Confessions Of A Heretic: The Sacred And The Profane: Behemoth And Beyond

by Adam Nergal Darski

  It’s not like I can’t sleep at night because of him; I really sleep well, and I keep doing my stuff. Maybe I even attracted some new fans thanks to him—because, let’s be honest, not a lot of people promote us as efficiently as he does. What hurts me, though, is that he makes profit on it. I just hate parasites. He’s not even my enemy, because I respect my enemies. I can only imagine if it was, say, the journalist Szymon Holownia on the other side of the barricade, I would have a much bigger problem. He’s as zealous as Nowak is, but at the same time he is intelligent and well prepared. Of course, I’m speaking purely theoretically here, because people like him don’t go to court because of a video on the internet.

  But Nowak’s issue was not just with the Bible. He also suggested that you are a member of a sect. Do you belong to any religious movement?

  No.

  Then maybe Behemoth’s fans are part of a sect?

  We have all kinds of fans.

  We have a test for you. Here are some tips on how to recognise a sect. We downloaded them from the website of one of the archdioceses. Here they are.

  1. As little as one contact with the group causes the worldview to change. Do you try to screw with your fans’ heads?

  I tell them that they have to open their hearts to Jesus Christ, because only then they will see the world as it truly is.

  Surely you’re being ironic?

  What else am I supposed to do? Of course I screw with my fans’ heads. I give them a simple message: don’t believe any revealed truths, and don’t trust my words, either. Think for yourself.

  2. A sect gives a simple view of the world that explains everything.

  I never told anybody that there is only good and evil, and I don’t teach about how the world began and how it will end. There are as many explanations of the world as there are people living on this planet.

  3. In the group, the follower will find everything he’s been looking for.

  I can only offer a good show—a bit of rock’n’roll and some lyrics that make you think. If somebody’s looking for a new family, then maybe he should turn to the Holy Ghost, not Behemoth.

  4. A sect claims that the world is heading toward destruction, and that only the group knows how to save it.

  Not that long ago I saw a protest march on TV. There were people who wanted to save the world from destruction with prayer. They had a banner saying ‘We are the nation. They are Nergal’s homies.’

  5. The group rejects science, and only its own science is the source of real knowledge.

  The world was created in seven days, dinosaurs are dragons, and three days after you die, you can rise from the dead. All my fans will tell you that.

  More irony. 6. A sect rejects rational thinking.

  How am I supposed not to be ironic? I’m not the one telling my fans they have to believe in order to understand.

  7. Criticism and rejection by those who are not part of the group prove that the group is right.

  It’s all about those guys with banners again. If somebody does not agree with them, he’s either Jewish, a member of the Masonic Lodge, or the devil himself. And if a Jew does not agree with them, then they’re obviously right. Next you’re gonna ask me if I limit the sex life of my fans in any way, and if I have made some commandments up for them to follow if they want to be saved …

  That’s right. That was the next question!

  I’ll give you a summary answer. I would love all my fans to search the internet for a tutorial on how to recognise a sect, read it carefully, and to draw their own conclusions. I’m not saying what kind of conclusions. I believe in the intelligence of people who like my music.

  Do you still think that the church is ‘the biggest and most maleficent sect’ in the world’s history?

  I repeat: I believe in the intelligence of my fans.

  That’s what you said during one of your concerts in Gdynia, where you tore up the Bible.

  I did.

  What was your reaction to that first lawsuit accusing you of blasphemy for tearing up a Bible?

  At first, it didn’t really make any impression on me. I didn’t realise how serious it was. Only later did I realise that you could indeed be punished for voicing your opinions or for an artistic performance. I still don’t get it. Luckily, the court didn’t get it either. There were two judgements in this trial, both of them acquittals. Maybe Poland is a country of justice after all.

  Your ex-girlfriend, Doda, was convicted for saying that the Bible was written under the influence of drugs.

  That shook me up a bit. It turned out that the courts view things differently. Apparently a judge is a man, too. One follows the common reason; the other doesn’t even have it.

  You tore up a Bible, but you won’t say it was written on drugs?

  I’ve read quite a few dissertations on drugs’ role in religion’s development. There are substantial authorities that claim that any belief in a supernatural world is a result of using drugs. I also read about Professor Benny Shanon, from a university in Jerusalem, who examined the Bible and its history in great detail. He also analysed the plants that used to grow in the desert where the Israelites wandered. One of these plants was Peganum harmala, which had strong psychedelic effects. In one of the psalms, you can also hear about Mandragora being used as a medicine for potency …

  Did you tell Doda about this?

  No. She read it somewhere herself, and she said it out loud at the first possible opportunity. She was actually quite direct about it. That’s her style. She’ll just throw it in everyone’s face to see what might happen. Everybody knows that, so the biggest bullshit about all that is the fact that anyone was even bothered by it.

  Should the law secure religious beliefs anyway?

  No.

  Not even yours?

  It doesn’t matter what you believe. Faith is always individual. If there are people who get easily offended by what other people say, then what is the basis of their faith? It’s got to be pretty fragile if they’re afraid of mere words.

  You could lose your head for blasphemy in Islamic culture.

