Lucifer Rising – The Story of Satanism in Heavy Metal┃Documentary

Interpretation is like a virus or even a pharmakon that affects everything it comes into contact with. On the one hand, it reduces all reality to message—erasing the distinction between Natur and Geisteswissenschaften, since even the so-called hard sciences verify and falsify their statements only within paradigms or preunderstandings. If “facts” thus appear to be nothing but interpretations, interpretation, on the other hand, presents itself as (the) fact: hermeneutics is not a philosophy but the enunciation of historical existence itself in the age of the end of metaphysics. The “validity” of Heidegger’s thought is equivalent to its capacity, superior to that of other philosophies, to correspond to the epoch, to let the event speak: the same event that Nietzsche calls nihilism and that for Heidegger is the end of metaphysics. This event comprises the end of Eurocentrism, the critique of ideology, the dissolution of the evidentness of consciousness through psychoanalysis, the explicit pluralization of the agencies of information, the mass media, which, as Heidegger had anticipated in his essay, “The Age of the World-Picture” (“Die Zeit des Weltbildes”), make the idea of a “unique” world picture impossible.

Gianni Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation”

A group of Satanists even invited Black Sabbath to play a show at the coveted StoneHenge to which the group refused. The very name, Black Sabbath, can easily denote links with the occult or at least an attempt to oppose traditional religion. The word Sabbath is by definition, “a day of religious observance”. It is a day dedicated to practising faith and worshipping whatever god you believe in.

You also have the witches sabbath, said to be a day for Witches to gather in order to practise witchcraft and other rituals. So based on the name alone, this could have given Satanists the idea that Black Sabbath were indeed practising some sort of Witchcraft or Satanism.

The band, though, say the name is far more innocent, taken from the Mario Bava 1965 film called Black Sabbath where a Russian count encounters a family trying to destroy a line of vampires. Which, back then, would still seem like a very dark and supernatural concept. So combine this with the actual music of Black Sabbath and it’s easy to see why at the time the group attracted people that practised the occult and Satanism.