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.

Sonntag, 9. Januar 2011

Belphegor - Angeli Mortis De Profundis

Belphegor - Blood Magick Necromance (2011)

Soon, Belphegor gonna release their next bloody opus. Track nr. 5 has a latin title, which means Angels of death out of the depths. If there will be any latin phrases in the lyrics, I gonna explain them later...

... back again: Now I hold the new CD in my hands and reading the lyrics, I found two latin phrases:

The phrase natus in morte (in: Blood Magick Necromance) means born in death, the phrase ignis extotum corpas (in: Possessed Burning Eyes) means... actually nothing. "ignis" is "fire" and the two other words don't exist. Maybe Belphegor wanted to say Fire out of the whole body, which would be ignis ex toto corpore in latin.

\m/arkhei\m/

1 Kommentar:

Vlürch hat gesagt…

I'm not trying to be offensive, and I might be wrong (most likely am), but doesn't 'extotum' have an obvious meaning; 'before anything'? Even if it isn't exactly 100% correct, seems like the most likely thing in my opinion. Also, 'corpas' might be a word that's obscure/weird on purpose, or if things go weird, it could be two words mixed together; 'corpus' and 'apas' for example, to make something to mean 'binding bodies' or something like that. Obviously, it doesn't make real sense, but I mean, there are some bands who do that, to make their stuff seem even more cryptic. Can't remember any right now though, so maybe it's something I falsely remember, but I think some band said it in an interview, though.

Then it would make (a little bit more) sense. But well, would be going too far to say they meant that, I suppose.