  I don’t know Islamic culture. I was born in Poland, which is a Catholic country, not Muslim.

  You destroyed a copy of the Bible, yet you won’t touch the Koran. ‘Nergal’s got no balls’, they’ll say.

  I fight what I know. By similar logic, you could say that if I speak English, then I should also speak Chinese. And if I can’t, then I’m a wimp?

  But it is easier to fight a religion of love than warring with Islam.

  It’s a nasty stereotype to say that this is a religion of love. It’s just like saying that communism is a policy of equality. For me, both of them are totalitarian systems. It’s just that Christianity is about the soul and communism was about property. What does it matter if an ideology has good intentions? It’s not about the basics, but the real performance. Polish Catholicism is an ideology of aversion to everything that is different, not a religion of love.

  Aren’t you going too far by comparing the two?

  The similarities between red totalitarianism and Christianity are obvious. The former changed the names of the cities: Petersburg became Leningrad; Volgograd became Stalingrad. The latter annexed gods and changed them into saints. They took pagan celebrations: Christmas instead of Sun’s birth. Easter? This word comes from the name of a pagan goddess, Ishtar.

  Take a look at history. When Christianity stepped on the ground of another culture, they did exactly what the Bolsheviks later did in 1939. Conquistadors were conquerors. It was not about God but about power. People were exterminated, and scorched earth was left behind.

  But that was a long time ago. You don’t really hear about Catholic terrorists today.

  For the time being they make do with spitting venom and cursing, but for how long? I’ve been getting threats online for a long time. I don’t get them from Muslims; I get them from Catholics. I can never be sure if one day they’ll replace words with actions.

&nbs
p; Not that long ago, there was this incident at a concert in Rzeszów. There was a girl wandering around the hotel from early in the morning. She badly wanted to meet me. I was busy; I didn’t have time to talk to fans that day. I thought she just wanted to take a picture with me and maybe get an autograph.

  After the show, when I was going to my car, I noticed her out of the corner of my eye. She approached me, looking very nervous; her eyes were wide open, like she was on drugs. She grabbed my hands and said, ‘Adam, how lucky I am to meet you.’ She had tears in her eyes. I asked her if I could help her in any way, but I felt that something was not right. Suddenly she put her hand in her pocket and took out a bottle containing hallowed water. I knocked that shit out of her hand.

  She couldn’t hurt you with that, though.

  The problem was not what was in the bottle. It was that she attacked me. She invaded my private space—that really bothered me. Today, it’s hallowed water, but what is it tomorrow? A knife? Hydrochloric acid?

  This girl wasn’t even listening. She didn’t understand that I don’t give a shit about her God. She just stood there and gibbered about the Holy Ghost.

  But you provoke these people by, for example, comparing Christianity to communism. The Church actually fought communism.

  Correct—just like two dogs fight for food. Of course, I do appreciate the Church’s influence on how our history developed. But that is the past. Today, Christianity has lost its authority, and it has no idea what people actually need. I would say its place is in the museum, and it’s happening as we speak. Churches are actually turning into museums.

  In London, there are a few temples that were turned into clubs. There’s no point in wrecking them; it’s better to use them for something good. We played in a church like that once. Our changing room was in the old sacristy, and we performed on a stage that used to serve as altar.

  Not long ago, in Pittsburgh, we played a show in an abandoned and long-forgotten temple. What perversity: we preach from the pulpit of a former temple. What’s happening right now is a discreet changing of the guard.

  Wouldn’t you achieve more by saying all that without being so literal?

  I’m not a politician. I can’t lie or hide the point under a blanket of sweet words.

  But nowadays you don’t tear Bibles apart at your shows.

  And I don’t spit fire, either, even though I used to do that at every show.

  Why did you give that up?

  Well, not because of the people who attacked me for doing it, let’s put it that way. We removed that aspect of the performance long before all the media witch-hunt.

  There’s just no point in repeating the same provocation over and over again. It ceases to be provocation then. You don’t do the same painting twice, do you? But all of our shows still make you think.

  What do you have to offer today?

  Come and see for yourself. After the first show where I destroyed the Bible, our tour manager said it was disturbing. That’s a very nice English word, but I’m not really capable of translating it into Polish. It means something that causes anxiety, but at the same time it’s moving. When somebody says that about our music, I take it as a huge compliment.

  It’s the same with cinema. The best movies are disturbing. Like, for example, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, or Wojtek Smarzowski’s Róza. You go to the cinema in the evening, and when you walk out of there you continue to think about the film.

  You wake up the next morning and there is still a storm in your head. I would love our shows to be received like that. I hate when people say that a movie or a show was nice.

  You don’t really play ‘nice’ shows then?

  If somebody said that our show was nice, I’d feel like I’d been slapped in the face. Cheap hookers can be nice, but not Behemoth’s concerts.

  I have a friend who plays jazz; he came to see our show in Bydgoszcz. He came up to me and said that we played nice. He clearly didn’t get it. A girl on the street can be nice. The spring this year was nice. But surely not our concerts or—and let me indulge myself—von Trier’s movies.

  Disturbing art is depressing. Metal music is accused of provoking suicidal tendencies.

