Order of Nine Angles: History, Ideology and Extremist Links

The Order of Nine Angles (ONA or O9A) is a decentralised Satanist and neo-Nazi network that emerged in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s and has since spread internationally, mainly through the internet. Its writings combine a "sinister" initiatory path, a pagan-flavoured pantheon of dark gods and an explicit ideology of transgression that endorses violence, and researchers and security agencies have linked it to several violent extremist groups and criminal cases. It is rejected by virtually every other Satanist and left-hand path organisation.

Origins and Self-Mythology in the Welsh Marches§

According to its own accounts, the Order of Nine Angles arose in the early 1970s when a small number of old pagan groups in the borderlands of England and Wales were united under the leadership of a Grand Mistress, who later passed authority to a young male initiate. These groups were said to have preserved a hidden "sinister" tradition, rural and pre-Christian, that had never been part of the ceremonial magic of the Golden Dawn or of the Church of Satan. No independent evidence for these earlier groups exists, and historians treat the narrative as a foundation myth of a kind common in occult movements, comparable to the claimed ancient lineages of early Wicca discussed in Traditional Witchcraft.

What can be documented is a body of writing that began to circulate from the late 1970s and especially during the 1980s, in typescript, photocopied newsletters and small-press journals of the British occult and far-right underground. Key compilations include the multi-volume Naos, a practical guide to the Order's magic, the so-called Black Book of Satan, and a series of novels known as the Deofel Quartet that dramatised its ethos. The Order's terminology, its "sinister tarot" and its pantheon of "Dark Gods" made it distinctive within the left-hand path milieu described in The Left-Hand Path.

The Seven-Fold Way and Sinister Initiation§

The O9A's initiatory system, the "Seven-Fold Way", is organised around the seven classical planets and leads through grades from Neophyte to Adept, Master or Mistress, and beyond. The emphasis falls less on ceremonial ritual than on physical and psychological ordeals intended to forge a self-reliant individual: long-distance endurance challenges, and at the grade of Internal Adept a period of months living in isolation in the wild. Its texts present these trials as a way of transcending ordinary morality and identity.

Unlike LaVey's atheistic Satanism, the O9A speaks of acausal energies and dark entities with which the initiate interacts, and it describes Satanism as only one stage or expression of a wider sinister path. Its emphasis on hardship and elitism echoes earlier currents of European "heroic" esotericism, while its notion of the self-overcoming individual borrows from Nietzsche. Scholars note that the documents mix practical counsel, mythology and deliberate provocation, so that their intended audience and seriousness are often hard to judge.

Anton Long and the David Myatt Question§

The O9A's principal texts appeared under the pseudonym Anton Long. From the 1990s, journalists and then academics proposed that Anton Long was David Myatt (born 1950), a long-standing British neo-Nazi activist and ideologue who later converted to Islam in 1998, wrote in support of jihadist violence, and from around 2010 announced that he had rejected extremism in favour of a personal ethical philosophy. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke discussed Myatt and the O9A in Black Sun (2002), and the Danish scholar Jacob C. Senholt set out a detailed case for the identification in research presented from 2009 and published in The Devil's Party (2013).

Myatt has consistently denied being Anton Long, and some O9A writers dispute the link. Senholt's interpretation is that the Satanist, National Socialist and Islamist phases of Myatt's career can be read as parts of a single "sinister" strategy aimed at destabilising Western society, using the Order's own concept of insight roles. Other scholars find the stylistic and biographical evidence persuasive while remaining cautious about such a unified reading. The question remains open, but the identification is widely accepted in the scholarly literature.

Aeonics, Insight Roles and the Ideology of Transgression§

Much O9A writing is devoted to "aeonics", a theory of history in which civilisations rise and fall in cycles of roughly two thousand years, partly inspired by the cyclical histories of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. In this scheme the present Western civilisation is decaying, dominated by what the texts call "Magian" and "Nazarene" values, terms used in a way that researchers identify as antisemitic and anti-Christian. The O9A anticipates a new "Galactic Imperium" and a future leader named Vindex, and many of its texts express open sympathy for National Socialism, linking it to the strands of esoteric Nazism traced in German Occultism from the Romantics to Ariosophy.

