Bible texts inspire reflection in music

How Revelation shapes heavy metal

Patmos - The Apocalypse is a book full of metaphors and irritating details. But this is precisely why it has also become an inspiration for rock music - and continues to play biblical texts into the mouths of music fans to this day.

Published  on 28.07.2024 at 11:45  – by Fabian Peltsch

Patmos is a sleepy island in the Aegean. There are hardly any cars on the single-lane road, which takes barely half an hour from one side to the other. The locals have pulled down their blinds in the midday heat. Only a few tourists stroll through the alleyways, of which only the street cats seem to take any notice. Patmos has neither party beaches nor luxury clubs to offer. Its only selling point: it is the place where John, the "seer of Patmos", is said to have received the revelation named after him - visions of the end of the world and the beginning of a new age without death and suffering, when "God dwells among his people".

The cave in which the prophet is said to have seen the Apocalypse in his mind's eye is now a place of pilgrimage. In the mornings and afternoons, buses toil up the steep roads - "Apocalypse Travel" is one of the most popular tour operators. Orthodox Christians on pilgrimage, but also tourists from Europe, the USA and Asia queue in front of the grotto, to which a small chapel is now attached. A priest in a robe and with the black headdress typical of Orthodox clergymen urges visitors to be quiet and reminds them of the ban on photography. Among them are also some who do not look like tourists or pilgrims, but enter the cave at least as reverently. They wear black T-shirts with spiky logos and heavy boots. They are heavy metal fans who want to see where one of the most important sources of inspiration for their scene originated.

The Apocalypse (Greek apokalypsis, "to reveal something") is the last book of the Bible and the part that still has the widest pop-cultural appeal. In visionary images, it depicts the end of the world in a dramatic battle between good and evil, the judgement of God and the final destruction of evil. Some of the images that appear in the book are still in the public memory today: the monster with the number 666, the apocalyptic horsemen, the book with seven seals. There is also a dragon with seven heads and ten horns that wants to devour a newborn child, the victory of the archangel Michael over this dragon and the whore of Babylon, as well as monster locusts, conflagrations and the collapse of the firmament. Like a kind of primordial cell of fantasy and horror, the only prophetic book of the New Testament has influenced countless films, books and rock songs, whereby the formula applies to the latter: the heavier the guitars, the higher the number of references.

Bild: ©katholisch.de/Peltsch

Travelling tourism on Patmos has taken on bizarre forms.

Iron Maiden, one of the longest-lasting bands in the heavy metal genre, quote an entire paragraph from the Book of Revelation in their 1983 song "The Number Of The Beast": "But woe to you, land and sea! / For the devil has come down to you; his fury is great." (Rev 12:12) At live performances, fans cheer as soon as the first words of the heavy metal classic are heard and recite the lyrics by heart, but most of them would not be able to get the Lord's Prayer right. In its own way, no other popular music style is as biblical as heavy metal in all its forms. The list of groups and pieces of music that refer directly to the last book in their names, symbolism, lyrics or album artwork is long: Revelation ("Revelation"), Armagedon (the site of the decisive battle), Lamb Of God (The Lamb of God), The Four Horsemen (Metallica, the seven apocalyptic horsemen are a core motif of Revelation), "Seven Seals" (Testament, referring to a scroll with seven seals, which are opened by the Lamb of God), "Seven Trumpets" (Manilla Road, in Revelation seven trumpets are blown, through one of which about a third of the world is burned), Seven Churches (Possessed, the seven epistles at the beginning of the book). The world of heavy metal is interspersed with biblical revelatory vocabulary.

Not just an adolescent flirtation

The confrontation with Judgement Day is not just an adolescent flirtation with dark forces. Many bands treat the material with reverence. The tone is often heroic when talking about fallen angels and glorifies violence when battles are set to music. In the next breath, there is often a rant against the church, with free churches and TV preachers regularly being the target of attack, especially in the case of US bands. But rejection is not indifference: in fact, some of the most revelatory metal bands are explicitly religious. The band GOD from Israel released a sprawling concept album about the apocalypse in 2020. "IV - Revelation", as the album is titled, is a disruptive, technically adept death metal thunderstorm that ends on a conciliatory note with the track "New Heaven, New Earth, New Jerusalem". It is supposed to be an acoustic premonition of the peace that will come over the world when the last battles have been fought and their fruits have risen in the new Jerusalem. With "Legend I-III", the band Savior Machine from California has released a trilogy of albums on the subject. The five-hour revelatory opera can be heard as an "unofficial soundtrack for the end of the world", explained Eric Clayton, the eccentric mastermind behind the project, when the first part was released in the mid-1990s. "Inspired by the greatest story ever told" reads the last page of the booklet, which, like GOD, meticulously lists all the biblical passages quoted. There are also excerpts from apocalyptic paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Lucas Cranach the Elder from the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries - an epic triptych that was admired for its ambition in the metal scene as soon as it was released, but was also met with a shake of the head. "I am with you, I am coming soon. The kingdom of heaven is surely near," sings the trained tenor in "The Lamb", accompanied by specially hired choirs from St Stephen's Church in Würzburg. The perspective remains hopeful despite the darkly ominous drama. Here, too, the devil's takeover is only temporary.