  If somebody is prone to depression, then even a romantic comedy may trigger him or her to kill themself. Some people consider it cowardice, whereas others consider it courage. I am not going to judge these decisions; everybody determines their own life path. You choose death? Go ahead. That’s how my friend Jon Nödtveidt from Dissection left this world.

  Did you know him well?

  Our relationship was short and intense but also very deliberate. I met Jon halfway through the last decade. Firstly, of course, I had heard his music. I was a fan as early as the 90s. In fact, I still consider Storm Of The Light’s Bane to be one of the best black metal records ever.

  I suppose it was difficult to meet him prior to that, given that he did time for being an accessory to murder.

  We played a show in Denmark with them. It was one of the first concerts that Dissection played after Jon was released from prison. It was also the first time I saw him live. He was my height—a bit chunkier, maybe—and you couldn’t tell he had just left prison. He was very nice, but he also inspired respect. That was my impression of him. He emanated strength and even his way of walking was epic. He came up to us after the show and said he had seen a lot of our concerts, and that the last time he ever felt something similar was at a Morbid Angel gig in 1991.

  Sometimes I meet with that kind of compliment for the sake of ingratiation, but this time it was an honest opinion. We started talking. It turned out that Jon knew our records well. When he was inside, his girlfriend brought them to him. I felt that we shared a kind of understanding.

  Hours passed, and we sat there, wrapped up in conversation—almost as if we done coke together or something. Thereafter, we had great contact, mostly by email or phone. We spent another few hours talking after music industry exhibitions in Germany. He was looking for a label to release Reinkatos, Dissection’s new album. He had already sent me some demos of songs from it. At first it was one song, then three, then all of them. I really supported him and I instantly knew this album was great. I got the impression that people didn’t fully appreciate how great it was when it came out. Only now, after Jon’s death, have people started to give it the recognition it deserves.

  When was the last time you saw him?

  At the end of 2005, Jon asked if we wanted to play a New Year gig with Dissection at the Kolingsborg club in Stockholm. Of course I said yes. We played on the 30th of December and, because I wanted to spend as much time with Jon as possible, I deliberately booked the tickets home for New Year’s Day. I went there with my girlfriend, Shelley. She was a cute Croatian I’d met at one of our shows in Switzerland. But I wasn’t a good boy in Sweden, at least not on that New Year’s Eve.

  We sat with Jon and talked, and the next thing we knew it was midnight. There were people everywhere, having fun, debauchery all around. And there we were, sitting for the whole day, talking about black metal, philosophy, death—deep stuff. I opened a bottle of champagne and I wanted to pour him a glass, but he declined. After a while he agreed, and we made a toast. He took a sip, smiled, and said he hadn’t had any alcohol in his mouth for the last dozen years.

  After midnight I went crazy—dancing my ass off to the beats of Turbonegro. Our drummer, Inferno, was with me. We were drunk, half-naked, and wonderfully unpredictable. In the meantime, Jon slipped out and went home. That was Jon.

  Did you ever ask him why he killed a man?

  No, I wouldn’t dare. It was his personal business. He must have had his reasons.

  To take his own life, too?

  I don’t know.

  What was your reaction?

  It was a major blow. I was totally bewildered. I had talked to him about the next Dissection album—he was really excited about it. Nothing indicated that he would soon shoot himself in the head and say goodbye to the world. />
  I started calling our common friends, people who had the chance to talk with him in the days prior to his death. This was when he played his last concert. They said he wasn’t showing any signs of depression. On the contrary, he seemed to be absolutely at peace with the world and happy.

  This is the decision he made; I don’t want to judge it. All I can do is just try to understand.

  Do you understand?

  I can’t even imagine a situation that could make me take my own life. I love it too much.

  CHAPTER III

  TREE OF LIFE

  When did women and sex appear in your life?

  I was sixteen. She was twenty years old and already had a child. I was off my face, so it was difficult to even call what I had an erection. I then consciously lost my virginity with Celina, my first real love.

  How did you meet her?

  In a similar way that I met Baal: I’d known her since childhood. She lived in the same block. We went to school together, and we learned to play the guitar together. At first I wasn’t interested in her as a woman. During the first years of school she was very thin, like a stick. When I went to high school, we lost touch. I had seen her sporadically, mainly through the window when she was going somewhere. I noticed how she was changing, though: she had gained more womanly shapes, and she had beautiful breasts. She grabbed my attention. Everybody in the neighbourhood had a crush on her. And she was cold and inaccessible—that kind of unconquerable virgin.

  One day I met her brother, just outside the block. I wanted to know how she was doing. He told me that Celina was actually in the house, so I could go and ask her myself. It was an impulse. I just used the entry phone and entered the apartment. ‘Hi, it’s Adam Darski.’ We weren’t really in touch at that time, but she let me in nevertheless. We started talking … we quickly became a couple. She was completely out of this world, but it didn’t mean anything.

  When you’re sixteen, sitting with a beautiful girl is enough: you can feel her close and smell her. And she had much more to offer. She knew how to speak her mind. She was intelligent, a good student, she spoke English fluently … she impressed me.