Norway Trains Its Diplomats in Black Metal

Black metal is a subgenre of heavy metal music that, to an extent, originated in Norway. It's gaining increasing popularity across the world and is an emerging symbol of Norwegian culture. So to ensure that Norway's official representatives can speak intelligently about it, the government is training diplomats on the subject:

Kjersti Sommerset, the head of Norway’s foreign ministry’s centre of excellence, told Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv: “We now have 106 foreign service missions and they get many enquiries from people who want information about Norwegian black metal as a phenomenon. In the training program, we have a large cultural program in order to give the trainees a good understanding of Norwegian culture and the cultural industry. Black metal is clearly a part of this ‘global awakening.’”

Link -via Nerdcore | Photo by Flickr user Robert Bejil Photography used under Creative Commons license

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So actually, this link is to an aniboom awards finalist and their video "Live Life" which is a claymation animation of the famous Sedlec Ossuary set to William Shatner's 'You'll have Time'. Which is meant as a kind of meditation on our mortality. The video and the concept are incredibly neat and therfor also incredibly approprite for this site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCfK0xE2OPw

But please correct me if I've misinterpreted the inclusion of black metal as a form of dark imagery. If by it they mean nothing than to be prideful of national accomplishments, then I guess we aren't talking about the same kind of "global awakening".

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Dark imagery is a portal to the supernal realm. Certainly it was for figures like Alister Crowley and his Abbey of Thelemists. At a recent dinner party a young man asked a child-artist to draw something and he would buy it from her, for tattoo art. He wanted something like the totem of skulls he already has inked in his forearm. The girl's mother, however, insisted that it was evil imagery and that it would bring all kinds of evil thoughts and inclinations to mind as she was drawing it. Stating "I know that when artists work they feel what they are drawing, and I don't want her to feel that."

What? A totem of skulls? Death? The final state of all human beings, our ultimate destiny? You don't want her to see where she is going ahead of time? This same woman was disturbed by the images of cadavers in a color Atlas of Human Anatomy which she gave me to keep myself amused. She said the images were too disturbing to look at. They aren't disturbing to me, but then I've learned to accept death and even appreciate the contrast it provides to the living. The human body is a miraculous work of art, it looks sick to people who can't stomach their own mortality. But a word of advice to people who don't want to live in fear and don't want to suffer immensely on their death-bed, learn to love it, look for the hidden lining that is made out of silver. But, if you never look out of fear...

So, I can see how dark imagery would be necessary for "awakening".