Stobaeus in Eclogarum physicarum et ethicarum (Late Latin meaning roughly Of Excerpts of Natural and Moral Philosophy) to refer to a central concept of Heraclitus’ philosophy regarding the tendency of things to turn into their opposites, especially in the absence of balance. More recently, Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung re-popularized the concept.

I should note: while I know enough Latin to be dangerous, I’m by no means fluent (to the extent that one can be fluent in a language with no native speakers). I could perhaps start a fight, but certainly not an entire war with Carthage. By contrast, I barely even know enough Greek to be dangerous to myself.

—	Aaron Freed 2016-02-01 (updated 2022-07-30, 2024-08-10, 2024-09-04, & 2024-10-09)

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Endnotes

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Note

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Original text: 「ビザンツ－スラブ典礼という背景において日本の旋律を選んだことは，少なからず恣意的かつ大胆に見えるかも知れない．しかしいかなる外的，形式的基準も，こうした音楽が神聖であるか否かを決めることなどできない．ある作品の美的着想において，その普遍的・宗教的特性を形成するものを見分けるためには，ある心からの感性に従うだけで足りることがままあるものだ．こうして「荒城の月」の旋律の音楽的本質を吟味してみると，画家の偉大なスケッチのように純粋で率直な足跡を持っているいるように感じられる．なによりも，この旋律は魂の深い動きに合っている．そして，日本の精神的繊細さをなす優雅な郷愁を，またあらゆるものの愛で方を示す優雅な謙虚さや慎みを，言葉を用いずに告げている．」 Please contact me if you speak Japanese well enough to supply a better translation. If I barely know enough Greek to be a danger to myself (see directly above), I definitely don’t know even that much Japanese.

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