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.

Freitag, 10. Januar 2020

Mayhem - Deamon

Mayhem - Deamon (2019)

Well, there is a Norwegian black metal band called Mayhem. I guess some of you have already heard of them. They say that they are quite famous - don't know... Ok, Mayhem are bloody famous, but not for their Latin skills. They didn't much here in 2019 either.

The song title Agenda Ignis means The agenda of fire.

The song "Malum" contains Latin lyrics:

Mors certa hora incerta - death is certain, the hour uncertain
Daemonem liberta - Free the deamon! (The imperative "free!" means "libera" in Latin, "liberta" isn't a correct form)

Mens mala - Evil sense
Animus malus - Evil soul
Ab infernus sulus - From infernal soil (this is what I guess. "sulus" doesn't exist. "solum" means "soil". The preposition "ab" needs the ablative case which would be "ab inferno solo")

Daleo perdeo extinguo - ???, I destroy (correct: "perdo"), I exstinguish
Malum magnum excito - I evoke the big evil
Daleo perdeo extinguo - see above
Malum magnum excito - see above
Convoro lucem - I devour light.

Mors certa hora incerta - see above
Daemonem liberta - see above

Daleo perdeo extinguo - see above
Malum magnum excito - see above

Diabolicus fatus - Diabolical fate (correct: fatum diabolicum)
Purifies ad crucem - ??? to the cross (maybe they mean "purify")

Adlecto necto - ??? ??? (no existing words)
Mortem vesto - ??? death
Impetus excitus - called attack (?)

Daleo perdeo extinguo - see above
Malum magnum excito - see above

Well, the majority of the phrases are ok, but I have no explanations for some words which haven't anything in common with Latin words.

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