Order of Nine Angles

• 1. Introduction

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  The Order of Nine Angles, also written ONA or O9A, offers its own history and then tells readers not to trust it. Its writings call accounts of its past "just stories and tales… to be accepted, or rejected, on that basis." That disclaimer fits a Satanic left-hand path network that began in the United Kingdom and has since spread to other countries. Scholars say they find it hard to pin down "exact and verifiable information" about it, because the group keeps so much hidden. Yet its ideas have drawn the attention of academics, journalists and counter-terrorism analysts. Who actually wrote its founding texts? What do its followers believe about time, power and the cosmos? What are they told to do, and how many people take that seriously? And why have some governments decided the answer matters?

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• 2. Welsh Marches Legend

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  In the late 1960s, according to the Order's own writings, a woman who led a temple in the Welsh Marches joined three groups into one. The Welsh Marches are a border area between England and Wales. The groups were called Camlad, the Temple of the Sun, and the Noctulians. The Order says this was the moment the ONA was born.

  Behind that moment, the Order claims a far older lineage. Its writings say pre-Christian pagan traditions survived the Christianisation of Britain. They were supposedly handed down from the Middle Ages in small temples across the Marches, each led by a grand master or grand mistress. Scholars note that this runs against established understandings of British history. They also note that it echoes a belief common among modern pagans in mid-20th century Britain. Early followers of Wicca, for instance, also claimed membership in an ancient pre-Christian religion.

  The story then turns to a man called "Anton Long." He described himself as a British citizen who had spent much of his youth visiting Africa, Asia and the Middle East. By his account, he contacted a coven in the Fenland in 1968. He then moved to London and joined groups practising ceremonial magic in the style of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley. He also claimed a brief spell in a Manchester Satanic group, the Orthodox Temple of the Prince, run by Ray Bogart. It was there, he said, that he met the ONA's Grand Mistress.

  Long said he joined in 1973, the first newcomer in five years, and became the Grand Mistress's heir. Later he recalled rituals held at henges and stone circles around the solstices and equinoxes. When she migrated to Australia, he became grand master. The group says he then set out to make the teachings known on a large scale, urging new groups, called temples, to form. From 1976 he wrote texts that codified the tradition's teachings, mythos and structure.

  Those texts are mostly in English, with passages of Classical Greek and terms from Sanskrit and Arabic. The historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke said they evoke "a world of witches, outlaw peasant sorcerers, orgies and blood sacrifices at lonely cottages in the woods and valleys." Whether any such world existed remains open. The Order says the Camlad women, known as the Rounwytha, were folded in during the early 1970s only "in name only." By 2011, it reported, the few traditional members left were gone. The scholar Ethan Doyle White found "nothing intrinsically implausible" in the idea that Long met a small number of women in the Marches who saw themselves as a group.

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• 3. Who Is Anton Long

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  A 1998 issue of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight made the claim that has shadowed the ONA ever since. It said "Anton Long" was a pseudonym of David Myatt, a prominent figure in the British neo-Nazi movement. Nobody inside the Order, and no academic, has confirmed who Long really is. The two bodies of work do overlap. Both promote an "acausal" realm where the laws of physics do not apply, a history divided into aeons, and the future colonisation of space. Both also feature the Star Game, a board game Myatt said he developed in 1975.

  Myatt was born in the early 1950s. He served as a bodyguard for Colin Jordan of the British Movement, then joined the Combat 18 militia and became a founding member and leader of the National Socialist Movement. His text A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution, which advocated violent militancy, was cited as an influence on the nail bomber David Copeland. In 1998 he converted to Islam and stayed a practising Muslim for eight years, during which he encouraged violent jihad against Zionism and Israel's Western allies. In 2010 he announced that he had renounced Islam and now followed an esoteric tradition he called the "Numinous Way."

  Goodrick-Clarke, Per Faxneld and Jacob C. Senholt all supported the identification. In 2015 an ONA member known as R. Parker also argued that Myatt was Long. Massimo Introvigne, a sociologist of religion, later said the ONA had "more or less acknowledged" the two are one person.

  Myatt has repeatedly denied any involvement. He says he never used the name "Anton Long." He says he had personal contacts with people in the ONA around the 1980s, and that the overlap in ideas comes from the Order borrowing from him. In 1973, he has claimed, he formed his own occult group as a "honeypot" to pull occultists toward neo-Nazism, leaving most of its running to a man from Manchester. Doyle White suggested Long might have been one of the people in that group.

