The author of a previous item we have mentioned {1} has – or so it seems – “connected some more of the metaphysical dots” between the Order of Nine Angles and nihilism and which nihilism thus takes the O9A far beyond the “neo-nazism” that it is commonly but mistakenly said by the Occult illiterati and by the Media to espouse.
In an article titled Virtual Reality and Terrorism the author quotes from an O9A text published in Naos {2} decades ago which states that:
“For a long time the nature of the Left Hand Path has been misunderstood. The traditional definition as magick use for personal/destructive/negative purposes is meaningless because it assumes a framework of moral opposites, which does not, in reality, exist in relation to magickal energies. All evolution of consciousness is a magickal act – an expansion of the acausal into realm of the causal. From the ‘traditional’, moral/ Nazarene point of view all such evolution, of necessity, becomes evil. It is unfortunate that, for a long time, this simple fact has been obscured by silly systems like Qabala with its notions of a Dark Side of the Tree. No dark side exists, because what actually exists is dark of itself because it presences non-Being.”
As the author of Virtual Reality and Terrorism notes,
“It is all dark, because the acausal is just a […] term to denote absolute evil and every act of presencing it in the causal realm of necessity, becomes evil.”
Yet even if nihilism is accepted to mean “rejection of prevailing religious beliefs, moral principles, and laws, together with a practical hostility toward accepted beliefs and/or established institutions,” then both philosophically and practically the leaderless O9A movement goes beyond the type of nihilism manifest for example in O9A insight roles, in presencing the acausal through sinister deeds, through heretical Occult rites and ceremonies, and through the O9A principle of the authority of individual judgment.
It does so because, as explained elsewhere {3} the raison d’être of the O9A is evident in:
“individuals undertaking an often decades-long hermetic anados (ἄνοδος) by which they might discover Lapis Philosophicus and thus acquire wisdom. A practical anados manifest in the O9A Seven Fold Way,”
and in the fact that:
“what the Media focus upon and misinterpret – such as alleged culling, insight roles, satanism, alleged neo-nazism, alleged disruption of society, and Occult ceremonial rituals such as those in the O9A Black Book of Satan – are related to only one temporary part of that Seven Fold Way. Which part is that relevant only to an External Adept (stage three of seven) and which part lasts from between a year to around eighteen months after which the individual moves on to other learning experiences.”
Which other learning experiences – beyond the stage of External Adept – involve “numinous experiences” such as the three to six month long rite of Internal Adept where the individual lives alone in the wilderness.
The O9A Adept therefore as a result of their anados presences some-thing – a Reality – which prevailing religious beliefs, moral principles, laws, causal abstractions and forms hide or obscure or distort.
Furthermore, the O9A movement has always maintained that the knowing of this Reality is acquired wordlessly, and thus is not only an acausal-knowing but also the result of a pathei mathos – a learning from personal experience, ordeals, and challenges both Occult and practical. {4}
Thus it is perhaps more apt to describe the O9A as representing a post-modernist nihilism.
Some caveats aside, there is – at least in our view – a fairly insightful analysis of the Order of Nine Angles published in 2017 in an article with the title Order of the Nine Angles and Supremacy of the Fringe.
Which item hints at what the ONA is really all about and just how it differs from the boring ‘satanism’ of Levey et al. Here are just a few of the interesting points made in that analysis.
{begin quote}
§        The popular notion of Satanism rarely lays stress on the political aspect of it. Seemingly, its radical individualism submits the ideological ambitions to the needs of individual self-expression – or self-indulgence – rendering it to a large degree a-political, at least at first glance. When we come to deal with the sinister dialectic of O9A, we are soon forced to realize that deep down the real stress is precisely on politics; the politics taken in the most radical sense of inciting the end of the present world (Aeon) and the creation of the new man and the new world.
§        The idea of influencing the broader society by subversion ranging from inducing moral depravity to terrorist acts is the nucleus of O9A metaphysics.
§       What really makes O9A stand out is how high it sets the bar: every other conceivable form of radical politics can potentially be assimilated, provided it is genuinely directed against the system, towards the creation of the new world and the new man. Through it all it is astonishingly truthful to the principles of modernity – radical subjectivity and dissolution of it in the further radicalization of freedom, evolutionary principle driven to the extreme and technical approach to human inner life.
§       The purpose of [the] trickster [insight] role playing game is to create strife, chaos, confusion and – Satan willing – bloodshed in order, not only to open oneself to the chaos of acausal, but also to create the same disposition in the social groups and society at large.
