The Order of Nine Angles: Inside the Neo-Nazi Occult Network Behind Real-World Violence

A Pact Written in Blood

Danyal Hussein was nineteen years old when he sat in his bedroom in Eltham, southeast London, and signed a contract with a demon. The document, written in his own hand on lined notebook paper, was addressed to “King Lucifuge Rofocale.” In it, Hussein pledged to kill six women within six months. In exchange, the demon would deliver a Mega Millions lottery jackpot. He signed the pact with a thumbprint of his own blood.

On the night of June 6, 2020, Hussein took a knife to Fryent Country Park in Wembley, northwest London. He found Bibaa Henry, 46, and her younger sister Nicole Smallman, 27, celebrating Henry’s birthday in the park after a gathering of friends had gone home. Hussein stabbed Henry eight times and Smallman twenty-eight times. He left their bodies interlinked in the undergrowth and went home.

The Metropolitan Police did not find the sisters for thirty-six hours. Their concerned friends organized a search. When two officers were eventually posted at the crime scene, those officers took selfies with the bodies, a grotesque breach that resulted in their own criminal convictions.

Investigators recovered the blood pact from Hussein’s bedroom along with a trove of material that traced his radicalization to a single ideological source: the Order of Nine Angles.

The O9A is not a fringe curiosity. It is, by the assessment of multiple Western intelligence agencies, the most dangerous neo-Nazi occult network operating in the world today. Its adherents have committed murder on two continents, plotted mass casualty attacks against military personnel, sexually exploited children as a doctrinal requirement, and spawned a downstream network the FBI now classifies alongside ISIS as a Tier One threat. The group has no headquarters, no membership rolls, and no central leadership. That is by design.

What the Order of Nine Angles Actually Is

David Myatt grew up in Shropshire and Tanzania, studied martial arts and radical politics as a teenager, and by his twenties had become one of the most energetic figures in British neo-Nazism. He co-founded Combat 18 and served time for leading a violent assault. But Myatt’s ambitions exceeded what street-level fascism could offer. Writing under the pseudonym “Anton Long,” he began publishing a body of occult and political texts in the early 1980s that would eventually constitute the foundational literature of the Order of Nine Angles.

Myatt’s central innovation was structural. The O9A was never meant to be an organization in any conventional sense. There were no membership cards, no dues, no hierarchy answering to a national leader. Instead, Myatt designed the O9A as an ideology that could replicate itself through autonomous cells he called “nexions.” Any individual or small group could declare themselves a nexion, adopt O9A texts, and begin practicing its system. No permission was required. No communication with other nexions was necessary.

This architecture made O9A nearly impossible to dismantle through the conventional tools of counterterrorism. Arresting the leader of a nexion did not affect any other nexion. Infiltrating one cell provided no intelligence about the next. The ideology was the organism, not the people carrying it.

At the core of O9A practice sits the Seven Fold Way, a multi-year initiatory path that Myatt presented as a synthesis of Satanism, Hermeticism, and National Socialism. The path moves through seven stages, each corresponding to a celestial sphere in a system Myatt adapted from Western esoteric tradition. At the lower stages, an aspirant studies texts, practices physical endurance exercises, and performs rituals. At the higher stages, the requirements become criminal.

Myatt has periodically distanced himself from the O9A, claiming conversion to Islam in the early 2000s and later adopting a personal philosophy he calls “the Numinous Way.” Scholars who have studied his output, including the academics Massimo Introvigne and Jacob C. Senholt, note that the pseudonymous “Anton Long” continued publishing new O9A material during periods when Myatt claimed to have left the movement. Whether Myatt still guides the O9A is less important than the fact that the system he built does not require him. The texts circulate. The nexions multiply.

The Doctrine: Violence as Sacrament

O9A ideology is not reducible to white supremacy with occult window dressing. The occultism is not decorative. It is functional. The system treats violence, crime, and human suffering as necessary instruments of spiritual development and civilizational transformation.

The most operationally significant element of O9A doctrine is the concept of “Insight Roles.” At a certain stage of the Seven Fold Way, an aspirant is instructed to adopt a challenging real-world identity for an extended period, typically six months to two years. The role must be genuinely transgressive and involve real risk. Prescribed roles have included joining a criminal organization, enlisting in the military, entering a monastery, or working in law enforcement. The stated purpose is to shatter the aspirant’s existing identity and social conditioning. The practical effect is that O9A adherents are instructed to infiltrate institutions.

