Stepping out of my favourite Vietnamese restaurant last night was like plunging into a churning black sea with frothing whitecaps. 

  Granted the restaurant sits beside and below Montreal’s legendary Goth and Metal hangout Les Foufounes Electriques, but the black t-shirted and jeaned throng, the grey haired, tattooed and mascarad masses outside stretched three or four blocks along a sad rundown drug ravaged segment of rue Ste-Catherines Est. 

  Anyway, I slowly made my way through the teeming multitude taking in the spectacle. Pale no longer young faces all expressed a keen expectancy, some were painted a ghastly white and highlighted with lurid scarlet or glossy black. There were studs, nose rings, black leather silver studded belts and bracelets and heavy black boots. Everywhere were occult symbols, insignia, tattoos, and printed T’s, pentagrams, horned skulls, black magic talismans, blood dripping swords, flaming eyed dragons and dark alluringly beautiful female images, demons and goddesses. 

  Few of the waiting crowd were in shape, muscular or athletic; many were smoking and were carrying extra pounds. Walking around the corner and exploring the alleyway behind I came across numerous small suspicious-eyed clutches drinking from brown bags and smoking dope. 

  Out back was a huge shiny black tour bus with a heavy electrical cable connecting it to the building and a full length tractor-trailer in a loading dock. 

  “Here we go,” I thought, “somebody’s playing tonight.” 

  Turns out the concert was next door to the Foufounes and a band I’d never heard of called Dimmu Borgir was playing at the Telus Centre. 

  Later on YouTube I watched concert footage of Dimmu in action. 

  “It’s a Black Mass,” I said to myself, and wasn’t surprised in the least. 

  Myth and religions are cohesive narratives that make powerful use of a vocabulary of poetic, dream imagery and are a necessary part of a human group’s social landscape. It is a binding and bonding expression of our collective relationship with one another and the world in which we live and derive our sustenance from. When myth and religion dies, and it periodically does so if not continually revivified, continually maintained by a qualified Shaman-Type tradition, a gaping emptiness opens up in our collective beings. 

  And as the old saying goes: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum.’

  I left the area to go find a park in which to read the book I was carrying in peace, understanding fully the appeal of such dark apocalyptic occult messaging. 

  ‘All part of the fragmentation I see everywhere,’ I thought…

  ‘But is it healthy and viable…?’

  ‘Is it an expression of Life…?’

  ‘Or thwarted Life…?’