Where the Order of Nine Angles Began: The UK Origin Story and the Three Shropshire Covens

A Sentence in a Durham Courtroom

In January 2020, a sixteen-year-old boy was sentenced at Manchester Crown Court to six years and eight months in custody for preparing acts of terrorism. He had researched explosives, drawn up a target list that included a synagogue and a pub in his home city of Durham, and possessed material the prosecution described as O9A literature. The judge, in passing sentence, described the boy as having sought to alter himself in line with the literature of the Order of Nine Angles, an organization the court characterized as self-consciously and explicitly malevolent. The boy was, at the time, the youngest person ever convicted in the United Kingdom of a terrorism offence.

The literature he had absorbed traced back, on the published record, to a farmhouse in Shropshire, to a man writing under a pseudonym in the late 1970s, and to an origin story whose internal claims and external evidence have never been reconciled.

This is the UK origin question, and it carries the weight of a body count.

What the Order Says About Itself

The Order of Nine Angles’ published account of its own founding is precise about geography and vague about everything else. The tradition, in its own telling, emerged in the Welsh Marches of western England in the late 1960s, when a woman the order’s texts call the Lady Master, said to have descended from a pre-Christian Romano-British pagan lineage that survived in the borderlands between England and Wales, united three small Shropshire-based covens into a single working group. The three covens named in the foundational documents are Camlad, whose name nods to the Arthurian river, the Temple of the Sun, and the Noctulians. The county is specified. The covens are named. The Lady Master is not.

In 1973, according to the same texts, a man given the pseudonym Anton Long was initiated into the tradition. After the Lady Master relocated to Australia later that decade, Long is said to have assumed the role of Grand Master and to have authored the body of writing that the order subsequently treats as its working library. The original Shropshire cell is referred to in O9A material as Nexion Zero, a term the order uses to mark the lineal point of origin from which subsequent cells, called nexions, are said to derive.

This is the order’s own version. It is internally consistent and externally unverifiable. Academic researchers including Jacob Senholt, whose 2009 MA thesis at Aarhus University remains a foundational treatment of the order, and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whose 2002 Black Sun is the standard scholarly reference for the broader milieu, have treated the founding narrative as the order’s mythologized self-presentation rather than as a documentable historical sequence. Senholt’s position is more careful: he does not foreclose the possibility that some pre-existing local occult activity in Shropshire fed into what became O9A material, but he treats the verifiable documentary record as beginning with the Anton Long writings of the late 1970s.

The order’s account, in other words, is a frame around a smaller and harder fact. The smaller fact is that, by the late 1970s, someone in Shropshire was writing texts that synthesized European left-hand-path occultism, British neo-Nazi politics, and an instructional methodology that explicitly framed acts of extreme violence as initiatory practice. The harder fact is that the person doing the writing has, across four decades, been identified by external researchers as David Myatt.

David Myatt’s Documented Biography

David Wulstan Myatt is a public figure whose biography has been documented through his own published writings, through journalistic reporting in Searchlight and on the BBC’s Panorama, and through academic treatment beginning with Goodrick-Clarke and continuing through Senholt and into the post-2018 wave of counter-extremism research. The documented arc has the same general shape across each source, though the interpretive framings differ.

Myatt was born in 1950. By the early 1970s he had moved through the British far right’s organizational ecosystem and had associated with Column 88, a clandestine paramilitary organization that operated on the margins of the British neo-Nazi scene through the 1970s and 1980s and that has been linked in subsequent reporting to the broader Operation Gladio stay-behind networks that NATO maintained across Western Europe during the Cold War. Column 88’s leading membership has never been fully reconstructed in the public record. Myatt is one of the few participants whose name appears consistently in the available sources.

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Myatt circulated through a series of British neo-Nazi formations: the British Movement, an earlier and more openly Hitlerite organization than the National Front; the National Socialist Movement of Britain, which Myatt founded in 1997 after leading approximately fifty members out of Combat 18; and the broader Combat 18 milieu itself, the street-fighting wing of British neo-Nazism that drew its name from the alphabetic ordinal positions of Adolf Hitler’s initials. In 1998, BBC’s Panorama broadcast an investigation in which Myatt was recorded calling for the creation of racial terror through bombs, a phrase the program played without dispute and that Myatt did not subsequently challenge.

The most consequential text Myatt produced during this period was A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution, a pamphlet that circulated through British neo-Nazi networks in the late 1990s and that advocated political violence as the means of achieving racial revolution. The pamphlet has been cited in subsequent reporting and in Hope Not Hate’s documentation as a foundational text in the radicalization of David Copeland, the former British National Party member whose nail-bombing campaign in April 1999 killed three people, including a pregnant woman, and injured more than a hundred at sites in Brixton, Brick Lane, and Soho. Copeland’s targets were chosen for their associations with Black, Bangladeshi, and gay communities respectively. He was sentenced in 2000 to six life terms.

