A pdf version of this article is available here – roots-of-the-o9a.pdf
Note: This article was updated on 9 June 2013 by adding a reference to the book Studien zum antiken Synkretismus aus Iran und Griechenland.
Order of Nine Angles
Roots and Organization of the Order of Nine Angles
The Order of Nine Angles (ONA, O9A) is a controversial occult group for a variety of reasons. For it has been claimed that they “represent a dangerous and extreme form of Satanism” {1} having, as a reading of the voluminous ONA corpus {2} reveals,
“a distinct praxis, advocating as it does not only practical physical ordeals and what it terms Insight Roles, but also practical adversarial acts such as culling (human sacrifice), criminality, political extremism, and even terrorism.” {3}
In addition, the ONA is unlike most, if not all, contemporary Occult orders or organizations in that it has no centralized organization, no person claiming to be its leader, no formal membership, and – as the ONA – holds no public activities, meetings, or events, issues no public statements, and detests the use of titles. Instead, it is a particular type of secret society; a collection of covert localized groups (small clandestine cells) and anonymous individuals who identify with or who support its aims, methods, and goals; who apply its praxis to their own lives, and who often establish their own local ONA nexion and recruit people to join it. According the Order of Nine Angles themselves, they have always been based on the principle of
“self-replicating self-contained units; that is, based on the seeding, development and propagation of certain causal forms, and thence on the establishment of independent groups and independent individuals who would be freely provided with all the texts and materials necessary to either: (1) if they chose, to follow the Seven Fold Way on their own without any direct personal [centralized] guidance; or (2) to develop their own system based upon or inspired by the ONA, its causal forms, praxis, and mythos. These groups and individuals then would or could be the genesis of other seedlings.” {4}
It would be thus be more appropriate to talk and write not about the ONA as if it were an ordinary occult organization akin to the Church of Satan, or the Temple of Set – which it is not – but rather about the particular occult philosophy that is being propagated and has been propagated under the name ‘the order of nine angles’ and which occult philosophy influences or inspires – and has influenced or inspired – those who describe themselves as ONA and who therefore personally apply its praxis, who establish their own ONA nexion, or who develop their own praxis or occult system “based upon or inspired by the ONA, its causal forms, praxis, and mythos”.
This occult philosophy is ‘the sinister tradition’, the ‘O9A way’, or more accurately the modern esoteric philosophy of the pseudonymous Anton Long as described in the 2013 e-text by Richard Stirling entitled The Radical Sinister Philosophy of Anton Long, which details its ethics, epistemology, ontology, and praxis, and which ethics, epistemology, ontology, and praxis, mark it as a distinctive esoteric philosophy within the Western occult tradition.
An esoteric philosophy which includes, but is not limited to, (i) the self-initiatory Seven Fold Way of individual occult training with its ordeals, practical insight roles {5}, sorcery, grade rituals, esoteric chant, star game, and dark gods mythos {6}; (ii) the code (the praxis) of kindred-honour and the amoral utilization of mundanes; (iii) an adversarial, practical, individualistic, non-hierarchical, and subversive, form of Satanism and of the Left Hand Path {7}; (iv) the way of the Rounwytha {8}.
To develop such a “dangerous and extreme” esoteric philosophy, and to then propagate it, world-wide, by means of independent ‘self-replicating’ clandestine cells and covert operatives, is surely unique in the annals of modern occultism. Little wonder, then, that the O9A has attracted criticism.
Early and Later Writings
It is convenient to divide the writings of Anton Long – his esoteric philosophy – into two parts, before and after around c. 2000. Some of the later writings extensively elaborate on some of the topics mentioned in the early writings, with many of these later writings apparently dealing with altogether new topics.
Certainly, the majority of these later writings, especially those dating from 2009 onwards, have a different tone, with the rhetoric and propaganda – and the ‘satanic diatribes’ – of the earlier writings replaced by sometimes lengthy, staid, metaphysical musings.
However, as I described in my 2012 essay Developing The Mythos, The Order of Nine Angles In Perspective,
“…throughout its more than thirty years of public notoriety, the ONA has been consistent in its mythos, with their more recent texts (of c. 2009-2012) often or mostly just elaborating on this mythos or with the mythos merely being re-expressed using some newly developed terminology, such as the terms dark empathy and acausal-knowing.”
That is, most definitely before 2000, and probably in the early 1980s, the philosophy was complete, if only – in respect of some of the more advanced aspects – as yet untried, untested, by Anton Long himself.
For what these later writings seem to show is a writing from personal experience; with the early writings, for instance, just mentioning – or more often than not dealing only in a cursory manner with – topics such as the Abyss, pathei-mathos, and the cultivation of dark empathy. In effect, therefore, the later writings are those of a wiser man who, following his own journey along the Seven Fold Way, ventured into and beyond the Abyss to reach the penultimate stage of that Way.
A detailed study of all the works authored by Anton Long, from the 1970s to 2011 – from the novels in the Deofel Quartet to the Black Book of Satan, to Naos, the two volume Satanic Letters of Stephen Brown, the three volumes of Hostia, and later writings such as Pathei-Mathos and The Initiatory Occult Quest – reveal some of the roots of, or those who may have influenced, his esoteric philosophy and its development, and which roots and influences, despite silly claims made by some over the last two decades, are not from the likes of Crowley, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, LaVey or the Temple of Set, but rather from much older, and separate, occult traditions. Occult traditions that owe much to (a) ancient Greek hermetic writings (in the original Greek), (b) Arabic alchemical and Sufi texts (themselves often influenced by the writings of the Greek philosophers and possibly Hellenic hermeticism), (c) ancient Persian and Indic philosophy, and (c) an ancient pagan tradition indigenous to the British Isles.
The Nine Angles
The very name chosen by Anton Long, in the 1970s, to propagate his esoteric philosophy – the Order of Nine Angles – is interesting and indicative.
In a paper about the Order of Nine Angles read at an international conference about Satanism in 2009 {9} – a revised version of which was published in the 2012 book The Devil’s Party {10} – Senholt repeated the claim, prevalent in the previous two decades and repeated ad nauseam on the internet, that “the concept of the nine angles appears for the first time in published sources by the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set […] and this appears to be the probable source of inspiration to the ONA.”
However, Senholt, it seems, made no effort to study or even reference ancient Arabic alchemical and Sufi texts – many of which have not been translated into English or any modern language, and some of which MSS were acknowledged by Anton Long as a source {11}.
Senholt was also not familiar with references to ‘nine angles’ (or ‘nine emanations’, depending on the translation) in other ancient texts, including those mentioned by Professor Connell Monette of Al Akhawayn University, Morocco:
“A further possibility suggested by ONA texts is that it refers to nine emanations of the divine, as recorded in medieval Sufi texts. It is equally likely that the Order has borrowed from classical Indian tradition that arranges the solar system into nine planets, and the world itself has nine corners; or perhaps from the Sanskrit srivatsa, a special mark with nine angles that indicates the supernatural or the heroic.
On the nine angled srivatsa, Gonda states that: ‘This [mystical] figure has nine angles: the number nine often occurs in connection with auspicious objects, powers and ceremonies related to material welfare’. See Gonda, J. ‘Ancient Indian Kingship from the Religious Point of View’, Numen, Vol. 4, Fasc. 1 (Jan., 1957): 24-58.
The Indian belief that the world has nine corners is attested even in medieval European sources, e.g. Father Emanual de Veiga (1549-1605), writing from Chandagiri in 1599 who states ‘Alii dicebant terram novem constare angulis, quibus celo innititur.’ (Others said that the Earth had nine angles, by which it was lifted up to Heaven), see Charpentier, J. ‘Treatise on Hindu Cosmography from the Seventeenth Century’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1924): 317-342.
It is clear despite claims that the term ‘nine angles’ was introduced in the twentieth century, the term is centuries older, especially in esoteric or cosmological discourse. See Pingree, D. The Latin Version of the Ghayat al-Hakim, Studies of the Warburg Institute, University of London (1986); Ritter, H. ed. Ghāyat Al-Hakīm Wa-Ahaqq Al-Natījatayn Bi-Altaqdīm (Leipzig : B.G. Teubner, 1933); al Buni, Shams al-Ma’arif (Birmingham: Antioch Gate, 2007).
Indeed, the founder of the ONA has stated in several documents (and interviews) that Naos was influenced by a private collection of unpublished Arabic manuscript folios, which may share a common ancestry with the Picatrix and Shams.” {12}
In addition, Senholt, and others, failed and fail to appreciate the relation between the term ‘nine angles’ and the ONA’s Star Game, which esoteric game is an abstract representation – developed in the 1970s and using alchemical terminology for the pieces – of both ‘the nine angles’ and of the ONA’s septenary system.
The Septenary System
Senholt, along with many others before and since, have dismissed the ONA’s septenary system as merely “a replacement for the Kabbalah […] a non-Semitic version of the Kabbalistic Sepherot” {13}, apparently unaware that a septenary system is mentioned in the early and important hermetic text (c. 2nd/3rd century CE) written in Greek, and which text is more popularly known in English translations and as the Pymander dialogue of the Hermetica attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.
According to this hermetic text – which pre-dates the Kabbalah by almost a thousand years – there is “a cosmic framework [a system] of seven” of which man is a part {14}, a septenary system which, as the ONA noted in some of their early MSS, the Elizabethan mathematician Robert Fludd made mention of in some of his writings, and which some medieval alchemical texts also make reference to.
As with the term nine angles – and what the ONA mean by angles {15} – the septenary system therefore not only harks back to times well before the emergence of the modern Western occult movement, but also to ancient sources that are Hellenic, Arabic, Persian, and Indic.
The Rounwytha
As Goodrick-Clark noted, “compared to the eclectic nature of American Satanism, many ideas and rituals of the ONA recall a native tradition of wicca and paganism” {16}. Something especially true of what the ONA – that is, Anton Long – describe as the Camlad Rounwytha tradition, hailing from the Shropshire and Herefordshire areas of England, and the marcher areas of Wales, and which tradition is quite unique in Western occultism, bearing little if any resemblance to the modern manufactured ‘wicca’ propagated by the likes of Gerald Gardener, and which pagan tradition cannot be found in books, ancient or modern.
For, in the Rounwytha tradition {17},
i) There are no named deities or divinities or ‘spirits’. No ‘gods’, no ‘goddess’. No demons.
ii) There are no spells or conjurations or spoken charms or curses; no ‘secret scripts’ and no ‘secret teachings’; indeed no teachings at all.
iii) There are no ‘secret book(s)’ or manuscripts; indeed, there are no writings.
iv) There are no ritual or Occult or ‘wiccan’ or ‘satanist’ elements at all.
v) There is no calendar, as calendars are usually understood, and thus no set dates/times for festivities or commemorations.
vi) There are no oaths made, no pledges written or said.
vii) There is no organization, no dogma, no codification of beliefs, no leader(s), no hierarchy, and no stages or grades of ‘attainment’.
Instead, the Rounwytha way is the way of “a particular and a natural sensitivity: to human beings, to Nature (and especially the land, the weather), to living-beings (especially animals) and to the heaven/Cosmos. A wordless, conceptless, feeling of connexions, and of the natural balance that we mortals, being unwise, have such a tendency to upset.”
This is most certainly not the modern wicca of ‘harming none’, for it is also the ancient pagan way of
“knowing the nature of the rotten: human, animal, land. Of the need, sometimes, to cleanse, perchance to cull. As when there was the knowing that a certain individual doing a certain deed was bad, rotten – and not because they had offended some named and powerful god or goddess, and not because such a deed contravened some law or decree said to be divinely inspired or laid down by some sovereign or by someone who claimed authority from some god or gods or ‘government’, but because such a deed signed that person as rotten, and who thus, like a rotten piece of meat eaten, might or most probably would cause sickness, or spread disease, among us, among the land. Hence why their removal – by exile or by cull – would end (cure) the sickness, restore the balance their rotten deeds and they themselves had caused to be upset, restoring thus the natural flow, and gifts, of Life: of health, fecundity, happiness, good fortune.” {17}
In effect, the conceptless empathic and often reclusive way of the Rounwytha is what the initiate following the Seven Fold Way finds beyond The Abyss at the very end of their life-long occult quest (the sixth sphere of the seven forming the Tree of Wyrd), for it is that essence that has, for over a thousand years, been described as Lapis Philosophicus; and what Anton Long has termed the sinisterly-numinous, which is “the living unity beyond the abstract, the lifeless, division and dialectic of contrasting/abstractive/ideated opposites. A division most obvious in the false dichotomy of good and evil.” {18}
From its inception the O9A have (that is, Anton Long from the 1970s has) claimed five things.
