Water and Dreams in Early Finnish Death Metal: Adramelech’s Spring of Recovery
Water and Dreams in Early Finnish Death Metal: Adramelech’s Spring of Recovery

Summary/Abstract: The present study aims to investigate, through mythocriticism, the song Revived by the early Finnish Death Metal band Adramelech, as an example of Contemporary Written and Visual Media. The article will focus on the symbolic constellation which lies beneath the lyrics of this song also in relation to the cover artwork of the EP from which it is drawn, Spring of Recovery (1992). The first part of the study will analyze Revived’s scenario of "initiatory death": the Regressus ad Originem – i.e. the return to the germinal stage –, grounded in an intense aquatic imaginary, eventually reveals itself to be a Regressus ad Uterum, that is a regression into the watery abyss of gestation. Then, the symbolism of the immersion into the "spring of recovery" – a key-syntagm which again informs the whole EP’s title – will be explored. Through its matricial and primordial Water, the chthonic spring bestows onto the initiate a prodigious renovatio, which starts his uterine ascent. This study will thus demonstrate how some representative artists of the Death Metal subgenre – authentic postmodern lyric poets – evoke and recombine the most fecund archetypes of the collective unconscious, substantiating Mircea Eliade’s assumption according to which "poetry renews and continues the myths" even within the contemporary mediatic universe.

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