The following is a cover of Mayhem’s “Pagan Fears” by one of Dædscua’s side projects, Maboya. In addition to being a friend and the founding member of Call to Prayer, Dædscua has shown through his courage, devotion, and compassionate receptivity to the lifelong spiritual journey of the Order of Nine Angles that its transformative practice eventually gives way to something more fundamental, more honest, and more open than the self-contained closure of any dogmatic system. Though the ONA resists this dogmatism, no incomplete system is perfect, and no complete system can resist the threat of becoming static tradition rather than a living activity. The ONA is a living tradition, but to remain alive it must find deep, renewable sources of influence that can inspire and reinvigorate, learning to find beauty in the most ordinary things. On the part of its associates, these can be as simple as a kind gesture, a moment shared, an overlooked idea, or an unexpected source of insight.

Dædscua has demonstrated through the quality and care he imbues in all his music that the insights gleaned from deep transformative experience are now finding their own voice in areas of his life, once familiar, intimate, serene. As the sinister rends and rives individual destiny within the context of cosmic wyrd, we find that familiarity give way to something else entirely … and we embrace it.

As an expression of that familiarity, Dædscua and his bandmates continue to produce quality material within the sinister homeland of black metal, one that many of us have devoted much of our lives to, one that we know intimately. Now finding his own way of expressing a new musical grammar through his transformations within the ONA, I expect that his unique style will find new ways of saying old things … brewing something quite sinister indeed.

With that, I present Maboya’s cover of “Pagan Fears.” Top-notch performances from both Dædscua and his bandmate, Delem Insularis. A wonderful homage to the spiritual darkness that Mayhem burned in our hearts, from the brumal north to the Satanic south.