(1) That their septenary system, manifest in their Seven Fold Way, is ‘the genuine Western occult tradition’ pre-dating the Kabbalah and that they have simply “made public various aspects of it and extended it in some particular ways”. One particular extension is the Star Game; another, Insight Roles.
(2) That their sinister tradition or philosophy exists to be lived, being (a) the way of practical, exeatic, experience and learning from such experience; (b) the way of ordeals (such as the rite of internal adept) and (c) the way of developing skill in their Dark Arts {19}. This way is difficult, individualistic, and takes time.
(3) That their pantheon of ‘dark gods’ are part of a garbled, aural, tradition – a mythos – and like the entity termed Satan may or may not be ‘real’, and may or may not be archetypes; and that it is for each individual to discover for themselves, via practical experience of sorcery, the truth of the matter.
(4) That the primary aim of their way – that is, of the O9A philosophy of Anton Long – is to aid the development of Adepts and thus hasten the development of a new type of human being and thence fulfil the potential that human beings possess; and that this aim will take a century or (more likely) far longer to achieve.
(5) That, importantly, their O9A way, as it now exists, is not sacrosanct or dogmatic and (a) should be added to, evolved, and refined, as a result of the esoteric pathei-mathos of those who have lived it, and (b) can and should be adapted and developed and changed, in whole or in part, by others who are or who have been inspired by or influenced by it.
In conclusion, therefore, the esoteric philosophy of Anton Long as manifest in the Order of Nine Angles could be usefully summed up as one man’s codification, amalgamation, and development, of (a) several disparate traditions, of diverse origins and periods, and of (b) his own pathei-mathos from his exeatic life, into a practical and flexible and modern, and unique and subversive and individualistic, esoteric system.
These disparate traditions, of diverse origins and periods, include the ancient Corpus Hermeticum; Arabic, Sufi, Persian, Indic, and medieval Western alchemical, texts; and an aural English-Celtic pagan tradition.
R. Parker
2013
Footnotes
{1} Per Faxneld: Post-Satanism, Left Hand Paths, and Beyond in Per Faxneld & Jesper Petersen (eds) The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity, Oxford University Press (2012), p.207
See also Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, New York University Press, 2002, p. 218.
{2} An extensive bibliography is provided in Richard Stirling, The Radical Sinister Philosophy of Anton Long. e-text 2013
{3} Stirling, op.cit
{4} Playing The Sinister Game. ONA e-text, dated 122 yfayen (updated Jan 2012 CE)
{5} “Through the practice of ‘insight roles’, the order advocates continuous transgression of established norms, roles, and comfort zones in the development of the initiate […] This extreme application of ideas further amplifies the ambiguity of satanic and Left Hand Path practices of antinomianism, making it almost impossible to penetrate the layers of subversion, play and counter-dichotomy inherent in the sinister dialectics.” Per Faxneld and Jesper Petersen, At the Devil’s Crossroads in The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity. Oxford University Press, 2012, p.15.
{6} The Seven Fold Way is described in detail in the two freely available ONA pdf compilations (i) The Requisite ONA – A Practical Guide to the Sinister Sorcery of the Order of Nine Angles (of 981 pages, and which includes a facsimile copy of the 1989 Naos MS) and (ii) Enantiodromia – The Sinister Abyssal Nexion.
{7} This subversive individualistic Satanism is evident in (i) the ONA’s 1984 text The Black Book of Satan, where there is a self-initiation, ceremonial rituals, and with the individual expected to form their own independent Satanic group, under the banner of the ONA, and recruit members for it; and in (ii) classic ONA texts, from the 1980s, published in Left Hand Path zines such as Nox.
It is also evident – perhaps more so – in ‘the drecc’ or niner; the lone operative expected to do practical heretical and criminal (or even terrorist) deeds in pursuit of going beyond and transgressing “the limits imposed and prescribed by mundanes, and by the systems which reflect or which manifest the ethos of mundanes – for example, governments, and the laws of what has been termed society.” Glossary of ONA Terms (v. 3.07)
The ONA define the Left Hand Path as,
The amoral and individualistic Way of Sinister Sorcery. In the LHP there are no rules: there is nothing that is not permitted; nothing that is forbidden or restricted. That is, the LHP means the individual takes sole responsibility for their actions and their quest, and does not abide by the ethics of mundanes. In addition, the LHP is where the individual learns from the practical deeds and practical challenges that are an integral to it. Glossary of ONA Terms (v. 3.07)
{8} The way of the Rounwytha is outlined in the following ONA texts, all authored by Anton Long. (i) The Rounwytha Way in History and Modern Context; (ii) Alchemical Seasons and The Fluxions of Time; (iii) Denotatum – The Esoteric Problem With Names.
{9} Senholt, Jacob C: Political Esotericism & the convergence of Radical Islam, Satanism and National Socialism in the Order of the Nine Angles. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Conference: Satanism in the Modern World, November 2009
{10} Senholt, Jacob. Secret Identities in The Sinister Tradition, in Per Faxneld & Jesper Petersen (eds), The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity. Oxford University Press, 2012
{11} Anton Long. Presencings Of A Hideous Nexion. e-text. Dated 122 yfayen.
In a MS dated 107yf and entitled Quod Fornicatio sit Naturalis Hominis, Anton Long mentions that the title given to one Arabic MS, of only a few folios, that he used as a source, Al-Kitab al-Aflak, was obviously a much later addition, being in a different hand, and that those folios were probably once part of a larger MS.
{12} Mysticism in the 21st Century, chapter 5. e-text. 2012
{13} Senholt, op. cit., p.253
{14} For references to a septenary system in ancient Iranian texts, see Reitzenstein and Schaeder Studien zum antiken Synkretismus aus Iran und Griechenland, (Studien der Bibliothek Warburg), Teubner, Leipzig, 1926.
{15} Esoterically, the ONA use the term angles to refer to what is represented by the elements of the Star Game – the nine aspects of the three basic alchemical substances whose changing and permutations (over seven boards/spheres, or via seven archetypal and thus septenary forms) in causal time represents a particular presencing of acausal energy. The nine angles (or dimensions) therefore are a nexion – a map – that is the presencing of the acausal evident in our psyche and consciousness, and thus a link between us, Nature, and ‘the heavens’ (the cosmos) beyond.
{16} Goodrick-Clarke, op.cit. p.218
{17} The Rounwytha Way in History and Modern Context
{18} The Adeptus Way and The Sinisterly-Numinous. Version 2.03. 123 yfayen
{19} The Dark Arts listed and taught by the ONA include sorcery or magick (external, internal, aeonic), acausal empathy (aka dark-empathy) developed by rites such as that of internal adept, and the acausal-thinking developed by the Star Game.
Order of Nine Angles
In respect of the Order of Nine Angles, the majority of individuals who show an interest in, or who declare they are ONA/O9A or are associated with us, sooner or later leave or move on to other things, be such things Occult, personal, or otherwise; with their motives or reasons for such a leaving or for such a moving-on being almost as varied as the individuals themselves.
Most who leave or move-on do so after a few months or after a year or so, and do so quietly, with no explanation, public or private, although one or two will make, and latterly have made, some public announcement, sometimes critical of the ONA or critical of those involved with it or assumed to be involved with it, or critical of what they assume or believe is the way the ONA is developing. Sometimes someone who has been associated with – or even been a part of – the ONA for some years will leave.
Does all this – all this coming and going, and such pronouncements about leaving – matter? No, it does not matter. Why not? Because it is expected, and natural; and has been occurring for over thirty years.
It does not matter (i) because of the aims and goals of the ONA; (ii) because of the time-scale – of decades and centuries – on which the ONA operates; (iii) because of how the ONA is structured; and (iv) because of what the ONA really is.
As mentioned some years ago:
“One of the basic aims of the ONA is to create genuine Adepts – that is, individuals who question, who are rational; who possess genuine magickal skills; who have gone to and beyond their own limits. Essentially, the ONA is a LHP organization – there is no morality; no limits; no sycophancy. In fact, the ONA in its essence is profoundly anarchic, and may be said to preach and practice genuine anarchy {1}. The ONA system, such as it is, is for only limited guidance, on a direct individual basis, to be given. The novice, the Initiates, are expected to learn by trial and error, by practical experience […]
It needs to be made clear, yet again, that every Initiate is expected to work many things out for themselves, that the ONA is only a guide; it is practical experience, self-insight, and self-honesty, which matter.”
Source – http://web.archive.org/web/20111004064402/http://nineangles.wordpress.com/reply-to-some-criticism/
As AL wrote in 2009 ev regarding those following the traditional praxis of the Seven Fold Way:
“Over the decades, several people have come and gone – some only achieved External Adept; a few achieve Internal Adept. Of those who wander away, and give up or renounce their Sinister quest, one or two return, having learnt much – about themselves – during their exile.
Yet some of those who wander away or who may renounce their quest may still have done some useful work; may still have presenced the Sinister in some way, and thus have contributed something, or affected some changes, however small. Some of these may even have been manipulated into doing such things, into contributing such things, by a Master, or a Mistress, with their leaving or their renunciation a sign of their failure.
For such renunciations – whatever the reasons, or the reasons such people tell themselves – are expected, and indeed natural; part of the selection process itself. Those who go have failed, and proven themselves unsuitable; for the real, and the most important test, is that which lies beyond Internal Adept and which signifies the change from Adept to Master/Mistress. Of those who thus progress beyond the Abyss, there have been no renunciations.
Each Grade, of Internal Magick, is thus a test, a selection; and the move away from each Grade toward the next is also itself a test, a selection, and one which lasts many an alchemical season – in exoteric-speak, which lasts for some or often many many years.
Again, such people, such failures, should be viewed in the perspective of centuries: of the progression toward our Sinister goals, our disruption of the Old Order, our presencings of the acausal darkness, and the emergence of the New Aeon, whose Sinister magickal energies are already being felt, by some, and whose exoteric affects are slowly causing causal changes.” Source – https://lapisphilosophicus.wordpress.com/toward-the-formless-acausal/
In addition, and importantly, two things need to remembered. First, that the Order of Nine Angles is and always has been based on the principle of
“self-replicating self-contained units; that is, based on the seeding, development and propagation of certain causal forms, and thence on the establishment of independent groups and independent individuals who would be freely provided with all the texts and materials necessary to either: (1) if they chose, to follow the Seven Fold Way on their own without any direct personal [centralized] guidance; or (2) to develop their own system based upon or inspired by the ONA, its causal forms, praxis, and mythos. These groups and individuals then would or could be the genesis of other seedlings, with some forms – such as Insight Roles – when used by such people aiding the sinister infiltration of the societies of the West.” https://lapisphilosophicus.wordpress.com/ona-classic-texts-archive/playing-the-sinister-game/
Second, that the ONA has and always has had both an exoteric [causal] and an esoteric [acausal/Aeonic] purpose and nature; a dual nature [sinister/numinous; sinisterly-numinous] manifest in (α) a leaderless, a non-structured, non-hierarchical collective (or collection) of (often clandestine) individuals, groups, and nexions, who are all – in some way or other, and in whole or in part – guided by or inspired by the esoteric philosophy of Anton Long {2}, and in (ω) the ancestral and occult pathei-mathos of the individual Rounwytha and of the Inner ONA {3}.
Thus, α [alpha] implies – necessitates – the continuing development/reformation/counter-reformation of ‘the theory and praxis of the ONA’ by both individuals and groups, sans sycophancy, with the consequent subversion of existing forms and structures and the development of new ones; while ω [omega] implies – necessitates – the pursuit, over decades, of Lapis Philosophicus by a few (often reclusive) individuals and thus them adding to not only the occult pathei-mathos of the ONA but to the ancestral pathei-mathos germane to all human beings.
But it is only to be expected that only a few, now, will appreciate and understand all of this. Meanwhile, people will continue to ‘join’ and to leave what is exoterically known and exoterically described as The Order of Nine Angles.
O9A
June 2013 ev
Notes
{1} On the matter of anarchy, qv the following for example:
a) The text The ONA and Anarchy first circulated in 1991 ev, included in some compilations of ONA MSS published in the 1990s, and available here –
http://web.archive.org/web/20111004064308/http://nineangles.wordpress.com/ona-and-anarchy/
b) The Letter to Aquino, dated 7th September 1990 ev, in Vol i of The Satanic Letters of Stephen Brown
A useful, working, definition of anarchy is “that way of living which regards the authority of The State as unnecessary and possibly harmful, and which instead prefers the free and individual choice of mutual and non-hierarchical co-operation”.