The chain from Myatt’s Practical Guide to Copeland’s bombings is not legally established in the sense that a court found Myatt criminally responsible. It is established in the documentary sense that the pamphlet circulated in the networks Copeland inhabited, that the pamphlet’s instructional content tracks the operational pattern Copeland adopted, and that subsequent counter-extremism documentation has treated the connection as part of the relevant biographical record. The Crown Prosecution Service did not charge Myatt. The pamphlet remained in circulation.

In 1998, the same year Panorama aired its Myatt segment, Myatt converted to Islam. He took the name Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt and entered a roughly twelve-year period during which he produced a substantial corpus of Islamic theological writing while publicly distancing himself from his earlier neo-Nazi activity. The conversion has been treated by some researchers as genuine and by others as instrumental, a question that bears on the broader interpretive frame around the Anton Long identification but that does not displace the underlying biographical facts. Myatt subsequently moved away from Islam and into what he has called The Numinous Way, a post-Islamic philosophical position he has elaborated in writings published under his own name on his personal web presence.

Across all three phases of his publicly stated philosophical position, neo-Nazi, Islamic, and post-Islamic, Myatt has lived for substantial periods in rural Shropshire. The geography is the constant. The publicly stated content has changed.

The Anton Long Material

The texts attributed to Anton Long began surfacing in the British occult-publishing market in the late 1970s and accumulated through the 1980s into a substantial corpus. The most consequential single publication was Naos: A Practical Guide to Modern Magick, which appeared in 1989 under the Anton Long byline and which functioned as the first general-readership statement of what the order calls the sinister tradition. Naos is structured as an instructional text. It contains correspondences, ritual procedures, descriptions of what the order calls the Star Game, and a synthesis of left-hand-path occult practice with an underlying political framework that subsequent O9A writings would elaborate into the order’s accelerationist doctrine.

The 1980s and early 1990s O9A material was distributed primarily through small-press occult publishers, through xeroxed zines passed within the British occult underground, and through correspondence networks. The reach was limited. The order’s claim to a large following during this period is not supported by external evidence; academic estimates of the order’s broad-association numbers across all periods have placed the figure in the low thousands, with the active practitioner count substantially smaller. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, after Myatt’s Islamic turn, the production of new Anton Long material slowed but did not stop. Hope Not Hate has described this period as a brief lull from which the order emerged with renewed activity through social media beginning around 2008.

The 1998 issue of Searchlight, the British anti-fascist magazine, was the first widely circulated publication to identify Anton Long as a pseudonym of David Myatt. Searchlight’s identification was based on biographical concordances between the Anton Long material and Myatt’s documented life, on stylistic features common to both bodies of writing, and on Myatt’s documented presence at events organized under the Anton Long persona. Goodrick-Clarke’s 2002 Black Sun treated the identification as effectively established. Senholt’s 2009 thesis applied stylometric analysis and reached the same conclusion. Myatt has denied the identification consistently across four decades. The denial has not displaced the academic attribution. The contested evidentiary record on the identity question is reviewed separately at the Anton Long and David Myatt identity-evidence review.

What the UK origin question requires, even setting the Myatt identification aside, is the recognition that the Anton Long material was produced in Shropshire across the 1980s and into the 1990s by someone with deep biographical roots in the British far right and with operational familiarity with the British neo-Nazi networks that the order’s texts treat as natural carriers for the doctrine. The texts did not arrive in Shropshire from elsewhere. They were written there, by someone who lived there, in the period the documentary record covers.

The 2008 Resurgence and the UK Terror Wave

By the late 2000s, O9A material had migrated from photocopied zines and small-press print runs onto the internet. The order’s own web presence consolidated through a series of websites that hosted the foundational texts as free downloads. Forums including Iron March, which served as the online clearinghouse for the international accelerationist milieu through the mid-2010s, hosted active O9A discussion threads and circulated the order’s instructional material to a substantially younger and more geographically dispersed audience than the 1980s zine networks had reached.

The downstream effects in the UK began appearing in the criminal record by the late 2010s. The most documented period is the eight terror convictions in Britain across 2018 to 2021 that Hope Not Hate’s reporting and subsequent academic treatment have linked to O9A material possession, doctrinal influence, or organizational affiliation. The convictions are not uniform in their O9A connection. In some cases the link is doctrinal, established through possession of the order’s texts and through the defendant’s stated ideological position. In others the link is organizational, established through membership in groups, principally Sonnenkrieg Division, that drew their imagery and rhetorical content from the O9A corpus.

