Euronymous

Religion

In interviews, Euronymous said he was a theistic Satanist.

In an interview by Esa Lahdenperä conducted in August 1993, Euronymous stated:

I believe in a horned devil, a personified Satan. In my opinion all the other forms of Satanism are bullshit. [...] Satanism comes from religious Christianity, and there it shall stay. I'm a religious person and I will fight those who misuse His name. People are not supposed to believe in themselves and be individualists. They are supposed to OBEY, to be the SLAVES of religion.

The theistic Satanism espoused by Euronymous was an inversion of Roman Catholic dogma, and he claimed "We praise the evil and we believe blindly in a godly creature just like a Christian". On the relationship between religion and science, he said: "Scientists can't disprove [...] religion. No matter how hard you try, you can't explain the universe. You can't leave out a religious belief."

He opposed the Satanic and occultist teachings of Anton LaVey and Aleister Crowley, for unlike Euronymous, they promoted what he saw as "peace" and commercial frivolity, as well as individualism in contrast to dogma. He said he would "never accept any band which preaches Church of Satan ideas, as they are just a bunch of freedom and life-loving atheists, and they stand exactly the opposite of me". When asked what he thought of Crowley's code of "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", he answered, "People shall do what WE want them to do. We're against freedom, and forced a band from Rogaland in Norway—Belsebub—to split up."

As noted earlier, some of those who knew Euronymous claim that his "extreme Satanic image" was an act. While Mortiis said that Euronymous "was such a devil worshipper you wouldn't believe it", in the black metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us, Varg Vikernes claimed that Euronymous was not a Satanist. He said: "To Aarseth everything was about image and he wanted to appear extreme. He wanted people to think of him as being extreme; the most extreme of them all. But he didn't want to be extreme and he wasn't really extreme". While Metalion, who was friends with both Vikernes and Euronymous when the latter died, and called Euronymous his best friend, wrote that "some people in our scene read a few books and considered themselves Satanists", he made no such statements about Euronymous. Tenebris (allegedly Jon Nödtveidt) from the Misanthropic Luciferian Order, a Swedish Satanic order formed in 1995, wrote that "back then, in 1991, things mainly concerned black metal and ideological Satanism [...] and kind of stood and fell with Euronymous and his shop. Therefore, it vanished with his death in '93".

Over time, some members of the Norwegian scene began to follow Paganism. Vikernes later claimed that Euronymous—"obsessed with this 'Satanist' thing"—disapproved of Vikernes promoting paganism. Euronymous showed no explicit disapproval of paganism though, and released the pagan band Enslaved's first album, Vikingligr Veldi, on Deathlike Silence Productions.

Euronymous was interested in totalitarian communist states such as the Soviet Union under Stalin and the People's Socialist Republic of Albania. He collected Eastern Bloc memorabilia, and in the 1980s, he was a member of the Norwegian communist youth group Rød Ungdom, which was Marxist–Leninist at the time. He left Rød Ungdom, allegedly because he came to realise that they were "just a bunch of humanists". He said "as I hate people I don't want them to have a good time, I'd like to see them rot under communist dictatorship". He had a fascination with the idea of mass surveillance, secret police and forced disappearance. Mayhem's Attila Csihar said Euronymous was not a communist "in the political sense" but was fascinated by the power communist dictators had over their people.

Hellhammer said "Euronymous wanted to be the most extreme person, and he thought that communism was very extreme", but that he later claimed to be a fascist. In a private letter written in the early 1990s, Euronymous claimed that "almost all" Norwegian black metal bands at the time were "more or less Nazis", including Mayhem. He did not, however, use the music of Mayhem to promote any kind of politics.