{2} For an outline of this esoteric philosophy, see https://lapisphilosophicus.wordpress.com/about-2/philosophy-of-anton-long/
{3} https://lapisphilosophicus.wordpress.com/inner-ona/
AoB
Hebdomadry – Exeatic Way of The Order of Nine Angles
The link below is to a work which brings together four recent (2012-2013) articles about the Order of Nine Angles. These detailed articles – referencing ONA texts as they do – provide a good introduction to, and an overview, of the ONA.
Preface
(pdf 515 Kb)
O9A
Sinister Tribes, Satanism, and The Order of Nine Angles
The Sinister Dialectic, Manipulation of Forms, and Satanism
The sinister dialectic is the term used in the sinister tradition of the Order of Nine Angles to describe their
“Satanic/Sinister strategy – which is to further our evolution in a sinister way by, for example, (a) the use of Black Magick/sinister presencings to change individuals/events on a significant scale over long periods of causal Time; (b) to gain control and influence; (c) the use of Satanic forms and magickal presencings to produce/provoke large scale changes over periods of causal Time; (d) to bring-into-being a New Aeon; (e) to cause and sow disruption and Chaos as a prelude to any or all or none of the foregoing.” [1]
An early, 1989, ONA text gives more detail:
” i. On a basic level, the dialectic is concerned with simple opposition – with defiance of what is accepted or conventional at particular times. This is heresy – the Adversarial role, a challenge against both conscious and unconscious norms. This opposition works on two levels – the individual, and society […]
ii. On a higher level, the dialectic is concerned with long-term evolution – with the creation and change of civilizations and ultimately with the creation of a new type of individual, a new species. This means altering our evolution [and] two tactical approaches. (1) Enabling individuals to change themselves, to evolve, consciously, and so become part of that evolutionary change. (2) Changing/influencing the structures (such as societies) to make them instruments for such change or at least not detrimental to it […]
(i) involves such things as External and Internal Magick – a following of the Seven Fold Sinister Way. (ii) involves Aeonic magick – e.g. the creation of new archetypal forms or images and the infection in the psyche of others which results from introducing them – and gaining/using influence. It should be understood that while the tactics of (i) above can and do change, the tactics used to attain (ii) remain essentially the same because the goal is precise. Further, (i) in many ways aids (ii).” [2]
The adversarial role is described, in another early ONA MS [3] as ‘shadow magick’ because it is mostly secretly done and because it is dangerous; with the reality being [4] that
“…all significant magick is either Aeonic or Internal: External Magick is a child’s game, to be played while learning the most basic skills […] or for amusement, later on. To the real magickian [sorcerer/sorceress] all types of political (as well as religious and cultural) forms are means, to be used if the are useful for aeonic or internal magickal goals.”
The same MS also states that among the ‘forms’ used or usable by a sorcerer/sorceress for the purposes of external, internal, or aeonic sorcery are archetypes, myths, mythos, symbols (including artistic representations) as well as politics and religions.
In addition, according to the ONA, each form has an outer, or exoteric, aspect and an inner, or esoteric, nature [5] , with part of the training of the initiate following the ONA’s seven fold way being to learn to distinguish the esoteric from the exoteric [6] and be able to learn from, and manipulate, both.
Thus, as the ONA have repeatedly stated from the 1980s onward, Satanism, for them, is an exoteric form used as part of their aeonic sinister strategy and is “a presencing of dark forces/acausal energies – a form/mythos – only relevant to the current Aeon, and is but as outer, an exoteric, form – and one means of provoking and encouraging radical and diabolical change and reformation in the present aeon, which present aeon is one aeon among a progression of aeons.” [7]
In addition, they used, and have developed, various ‘forms’ of Satanism, from the old-style ceremonial Satanism of their 1970s Black Book of Satan to the ‘simplified Satanism’ of their 2009 text How To Be A Satanist – A Guide To Satanism For Beginners (The Simple ONA Way) and concerning which ‘simple way’ Anton Long interestingly wrote:
“Not that long ago we published an item which simplified Satanism to its practical, causal, core. There was thus a personal pledge by the aspiring Satanist, a code, and three fundamental principles. Very little in the way of traditional ceremonies or rituals or even words, since the core was the live in a particular way, sans the laws of the mundanes, where there is no law, no authority, no justice except that of the individual.
This item works on a variety of levels, some of which I will enumerate here. Thus, for some of those who might have the potential to be one of our kind, it is one possible beginning – to entice, to provide experience, to live exeactically, and so possibility at some time this might move some of these people toward a desire for more.
For some of those who are already of our kind (but may not yet know it) it is a sign, to what lies beyond such an outer form. An intimation of just why we produce and use such a form.
It is also a practical defiance of those who aid and support the mechanisms which keep mundanes in thrall – for those, for example, who support and aid existing nation-States and the mechanisms of control of those States (be such mechanism psychic, practical, or causal abstractions). For the flunkies of all nation-States do so hate and do find subversive those who believe and who practice the truth there is no law, no authority, no justice except that of the individual. Thus, if that item only influenced ten people in one nation-State in one year to change their way of life and live defiantly, outside mundane law, it would have achieved something in the causal, with no practical effort on our part.
It is also something that undercuts and undermines the pomposity, the pretentiousness, of already existing so-called ‘satanic’ groups, with their ‘temples’ and ‘grottoes’, their rituals, their books, their discussions, their self-awarded titles, and their old Aeon sycophancy.” [8]
That this is and was diabolical – aeonic – sorcery, part of the sinister dialectic, Anton Long reveals in another text:
“This is the type of satanism – note the lower case s – that can be readily and easily understood by ‘the hoodie on the Clapham omnibus’. [9] It is the type of Satanism evident in our text A Guide to Satanism for Beginners (The Simple ONA Way) and, more realistically and perhaps more importantly, in the text The Drecc, which is a guide to devilish living in modern society, with the terms drecc and dreccian being easily replaceable by different terms should others, or the hoodie on the Clapham omnibus, want to replace them with something more to their liking.
Such a way of living (and its propagation) is heretical, sly, and devilish because it is so simple and because there is (i) a rejection of (a living outside of) the law and the ‘justice’ of society and governments; (ii) a fierce, clannish, loyalty; and (iii) the understanding that the property, goods, and wealth, of mundanes – non-gang/non-clan members, those not part of our gang/clan or those are not covered by a truce – are a resource we can lawfully use.
Understood esoterically, and Aeonically, this type of satanism is a Dark Art, a work of Black Magick, an act of diabolical Aeonic sorcery.” [10]
Sinister Tribes – An Exoteric Form
A study of early – 1980s – ONA typewritten and hand-circulated MSS, made publicly available in publications such as the 1989 text Naos and the 1992 multi-volume compilation Hostia, makes it clear that the propagation, around 2009-2010, by the ONA of the idea of sinister tribes and of a ‘kollective’ of individualistic activists is also part of their sinister strategy, and that such things are but exoteric forms.
These ideas, of tribes and of a ‘kollective’, were outlined in articles such as Guide To The Kulture and Sinister Ethos of the ONA, dated 121 yf., where a sinister tribe is defined as “a localized, territorial, sinister kindred – a gang, clan, or tribe – of Dreccs who rule, in a practical way, their own neighbourhood or neighbourhoods, and who regard mundane property and wealth as a useful resource,” with a Drecc being described as “a person who, as part of a gang, tribe, or clan, lives a practical sinister life – that is, who upholds and lives by The Code of The Sinister-Numen aka The Code of Kindred-Honour.”
That such things are but exoteric forms is clear from the aforementioned ‘guide’:
“Our means to achieve our aims and goals are many and varied, and include our sinister tribes, our Traditional Nexions (with the Seven Fold Sinister Way and External, Internal, and Aeonic Magick), our Dreccs, our Sorcerers and Sorceresses who work alone or with a few sinister comrades, our Sinister-Empaths, our Star Game, and our sympathizers and helpers, such as Balobians. One other important means, employed, by the ONA – and an essential part of our Dark Arts – is our sinister Mythos, and which ONA Mythos includes The Mythos of The Dark Gods, and The Mythos of Vindex.”
Which means that one must not confuse some exoteric form, dialectically and probably diabolically and only temporarily used by ‘those who know’, for the ONA or for what the ONA esoterically represents, for such a form would just be abandoned by them if it proved ineffective, impractical:
“…restricting, causal, forms and causally-limited abstract aims are not important. What works, works. What does not work will be abandoned.” [8]
Therefore if a new form, such as ‘sinister tribes’, proves to be ineffective, in exoteric and esoteric terms, or is not producing the required change or results, it would be abandoned.
Furthermore, it is fairly easy to distinguish what the ONA is propagating or using as an exoteric, an outer, form and/or as part of their Labyrinthos Mythologicus [11], since,
“…people would react to this simple thing according to their nature, their conditioning, their potential. So it was/is fun, and useful, esoterically and exoterically.” [8]
Such newer forms as tribes and Drecc are thus designed to work, like the types of Satanism propagated over the decades by the ONA, on a variety of levels; the exoteric and the esoteric; the immediate (the personal, adversarial, diabolical) and the aeonic (the disruption, however small, of the status quo, and so on); and as tests, inducements, inspiration, and to mischievously annoy.
Esoterically, such outward forms can change particular individuals in certain ways, and it is such individuals
“…who by this very transformation of themselves – and what many of them will subsequently do in the world of mundanes according to how the sinister mood takes them – that moves us toward our causally-understood aims and goals and which brings-into-being our new aristocracy spread over the world. A practical aristocracy which is sinisterly subversive not because it seeks to implement some abstraction in some causal time-scale or is motivated by some causal idealism (such as overthrowing some nation-State), but because it aids and enhances the lives of those belonging to it in practical and often material ways – for instance, in terms of influence, in terms of providing goods and services, and in materially rewarding loyalty and honour and service to its members and participants.
In effect, it is/will be an international group – bound together by certain rules, such as our Code of Kindred-Honour and viewing mundanes as a resource – formed of kindred local groups in various nation-States, whose members co-operate together, dispense their own justice, obey their own laws, and who aid and help themselves and others of their kind by whatever practical means they can, even if some of these means are viewed by some existing nation-State as ‘illegal’ or ‘criminal’ or whatever. In this sense, we are a new type of organization in the causal, a mysterium.” [8]
Which is basically just another way of saying that such forms, whatever they are, whenever they are, and however they are perceived by others, are one means whereby the ONA not only influences and expands but also assimilates suitable individuals into its cabal, a secret cabal who understand aeonic sorcery and the sinister dialectic and that “it will take centuries for the affective and affecting changes to become manifest on the type of scale most use to judge such matters as causal aims and goals.”
From Exoteric to Cabal
The causal observer, the dilettante, and many of ‘the O9A-pretendu-crowd’ [12], all mistake some outer form, or several outer forms, for the esoteric ONA. Hence their fixation on one or more of those forms, such as neo-nazi politics, or Satanism, or gangs (sinister tribes) or personal adversarial deeds. The esoteric ONA, however, as their texts make clear, is manifest (a) in the ‘ancestral pathei-mathos’ and the mythos that is the sinister tradition of the ONA; (b) in those who are undertaking the seven fold way; (c) by those who have been recruited by the ‘inner ONA’ (whether or not those so recruited are following the seven fold way); (d) by the inner ONA itself; and (e) by those who, by their practical sinister deeds, by their pursuit of the aims and goals of the ONA and by their adherence to the ONA code of kindred honour, associate themselves with the ONA or who are or who have been assimilated into the ONA. [13]
For, as Anton Long made clear,
“One of our axioms is that we classify humans as either our kind or as mundanes. Our kind currently, and for some previous Aeons, amount to perhaps five per cent – the creative or the defiant minority who latently or by means of their pathei-mathos have a certain natural intelligence, a certain instinct, a certain type of personality, certain personal qualities.
Another of our axioms is that in general (with many exceptions) mundanes are made, not born, and that therefore perhaps a majority of human beings (though certainly not all) have the potential to cease to be mundanes. Most of course will never realize this potential, for a variety of reasons. A corollary of this axiom is that the children of mundanes have not as yet reached the age when mundanity becomes or could become fixed – their natural pattern of behaviour. Thus the reason why children in practical terms are exempt from being considered fair game, a resource, and why we consider certain activities by adults involving children – and certain proclivities, in adults, in respect of children – to be dishonourable and not something our own kind would do. For such things are one mark of mundanity – of those not able to or capable of controlling or changing themselves.