Beyond Insight Roles, O9A texts prescribe what internal documents call “the ABC of Practical Satanism.” The initials stand for Assault, Business, and Criminal organization. The texts are explicit. Adherents at advanced stages are expected to engage in physical violence, build criminal enterprises, and organize or join criminal networks. Human sacrifice, referred to in O9A literature as “culling,” is presented as a legitimate practice for those who have reached the appropriate stage of initiation.

The doctrine does not treat these acts as metaphors. One O9A text, “Hostia,” contains detailed instructions for selecting and dispatching sacrificial victims, whom the texts call “opfers.” Preferred targets include those deemed racially or socially undesirable, those who violate O9A codes, and random individuals whose deaths serve to “further the dialectic of history.” The phrase is Myatt’s, and it reveals the ideological engine beneath the occult surface: O9A exists to accelerate the collapse of existing civilization so that a new, racially pure order can replace it.

Perhaps the most disturbing element of O9A doctrine is its explicit incorporation of child sexual abuse. Texts associated with the Tempel ov Blood, one of the most prominent O9A nexions, frame the sexual violation of children as an act of transgression necessary for advanced spiritual development. This is not a misinterpretation or a fringe reading. It is written into the published materials. And it has produced real victims.

The Body Count

The gap between ideology and action, the space where most extremist movements lose their adherents to apathy or cowardice, is unusually narrow in the O9A. The network’s decentralized structure means there is no centralized count of O9A-linked criminal acts. But the cases that have reached prosecution reveal a pattern that spans continents and escalates in severity.

Danyal Hussein: The London Double Murder

Hussein’s case, which opened this article, remains the most publicly visible O9A-linked killing. At trial, the prosecution presented evidence that Hussein had engaged extensively with O9A texts and ideology online. His blood pact to a demon, his selection of random women as sacrificial targets, and the ritualized nature of the killings all mapped directly onto O9A doctrine regarding “culling” and “opfers.”

In September 2021, Hussein was found guilty of the murders of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman at the Old Bailey. The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty-five years.

Ethan Melzer: The Soldier Who Plotted Against His Own Unit

Ethan Melzer was a twenty-two-year-old US Army private stationed in Italy with the 173rd Airborne Brigade when he decided to get his fellow soldiers killed. In 2020, Melzer transmitted classified information about his unit’s planned deployment to Turkey, including details about the unit’s location, security protocols, and force protection measures. He sent this information to members of the O9A and the affiliated RapeWaffen Division, an online network that combined O9A ideology with explicit celebrations of sexual violence.

Melzer’s intent, as documented in his own messages recovered by federal investigators, was to orchestrate a mass casualty attack on his unit by providing operational details to jihadist groups. He described the planned outcome as a second “Green on Blue” attack, referencing insider attacks in Afghanistan. “I would’ve died successfully,” he wrote to an associate, describing the scenario as a worthy sacrifice.

The FBI arrested Melzer before the deployment. In March 2024, a federal judge sentenced him to forty-five years in prison, one of the longest sentences ever imposed for a terrorism-related case involving a US service member.

Samuel Woodward: The Atomwaffen Murder

On January 2, 2018, twenty-year-old Samuel Woodward stabbed nineteen-year-old Blaze Bernstein more than twenty times and buried his body in a shallow grave in Lake Forest, California. Bernstein was gay and Jewish. Woodward was a member of Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi accelerationist group whose founding members had extensive connections to O9A ideology and practice.

Atomwaffen’s organizational structure borrowed directly from the O9A nexion model. Several Atomwaffen leaders, including John Cameron Denton, had studied and promoted O9A texts within the group. Woodward’s killing of Bernstein carried the hallmarks of O9A’s “culling” doctrine: a targeted victim selected for belonging to groups the ideology deemed disposable, killed in a manner that served as proof of the perpetrator’s commitment.

In August 2024, Woodward was convicted of first-degree murder with a hate crime enhancement and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Richard Densmore: The Marine Who Livestreamed Abuse

Richard Densmore, known online as “Rabid,” was a US Marine and a member of the 764 network, a group that grew directly out of O9A ideology. Densmore used the network to access minors, coerce them into producing child sexual abuse material, and in at least one case, livestream the sexual abuse of a child.