  Other scholars reject the link outright. Jeffrey Kaplan suggested the two are separate people. George Sieg called the association "implausible and untenable" given the gap in writing style, personality and tone. Connell R. Monette raised another possibility, that "Anton Long" was never one person at all. The Order itself has kept the question alive. In 2018 it issued A Modern Mysterium: The Enigma of Myatt and the ONA, a publication with essays arguing both for and against.

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• 4. Satanism or Something Else

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  Few scholars agree on what to call the Order of Nine Angles. Jesper Aagaard Petersen described its teachings as a "new interpretation of Satanism and the left-hand path." Per Faxneld went further, calling it "a dangerous and extreme form of Satanism." Fredrik Gregorius named it "one of the most controversial and infamous Satanic groups of the twentieth century." Graham Harvey thought it fit the stereotype of the Satanist better than the Church of Satan does, largely because it embraces "deeply shocking" and illegal acts. Sieg took the opposite tack and called it "post-Satanic," saying it has "surpassed (without fully abandoning)" its Satanic starting point.

  Other labels stress politics. Goodrick-Clarke called it a "Satanic Nazi cult." Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg wrote of a "National Socialist-oriented Satanist group." Monette argued that the Satanic overtones could be cosmetic and that its core cosmology is genuinely Hermetic, with pagan influences. Mattias Gardell saw "a heathen satanic path." The Global Network on Extremism and Technology labels it a "decentralised esoteric militant accelerationist network of threat actors." The United States government has described it as an "occult-based neo-Nazi and racially motivated violent extremist group."

  The ONA itself prefers the phrase "Traditional Satanism," even though it puts little weight on the figure of Satan. Faxneld read the word "traditional" as a "conscious strategy to build legitimacy." He compared it to esotericists who say "traditional witchcraft" to set themselves apart from Wicca. The Brotherhood of Satan, a theistic group, has since adopted the same phrase. R. Parker, a writer linked to the ONA, says the group is not "strictly satanist or strictly Left Hand Path." He describes Satanism as a set of techniques, experiences, ordeals and challenges meant to push a practitioner toward wisdom.

  The Order is hostile to its rivals. It dismisses the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set as "sham-Satanic," arguing that they chase the glamour of Satanism and fear its reality. The Church of Satan answered by criticising what it called the ONA's "paranoic insistence" that it alone upholds Satanic tradition. Kaplan treated this as ordinary "intramural tensions" within Satanism.

  Paganism is a second strand. The ONA calls Satanism "militant paganism" and says the true ethos of Western civilisation is pagan in essence. It speaks of "black pilgrimages" to prehistoric ceremonial sites around Shropshire and Herefordshire. It borrows the Anglo-Saxon notion of wyrd and the Norse wolf Fenrir. Yet it does not want old religions revived. One tract says all past gods of the Western traditions are rendered obsolete by forces that Satanism alone unleashes.

  Even the name is slippery. Occult scholars trace the phrase "Nine Angles" to the Church of Satan, but the ONA gives several meanings. One counts seven planets, the whole system as an eighth angle, and the mystic as the ninth. Another counts seven normal alchemical stages plus two further processes. A third points to nine emanations of the divine in Sufism. Monette suggested a classical Indian tradition that divided the Solar System into nine planets.

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• 5. Aeons and the Imperium

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  According to the ONA, human history runs in aeons that each last about 2,000 years. A civilisation develops during the final 1,500 years of each one. After 800 years of growth it enters a "Time of Troubles" lasting between 398 and 400 years. Its last stage is about 390 years of rule by a strong military and imperial regime, after which the civilisation falls. The Order counts five aeons so far, tied to the Primal, Hyperborean, Sumerian, Hellenic and Western civilisations. Scholars argue the scheme draws on the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, and possibly on the aeons in Crowley's Thelema.

  The Order says the West has a Faustian ethos and has just come through its Time of Troubles. Its final stage, a militaristic "Imperium," was due to begin sometime in 1990-2011 and run until 2390. Chaos would follow, then a sixth aeon called the Aeon of Fire. That aeon would be a Galactic civilisation in which an "Aryan" society colonises the Milky Way. The ONA is, in other words, a millenarian group, and it describes cosmic change as driven by a "sinister dialectics."

