Our T-shirt Le Chevalier, La Mort, le Diable (“Knight, Death and the Devil”) initially released in 1997 is available in a new version “…Only Dark is Absolute!” printed on both sides by the Ukrainian label Archivist Records, dedicated to high-quality reissues of metal music classics.
To order it: https://musical-hall.com/mordor-only-dark-is-absolute-ts
The picture used for the T-shirt is the famous 1513 detailed engraving Ritter, Tod und Teufel, a masterpiece by the great German artist Albrecht Dürer, one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance movement, and notorious for his employment of complex iconography and symbolism difficult to interpret. Nietzsche was captivated by this work of art, and in The Birth of Tragedy wrote the following lines, still relevant today:
“[…] What would we otherwise know to name which amid the desolation and weariness of contemporary culture could awaken some comforting expectation for the future? We look in vain for a single powerfully branching root, for a spot of fertile and healthy soil – but everywhere there is dust, sand, ossification, and decay. Here a desperate, isolated man couldn’t choose a better symbol than the knight with Death and the Devil, as Dürer has drawn him for us, the knight in armour with the hard bronze gaze, who knows how to make his way along his terrible path, without wavering at his horrific companions – and yet without any hope, alone with his horse and hound. Such a Dürer knight was our Schopenhauer: he lacked all hope, but he wanted the truth.”