Girls Against God

our own dregs and decay. Even the mill winds up in the sea when the fairy tale ends.
But everything leaves traces, memories or ghosts. The mill still grinds at the bottom of the sea. It grinds out an endless supply of herrings and gruel, or black oil for what they call the Norwegian Oil Adventure. It grinds, scratches, simmers and crawls. The Scandinavian minimalist greed surfaces under our shoes.
Trash, the modern cousin of the overflowing gruel, drifts through the streets of Oslo. On the supermarket shelves it begins as an exemplar of our contemporary Pietism: sober portion packaging, proclaiming extra vitamins, low fat and sugar, pasteurisation and homogenisation. The packaging containers are safe, clean and hygienic. Eco-labelled with God’s blessing. Now, if you just look closely, they’re transformed into a congestion of sour cardboard, slimy plastic and sharp rusty metal scraps that rot openly in the cityscape. What once gave form to our grey-white groceries, to skim milk, oats, brown bread and fish pudding, is now semi-translucent, porous, and compressed. All the text and all the colour has been washed from its pale plastic skeleton. Most people don’t see it as clearly as we do; they only notice ordinary litter and a whiff of sour wind. For us, the image of Grønland’s streets appears in double exposure: contemporary world and ancient symbols. It’s as if we’re caught in the aura, that phase before the migraine when you hallucinate or see multiple worlds on top of each other, or before a serial killer commits another murder. This has to be the Norwegian aura: two worlds on top of each other, the real and the waste of the real.
A new double image is exposed: the Pietistic and the Occult, the glowing snow in the woods and the whirling, dark tree crowns, the purified subjectivity and the piercing hatred. Here lies that old Southern aura, layer on layer, the Christian and the blasphemous, the white and the black. The black threatens to crack open the white: the unceasing threat of heresy. The black spots are white’s problem. This is what we’re stretched between. What they call light, and what they call darkness, the ground and the underground, hell, amen!
We want to move the underground up a notch. Hell is a place on earth.
We walk down Tøyen. Under our feet is Oslo, southern Norway, the South, in ruins, layer upon layer of refuse and faeces, fossils of Norwegian folk tales, paintings and monopolies on food production. And below that are the archives of the underground, mile after mile of blood.
From the chain coffee shop, or from Venke’s apartment, you can spy on the American metal tourists getting off the 37 bus at the Oslo Street stop to visit old Helvete, the record shop, now called Neseblod, nosebleed. A lot of them come here after reading that crap book Lords of Chaos. Unsure about what exactly it is they’re looking for, they stand there in their cute leather jackets and collars, peering across the road before they cross it and enter the shop to buy jumpers with printed band and record logos.
Sometimes I spot black-haired couples with pierced lips and DEATH written in fake gothic font on their denim jackets, buzzing around in the streets below the Munch museum. Smart phones in their hands and map apps on the screens, they search confusedly for the apartment where Varg Vikernes killed Øystein Aarseth in 1993. Once in a while they get as far as ringing the doorbell. When Lords of Chaos was made into a film the producers wanted to shoot it there, to make it more authentic. But they would have found an entirely ordinary Oslo apartment with a cosy living room and kittens playing around chair legs and burrowing into the sofa cushions (they are lords of chaos, too), and a window with a view right into the botanical garden, Oslo’s 200-year-old root system. If you stand by Venke’s window and look to the right, you can just make out the herb garden through the beech leaves where liquorice root, lavender, vervain and agrimony are intertwined in a witch’s brew. Drink this brew daily, to ward off unnecessary masculine problems.
The sun has been shining directly on the flat for hours, and inside the air is dense, like the air in a tomb furnished with our belongings. Venke opens the window, pulls out the coffee machine and pours water into the kettle. Terese slumps on the couch in the living room and opens her laptop. I’m in the hallway reading a message on my phone, then I put the phone in sleep mode and kick off my shoes. If a line were drawn between us, we’d form a triangle pointing into the flat:
hallway
me
kitchen      living room
Venke       Terese
Or, explained in band terminology:
me
guitar
Venke       Terese
bass        drums
The triangle is a simple shape, but more complex than the simplified binary that language is stuck in. The triangle is always expanding. It always opens up to a multiplicity that branches out in our subconscious. When we introduce that third component, we no longer have only a mirror image, but depth, or a magical symbol, creating portals to other places. What happens to two counterparts if you add a third? It becomes hard to define what the third component is; it could represent a sea of different possibilities. Reality, fiction, and? Man, woman, and? The presence of this third point makes the counterparts tremble.
We flip the triangle and point the tip down. This is the first shape we find on the body, and the most magical: the dark triangle of pubic hair. We step into the magical, with the trash, the underground and the shadows.
The root of all witchcraft is in this first magical shape. The magic lies deep inside, far away from the South, far away from Oslo and Norway, and at the