Michal Szewczuk of Leeds and Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski of west London were sentenced in June 2019 for terror offences arising from their operation of the Sonnenkrieg Division Gab page, which the prosecution established as a direct imitation of the American Atomwaffen Division and which incorporated O9A symbology and rhetorical content into its propaganda output. Szewczuk received a custodial sentence of just over four years. Dunn-Koczorowski received an eighteen-month detention and training order. The judge in the Szewczuk case described the defendant’s ideological formation as having occurred substantially through O9A-adjacent material.

The Durham sixteen-year-old, Jack Reed, was sentenced in January 2020 to six years and eight months. The prosecution established that Reed had been influenced by O9A literature and had sought to align his own conduct with the order’s doctrinal expectations. Reed had drawn up a target list, had researched explosives, and had been preparing what the court accepted as a viable terrorist attack at the time of his arrest. He remained, until subsequent younger convictions, the youngest person ever convicted in the UK of a terrorism offence.

Ryan Fleming of Horsforth, Leeds, was convicted in 2012 of false imprisonment and sexual abuse of a young boy, in 2018 of sexual abuse of a fourteen-year-old girl he had met online, and in 2021 of unsupervised contact with children in violation of his prior sentencing conditions. Fleming was a regional organizer for National Action, which the UK government proscribed in December 2016, and was identified by Hope Not Hate as an active O9A promoter on Iron March and as a member of an O9A affiliate group operating in Yorkshire that the order’s own writings refer to as Drakon Covenant.

In June 2020, two sisters, Bibaa Henry, age forty-six, and Nicole Smallman, age twenty-seven, were attacked and killed in Fryent Country Park in Wembley, north-west London. The attacker was Danyal Hussein, age eighteen. Hussein was carrying, when arrested, a handwritten document the prosecution described as a blood pact. The document was addressed to King Lucifuge Rofocale, a demon drawn from grimoire literature and incorporated into the broader O9A-adjacent occult ecosystem in which Hussein had been active online. The pact pledged the sacrifice of six women every six months in exchange for a lottery jackpot. Three lottery tickets were folded into the pact when police recovered it. Hussein was sentenced in October 2021 to a minimum thirty-five years in custody.

The Hussein case is the most ambiguous of the UK terror cluster on the question of direct O9A doctrinal affiliation. Hussein had been active on Becoming a Living God, an online forum operated by the American black-magic author E.A. Koetting, whose work overlapped with but did not fully duplicate the O9A corpus. Hope Not Hate and the Religion Media Centre have placed the Hussein case in the broader O9A-adjacent category rather than as a doctrinally pure O9A case. The case still belongs in the UK origin story because the demonological imagery, the framing of murder as instrumental sacrifice for personal advancement, and the operational pattern of a young man producing a written pledge addressed to a named entity from grimoire literature are continuous with the rhetorical and operational architecture the Anton Long material had been producing since the 1980s.

The Proscription That Did Not Happen

In March 2020, Hope Not Hate published a report describing the Order of Nine Angles as, in its own phrase, an incubator of terrorism, and calling on the UK government to proscribe the order under the Terrorism Act 2000. The report documented the eight UK terror convictions, the international network of nexions, the order’s role as ideological feedstock to Atomwaffen Division and Sonnenkrieg Division, and the patterns of recruitment that had drawn boys as young as thirteen into the order’s online orbit. The report was framed for parliamentary consumption.

The parliamentary moment arrived on 15 July 2020, when the House of Commons debated the Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2020, which proposed the proscription of Feuerkrieg Division. During the debate, MPs from multiple parties, including the parliamentary chair of Hope Not Hate, called on the Home Secretary to also proscribe the Order of Nine Angles. The MP speaking in support of the proscription motion noted that the order had been active since the 1970s, that its members used encrypted social media platforms to incite hatred and inspire terrorism, that eight individuals linked to O9A had been convicted of terror offences across the preceding twenty-four months, and that children as young as thirteen had been drawn into the order’s recruitment infrastructure. The Home Office did not include the order in the proscription order. Feuerkrieg Division was proscribed. O9A was not.

In the years since, the UK has proscribed several O9A-influenced groups while leaving the order itself unproscribed. Sonnenkrieg Division was proscribed in February 2020. The National Socialist Order and Atomwaffen Division were proscribed in April 2021. The pattern, considered as a sequence of decisions, has effect: the downstream organizational expressions of O9A doctrine have been treated as proscribable; the doctrine’s institutional source has not. The Home Office’s standard response to the question has been that O9A’s decentralized structure complicates the application of the Terrorism Act’s organizational-membership provisions, an argument that has not been extended to other decentralized accelerationist formations the UK has subsequently proscribed.