This axiom of potential within others is one reason why, in respect of culling for instance, we always give mundanes a sporting chance – to see if they can react in a non-mundane manner and so provide evidence of their potential to change.” [8]
This ‘potential to change’ and the necessity of providing ‘a sporting chance’ are crucial to understanding the sinister dialectic and the raison d’etre of the mysterium that is exoterically known as the Order of Nine Angles, and are two of the many things which the causal observer, the dilettante, and ‘the O9A-pretendu-crowd’, have overlooked.
For the ONA exists (a) to provide opportunities for its kindred; (b) as a practical and tried and tested means of change for others (some of whom may thus be assimilated and become kindred), and (c) to give those deemed mundanes a sporting chance, with failures culled or (more often) their property and wealth used as a resource [14]. An existence and a provision of opportunities which necessitates the assimilation of others, necessitates an ‘inner generational core’, and necessitates an inner guiding cabal (a hidden hand), given that the aims of the ONA include:
(i) using the sinister tradition to create sinister Adepts and, over a long period of causal Time, aid and enhance and create that new, more evolved, human species of which genuine Sinister Adepts may be considered to be the phenotype; (ii) using the sinister dialectic to aid and enhance and make possible entirely new types of societies for human beings, with these new societies being based on new tribes and a tribal way of living where the only law is that of our kindred honour; and (iii) for our new species to leave this planet we call Earth (our childhood home), and establish ourselves among the star-systems of our own Galaxies, and other Galaxies. This leaving of our childhood home will, with its challenges, its experiences, and its opportunities, enable us to mature, and further evolve, as a species. [15]
The guiding cabal is ‘the inner ONA’ one of whose tasks is to recruit “people in academia, the artistic professions, and suitable officers in the military, the police” [16] in order to increase the influence of the ONA and aid the aims of the ONA, with this inner ONA consisting
“… of individuals, known to each other personally, and from traditional nexions, of the Grade of Internal Adept and above, who possess the faculty of dark-empathy (aka esoteric empathy aka sinister empathy) and who possess certain other personal qualities. These individuals have therefore all had some personal guidance, over a period of many years.” [17]
Hence, according to Anton Long, the ONA
“…produces both internal and external change in an affective, sinisterly-numinous, way. That is, we not only change a limited number of individuals, personally, individually, by our Occult Arts, over long-durations of causal Time, but also – because we are redolent of Wyrd – directly and indirectly influence others, greater in number than the number of our initiates, by our very existence, by our ethos, our methods, our philosophy, our mythos, with some for example adopting and adapting some of our praxis, some of our Occult Arts, some of our esoteric philosophy. [Thus] we grow and have grown slowly, as befits our Aeonic perspective. Slowly, through personal contact, a personal knowing, pledges of duty and loyalty based on our code of honour. It means we are something of a large, growing, unconventional family, whose relations and relatives are becoming dispersed around the Earth, and who – unlike many extended natural families – have a shared, supra-personal, purpose and a shared culture.” [18]
Conclusion
This compact overview has hopefully revealed some of the complexity, some of the esotericism, and part the diabolical nature, of the Order of Nine Angles, and thus might inspire some others to undertake their own study of O9A theory and praxis.
R. Parker
2013 ev
Footnotes
[1] A Glossary of Order of Nine Angles Terms. Version 3.07. 123 yfayen [pdf]
[2] The Sinister Dialectic. The MS was included in the 1992 multi-volume compilation entitled Hostia.
The seven fold way – Hebdomadry – is given in detail in the two texts The Requisite ONA. A Practical Guide to the Sinister Sorcery of the Order of Nine Angles (121 Year of Fayen) and The Sinister Abyssal Nexion (122 Year of Fayen).
Hebdomadry includes such ‘dark arts’ as insight roles, which involve the initiate in engaging in activities which both enhance their own life experience and aid the sinister dialectic.
[3] The Sinister Shadow. Included in Hostia.
[4] Aeonics, The Sinister Tradition. Included in Hostia.
[5] qv. the ONA texts Alchemical Seasons and The Fluxions of Time, and Denotatum – The Esoteric Problem With Names.
[6] Such a learning is one of the aims of the ONA’s grade ritual of internal adept, with the person expected to live alone in the wilderness for at least three months. The ritual is explained in Naos, and other works such The Requisite ONA. A longer, six month, ritual is mentioned in texts such as The Sinister Abyssal Nexion (122 Year of Fayen) and which extended ritual is said to be more efficacious.
[7] Richard Stirling. The Radical Sinister Philosophy of Anton Long. 2012.
[8] Anton Long. Mysterium: Beyond The Order of Nine Angles. 122yf
[9] The idiomatic expression mentioning the Clapham omnibus refers to a phrase formerly and occasionally used in English courts of law and political discussion, with ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ being the upright citizen who possesses the virtue of ‘common sense’.
[10] Toward Understanding Satanism. 122yf
[11] Labyrinthos Mythologicus is “…a modern and an amoral version of a technique often historically employed, world-wide among diverse cultures and traditions both esoteric and otherwise, to test and select candidates, and a mischievous, japing, and sly, part of our sinister dialectic.”
[12] A description of the ‘o9a pretendu crowd’ is given in Anton Long’s text Order of Nine Angles Style, O9A Chic. 122yf
[13] An interesting and aeonic overview of the ONA is given by Anton Long in the text The Aeonic Perspective of the Order of Nine Angles. 123 yfayen
[14] The necessity of testing mundanes, by the ONA or those associated with it, before culling and before appropriating their property and wealth – e.g. stealing from them or fraudulently acquiring their resources, wealth, or property – is mentioned in several ONA texts from the 1980s on, including Guidelines for the Testing of Opfers and Drug-Dealing, Crime, and How To Spot and Test A Mundane.
There is a hitherto undocumented distinction regarding such testing; a distinction made between ‘the esoteric ONA’ – and those who are part of it – and those who are just using or who have appropriated some ONA external form or praxis such as sinister/dreccian tribes, the ‘simple satanism way’, or adversarial living, with those who are part of the esoteric ONA, or associated with it, expected to use such testing of mundanes, while those using or who have appropriated some form not expected to use such testing. I suspect that this subtle undocumented distinction is part of the ONA’s Labyrinthos Mythologicus; that is, part of their testing and selection process for those who aspire to be ONA.
[15] Richard Stirling. The Radical Sinister Philosophy of Anton Long. 2012.
[16] Presencing Azoth. Phase Three 119 – c.157. Documents of the Inner ONA, Part One.
[17] The Inner ONA. 121 Year of Fayen
[18] The Aeonic Perspective of the Order of Nine Angles. 123 yfayen
Order of Nine Angles
A Review of The Contemporary Secret Society Known As The Order of Nine Angles
Contents
Introduction
A Theory of Ethics – Culling, Amorality, Satanism, and Exeatic Living
An Ontology – The Aeonic Perspective, Nexions, and the Sinisterly-Numinous
An Epistemology – Dark Arts and a Life of Sorcery
Conclusion
Appendix – The Code of Kindred Honour
Notes and References
Bibliography
Introduction
There is, in this review of the Order of Nine Angles, no speculation regarding and no attempt made to prove ‘who is behind the pseudonym Anton Long’ beyond stating, in this Introduction, the well-known fact that the prime suspect does deny and always has denied using the pseudonym Anton Long. Neither will this work speculate about the contemporary ‘influence’ or the ‘importance’ of Anton Long and the esoteric group, association, or ‘secret society’ [1] – the Order of Nine Angles (ONA, O9A) – that he founded in 1972, beyond making, in this Introduction, the following observations: (i) the attention recently paid to the ONA by various academics and mainstream authors [2]; (ii) the interest in the ONA from those curious about or desirous of involvement with occultism and/or Satanism and/or what is often referred to as the Left Hand Path; (iii) the number of those publicly or anonymously identifying with the ONA and/or establishing ONA/ONA-type nexions or groups; (iv) the number of those publicly or anonymously using ONA ideas and praxis (in whole or in part) and/or using ONA terminology.
Instead of such speculation about authorship and influence, this work deals with the esoteric, the sinister and the practical, philosophy propounded by Anton Long, and accepts (i) the premise that this Anton Long is, despite recent attempts at obfuscation (mostly by those involved with the ONA), one person; (ii) that this one person is, as Senholt – and others – have suggested “paramount to the whole creation and existence of the ONA” [3]; and (iii) this one person is also the author of the whole vast corpus of ONA works, with only a few exceptions [4], from the 1970s until 2011 when he publicly announced his retirement [5].
Thus, when writing or speaking about the ONA we are essentially writing and talking about the esoteric philosophy of Anton Long.
A reading of the ONA corpus [6] – of works authored by Anton Long from the 1970s until 2012 – reveals an esoteric, an occult, philosophy radically different, in theory and praxis, from other occult philosophies of both contemporary Satanism and the Left Hand Path in general. A difference and a radicality [7] that can be usefully summed up by roughly dividing the ONA corpus into the following subjects or themes:
i) Culling, Amorality, and Exeatic Living
ii) The Code of Kindred Honour
iii) Labyrinthos Mythologicus
iv) Baeldraca – Causal and Acausal Terror
v) Seven Fold (Sinister) Way – Grade Rituals, Ordeals, Insight Roles
vi) Dark Gods, Nexions, and the Acausal
vii) Aeonics and the Sinister Dialectic
viii) Pathei-Mathos and the Initiatory Occult Quest
ix) The Dark Arts
x) The Rounwytha Tradition
xi) The Sinisterly-Numinous
xii) Esoteric Chant and The Star Game
xiii) The Mythos of Vindex
This incomplete division alone suffices to distinguish the ONA from all other contemporary Satanist and the Left Hand Path philosophies, groups and individuals (self-professed or otherwise). For not only does the ONA have its own, original, terminology – for example, exeatic, the Sinisterly-Numinous, nexions, Labyrinthos Mythologicus, Sinister Dialectic, and so on – it also has a distinct praxis, advocating as it does not only practical physical ordeals and what it terms Insight Roles, but also practical adversarial acts such as culling (human sacrifice), criminality, political extremism, and even terrorism.
Given that this review concerns the philosophy expounded by Anton Long, and thus by his Order of Nine Angles, it is relevant to mention what a specific philosophy involves. It is generally accepted that to be regarded as a philosophy an individual should propose (i) an ontology, describing and explaining the concept of Being, and beings, and our relation to them; (ii) a theory of ethics, defining and explaining what is good, and what is bad; (iii) an epistemology, describing how truth and falsehood, and knowledge, can be ascertained. In addition, a philosophy should be able to give some answers to, or have some suggestions regarding, obvious questions such as ‘the meaning and purpose of our lives’, as well as explain or suggest how this particular posited purpose, of the philosophy, might be achieved.
As this review of the ONA – of the works of Anton Long – will attempt to show, the ONA has a specific (esoteric) ontology, an (esoteric) theory of ethics, and an esoteric epistemology, as well as answers to such questions as ‘the meaning and purpose of our lives’ and practical (not theoretical) suggestions as to how this purpose might be achieved. What is particularly interesting, in the context of contemporary Satanism and the Left Hand Path in general, is that the philosophy of Anton Long completely rejects the ethics of ‘might is right’ and the patriarchal ethos, proposing instead a morality based on the concept of personal, and kindred, honour and the division of human beings into ‘mundanes’ and those who manifest, or who have the potential to manifest, what is termed a Baeldracian nature.
A Theory of Ethics – Culling, Amorality, Satanism, and Exeatic Living
In many essays, recent and otherwise, Anton Long describes culling – the practice of human sacrifice according to guidelines laid down by the Order of Nine Angles – as one of the basic principles of the ONA and as a task every ONA person is expected to undertake; a test of their commitment to the sinister, exeatic, way of life and to the ONA; and a sign of their character, with refusal or an inability to so cull revealing the person as unsuitable for the ONA and as a mundane.
For instance, in Satanic Sacrifice and Satanic Thinking [8] Anton Long wrote:
“If there is one thing which expresses the essence of the Satanic ethos it is culling; and if there is one way to detect a pseudo-Satanist it is their attitude to culling.”