{end quote}
Finally, perhaps the most interesting bit of all:
{begin quote}
§       In a strictly philosophical sense this truly is a form of Satanism. What makes it ominous is that, when you ponder about it a bit, it really isn’t detached from presuppositions of the mainstream, seemingly anti-metaphysical, notions about man and history. O9A has an ontology and metaphysics of Satanism, but it is fairly in accordance with both extreme empiricists and supposedly opposed Heideggerian understanding of getting over the metaphysics (überwindung der Metaphysik): rejecting the error of transcendence towards above. The only step needed to develop what would properly be called ‘subphysics’ is to draw the final consequences of this decision.
{end quote}
For what the ONA really amounts to – in our view – is Chaos (χάος). Bringing the chaos of the acausal into our temporal (causal) world. By any means possible, and without any checks or balances, such as ‘God’ or even ‘Satan’ as described by both Nazarenes and by material egoists such as Howard Levey.
In this sense, the Order of Nine Angles really is nihilist, anarchic, and redefines what ‘modernism’ – metaphysically and in reality (esoterically and exoterically) – means, or perhaps should now mean.
I. The Tree Of Wyrd And The Star Game: An Overview.
Herewith a useful overview of some of the renaissance alchemical, and the ancient hermetic, roots of the Order Of Nine Angles.
The above is a Renaissance illustration of the septenary Tree of Wyrd, from the book Azoth Sive Aureliae Occultae Philosophorum published in 1613 CE, which illustration includes the three fundamental alchemical substances, Salt, Sulphur, Mercury, whose nine transformations form the “nine angles” of the O9A and which nine angles are represented by the pieces of the O9A’s Star Game thus:
Both of the above illustrations were included in the O9A text á¼€ÏÏενόθηλυς: Alchemical And Hermetic Antecedents Of The Seven Fold Way Of The Order Of Nine Angles. {1}
The Star Game itself is an esoteric representation of the septenary Tree of Wyrd. That is, of the nexion between the acausal and the causal and which nexion is also represented by our psyche as human beings, a complex psyche hinted at in many medieval and Renaissance alchemical texts {2} and in modern times – for example by Carl Jung, whose inspiration was Renaissance alchemical texts – represented in terms of archetypes, a collective unconscious, the anima and animus, and ‘a shadow aspect’. {3}
The septenary Tree of Wyrd also represents the anados (ἄνοδος), the hermetic journey or alchemical/occult quest up through the seven spheres, anciently described in the Poemandres tractate of the Corpus Hermeticum {4} and described in more recent times by the Seven Fold Way of the Order of Nine Angles {5}.
Which overview reveals that the Occult tradition of the O9A is independent of, different from, and an alternative to the Qabala based tradition used by the majority of modern Occultists. {6}
{2} See, for example, (i) Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, published in 1652 CE, (ii) Theatrum Chemicum Praecipuos Selectorum, published in 1550 CE, and (iii) De Alchimia Opuscula Complura Veterum Philosophorum, published in 1613 CE.
{4} See Myatt’s translation of and commentary on the Poemandres tractate, available at https://davidmyatt.wordpress.com/corpus-hermeticum/. Printed version: David Myatt, Corpus Hermeticum: Eight Tractates, 2017, ISBN 978-1976452369.
{5} Regarding the O9A Seven Fold Way, refer to the á¼€ÏÏενόθηλυς text, such as the chapters titled Perusing The Seven Fold Way, and Alchemy And The Sinisterly-Numinous Tradition.
II. Extract from the 2013 text Originality, Tradition, And The Order of Nine Angles. {1}
{quote}
A study of O9A [Order of Nine Angles] texts reveals that, from the 1970s on, their ‘nine angles’ refer to the nine combinations – the “numinous symbols of cliology†(qv. the 1990s text ‘Aeonic Magick: A Basic Introduction’) – of the three basic alchemical substances (Mercury, Sulphur, Salt) which are represented in the pieces of the 1970s vintage O9A Star Game. These nine angles/combinations were first outlined in the 1974 text Emanations of Urania, and which nine combinations can be used to symbolize how the the causal and the acausal are manifest to us, as for instance in our psyche (in the nexion of causal/acausal that we are) via archetypes, ‘personality types’, and the esoteric correspondences of the O9A Tree of Wyrd.Furthermore, according to Anton Long his inspiration for this 1970s theory of cliology – of nine alchemical combinations or emanations – was an ancient Arabic manuscript, of a few folios, he read while travelling and studying in the Middle East and Asia in 1971, and to which MS some scribe had added some scholia and the title Al-Kitab Al-Alfak (which translates as The Book of The Spheres), for in ancient Muslim alchemy and cosmology there are nine cosmic spheres or ‘supernatural’ realms. {2}
The most distant of these spheres or realms is falak al-aflak, the ‘primary of the spheres’. Below this (and thus nearer to us) is al-kawakib al-thabitah, the realm of the heavenly fixed stars. Next is Zuhal, the sphere of Saturn. Then there is Mushtari, the sphere of Jupiter, followed by Marikh (Mars); Shams (the Sun); Zuhrah (Venus); Utarid (Mercury); and finally Qamar, the sphere of the Moon.