Bild: ©katholisch.de/Peltsch

To the apocalypse? That way!

Interestingly, the musicians have this approach in common with Joseph Ratzinger, who dismissed heavy metal as the devil's stuff in his time as prefect of the faith, but called the apocalypse a "transitory stage to bliss" in his sermons. Stylistically, heavy metal may be more about the ominous end and not the hopeful return of the Lord. However, the current time reference is very biblical. For John, who probably wrote the text around the year 90 AD, the apocalyptic images were in all likelihood a critical commentary on the Roman Empire and the persecution of Christians, who at the time were an oppressed minority - or, depending on your point of view, a sect perceived as radical. John's homeland of Judea had been starved and devastated by Roman soldiers following an uprising, just as Jesus had foreseen: "For those days will be a tribulation such as has not occurred since the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and such as will not occur again." (Mark 13:19). Like many of the second generation of followers of Jesus, John was already expecting the Last Judgement and the dawn of the Kingdom of God during his lifetime. He saw how the Roman Empire continued to expand. Even on the remote island of Patmos, it was impossible to escape his idols. John's core symbols, the dragon, the beast or the whore of Babylon, symbolise the monstrous face of the empire towards the oppressed. According to historians, the number 666 stands for Emperor Nero, who allegedly set up the followers of Jesus as living torches in his gardens. It is a cry for justice that culminates in images of a heavenly slaughter in St John. These images also move heavy metal fans today. Many of them see today's world as being on the brink of destruction. In the song "The Skeletons of Society", the group Slayer denounces a morally degraded society whose end came "all of a sudden, with burning, judging winds":

Humanity is going mad
Shadows of death are all I see
Skeletons of society

Painting the devil on the wall - or in this case conjuring him up with guitar riffs - is a first step towards purification. Between the lines, listeners are asked to come to terms with threats such as ecological destruction or shifts in the global world order - and at the same time to prepare themselves for the worst. In this context, cultural scientist Jörg Scheller speaks of "aesthetic resilience training". It is no coincidence that heavy metal experienced its first peak in the 1980s. Back then, the nuclear threat was omnipresent, with Iron Maiden singing about the exchange of blows between the superpowers USA and USSR in "Two Minutes to Midnight" in 1984:

We oil the mouth of the war machine
and feed it with our babies

With the stylistic device of heavy metal, the urgency to act could be formulated better than popular, peace-moving artists of the time such as BAP, Udo Lindenberg ("Wozu sind Kriege da", 1981), Peter Maffay or Konstantin Wecker.

Music that preserves

In this sense, heavy metal is music that wants to preserve. The masses of its listeners are no longer the non-conformists and rebels they once were, even if the big names in the scene still like to present themselves as such. A look at Wacken, the biggest metal festival in the world with over 80,000 visitors, shows this: The metal community is for the most part peaceful, friendly, civil. The American industrial shock rocker Marilyn Manson called himself "Antichrist Superstar" in the 90s. However, Satanism as an ideology played far less of a role than critics like Ratzinger thought. Many satanic bands from Black Sabbath to Slayer have repeatedly emphasised over the years that devil worship was above all an effective tool to provoke and attract attention - and to underpin social criticism in this way.

While Satanism is somewhat out of fashion in metal today, the heavenly carnage of Revelation remains timeless as a theme and can be reactivated at any time. One reason for this may also be that the visually powerful revenge fantasy is always accompanied by a defiant "you will not defeat us" attitude, which also characterised the early Christians. The pilgrims from Patmos put their earplugs back in their ears as they leave the cave. Instead of the thundering of trombones, the staccato of brute drum rolls and guitars screaming at the top of their voices will no doubt continue to resound there. They are, at least stylistically, prepared for the new day.

by Fabian Peltsch