This expectation and requirement to undertake such a conventionally amoral deed or deeds, and such a test of commitment and of personal character, expresses not only the reality of the exeatic ONA way but of how they understand, and define and practice, Satanism. An understanding, definition, and practice which has led to the statement that the Order of Nine Angles “represent a dangerous and extreme form of Satanism.” [9]
In A Glossary of Order of Nine Angles Terms (version 3.07) Anton Long defines exeatic as “to go beyond and transgress the limits imposed and prescribed by mundanes, and by the systems which reflect or which manifest the ethos of mundanes – for example, governments, and the laws of what has been termed society,” with mundanes defined, in the same glossary as “those who do not live by the law of the sinister-numen,” and which law is variously termed, in the ONA corpus, the law/code of sinister-honour, the law of the new aeon, the sinister code, and the code of kindred honour [given in full in the Appendix to this review]. And it is mundanes who are the target of most ONA culls, as Anton Long explains in the aforementioned Satanic Sacrifice and Satanic Thinking:
“For us, culling is natural fact of life – of how we live, or how we desire to live. Of course, there are different ways of culling mundanes – not every culling takes place, or needs to take place, in some Satanic ceremony or ritual, although obviously that is a great source of Satanic joy. A good way of culling is war; another is stirring up religious and political conflict; another is insurrection, revolution, assassinations, and so on. In fact, any means of conflict offers opportunities for culling; opportunities for those of Satanic character to weed out the weeds and reduce the surplus population of mundanes. Another, more personal way – and a good means of developing Satanic character – are ‘accidents’. And so on.”
Which mention of “insurrection, revolution, assassinations, and so on” and of stirring up religious and political conflict is germane to how the ONA understand Satanism. According to Anton Long in his 122 yfayen text Toward Understanding Satanism:
“The ONA, contrary to how others understand and manifest it, understands Satanism and manifests Satanism (in an esoteric and an exoteric way) as:1) An amoral, dangerous, practical, exeatic, devilish, way of life.
2) A presencing of ‘dark forces’/acausal energies – a form/mythos – only relevant to the current Aeon.
3) An unrestricted, amoral, diabolical, effective and affective, transformation/development of individual human beings by esoteric and exoteric means […]No restrictions are placed on the individual, so that they are free (and often encouraged) to transgress norms, to be exeatic in a social, personal, and legal, way. For example, to undertake a culling or two; and, should they so desire, to use violence, to go to extremes, to learn certain anti-social, baleful, skills such as those of a fraudster or a robber or dealing in drugs. Of course, this is wicked of us, a diabolical thing to do, which is exactly the heretical point and most certainly is an example of being conventionally bad in moral character, disposition.”
In a footnote, he adds:
“Several older, exoteric, polemical, ONA MSS outline this wickedness, this diabolism. For example the texts (i) Satanism, Sacrifice, and Crime – The Satanic Truth, and (ii) The Practice of Evil, In Context, both originally circulated in 1986 ev, and later included in compilations such as Hysteron Proteron (1992 ev). Most of these early diabolical MSS were (given their irresponsible content) only privately circulated, but a few of them appeared in internal ONA journals such as Exeat and Azoth.”
This diabolical amorality, this wickedness, however, as Anton Long makes clear, must be placed in the context of ‘us’ (the ONA, those following the code of kindred honour) and of ‘them’ (the mundanes, who do not follow ‘our’ code) – or 9 and Non-9 as we might with some humour describe them. As stated in the Introduction to the code of kindred honour “the Code sets certain standards for our own personal behaviour and how we relate to our own kind and to others.” In effect, and with one exception, the amoral acts are or can be perpetrated on those who are non-9 while those who are 9 are considered as ‘brothers and sisters, as kin’ and treated in accordance with the code of kindred honour. Similarly, it is, again with one exception, those who are non-9 who can be culled. The one exception, in both cases, being children, as Anton Long explained in the text Children and the ONA, dated 122 Year of Fayen:
“In respect of our children, we accept responsibility for them and for their development until they reach such an age as they are developed, mature, enough to make their own informed choices, which is generally around sixteen years of age. Before this age, we are their guardians. After this age, then and only then are they free to join us and our activities […] as a result of them making their own decision and being given the absolute freedom to so choose. Thus, when they reach this age, they are given the choice, and should they choose not to pledge themselves – and thus do not accept our code of kindred honour – then our responsibility for them ends, and they have to make their own way in the world of humans […]
Our law of honour does not apply to adult mundanes of sound body and mind, and thus such human beings are considered fair game, a resource; although should it be necessary – for example in the matter of individual culling – our honour demands that we give them a sporting chance by subjecting them to certain tests in order to verify their mundane character. Thus and importantly, the children of mundanes – those below the age of sixteen or so – are not considered mundanes per se.That is, we accord such children – until they reach the age of choice, of maturity – a certain respect, which in practical terms means they are exempt from being considered fair game, a resource. This naturally excludes us from involvement with certain activities involving children and also means that individuals of certain proclivities, involving children, are regarded by us as dishonourable individuals who most certainly are not of our kind.”
In respect of amorality, Anton Long, in his 2011 text A Satanism Too Far, writes
“We of the Order of Nine Angles do not, never have, and never will condemn acts of so-called terrorism (individual or undertaken by some State), nor do we condemn and avoid what mundanes regard as evil or as criminal deeds. For us, all such things are or could be just causal forms or causal means, and thus are regarded by us as falling into three categories, which categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive: (1) things which might or which can be the genesis of our individual pathei-mathos and which thus are the genesis of our own sinister weltanschauung; (2) things which aid our sinister dialectic or which are or might be a Presencing of The Dark; or (3) things that can or could be a test, a challenge, a sinister experience, too far for someone who aspires to be one of our sinister kind, someone who thus fails the test, balks at the challenge, or is destroyed or overcome by the experience.
For our criteria are not those of morality; are not bounded by some abstract good and evil; are not those defined by the laws manufactured by mundanes. Our criteria is the amorality of personal judgement and personal responsibility, whereby we as individuals decide what may be right or wrong for us based on our own pathei-mathos, and act and take responsibility for our acts, knowing such acts for the exeatic living they are or might be, and knowing ourselves as nexions possessed of the ability, the potential, to consciously – via pathei-mathos and practical sinister experience – change ourselves into a new, a more evolved, species of life. Herein is the essence of Satanism, for us.“
Importantly, Anton Long makes it clear that Satanism, for the ONA, is just “a presencing of dark forces/acausal energies – a form/mythos – only relevant to the current Aeon,” and is but as outer, an exoteric, form – and one means of provoking and encouraging radical and diabolical change and reformation in the present aeon, which present aeon is one aeon among a progression of aeons and each of which aeons last, according to the ONA – that is, in the esoteric philosophy of Anton Long – for around two thousand years. [10]
Similarly, the ONA understand Satan in a unique, non-dogmatic, manner. In the 2011 text The Discovery and Knowing of Satan – Satan, Acausal Entities, and The Order of Nine Angles, Anton Long explains that,
“In respect of Satan and acausal entities, our tradition – our accumulated individual pathei-mathos – suggests that there are two possible modes of apprehension of such beings/entities, and that one of these apprehensions can only be known by individuals actually engaging in practical Occult activity of a certain type (i.e. following our Seven Fold Way from Initiate to Internal Adept). Having then so discovered and so experienced this particular apprehension, they are then and only then (in our view) in a position to make an informed and personal judgement about which of the two suggested apprehensions, in their opinion, might be a valid apprehension of Reality.
These two modes of apprehension of such entities are:(1) The first mode of apprehension is that Satan and such entities have their origin, their existence, their reality, in our human consciousness/unconscious/imagination so that, in effect, they are symbols/archetypes, with Satan [the Satan] being, for example, an archetype of heresy, rebellion, chaos, and adversarial conflict, and/or with ourselves as individuals being a satan and thus heretical, rebellious, adversarial, amoral […]
(2) The second mode of apprehension is that Satan and such entities are actual types of being (acausal life/energy) in a posited acausal continuum, which acausal continuum is quite distinct from the causal phenomenal realm described by such sciences as physics and astronomy, and which acausal beings are quite distinct from all the life-forms we know and have experienced by Phainómenon and understood by causal sciences such as biology […]
The ONA thus has two apprehensions of Satan and thus two types of satanism, with individuals free to choose and use and experience which of these satanisms they want or believe might be useful.For such use and experience, of both, is according to our tradition the means whereby each individual can decide which – or neither, or both – of these satanisms their judgement informs them presents a better understanding of themselves, of Satan, and of Reality. Thus will they – or thus can they, possibly – become aware of the esoteric essence which has become hidden through causal abstractions and even by naming [denotatum], and which awareness is of opposites-as-appearance not as Reality.”
In the Sinister Tradition of the ONA, therefore, the individual is tested, expected to undergo ordeals [11]; expected to live and experience an exeatic, and amoral, a diabolical, way of life – which way of living includes culling – and also engage in practical occult activity of a certain type in order to discover for themselves, from personal experience, the nature of Reality, for:
“…wisdom – one goal of the Adept; acquiring a true, balanced, understanding; the dis-covering/revealing of Reality – has its genesis in the combination of: (a) personal suffering, (b) a learning from adversity, (c) the development of certain Occult skills, and (d) practical personal experience. That is, that all these diverse experiences [and] all such experiences are necessary for interior, esoteric, change within the individual. Not just ‘personal practical experience’; not just Occult skills, and not just a ‘learning from adversity/challenges’, but also and importantly a learning from personal suffering: from grief, severe trauma (physical and/or emotional), personal loss, and an encounter (or many encounters) with the imminent possibility of one’s own death.” [12]
For in the philosophy of Anton Long – and therefore in the theory and the praxis of the ONA – the goals of personal and societal change, reformation, and evolution, together with the personal journey toward wisdom and the discovery of Lapis Philosophicus are central, since
“…our real work, both as individuals and as an Order – our Magnum Opus – is genuinely esoteric and Occult, and thus concerned with lapis philosophicus and not with some purely causal self-indulgence, or some ephemeral outer change in some causal form or forms, or with using such forms to try and effect some external change. For it is this esoteric, this Occult, work which will, affectively and effectively, introduce and maintain the Aeonic changes we desire and plan for – in its own species of acausal Time.” [13]
Which is to say that the ONA is not a group of Satanists (or satanists) culling, doing diabolical deeds, and inciting chaos for their own amusement and pleasure, but an entirely different kind of beast. A secret society of individuals, tried and tested, bound together by a code of kindred honour, who are not only dedicated to personally finding Lapis Philosophicus, but who are also, as a secret cabal, dedicated to changing, transforming, society itself by whatever radical means, whatever outward form – however amoral – that they consider might be useful and productive. A change, a transformation, in order, via their sinister dialectic, to create new societies “based on new tribes and a tribal way of living where the only law is that of our kindred honour.” [14] Here again we have the thread of kindred honour running through the activities of the ONA and guiding them toward, and shaping, their aims.
Which aims include (i) using ‘the sinister tradition’ to create sinister Adepts and, over a long period of causal Time, aid and enhance and create that new, more evolved, human species of which genuine Sinister Adepts may be considered to be the phenotype; (ii) using the sinister dialectic to aid and enhance and make possible entirely new types of societies for human beings, with these new societies being based on new tribes and a tribal way of living where the only law is that of our kindred honour; and (iii) “for our new species to leave this planet we call Earth (our childhood home), and establish ourselves among the star-systems of our own Galaxies, and other Galaxies. This leaving of our childhood home will, with its challenges, its experiences, and its opportunities, enable us to mature, and further evolve, as a species.” [15]
An Ontology – The Aeonic Perspective, Nexions, and the Sinisterly-Numinous
An essential part of the philosophy of Anton Long is ‘the aeonic perspective’, a term used
“…to describe some of our pathei-mathos, some of our experience; that is, to describe some knowledge we have acquired […] This knowledge concerns several matters, some to do with how we understand the individual human being, some to do with our perception of Aeons, and some to do with our praxis and the purpose and effectiveness of our methods and techniques both exoteric and esoteric […]
In our esoteric philosophy the individual human being is regarded as a nexion. As having both an acausal and a causal nature, and as possessing, or being imbued with, a certain amount of acausal energy and which acausal energy is what animates physical matter making it ‘alive’. In one sense, the psyche of the individual is how some of this energy is naturally manifest in us, and an esoteric praxis such as our Seven Fold Way – or our Way of the Rounwytha – are a means whereby we can rationally apprehend and thus come to know and understood and control such energies/forces, some of which are archetypal in nature when perceived exoterically.” [16]
In simple terms, the aeonic perspective relates to the ontology proposed by the philosophy, which is of causal and acausal being and beings; of ourselves as a nexion – ‘a connexion’ – between causal and acausal; with living beings in the causal – including human beings – understood as possessing both an exoteric and an esoteric (an ‘occult’) nature (or being). The esoteric aspect is generally hidden from (unperceived by and thus unknown to) mundanes (intentionally or otherwise). In addition ‘causal abstractions’ and words and naming obscure or can hide the esoteric nature (the essential character) of things, often because they describe, or denote, or refer only what is causal and/or mundane. [17]
Sorcery, and the Dark Arts in general [18], are regraded as one significant and practical means of discovering – knowing – the esoteric nature of living beings, with sorcery defined [19] as “the presencing of acausal energy in the causal by means of a nexion. By the nature of our consciousness, we, as human individuals, are one type of nexion – that is, we have the ability to access, and presence, certain types of acausal energy.”