The proscription gap matters for the UK origin question because it leaves the Shropshire origin point legally untouched. The order’s foundational texts remain available online, including from infrastructure that has tolerated their presence across multiple platform-policy cycles. The order’s recruitment continues through the same kinds of online forums that produced the Reed, Szewczuk, and Dunn-Koczorowski cases. Whatever the UK government’s stated reasons for the non-proscription, the operational effect is that the doctrinal corpus produced in Shropshire over the past forty-five years remains in legal circulation, and the next case continues to arrive.

The Transatlantic Relay

The UK origin story does not end in the UK. By the early 2000s, the O9A corpus had crossed the Atlantic through Joshua Caleb Sutter, the South Carolina former Aryan Nations figure who became a paid FBI informant in 2003 while simultaneously founding the American nexion Tempel ov Blood and launching the publishing operation Martinet Press. The Tempel ov Blood texts and the Martinet Press catalogue, which included the novel Iron Gates, became the operational radicalization library for Atomwaffen Division and, by the early 2020s, for the 764 network, the Texas-founded online child-exploitation formation that drew its rhetorical content and its operational architecture from the O9A corpus.

The transatlantic relay is treated separately at the Joshua Sutter FBI informant investigation, at the Order of Nine Angles network hub, at what the evidence shows on the order’s human sacrifice claims, and at the 764 network explainer. What belongs in the UK origin story is the geographical fact: the doctrine that the FBI’s most consequential domestic-extremism informant scandal centers on was written in Shropshire, by someone the academic record identifies as a former leader of British neo-Nazi paramilitary organizations, in the same decades during which that figure was producing the texts that radicalized the bombmaker who killed three people at the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999.

The Shropshire farmhouse, the photocopied zines of the 1980s, the Naos publication of 1989, the Searchlight identification of 1998, the BBC Panorama segment of the same year, the Goodrick-Clarke treatment of 2002, the Senholt thesis of 2009, and the eight UK terror convictions of 2018 to 2021 are not separate stories. They are one story, with a continuous documentary record, that the UK government has chosen not to act on at the level of the doctrinal source.

The Residue

The UK origin of the Order of Nine Angles is not a mystery. The order’s self-told mythology, three covens in the Welsh Marches united in the late 1960s by a Lady Master who later moved to Australia, is unverifiable in its specifics and irrelevant in its function: the function is to give the doctrine a depth that the documentary record does not require it to have. The documentary record is sufficient. It places the production of the foundational texts in Shropshire across the late 1970s and the 1980s, attributes them on convergent evidence to a former leader of British neo-Nazi paramilitary formations, and traces a continuous line of downstream effect through the Copeland bombings, the National Action era, the Sonnenkrieg Division prosecutions, the Reed and Hussein cases, the Atomwaffen Division ideological pipeline, and the 764 network’s transatlantic absorption of the same corpus.

The order remains unproscribed in the country where it was written. The texts remain available where their author placed them. The next case continues to arrive on the same documentary timeline that has been arriving since 2018. The UK origin question, for the institutions that could act on it, is not a question of evidence. It is a question of will.

Sources

• Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, New York University Press, 2002
• Jacob C. Senholt, “Secret Identities in the Sinister Tradition: Political Esotericism and the Convergence of Radical Islam, Satanism and National Socialism in the Order of the Nine Angles,” MA thesis, Aarhus University, 2009
• Hope Not Hate, “State of Hate 2019: The Order of Nine Angles”
• Hope Not Hate, “Government Misses Opportunity to Proscribe Order of Nine Angles,” 19 April 2021
• House of Commons Hansard, Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism debate, 15 July 2020
• Hannah Gais and Megan Squire, “Occult Beliefs and the Far Right: The Case of the Order of Nine Angles,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 2023
• Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “The Order of Nine Angles” explainer
• Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “The Order of Nine Angles,” July 2023
• Middlebury Institute CTEC, “Dangerous Organizations and Bad Actors: Order of Nine Angles”
• BBC News coverage of David Copeland, the London nail bomber
• The Washington Post, “Michael Szewczuk and Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski convicted for promoting far-right terrorism online,” 18 June 2019
• Far-Right Criminals, “Ryan Fleming: Neo-Nazi paedophile jailed for messaging children,” 13 February 2021
• Jersey Evening Post, “Social media giants under pressure over Satanist linked to Wembley murders,” 20 October 2021
• CREST Research, “Timeline: Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism in the UK”