Federal investigators documented Densmore’s participation in 764’s command structure, where members competed to produce increasingly extreme content involving children, including self-harm, sexual abuse, and animal cruelty. The ideological justification for this conduct traced directly to O9A’s framing of child exploitation as transgressive spiritual practice.

In 2024, Densmore was sentenced to thirty years in federal prison. Prosecutors described his conduct as some of the most disturbing material ever processed by the FBI’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force.

Ryan Fleming: The Drakon Covenant Predator

Ryan Fleming was a member of the Drakon Covenant, an O9A nexion operating in the United Kingdom. Fleming was convicted of three counts of sexual assault, with his offenses directly connected to his involvement in O9A activity. The Drakon Covenant had operated as a node for both ideological radicalization and the commission of sexual violence, with O9A texts providing the doctrinal framework that prescribed such acts as initiatory requirements.

Fleming’s case was one of several UK prosecutions that drew direct lines between O9A membership and sexual offending, reinforcing the assessment by counterterrorism researchers that O9A’s integration of sexual violence into its doctrinal framework produces offenders at a rate disproportionate to the network’s small size.

The FBI Informant Who Built the Machine

In December 2023, The Intercept published an investigation that exposed one of the most consequential failures of FBI informant management in the modern history of domestic counterterrorism. Joshua Caleb Sutter, a South Carolina man with a long history in white supremacist movements, had been a paid FBI informant since 2003. Over the next eighteen years, the Bureau paid Sutter more than $140,000.

During that same period, Sutter founded and led the Tempel ov Blood, one of the most influential nexions in the entire O9A network. The Tempel ov Blood produced some of the most extreme texts in the O9A canon, including “Iron Gates” and “Liber 333,” works that explicitly glorify child sexual abuse, torture, and murder as spiritual practices. Sutter published and distributed these texts through Martinet Press, his own publishing imprint. The books circulated widely in neo-Nazi and accelerationist circles and served as primary radicalization material for a generation of O9A adherents.

The timeline is what makes the case extraordinary. Sutter was not an informant who happened to have a past in extremism. He was an active, producing, central figure in the O9A’s publishing infrastructure while simultaneously receiving FBI payments. The texts he published directly influenced the radicalization pathways of individuals who later committed acts of violence. Whether the FBI knew what Sutter was publishing, and whether agents made a calculated decision that his intelligence value outweighed the damage his publications were causing, are questions that congressional investigators have begun to examine.

Senator Dick Durbin and other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have requested briefings on the Sutter case. The fundamental question is one of institutional accountability: can the FBI claim success in monitoring a domestic threat when its own paid informant was building that threat’s ideological infrastructure?

The 764 Evolution: When the Students Surpass the Teachers

The most dangerous development in the O9A’s influence is not the O9A itself. It is what the O9A produced downstream.

764, named after an area code used as a network identifier, represents the evolution of O9A ideology into a form optimized for the digital generation. Where O9A required its adherents to study dense occult texts and undertake multi-year initiatory paths, 764 stripped the framework down to its most violent and exploitative elements and deployed them through Discord servers, Telegram channels, and encrypted messaging platforms frequented by minors.

The network was founded by Bradley Cadenhead, who was fifteen years old at the time. Cadenhead, operating under the handle “Rabbitwolf,” built a system in which minors coerced other minors into producing self-harm content, child sexual abuse material, and animal cruelty. The escalation structure mirrored O9A’s initiatory ladder: new members proved commitment through increasingly extreme acts, documented on camera and shared within the network. Those who attempted to leave were threatened with the release of their material.

The FBI classified 764 as a Tier One threat in 2024, placing it at the same priority level as ISIS and al-Qaeda. The Bureau identified more than 5,000 victims, the majority of them children. Multiple federal prosecutions have followed, with defendants ranging in age from teenagers to active-duty military personnel.

What makes 764 distinctive is its hybridization. It is simultaneously a terrorist recruitment pipeline, a child sexual exploitation network, and a self-harm promotion community. The ideological DNA is O9A’s, particularly the doctrine that the most extreme transgressive act is the most spiritually valuable one. But 764 adapted that doctrine for a population of digitally native adolescents who would never read “Naos” or practice the Seven Fold Way.

The result is a network that radicalizes faster, exploits more efficiently, and produces younger perpetrators than anything the O9A’s founders envisioned.