For, according to Anton Long, the aeonic perspective means that:
“… we understand the achievement of our aims and goals in terms of long durations of causal Time, of centuries and more. That we know that changing an ordinary human into one of our kind is a slow, difficult, testing, process involving as it does such things as exeatic experience, practical challenges, and pathei-mathos, as well as a coming-to-live both the sinister and the numinous. Thus our kind develop an awareness and a knowing of themselves as a nexion balanced between causal and acausal and of possessing within them – latent, then discovered, then developed and then lived – the sinisterly-numinous. For such a knowing and then a living of the sinisterly-numinous is an essential part of the development, the breeding, the emergence, of our new kind.The second means not only that we have certain Dark Arts, certain skills, certain Occult methods and techniques, as well as an esoteric aural tradition, but also that one of our tasks is to recruit some suitable individuals and for such initiates to begin to follow the Adeptus way, since we know, from experience, that such a practical and Occult way is most efficacious in producing the new breed of human.” [20]
Which brings us to an important if neglected part of Anton Long’s philosophy, the sinisterly-numinous.
“The term sinister-numinous is employed by us – part of our esoteric ONA-speak – to describe the living unity beyond the abstract, the lifeless, division and dialectic of contrasting/abstractive/ideated opposites. A division most obvious in the false dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and a division not so obvious in denotatum and thus in both Magian religions with their god, prophets, scriptures, and in occultisms and religions devolving around named deities […]
A knowing and then a living of the sinisterly-numinous is an essential part of the development, the breeding, the emergence, of our new kind.
For such a knowing and such of living of the sinisterly-numinous – and the personal learning, the pathei-mathos, that results – is the means to know, to live, to be, the natural balance, the Life, beyond abstracted opposites and all abstractions, and it is this natural, wyrdful, Cosmic balance, that is the quintessence of our new type of human being, and makes us and marks as a breed apart, as quite different from Homo Hubris and all other manifestations of human life on this planet. That the necessity of this knowing, this living, this type of learning, has been overlooked or forgotten by many interested in the Order of Nine Angles is both interesting and indicative.
In terms of the way of the Adept, of someone following our Seven-Fold Way, an experience and thence a wordless personal knowing of this living unity is the purpose of the Camlad Rite of The Abyss and of the living that precedes it.” [20]
In effect, the sinisterly-numinous is the thread that binds the whole ONA together; the balance attained when an Internal Adept progresses into and emerges from the sinister Abyssal nexion, and thus acquires the beginnings of wisdom, and where the path toward lapis philosophicus is clearly seen and clearly understood. A balance of (i) the exeatic, adversarial, amoral livings and sinister deeds and sorcery of the first stages – from Initiate to External Adept – with (ii) the experience, the pathei-mathos of the extended Grade Ritual of Internal Adept, and the ways of numinous living that precede the Rite of The Abyss [21].
It is the sinisterly-numinous that reveals the principle of ‘might is right’ for the de-evolutionary doctrine it is [22]. Being a practical, as well as a theoretical philosophy, Anton Long describes what the sinisterly-numinous means in an easily understandable, if provocative, way, and – importantly – from the viewpoint and the character of the Internal Adept preparing to undertake the Rite of The Abyss and thus preparing, after a successful passing through The Abyss, to undertake works of Aeonic sorcery to aid the sinister dialectic:
“…our Occult kind, our Adepts, have: (1) a type of pagan knowing and understanding of the natural world; (2) a certain sensitivity and empathy; appreciate such muliebral qualities in others, and thus appreciate, understand, women and their potential; and (3) a certain culture, where by culture here is meant (i) the arts of life made manifest by living by our code of kindred-honour, (ii) having a living (and thus numinous) tradition, (iii) having self-control, self-honesty, (iv) having a certain learned knowledge of the Arts, literature, and music of their own ancestral culture, and (v) having the all-important knowing of themselves as but one nexion between a causal past, their present short-lived life, and the wyrdful futures that will exist after their causal death. Therefore one exoteric, and old, archetype which still usefully expresses something of the sinisterly-numinous for those of the male human gender is the chivalrous warrior of stories such as Le Morte d’Arthur but where the supra-personal ‘numinous’ element is not the religion of the Nazarene but rather our code of kindred-honour or something similar. Or, if one desires a more modern, heretical, and somewhat more accurate (but still incomplete, imperfect) archetype, there are the warriors of the Waffen-SS, and what they were, of course, rather than what propaganda and lies about them have made them appear to be.” [19]
An Epistemology – Dark Arts and a Life of Sorcery
As mentioned above, in the philosophy of Anton Long the Dark Arts are regraded as a significant and a practical means of discovering – of knowing – the esoteric nature of living beings, including ourselves. These Dark Arts of the ONA include pathei-mathos, learning from the experience of adversity and from life-threatening situations:
“What pathei-mathos as a Dark Art does, has done, and can do is allow the individual to outwardly experience and to internally confront within themselves both the sinister and the numinous, the ‘light’ and the ‘dark’, and to thus learn from – or fail to learn from – such experiences, interior and exterior. Which is why Occult, initiatory, methods such as the Seven Fold Way and the Way of the Rounwytha exist and were originally devised, for they provide context, a living tradition (ancestral pathei-mathos/’guidance’) and form a tried and tested path toward the goal of positive, evolutionary, individual change and toward the goal of acquiring wisdom.” [11]
Thus, one of the main purposes for the existence of the ONA is to provide such practical experiences – through tests, ordeals, Grade Rituals, and so on – and to encourage the Initiate and the Adept to seek them out and to live in such an exeatic manner that they garnish such experiences by that very manner of exeatic living.
The Dark Arts therefore enable an individual to acquire an acausal knowing and a causal knowing – of ‘things’, of other humans, and other living beings – as well as an honest self-knowing, and it is the Dark Arts, their cultivation and their practice, which define the sorcerer/sorceress and their way of life. From the simple external (hermetic and ceremonial) sorcery of the Initiate and the External Adept, to the sorcery of sinister-cloaking (such as Insight Roles), to the sorcery of The Star Game and Esoteric Chant, to the aeonic sorcery of the Magus/Mistress and the Rounwytha, an aeonic sorcery of which the living ONA, the secret society bound by oaths of kindred honour, is an essential part.
For the philosophy of Anton Long, ‘truth’ is revealed by this combination of acausal knowing and a causal knowing, this living of the life of the sorcerer/sorceress, with the important proviso that what is so revealed by such a living is individual, part of the life, the very being, of the sorcerer/sorceress; a result of their effort and the development of that individual judgement that pathei-mathos makes possible; and that part of acausal knowing – of what is or may be relevant – is mythos, for:
“Mythos is affective, esoteric, and numinous. That is, it inspires, it provokes, it motivates, enthrals, and presences acausal energy. It is wyrdful – a means of change for human beings, and outlines or intimates how such wyrdful change can be brought-into-being. The so-called objective, cause-and-effect, ‘truth’ of a mythos – stated or written about by someone else – is basically irrelevant, for a mythos presences its own species of truth, which is that of a type of acausal-knowing.” [23]
The living, the numinous, truths that the life of the sorcerer/sorceress reveals are, being personal, non-transferable and non-dogmatic, and can seldom be expressed in words which non-Adepts can understand:
“We only had to learn to not only see as we can see but did not know we could but also to know, to understand, to feel, to appreciate, what is seen, sans denotatum, and be such denotatum words (verbal, written), symbolic, ideation (of ‘the mind’), archetypal, or whatever. The first part of this ‘secret’ concerns a certain knowledge: about ‘the living water’, azoth; about the nature of Time, of Being, of consciousness, of the Cosmos, and thus about our nature as mortal existents, as beings, in this realm of phenomenon; of how we are Time beyond its perceived dichotomy and are and have been and will be Being, and have the potential to become/return-to Being beyond our perceived temporary existence as conscious mortal beings. But one has to be ‘there’/here – now/then/when and in/within/beyond Time – in order to ‘see’, to know, to feel, to appreciate, to understand, this. The rest is either preparation or null.” [24]
Conclusion
A study of the complete ONA corpus – from the 1970’s to 2012 – reveals that the esoteric, occult, philosophy of Anton Long is manifest in the following:
(i) Ontology.
The Cosmos consists of both acausal and causal Space-Time, having causal and acausal being and beings; with humans – because of the faculty of reason – a type of nexion between causal and acausal universes.
Living beings in the causal – including human beings – are regarded as having both an exoteric and an esoteric nature (or being). Exoteric refers to the outer (or causal) form, or meaning, or nature, or character, or appearance, of some-thing; while esoteric refers to its occult/inner/acausal essence or nature. What is esoteric is that which is generally hidden from mundanes (intentionally or otherwise), or which mundanes cannot perceive or understand. Causal abstractions tend to hide the esoteric nature (character) of things, and/or such abstractions describe or refer to that-which is only causal and mundane and thus devoid of Dark/Esoteric Empathy.
Sorcery, and the Dark Arts in general, are regraded as a means of discovering – knowing – the esoteric nature of living beings.
Sorcery is defined as “the presencing of acausal energy in the causal by means of a nexion. By the nature of our consciousness, we, as human individuals, are one type of nexion – that is, we have the ability to access, and presence, certain types of acausal energy.”
Humans have the potential to transcend, beyond their mortal causal death, to the realms of the acausal, and which realms are said by aural tradition to contain acausal beings/entities, some of whom may have manifested in our causal realm in the past.
(ii) Theory of ethics.
What is good is what is honourable in personal and kindred terms, with such honour – defined by ‘the code of kindred honour’ – being regarded than more valuable, of a higher ethical value, than personal desires and the causal life of an individual. Such kindred honour is regarded as one means to an acausal existence after mortal death.
This honour demands that an individual is judged by – is distinguished by – their conduct, their behaviour, meaning no distinction is made in respect of, or on the basis of, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, social status, place of birth, or occupation.
Mundanes are defined as those who lack the quality – the arête – of personal and kindred honour, and can therefore be treated as a resource, or encouraged to change, to reform themselves, by following the ONA way.
(iii) Epistemology.
Knowledge is divided into causal and acausal knowing, which compliment each other, with both regarded as necessary to attain wisdom.
Causal knowing is regarded as attainable through reason, scholarly learning, rational observation (experimental science), self-insight, exeatic living, and learning from practical experience (pathei-mathos).
Acausal knowing is regarded as attainable through dark/sinister empathy, Insight Roles, Grade Rituals, Dark Arts, and sorcery. Dark Arts include Esoteric Chant and The Star Game. The Seven Fold Way is considered a practical means of acquiring acausal knowing.
Truth can be revealed by living the life of a sorcerer/sorceress and thus by seeking lapis philosophicus, the jewel of the alchemist.
(iv) The meaning and purpose of our lives.
To evolve into a new, a higher, species by acquiring both causal and acausal knowing and by living according to kindred honour, and which living means new communities whose law is based on kindred honour.
For this new species to – by whatever means, be it via causal or acausal technology or a combination of both – to explore and settle other planets and star systems.
(iv) How this particular posited purpose, of the philosophy, might be achieved.
By sinister dialectics and individuals following the ONA Way, currently manifest in the Seven Fold Way, with the proviso that the ONA is a living, evolving nexion, an ancestral pathei-mathos, acceptive of and receptive to the change, adaptation, and innovation of ‘those who know’: in current practice, those who have undertaken both the extended rite of Internal Adept and the Camlad rite of The Abyss and who thus change, adapt, and innovate on the basis of their causal and acausal knowing acquired via pathei-mathos and sorcery. For it is such sorcery and such personal pathei-mathos – such exeatic experience – over durations of causal time (of decades) that are the only acceptable standard, not words, dogma, ideology, ideas, abstractions, or zeal.