The doctrine of "insight roles" asks initiates to spend months or years living a life opposed to their own inclinations, for example by joining a political extremist movement, the armed forces, a criminal milieu or even a religious community, in order to gain experience and self-knowledge. The O9A is also notorious for texts that justify the killing of chosen victims, presented as an elitist ordeal. Scholars debate how far such writings are rhetorical provocation intended to repel the uncommitted, but they are a central reason why researchers, law-enforcement bodies and other Satanists regard the network as dangerous, and there is no reliable evidence that such acts have been carried out as O9A rituals.

Links to Violent Extremism§

From the 2010s O9A ideas reached a new, younger audience online. Researchers from anti-extremism organisations and academic centres documented how O9A texts circulated among members of the American neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, founded around 2015, and the British group Sonnenkrieg Division, which the UK government proscribed as a terrorist organisation in 2020. Several prosecutions of young men in Britain for terrorism offences have involved O9A material, and campaigners and some MPs have called for the network itself to be proscribed.

The most prominent case is that of Ethan Melzer, a US Army private who shared details of his unit's deployment with contacts in an O9A-linked online group in the hope of facilitating a deadly attack on his fellow soldiers. He pleaded guilty and in 2023 was sentenced to 45 years in prison; US prosecutors described the O9A as a network espousing a mixture of neo-Nazi, Satanist and jihadist ideas. Some journalists have also reported O9A influence on online networks of young men involved in the sexual exploitation and coercion of minors, which law-enforcement agencies have treated as a growing concern.

Scholarly Debates and the Wider Satanic Milieu§

Historians of religion classify the O9A in different ways. Connell Monette's study treats it as a distinctive form of traditional "sinister" esotericism and emphasises its pagan and initiatory features, while Senholt and others stress its political function and its continuity with neo-Nazi activism. Ruben van Luijk and Massimo Introvigne include it in histories of religious Satanism as an extreme and atypical case. All agree that its real membership is small and fluid, organised in loose cells called "nexions" rather than any central body, which makes its size and influence difficult to measure.

Other Satanist organisations have repudiated the O9A. The Church of Satan describes its ideas as incompatible with LaVeyan Satanism, the Temple of Set rejects its politics and violence, and The Satanic Temple, which campaigns for secularism and pluralism, regards it as the opposite of its values. The case illustrates a broader point made in What Is Satanism?: Satanism is not a single movement, and a small network's extremism says little about the largely law-abiding, often atheistic majority who use the name. For the contrasting theistic and Luciferian currents, see Theistic Satanism and Luciferianism.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the Order of Nine Angles?§

It is a small, decentralised Satanist and neo-Nazi network that emerged in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. It promotes a "sinister" initiatory path and an ideology of transgression, and its texts have been linked to violent extremist groups.

Who founded the Order of Nine Angles?§

Its key texts were written under the name Anton Long. Several researchers, including Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and Jacob Senholt, have identified Anton Long with the British extremist David Myatt, who denies it. The Order's own claims of older pagan origins are unverified.

Is the O9A part of mainstream Satanism?§

No. The Church of Satan, the Temple of Set and The Satanic Temple all reject the O9A and its politics. Scholars treat it as an extreme and unrepresentative case within the wider Satanic milieu.

Is the Order of Nine Angles a terrorist group?§

It is not a single organisation with a clear membership, but its texts have circulated in groups proscribed as terrorist, and its material has featured in several terrorism prosecutions, including a 2023 US case. Campaigners in Britain have called for it to be proscribed.

Sources and further reading§

• The Devil's Party: Satanism in Modernity — Per Faxneld and Jesper Aagaard Petersen (eds), 2013
• Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity — Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, 2002
• Mysticism in the 21st Century — Connell R. Monette, 2013
• Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism — Ruben van Luijk, 2016
• Satanism: A Social History — Massimo Introvigne, 2016
• The Invention of Satanism — Asbjørn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen, 2016
• The Decline of the West — Oswald Spengler, 1918