The Order of Nine Angles, ONA, or O9A is a clandestine, extremist group of theistic Satanists that first gained notoriety following the publication of their founding work Black Sun by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.
A portrait of David Myatt, the alleged leader of the Order
According to Black Sun, O9A was formed in the 1960′s following the merger of three neopagan cults in England: Camlad, The Noctulians, and the Temple of the Sun. Their alleged leader, David Myatt, has since emigrated to Australia; the O9A website, however, claims their organization is leaderless. The Order boasts a presence in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Russia. The cited roots and organization of O9A is explained in this .pdf file.
Symbol of the Order of Nine Angles
O9A espouses a dichotomy between two walks of life: the “mundanes,” and the ubermensch, the Nietzschean shepherd among men they call “kindred.” It claims the principles of Satanism are inherent to this mastery of the self and others.
Members of O9A follow a code of ethics called the Code of Kindred Honour, which dictates their behavior towards fellow members. These ethics do not apply to non-members.
The Code of Kindred Honour
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.
To become a kindred initiate within O9A, would-be-members must participate in an “initiatory occult test.” This test is described in Empathy, Pathei-Mathos, and the Aeonic Perspective: A Guide to the Esotericism of the O9A by Anton Long:
Internal Adept – as is now well-known in part due to the availability of texts such as Naos – is the phase, the stage, the iteration, of our sinister initiatory Occult quest, where the external gives way to the internal; where a personal destiny can be revealed; and where a certain inner knowing, and thus balance, is attained. An inner knowing, a balance, similar to, though not identical to, the individuation described by Jung. A knowing which the new Internal Adept carries with them throughout their life and which makes them, when they encounter the mundane world again after their three months or so (or more) spent in solitude, feel somewhat misplaced, bringing as this feeling does in many a sense of not belonging in the present but rather to some distant past or to some distant, longed for, future.
But this new knowing – partly acquired as a result of the months of solitude in isolated wild places and often slowly, gradually, more generally acquired over subsequent months – is not itself wisdom, being as it is of a more personal nature. That is, of their feelings, their relation to Nature; of the things they themselves now do so desire to do: to create, to manifest, to perhaps explain.
Beyond all this is the rite of The Abyss, preceded – by those following a sinister initiatory way – with a lengthy and practical engagement with the numinous; and preceded – by those following a numinous initiatory way – with a lengthy and practical engagement with the sinister. That is, preceded by the experience of, and the living over a period of some three years or more of, the numinous/sinister aspect, followed by the integration of that aspect and a going-beyond – again, in practical terms – of the personal amalgam that results, a going-beyond that the rite of the Abyss is an integral part of.
This experience, this living of ways of life, of and for at least three years, of the apparent opposite from one’s initially chosen path, is very easy in theory but quite difficult and testing in practice, undermining and destroying as it does and must the self-image – the sense of Destiny, the self-importance, the pride – that the Internal Adept rite helped to reveal and then the Internal Adept strove for some years to manifest, to presence. For the new type of knowing, for instance in respect of someone following a sinister initiatory way, is of others, of empathy, of the connexions that bind them, beyond their self, to Life: to other human beings, to Nature, to the Cosmos. Of affective (acausal) and effective (causal) change.
The rite of The Abyss – as manifest in the Camlad Rite with its dark simplicity, its stasis, its dangerous requirement of confinement for a whole lunar month – is where the old pathei-mathos before and following the rite of Internal Adept is melded with the new pathei-mathos of those recent three or more years. For the candidate has nothing else to do but dwell upon such matters, and to try and simply be, to be what they are and always were, one microcosmic connexion, suspended between causal and o9a-empathy-aeonics-pathei-mathos acausal Time. In addition, and crucially important and necessary, the candidate has to implicitly trust someone; trust them to leave food and trust them to reveal when their lunar month of isolation has ended. In effect, their entrust their own life to someone else, for a whole lunar month.
The Rite of the Abyss, as described above, is an initiation rite in which the person undergoing the rite enters a period of complete helplessness to a current member for a full lunar month. They enter a place of isolation with nothing to distract them from their thoughts and undergo meditation over the principles of Satanism outlined in their “Aeonic principles,” or “Cosmic Perspective.” They are to entrust the current member to bring them food and inform them when their lunar month is over; the initiate is not allowed to bring time pieces or modes of communication to the outside world into the rite.
Having completed the Rite of the Abyss, the initiate is also expected to live a period of at least three months in nature, surviving off whatever they can forage, hunt, or build with their own two hands. They are also expected to live an additional period of three years or more “of the apparent opposite from one’s initially chosen path.”
These trials are supposed to bring the initiate to a state of understanding known as “pathei mathos.”
Pathei mathos – πάθει μάθος – is a Greek term (used by Aeschylus in his Agamemnon) which can be variously interpreted as meaning learning from adversity, or wisdom arises from personal suffering, and/or personal experience is the genesis of true wisdom.
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There thus arises, from such pathei-mathos, certain intense personal feelings, a certain insight, and thence, in many individuals, a certain knowing – of yourself, and of how finite, how microcosmic, the individual human being is and just how fragile the human body is. In essence, the individual is placed in context and, if they possess a certain potential, a certain character, are changed by – learn from – the experiences. Of course some humans dwelling on planet Earth – lacking a certain potential, and possessing an altogether different character – do not change, do not learn from pathei-mathos. Which is to say that pathei-mathos tests, selects, reveals, and can breed a somewhat different type of human.
In that sense, it is and has been a useful esoteric technique, a new type of Dark Art. Which is one reason why the ONA has such techniques as Insight Roles, grade rituals such as Internal Adept; an exoteric adversarial – heretical and amoral – praxis; and tough physical challenges. So that individuals can test themselves and be tested; can suffer, can endure hardship and triumph or fail; can shed affectations and come to know themselves for who and what they are; and can acquire the necessary esoteric, Aeonic, perspective, of themselves as a fragile mortal nexion.
Simply put, pathei mathos means that only those who have experienced life-or-death situations – as the executioner or the victim – have shed the precepts of reality and ethics necessary to embrace Satanic teachings and the Dark Arts in their entirety. O9A, unlike other Satanic groups, is outspoken in its support of human sacrifice in its rituals for the purposes of achieving pathei mathos. For this reason, O9A has a long and well-documented history of hostility with more prominent Satanic groups, particularly those wishing to distance themselves from such practices in the wake of the Satanic Panic of the 80’s and 90’s.
O9A members believe in the literal existence of demons and Satan.
“While it is convenient to regard the Dark Gods as merely symbols that re-present the energies of the acausal – as a projection of our own consciousness upon Chaos itself – it is equally possible to regard them as physically existing in themselves. Which of these (or neither of them) is correct, the Adept discovers during the ordeal of the Abyss. Legend, however, recalls the Dark Gods as visiting our planet several times in the past – by passing through one of the many ‘Star Gates’. Star Gates are regions in space-time where our causal universe and the universe of the acausal are joined – they are physical gates, and passage from one universe to another is possible through them. According to legend, Star Gates exist near to stars Dabih, Naos and Algol: that is, if you journeyed from Earth in the direction of one of these stars you would pass through a Star Gate. There are also stories of a Star Gate within our own solar system – the Gate through which the Dark Gods came to Earth. This Star Gate is believed to be near the planet Saturn.” – Naos, A Practical Guide to Modern Magick