Vindex – manifest in the Vindex mythos – is one esoteric prediction of one exoteric means of how the new ways of living might be created from the destruction of the old. The prediction states that Vindex can be male or female, of any perceived ethnicity and sexual orientation, and be born in any land, but is marked – known – by their adherence to the cause of kindred honour, by their practical warrior skills and experience, and by their dislike of the Magian ethos and thus by dislike of the nation-State and its laws.
As noted above, while the secret society that is the Order of Nine Angles is receptive to change, adaptation, and innovation, this has to come internally; currently, from those who have travelled along the Seven Fold Way, and thus culled, undertaken the extended rite of Internal Adept and the Camlad rite of The Abyss [24], and who thus have the esoteric ability, knowledge and experience – the wisdom – required. The difficulty of so travelling, the natural selection along the way, and the decades of time required for this journey of discovering Lapis Philosophicus, thus ensures the practical and the Aeonic continuation of the ancestral, esoteric, pathei-mathos – the living philosophy of Anton Long – which is the heart of the living ONA. For so few now are in a position to so contribute, in a significant manner, to that ancestral, esoteric, pathei-mathos.
Richard Stirling
February 2013 ev
Notes and References
[1] The term ‘secret society’ is appropriate when considering the ONA given aspects of its praxis, and its consistent statements – made over some thirty years – regarding anonymity, its lack of direct contact information, and its ‘inner ONA’ consisting “of individuals, known to each other personally, and from traditional nexions, of the Grade of Internal Adept and above.” (Noble Guide to the Dark Arts, ONA text dated 119 year of fayen).
The ONA has also stated – in documents such as Presencing Azoth, Phase Three 119 – c.157 and Notes on Phase One and Phase Two – that its ‘third phase’ requires the secret infiltration of society and the secret recruitment of people in certain professions and occupations – for example, in academia, the artistic professions, the military, and the police.
In regard to anonymity, qv. the editorial note in volume one of the 1992 ONA publication The Satanic Letters of Stephen Brown: “It has been for many centuries an established principle among LHP Adepts to work in a reclusive manner in secret…”
[2] qv., for example, the Bibliography – Non-ONA Works given below.
[3] Senholt, Jacob. Secret Identities in The Sinister Tradition: Political Esotericism and the Convergence of Radical Islam, Satanism and National Socialism in the Order of Nine Angles, in Per Faxneld & Jesper Petersen (eds): The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity, Oxford University Press. 2012.
According to Goodrick-Clarke in his book Black Sun, ‘Anton Long’ codified “its teachings into a fully developed system of initiation and training for adeptship.”
[4] The few exceptions are works by ‘Beesty Boy’ aka ‘Christos Beest’ aka Richard Moult. His works amount to his Sinister Tarot; his Internal Adept journal, a few essays in the 1990s; his recorded ‘self-immolation rite’; some recorded chants and music; and some of his sinister pathway workings first published as Caelethi in ‘103 Era Horrificus’ and, in some editions, given the subtitle Black Book of Satan II.
These works serve to illuminate, illustrate (as in the Sinister Tarot and some other paintings), in some cases explain, and in some cases (such as the Internal Adept journal) are good practical examples of, the theory and praxis of the ONA. They are the works of a creative and talented individual assiduously following the Seven Fold Way from Initiate to Internal Adept (but not beyond). Thus, despite their merits, what they do not do is contribute to, or extend, the philosophy of Anton Long as that esoteric philosophy is manifest in the main Anton Long corpus and in the secret society known as the Order of Nine Angles.
[5] qv. (i) Documents of the Inner ONA Sunedrion, Oxonia 122 yf; (ii) Presencing Azoth, Phase Three 119 – c.157 and Anton Long, The Enigmatic Truth, dated December 2011 CE.
In The Enigmatic Truth, Anton Long writes:
“The wisdom acquired, the finding of lapis philosophicus during the penultimate stage of the Way – means two particular things, and always has done. (i) living in propria persona, in a private manner and sans all posing, all rhetoric, all pomposity, all ideations; and (ii) having an appreciation, an awareness (sans words, ritual, thought) of what is now sometimes known as the acausal – of Nature, the Cosmos, of the connexions that bind life and thus of the illusion that is the individual will, and which illusion sillily causes a person to believe ‘they’ are or can be ‘in control’. These two things form the basis of a particular and reclusive way of life of a particular type of person: the type known, in one locality, as the rounerer of The Rouning.”
Interestingly and perhaps importantly, in a footnote and in respect of in propria persona, he quotes – using the original spelling – a sixteenth century text:
“He wolde be in his owne persone, the example of our hole iourney.” William Bonde [lector philosophiae] – The Pylgrimage of Perfection (1526 ce), i. sig. Dvi.
[6] The ONA corpus, dating from 1974 to 2012, consists of printed books, a roll of microfilm, hundreds of pages of typewritten MSS, five occult novels, several collections of short stories, several volumes of various published journals and zines, archives of private letters and e-mails, thousands of pages of publicly available e-texts (in both pdf and html formats) and several collections of privately printed or privately distributed items.
The items and works of this corpus accessed and read for the purpose of this review are cited/listed in the Bibliography – ONA Texts, and which listing includes printed books, MSS, privately printed items, archives of private letters and e-mails, e-texts (in both pdf and html formats) as well as the two extant ONA authorized internet blogs and web archives of the now defunct authorized websites (nineangles.info and camlad9) which websites contained ONA articles and downloadable texts. Many articles/essays by Anton Long – including more recent ones – are accessible in pdf compilations issued by the ONA, such as the five volume ONA Classic Texts (122-123 yf) and The Requisite ONA – A Practical Guide to the Sinister Sorcery of the Order of Nine Angles (121 Year of Fayen).
When several different or updated versions of the same text exist, I have generally used to the later version, as for example version 1.03 of Knowing, Information, and The Discovery of Wisdom, and Version 2.03 of The Adeptus Way and The Sinisterly-Numinous.
[7] Radical as in advocating what is far-reaching, or considered extreme; and of or belonging to what is considered as fundamental to the subject(s) in question. The subjects in question here being ‘the sinister’ and the reformation, the change, of human beings and of human societies.
[8] The essay is included in the 2011 pdf compilation The Non-Essential Anton Long.
[9] Per Faxneld: Post-Satanism, Left Hand Paths, and Beyond in Per Faxneld & Jesper Petersen (eds) The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity, Oxford University Press (2012), p.207. ISBN 9780199779246
[10] An aeon “is a particular presencing of certain acausal energies on this planet, Earth, which energies affect a multitude of individuals over a certain period of causal time. One such affect is via the psyche of individuals. This particular presencing which is an Aeon is via a particular nexion, which is an Aeonic civilization, which Aeonic civilization is brought-into-being in a certain geographical area and usually associated with a particular mythos.” A Glossary of Order of Nine Angles Terms (version 3.07)
The ONA concept of Aeons is outlined in texts such as Naos. An important part of this concept is ‘the sinister dialectic’ which is, as stated in the aforementioned Glossary, “the name given to Satanic/Sinister strategy – which is to further our evolution in a sinister way by, for example, (a) the use of Black Magick/sinister presencings to change individuals/events on a significant scale over long periods of causal Time; (b) to gain control and influence; (c) the use of Satanic forms and magickal presencings to produce/provoke large scale changes over periods of causal Time; (d) to bring-into-being a New Aeon; (e) to cause and sow disruption and Chaos as a prelude to any or all or none of the foregoing.”
The mythos of Vindex is considered a necessary part of this sinister strategy; qv. Vindex and the Tyranny of The Magian in Magian Occultism and The Sinister Way, n.d but c. 2011.
[11] Anton Long. Pathei-Mathos and The Initiatory Occult Quest. 123 yfayen
[12] Tests and ordeals are part of the ONA’s Seven Fold Way, and – as outlined in Naos – include physical challenges, Insight Roles, and Grade Rituals.
[13] Anton Long. O9A Adversarial Action – Success or Failure? 122 yfayen
[14] Frequently Asked Questions About The Order of Nine Angles. Version 4.05. 123 Year of Fayen
[15] The first two aims are stated in various ONA texts, including Frequently Asked Questions About The Order of Nine Angles. Version 4.05, 123 Year of Fayen. The third aim is taken from Guide To The Kulture and Sinister Ethos of the ONA, 121 Year of Fayen.
[16] Anton Long. The Aeonic Perspective of the Order of Nine Angles. 122 yfayen
[17] The basic ideas of causal and acausal – and of esoteric sorcery – are outlined in Naos. See also The Ontology and Theology of Traditional Satanism. 119 yf
In respect of exoteric and esoteric natures, refer, for instance, to Alchemical Seasons and The Fluxions of Time, which is included in the pdf compilation Marcheyre Rhinings (122 Year of Fayen). See also Denotatum – The Esoteric Problem With Names.
Discerning the esoteric from the exoteric is an important part of the training of the Internal Adept, and which training includes the Grade Ritual of Internal Adept.
A rounwytha is a person naturally gifted with – or who learns – the ability to discern the esoteric nature of beings. For the rounwytha tradition of the ONA, see The Rounwytha Way In History and Modern Context (2011 CE) and Questions From A Modern Rounwytha Initiate (122 yf)
[18] The Dark Arts are explained in Anton Long’s text The Dark Arts of The Sinister Way. Version 2.01. 119 yf (revised 122 yf)
The Dark Arts include not only sorcery (external, internal, aeonic, and ceremonial and hermetic) but also Acausal Empathy (aka sinister-empathy aka dark-empathy) and Acausal Thinking.
[19] The definition is from A Glossary of Order of Nine Angles Terms (version 3.07)
[20] The Adeptus Way and The Sinisterly-Numinous. Version 2.03. 123 yfayen
[21] The Rite of The Abyss is given in the pdf compilation Enantiodromia – The Sinister Abyssal Nexion. 122 Year of Fayen. The compilation also contains some notes relating to preparations for the rite. What is not given – but taught orally – is the Oath of The Abyss.
[22] Anton Long. The De-Evolutionary Nature of Might is Right. 122yf
[23] Anton Long. Pseudo-Mythology and Mythos – Lovecraft, The Dark Gods, and Fallacies About The ONA. 121 Year of Fayen
[24] Anton Long. Lapis Philosophicus. 2/2/123 yfayen
[24] The extended rite of Internal Adept involves the candidate in living, for around six months, in an eremitic way, in a wilderness area, bereft of human contact and modern comforts. The Camlad rite of The Abyss requires the candidate to live alone, without speaking, in an underground cavern or isolated dark cave for a lunar month, dependant on food and water brought and left by a fellow ONA member.
Introduction
The Code sets certain standards for our own personal behaviour and how we relate to our own kind and to others. Our Code, being based on honour, thus concerns personal knowing, and therefore demands that we judge others solely on the basis of a personal knowing of them – on their deeds, on their behaviour toward us and toward those to whom we have given a personal pledge of loyalty.
We know our own kind by their deeds and their way of life; that is through a personal knowing.
The O9A Code of Kindred Honour
Those who are not our kindred brothers or sisters are mundanes. Those who are our brothers and sisters live by – and are prepared to die by – our unique code of honour.
Our Kindred-Honour means we are fiercely loyal to only our own ONA kind. Our Kindred-Honour means we are wary of, and do not trust – and often despise – all those who are not like us, especially mundanes.
Our duty – as individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – is to be ready, willing, and able to defend ourselves, in any situation, and to be prepared to use lethal force to so defend ourselves.
Our duty – as individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – is to be loyal to, and to defend, our own kind: to do our duty, even unto death, to those of our brothers and sisters to whom we have sworn a personal oath of loyalty.
Our obligation – as individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – is to seek revenge, if necessary unto death, against anyone who acts dishonourably toward us, or who acts dishonourably toward those to whom we have sworn a personal oath of loyalty.
Our obligation – as individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – is to never willingly submit to any mundane; to die fighting rather than surrender to them; to die rather (if necessary by our own hand) than allow ourselves to be dishonourably humiliated by them.
Our obligation – as individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – is to never trust any oath or any pledge of loyalty given, or any promise made, by any mundane, and to be wary and suspicious of them at all times.