  What stands in the way, says the Order, is a "Magian/Nazarene" distortion, which it links to Judeo-Christian religion. Its writings say the West was once a pioneering entity that exalted the way of the warrior. Under the new ethos, they claim, it became "essentially neurotic, inward-looking and obsessed." The list of blamed ideas includes humanism, capitalism, communism, democracy and racial equality. Goodrick-Clarke and Sieg both note that the notion of a Jewish "Magian soul" and "cultural distortion" comes from the works of Oswald Spengler and Francis Parker Yockey. The ONA treats this as a counter-evolutionary force that must be overcome by will, which makes it far more openly extreme than other Satanic groups.

  The Order's material praises Nazi Germany as "a practical expression of the Satanic spirit... a burst of Luciferian light." Its text for a Black Mass invokes Adolf Hitler as a positive force. It also embraces Holocaust denial, claiming the Holocaust was a myth built to discredit the Nazi administration and erase its achievements from the "psyche of the West."

  Yet the picture shifts depending on who is speaking. Senior member Christos Beest presents Nazi imagery as only one of the Order's tools and calls the group "the only true anarchist group." An Australian ONA group, the Temple of THEM, produced a Black Mass that replaces Hitler with the Salafi jihadist Osama bin Laden. The Order frames both neo-Nazism and jihadism as "causal forms" that can bring down the old order. And in the U.S.-based White Star Acception, the writers Chloe Ortega and Kayla DiGiovanni set out what Sieg called a "left-anarchist" platform, with no condemnation of Zionism and no endorsement of Aryan racialism.

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• 6. Ordeals and Magick

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  The ONA's core scheme is the "Seven Fold Way," also called the "Hebdomadry," outlined in the primary text Naos. It maps onto the "Tree of Wyrd," where seven bodies sit: the Moon, Venus, Mercury, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Monette called this a hermetic system, noting that its seven planets owe a debt to the medieval Arabic texts Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm and Shams al-Ma'arif. Senholt argued the Tree of Wyrd was a deliberate attempt to set the ONA apart from the Kabbalistic tree of life, which it regards as an Abrahamic Semitic concept.

  The path has seven grades: Neophyte, Initiate, External Adept, Internal Adept, Master or Mistress, Grand Master or Mousa, and Immortal. Very few reach the fifth and sixth. A 1989 article stated that just four people had reached the rank of Master. Nobody initiates a newcomer. Practitioners initiate themselves, and are told to keep fit, follow a training regimen and take a magical partner of the opposite sex. Most ordeals are published openly, because the group holds that the real initiation lies in the experience.

  Those ordeals are physical. To become an External Adept, a candidate lies still in a lonely spot for an entire night without moving or sleeping. An Internal Adept must leave human society for three months, from an equinox to a solstice, or more usually six months, living in the wild without modern conveniences. Kaplan said such tasks reflect the ONA's self-image as a vanguard of "Nietzschean elites."

  Then there are "insight roles." These ask a practitioner to live a radically different life, often working undercover in a politically extreme group for six to eighteen months. Suggested roles include anarchism, neo-Nazism and Islamism. The Order says this gives personal experience and also undermines the Western order, to help bring on the Imperium. Monette noted a shift over time. In the 1980s and early 1990s the Order recommended criminal or military roles. By the late 1990s and 2000s it was recommending Buddhist monasticism instead. Senholt read Myatt's neo-Nazi and Islamist phases as exactly such roles.

  Magic is split into three kinds. External magick is either ceremonial, performed by more than two people toward a specific goal, or hermetic, done alone or in a pair and often sexual. Internal magick aims to produce an altered state that leads to "individuation" and adepthood. Aeonic magick is reserved for those who have reached Master, and aims to influence many people over a long period. It works by two methods. One uses rites and chants to open a gateway, called a "nexion," to the acausal realm. The other uses the Star Game, whose pieces stand for aeons and which can turn a player into a "living nexion." Its advanced form is part of training for Internal Adept.

  The causal realm is where cause and effect rule. The acausal realm is where they do not, and followers believe its energies can be drawn across. It is home to "Dark Gods," whom some members read as facets of the human subconscious. One is Baphomet, a goddess shown as a mature woman carrying a severed head. Others include Kthunae, Nemicu and Atazoth. Another, Vindex, takes its name from the Latin for "avenger," and is expected to incarnate as a messianic human who overthrows the Magian forces. Sieg compared this to the idea of Kalki in the thought of Savitri Devi. The final grade, Immortal, belongs to those who have earned an afterlife in the acausal realm.