{2} Editorial Note: The Arabic MS Kitab al-Aflak (Book of the Spheres) should not be confused with a book with a similar name – Kitab Ta’dil hay’at alâ€aflak – written by Sadr al-Sharia alâ€Thani in 1346 or 1347 CE. See below, Part Four: Kitab Al-Aflak
Contents: ° Preface ° The Nine Angles – Beyond The Causal Continuum ° The Nine Angles of Sinister Change ° Sorcery and the Esoteric Nature of The Acausal ° The Physics of Acausal Energy ° Some Notes On The Text The Physics Of Acausal Energy
°°°°°°°°°
Part Three:
The Order of Nine Angles Rite of The Nine Angles A Comparison with the Ceremony of Nine Angles by Aquino And A Brief Study of The Meaning of The Nine Angles
A study of Order of Nine Angles texts reveals that, from the 1970s on, their ‘nine angles’ refer to the nine combinations – the “numinous symbols of cliology†(qv. the 1990s text ‘Aeonic Magick – A Basic Introduction’) – of the three basic alchemical substances (Mercury, Sulphur, Salt) which are represented in the pieces of the 1970s vintage O9A Star Game. These nine angles/combinations were first outlined in the 1974 text Emanations of Urania, and which nine combinations can be used to symbolize how the the causal and the acausal are manifest to us, as for instance in our psyche (in the nexion of causal/acausal that we are) via archetypes, ‘personality types’, and the esoteric correspondences of the O9A Tree of Wyrd. Furthermore, according to Anton Long his inspiration for this 1970s theory of cliology – of nine alchemical combinations or emanations – was an ancient Arabic manuscript, of a few folios, he read while travelling and studying in the Middle East and Asia in 1971, and to which MS some scribe had added some scholia and the title Al-Kitab Al-Alfak – which translates as The Book of The Spheres.
Those curious about the Order of Nine Angles (ONA, O9A) who turn toward the four fictional stories that make up The Deofel Quartet expecting to find ‘horror’ stories or stories of bloody satanic sacrifice, or graphically described sexual or fetishistic satanic rituals, or de Sade like violence, sadism, and dominance, may well be disappointed […]
Nowhere is the dissonance between such expectations – of stories of horror, blood, sacrifice, sex, fetishism, satanic rituals, and sadism – and the Occult reality of The Deofel Quartet greater than in the story titled The Greyling Owl.
This fictional story – of some 130 pages – was published in 1986 ev and is set in and around the English city of York in the year 1976, with the story revealing “how the O9A often operates, and has operated, in the real world” for decades […]
What is described is The Dark Art Of Shrenching, otherwise known as Sinister Cloaking. A difficult Dark, Occult, Art to master involving as it can deceiving others about one’s intentions, and/or entrapping others for some sinister purpose.
In the O9A the most obvious use of The Dark Art Of Shrenching is in Insight Roles […]
Yet The Greyling Owl describes a somewhat hitherto neglected part of O9A tradition. Which is that Shrenching may also be a necessary part of those who, via the Seven Fold Way, have progressed beyond The Abyss and who thus have attained the Occult grade of Master of Temple, or Mistress of Earth […]
Part I: The Picatrix
Part II: Sigillum Dei Aemeth And The Septenary System
°°°
Extract from Part I:
In two previous notes we touched upon the difference in some of the Occult sigils in the 11th century (CE) Arabic manuscript Ghayat al-hakim and those in the manuscripts of the Latin Picatrix dating from the 14th and 15th centuries (CE).
While some of the differences in the manuscripts are undoubtedly due to scribal errors and unintentional emendations, other differences may well (i) reflect how the scribes – or the editor(s) or authors of later printed texts – naturally and perhaps in a well-intentioned way evolved the symbolism in accord with both their apprehension of the manuscripts and/or their apprehension and understanding of contemporary Occult texts and praxises, and/or (ii) reflect the judgment of the illustrators or typesetters of later printed texts in respect of representing them on the printed page.
It is therefore interesting to compare some of the differences between the sigils of the Arabic Ghayat al-hakim and those in the Latin Picatrix, especially as such sigils were regarded as important in the crafting and use of talismata.
For one question which a practitioner or an aspiring practitioner of The Dark Arts might well ask is whether or not such later, emended, sigils were as effective as the earlier ones. Questions which practitioners or aspiring practitioners of The Dark Arts should answer themselves as a result of practical Occult experimentation.