Our duty – as individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – is to settle our serious disputes, among ourselves, by either trial by combat, or by a duel involving deadly weapons; and to challenge to a duel anyone – mundane, or one of our own kind – who impugns our kindred honour or who makes mundane accusations against us.
Our duty – as individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – is to settle our non-serious disputes, among ourselves, by having a man or woman from among us (a brother or sister who is highly esteemed because of their honourable deeds), arbitrate and decide the matter for us, and to accept without question, and to abide by, their decision, because of the respect we have accorded them as arbitrator
Our duty – as kindred individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – is to always keep our word to our own kind, once we have given our word on our kindred honour, for to break one’s word among our own kind is a cowardly, a mundane, act.
Our duty – as individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – is to act with kindred honour in all our dealings with our own kindred kind.
Our obligation – as individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – is to marry only those from our own kind, who thus, like us, live by our Code and are prepared to die to save their Kindred-Honour and that of their brothers and sisters.
Our duty – as individuals who live by the Code of Kindred-Honour – means that an oath of kindred loyalty or allegiance, once sworn by a man or woman of kindred honour (“I swear on my Kindred-Honour that I shall…”) can only be ended either: (1) by the man or woman of kindred honour formally asking the person to whom the oath was sworn to release them from that oath, and that person agreeing so to release them; or (2) by the death of the person to whom the oath was sworn. Anything else is unworthy of us, and the act of a mundane.
Bibliography – ONA Texts
Printed works
§ The Black Book of Satan. Thormynd Press, 1984, ISBN 094664604X
§ Satanic Letters of Stephen Brown. Two volumes. Thormynd Press, 1992
§ Hostia, Secret Teachings of the ONA. Three volumes, 1991-1992
§ Satanism: An Introduction for Occultists. 1992, ISBN 0946646295
§ Hysteron Proteron. 1992
§ Satanism: A Basic Introduction for Prospective Adherents. Second edition, 1992
§ The Deofel Quartet. Anton Long 119yf revised editions. Privately printed 2011
§ Documents of the Inner ONA Sunedrion, Oxonia, 122 yf. Privately printed 2012
§ Documents and Transcripts Relating to the ONA Sunedrion, Florida. Privately printed 2012
MSS
§ Naos – A Practical Guide to Modern Magick. Typewritten & spiral-bound MS. 1989 [Xerox copies subsequently distributed by Brekekk]
§ The Requisite ONA. A Practical Guide to the Sinister Sorcery of the Order of Nine Angles. 981 pages. 121 Year of Fayen [Incorporates a Xerox copy of the 1989 Naos MS]
§ The Sinister Abyssal Nexion. 14 pages. 122 Year of Fayen
e-texts
§ Anton Long. Eulalia: Dark Daughter of Baphomet. 2008 CE [pdf]
§ Anton Long. The Discovery and Knowing of Satan – Satan, Acausal Entities, and The Order of Nine Angles. 2011 ev
§ A Camlad Rounerer [Anton Long]. The Rounwytha Way In History and Modern Context. 2011 CE
§ Magian Occultism and The Sinister Way, n.d but c. 2011. [pdf]
§ Anton Long. Baeldraca – From Causal To Acausal Terror. 121 Year of Fayen [pdf]
§ The Non-Essential Anton Long. 121yf [pdf]
§ Anton Long. Toward The Abyss – A Guide for the Internal Adept. 122 Year of Fayen
§ Anton Long. Presencings Of A Hideous Nexion. 122 Year of Fayen
§ Anton Long. Denotatum – The Esoteric Problem With Names. 122 Year of Fayen
§ Anton Long. Toward Understanding Satanism. 122 yfayen
§ Anton Long. The Dark Arts of The Sinister Way. Version 2.01. 119 yf (revised 122 yf)
§ Anton Long. The Geryne of Satan. 122 Year of Fayen (revised 2455853.743)
§ Marcheyre Rhinings. 122 Year of Fayen [pdf]
§ ONA Classic Texts. Five volumes. 122-123 yf [pdf]
§ A Glossary of Order of Nine Angles Terms. Version 3.07. 123 yfayen [pdf]
§ Frequently Asked Questions About The Order of Nine Angles. Version 4.05. 123 Year of Fayen [pdf]
§ Anton Long. Alchemical Seasons and The Fluxions of Time. 123 Year of Fayen
§ Anton Long. Knowing, Information, and The Discovery of Wisdom. Version 1.03. 123 Year of Fayen
Archives
§ Microfilm. Documents from the ONA, Temple of the Sun, and various other occult groups. 1968-1988 [Private collection]
§ The Sinister Tarot. Original art-work by Richard Moult. c.1989 onwards. Some Tarot images missing. [Private collection]
§ Anton Long. Selected correspondence. 1986-2012 [Private collection]
§ CD-ROM. Download of all items from the (now defunct) authorized nineangles.info website. November 2012.
Web resources
§ ONA authorized blogs, accessed 2/2/2013 –
The vast majority of items on the above blogs were authored by Anton Long.
§ Internet archive of 2012 ONA authorized website, accessed 2/2/2013 –
http://web.archive.org/web/20120117235238/http://www.nineangles.info/
The vast majority of items on that website were authored by Anton Long.
§ Partial internet archive of 2005 ONA authorized ‘mirror website’, accessed 2/2/2013
http://web.archive.org/web/20051213011018/http://camlad9.tripod.com/
The vast majority of items on that website were authored by Anton Long.
§ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York University Press, 2002.
§ Kaplan, Jeffrey, ed. Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2000.
§ Kaplan, Jeffrey. Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture, Northeastern University Press, 1998, ISBN 1-55553-331-0
§ Leather, Stephen. Midnight. Hodder & Stoughton. 2011. ISBN 978144470066
§ Leather, Stephen. Nightmare. 47North. 2012. ISBN 9781612182315
§ Monette, Connell. The Order of Nine Angles, in Mysticism in the Twenty-First Century. [Forthcoming, Al Akhawayn University, Fall 2013]
§ Per Faxneld & Jesper Petersen (eds). The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity, Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN 9780199779246
§ Senholt, Jacob. Secret Identities in The Sinister Tradition: Political Esotericism and the Convergence of Radical Islam, Satanism and National Socialism in the Order of Nine Angles, in Per Faxneld & Jesper Petersen (eds): The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity, Oxford University Press. 2012. ISBN 9780199779246
§ Sieg, George: Angular Momentum: From Traditional to Progressive Satanism in the Order of Nine Angles. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Conference: Satanism in the Modern World, November 2009
Order of Nine Angles
“The Order of Nine Angles…”
“They’re dangerous people, Jack”“I guessed as much…The human sacrifice was the clue.” {1}
As noted in Perspectives on the Order of Nine Angles, “how someone, or some group, is publicly perceived and understood (or misunderstood) by others unconnected to that person and not involved with that group can be interesting, and a rough gage of influence.” Ditto with regard to how such a group is portrayed in fiction.
Over the past decade, the ONA has been mentioned in a few works of fiction – both mainstream and otherwise. For instance, in Alex Unlimited: Split-Second Sight by Dan Jolley – who once worked for DC Comics – a 2007 work published by the US based Magna distributors Tokyopop.
“Order of Nine what?”
“Really aggressive. Not people you want to mess with…”
The ONA also appears in some of that genre named ‘fan fiction’, once confined to small sometimes underground zines {2} but now with its own internet sub-culture. For example, the following, from a story entitled An Unbreakable Bond authored by Ennauethys and part of the Anime/Manga sub-culture:
“Then there’s the order of nine angles which is not something you want to delve into…”
But the most detailed mention, so far, of the Order of Nine Angles in recent (non-O9A) fiction is in the novels of mainstream (and best-selling) author Stephen Leather, a former journalist on newspapers such as The Times (of London) and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages and he has written for television shows such as London’s Burning and the BBC’s Murder in Mind series.
The following quotes, about the ONA, are from his 2011 novel Midnight, published by Hodder & Stoughton (ISBN 978144470066).
‘I’m on a steep learning curve,’ said Nightingale. He leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees as he held his beer bottle with both hands. ‘The last time we spoke you said that my father was part of a sect that practised human sacrifice.’
‘The Order of Nine Angles, yes.’
‘My father said I should talk to them. They were connected to my sister’s adoption and he said they might be able to help me.’
Wainwright exhaled through pursed lips. ‘They’re dangerous people, Jack.’
‘I guessed as much,’ said Nightingale. ‘The human sacrifice was the clue.’
[…]
He says that Fairchild belongs to the Order of Nine Angles. Have you any idea what they do?’
Jenny shook her head.
‘They kill people,’ he said quietly.
In his newer novel, Nightmare, published in 2012 by 47North – ISBN 9781612182315 – the Order of Nine Angles appear to play an even greater role:
Nightingale leaned forward, both hands around his bottle of lager. ‘Let me ask you something, Marcus. Okay?’
‘Go ahead,’ said the lawyer.
‘Are you a member of the Order of Nine Angles?’
Nightingale resisted the urge to smile when he saw the look of surprise that flashed across the lawyer’s face.
[…]
‘So you know already. Yes, I am a member of the Order. Have been for years. So let me ask you a question in return, Jack. The Order goes to a lot of trouble to maintain a low profile, so who told you about us?’
‘A friend.’
‘An informant, you mean? I assume that your friend is an outsider. In the entire history of the Order no member has ever divulged any details of who we are or what we do.’
[…]
“The Order of Nine Angles? Trust me, there’s nothing charitable about them. Human sacrifice plays a big part in what they do. They call it culling.”
[…]
‘I’m serious, Jack. Fairchild is pure evil. Don’t even think about taking him on. He’s got the whole Order of Nine Angles with him. You go up against one and you’ll be facing them all.’
What is interesting is that in contemporary fiction, of whatever genre, the ONA is portrayed as a decidedly evil group. The bad guys. Which is how it should be – culling is a clue – for the ONA admit they are:
(a) practising or disposed to practise evil;
(b) actually or potentially harmful, destructive, disastrous, or pernicious; baleful;
(c) malicious; mischievous, sly;
(d) bad in moral character, disposition
(e) hard, difficult, misleading, deadly, amoral {3}
and that “performing, with a congregation and with cantors trained in esoteric Chant, The Ceremony of Recalling with opfer ending” is one of the three basic tasks a new Initiate is expected to undertake {4}.
However, if one wanted to be accurate/pedantic, the Order of Nine Angles have more bad girls than bad guys, and bad ONA girls would certainly make interesting characters in a novel.
R.P.
2013 ev
Notes
{1} Midnight, a novel by Stephen Leather, published by Hodder & Stoughton (ISBN 978144470066)
{2} In the 1990’s, a printed underground USA publication entitled Factsheet Five used to list many such zines published by a variety of sub-cultures.
{3} Toward Understanding Satanism. See also Praxis and Theory of The Order of Nine Angles.
{4} As noted in many texts including Order of Nine Angles Style, O9A Chic and Pretenders, Frauds, and The Order of Nine Angles, the internet-pretendu-crowd are not part of the ONA. The ONA has consistently stated that in order to advance to the Grade of Internal Adept the candidate must not only have learnt Esoteric Chant and the Star Game, and undertaken Insight Roles, but also culled. Those claiming to be ONA should be asked if they have:
(1) Undertaken a culling?
(2) Undertaken the rite of external adept?
(3) Trained for and achieved the basic physical challenges of our Way?
(4) Undertaken several Insight Rôles?
(5) Undertaken the rite of internal adept or spent at least three months alone in the wilderness?
(6) Indulged in violent, ‘criminal’, and other amoral activities for six months to a year?
(7) Acquired skill in esoteric chant and performed it with a group?
(8) Acquired skill in the advanced form of the star game?
(9) Undertaken rites to invoke the dark gods using a large crystal tetrahedron?
(10) Run a group/nexion/temple of many individuals for a year or two – and so had to deal with their questions, the squabbles, the rivalry?
(11) Had that group/nexion/temple plan and conduct the tests for selecting an opfer and then perform a rite of sacrifice?
(12) Sinisterly manipulated or incited someone, or several, into undertaking a culling and/or an act of terror?
(13) Sinisterly manipulated or incited someone, or several, into a life of violence and/or crime and/or of practical heretical/adversarial activism disruptive of the status quo?
If they have not done all these things – or have only done a few and are not in the process of doing or planning to do the rest – then they are only pretending to be O9A.
The Order of Nine Angles - Labyrinthos Mythologicus 