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• 7. Sacrifice and Violence

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  Four documents set out the ONA's rules for human sacrifice, among them "A Gift for the Prince" and "Culling." The writings call victims "opfers." The killer must let victims "self-select" by exposing perceived character faults, and those who do are judged worthy of death. Listed targets include people of low character and members of "sham-Satanic groups" like the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set. They also include "zealous, interfering Nazarenes" and journalists, business figures and activists who disrupt the group. Because of the self-selection rule, the texts say children must never be victims.

  The texts say sacrifice can be physical or magical, and that the killer absorbs power from the victim's body and spirit. The ONA also claims a prehistoric precedent, in which people were sacrificed to a goddess named Baphomet at the spring equinox and to the star Arcturus in the autumn. Monette noted that no nexion had publicly admitted a ritual sacrifice. He added, however, that members had joined the police and military to take part in legal violence and killing. The Temple of Set has condemned the advocacy because it hurts its own efforts to make Satanism more socially acceptable.

  The Counter Extremism Project reported an ONA publication titled The Rape Anthology, which urged followers to seek "spiritual arousal from violent sexual rape." The White Star Acception has published material presenting rape as a regular practice. It also claims rapes, assaults and robberies carried out to advance its power. Sieg noted that the reality of those actions has not been verified.

  In 1998, Searchlight magazine accused the ONA of links to paedophiles. A 2020 BBC News article quoted the view that "the authorities are concerned by the number of paedophiles associated with the ONA," which takes the group "into a different area of law enforcement activity." The Global Network on Extremism and Technology reports the ONA is "adjacent" to the 764 network, which has taken up the Order's visual aesthetics and is associated with widespread child sexual abuse.

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• 8. A Network Without a Center

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  The ONA calls its loose web of followers the "kollective," and it has no central office. There is no formal initiation, so anyone can start following the system in its writings. It dislikes the word "member" and prefers "associate." Monette described it as "not a structured lodge or temple, but rather a movement, a subculture or perhaps metaculture," and said that lack of structure helps it survive, because no single leader holds its fate. Most people engaged with it appear to work alone. Others form autonomous cells called nexions. The first, based in Shropshire, is Nexion Zero. Later cells appeared in Britain, Ireland and Germany, and then in places including the United States, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Serbia, Russia and South Africa.

  The group still has spokespeople. Richard Moult, a Shropshire artist and composer who used the name "Christos Beest," was the first to claim the title of "Outer Representative." "Vilnius Thornian" held it from 1996 to 2002, and ONA insiders identify that name as Michael W. Ford. In 2012 Long said followers fall into six categories. They include the "Niners," who support the aims through folk-based or gang-based and often criminal means rather than esoteric ones. They also include the "Balobians," artists and musicians who contribute through their work.

  Sizing the group is hard. Gregorius thought that in the 1980s it may have had only one or two members. In 1995 Harvey estimated fewer than ten, perhaps fewer than five. In 1998 Kaplan and Weinberg called it "infinitesmally small," a "mail-order ministry." By 2013 Senholt put the total reached from 1980 to 2009 at "a few thousand," while Monette estimated over two thousand associates. Introvigne observed that if Monette was right, the ONA is "easily... the largest Satanist organization in the world."

  Its output carried it further than its numbers. The Black Book of Satan appeared in 1984, and the journal Fenrir launched in 1988. The ONA also released music, a painted deck called the Sinister Tarot, and the Star Game. In 2000 it moved onto the Internet, and in 2008 it announced a third phase built around blogs, forums, Facebook and YouTube. The New Zealander Kerry Bolton, founder of the Black Order, served as its international distributor. The U.S.-based Tempel ov Blood published its texts through Ixaxaar Press.

  The influence reached militant groups. The Atomwaffen Division, formed in 2013, promoted the ONA publication Hostia on its website Siege Culture, and journalist Nate Thayer reported at least nine Tempel ov Blood members in key positions there. The ONA's reach was also seen in the British branch, the Sonnenkrieg Division, and in National Action, whose members included Ryan Fleming, leader of the ONA's Yorkshire nexion. In 2021, court proceedings against the Atomwaffen leader Kaleb Cole revealed that Joshua Caleb Sutter, founder of the Tempel ov Blood, had been paid over $140,000 by the FBI as a confidential informant since 2003. Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate said in 2019 that the ONA was "becoming more visible and influential than ever."

  Official action followed. Hope Not Hate called on the UK government in 2020 to proscribe the ONA for incubating terrorism. A 2024 St. Petersburg court order banned the distribution of its books and texts in Russia. In 2025, New Zealand outlawed the group as a terrorist organization.

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