What's all this fuss about?

Latin lyrics in Heavy Metal music are a common phenomenon. The darker the music, the more evil the band wanna be. What's better than using an old, mysterious, hardly understandable, cryptic, medieval and therefore almost satanic language? Unfortunately bands seldom know how to use this language properly. So, instead of evoking the demons of the realm of evil, they just evoke a hop-frog. Clatu verata nicto! - The most of you know what happened after this wrongly spoken spell.

Normally, two questions are the result of the fact that you've just read a latin phrase:
- What does it mean? (almost everybody)
- Is it correct? (just a few latin aficionados)

This page doesn't want to make fun of mistakes in latin lyrics. I wanna answer the first question to everybody who is interested. The second question is just for myself or for the two or three weird guys out there or for bands which are thinking about using a latin phrase as well. You can contact me if you want.

Donnerstag, 25. Juni 2009

Mayhem - My Death & Ordo ab Chao

Mayhem - My Death - Chimera (2004)

At the end of the quoted song you hear the line odium humani generis. Three simple, correct words, a delight for every latin teacher, a phenomenon which drives students crazy, because you can translate this line in two different ways.

odium (subject) - hatred
humani generis (genitive object) - of humankind

1.) The genitive marks the one who feels hatred: the hatred of humankind
2.) The genitive marks the one who is hated by someone else: the hatred towards humankind.

I guess, the second interpretation is what Mayhem wants to express.

By the way, I was also asked to tell something about the album title Ordo ad Chao.
You find informations about it in the internet, but I will explain it for the sake of comleteness.

Ordo ad Chao means order (leads) into chaos. The is the inversion of the quote Ordo ab Chao - Order from Chaos, which is used as a motto by the Freemasons.
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