Songfacts®:

• This song describes a Satanic ritual where a follower gives his soul to the Devil. The lyric was written by the band's frontman King Diamond, who often wrote about Satanism. Guitarist Hank Shermann wrote the music.
• This is a track from the first Mercyful Fate album, Melissa, which was a big influence on other metal bands. Metallica included part of the song on their Garage Inc. medley "Mercyful Fate."
• When the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) held hearings in Washington, DC in 1985 to push for a ratings system on albums, this song appeared on their list of 15 songs deemed most objectionable. How this group discovered a somewhat obscure track by a Danish metal band remains a mystery, but they tagged it as "Occult," a label they could have applied to Mötley Crüe, AC/DC or Judas Priest, but those bands were flagged for sex or violence.
  
  "We thought they must be really bored to have time for this," King Diamond told Rolling Stone. "How they saw those songs said more about them than it did about us - they had some really perverted minds."