The Legal Gap

Despite a body count, a conviction record, and an FBI threat classification that places its offspring alongside international jihadist organizations, the O9A occupies a peculiar legal position. In most Western democracies, it is not formally designated as a terrorist entity.

New Zealand became the first country to designate O9A as a terrorist organization in December 2025, a decision driven by the Christchurch Call framework and the country’s aggressive post-2019 approach to online extremism. Canada designated 764 as a terrorist entity the same month, the first nation to apply that label to what Canadian officials described as a “technology-facilitated” violent extremist group.

The United Kingdom, where O9A was founded and where the majority of its prosecutable offenses have occurred, has repeatedly declined to proscribe the organization. Home Office officials have cited the decentralized nexion structure as a complicating factor, arguing that proscription requires a defined organization with identifiable leadership. Critics, including the counter-extremism commissioner and multiple members of Parliament, have called this reasoning circular. The structure that makes O9A difficult to proscribe is the same structure that makes it dangerous. At least eight individuals in the UK have been convicted of terrorism or serious criminal offenses linked to O9A ideology. The refusal to proscribe means that possession and distribution of O9A materials remains legal, and that individuals who openly identify as O9A adherents cannot be charged on that basis alone.

The United States faces a different structural problem. US law does not provide a mechanism for designating domestic organizations as terrorist entities. The Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list, maintained by the State Department, applies only to foreign groups. Since O9A’s nexion model includes both domestic and international nodes, it falls into a jurisdictional gap. Federal prosecutors have charged O9A-linked individuals under existing statutes covering material support for terrorism, weapons offenses, and child exploitation, but the absence of a domestic terrorism designation means there is no legal framework for treating O9A affiliation itself as a prosecutable act.

Testing New Legal Ground

The case of Baron Martin may define how the United States prosecutes O9A-linked violence going forward. Martin, a Florida man charged in connection with 764 network activity, became the subject of what legal analysts believe is the first application of 18 USC 2339A (material support for terrorism) to a domestically operating network without an underlying FTO designation. The charge theory rests on the argument that 764’s activities constitute terrorism under federal statute regardless of whether the network appears on a formal designation list.

If the Martin prosecution succeeds, it establishes a template for charging O9A affiliates under material support provisions without waiting for a designation that the current legal framework may never produce. If it fails, the gap persists.

Legislative efforts have stalled. The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, introduced as S.2457, would create federal infrastructure for monitoring and prosecuting domestic terrorist organizations. The bill has languished in committee through multiple congressional sessions. Its opponents raise First Amendment concerns about the government maintaining lists of domestic ideological groups. Its supporters argue that the current framework leaves prosecutors improvising legal theories case by case while networks like O9A and 764 continue to radicalize and exploit.

A Machine That Builds Itself

The O9A’s most consequential feature is the one David Myatt engineered from the beginning: it does not need David Myatt. It does not need any leader, any headquarters, any communication infrastructure. The texts exist. The nexion model exists. The initiatory framework, with its escalating demands for real-world violence and exploitation, exists. Anyone with internet access can download the complete O9A library, declare a nexion, and begin practicing.

This is what distinguishes O9A from other violent extremist movements. Al-Qaeda required training camps. ISIS required territory. Even Atomwaffen Division, for all its decentralization, depended on a small number of identifiable leaders whose arrests disrupted the network. O9A was designed to survive every form of disruption that security services can deliver. The ideology is the infrastructure.

The downstream consequences continue to multiply. 764 demonstrated that O9A’s framework could be adapted for minors exploiting minors, a development that no counterterrorism model had anticipated. New nexions continue to appear on encrypted platforms. The Sutter case demonstrated that even the FBI’s own intelligence operations could, whether through negligence or calculation, feed the machine they were supposed to be monitoring.

Bibaa Henry was forty-six. Nicole Smallman was twenty-seven. They were celebrating a birthday in a London park on a summer evening. The teenager who killed them had signed a blood contract with a demon he learned about from texts written by a former Combat 18 organizer in Shropshire, distributed through a publishing house run by an FBI informant in South Carolina, hosted on servers maintained by anonymous nexions scattered across three continents. No single node in that chain was responsible for the murders. Every node was necessary.

That is the machine David Myatt built. It has no off switch, because he never installed one.

Sources

• Metropolitan Police Service — Danyal Hussein Sentencing — Press release, September 2021
• DOJ — U.S. Army Soldier Sentenced for Planned Ambush Attack — Press release, March 2024
• DOJ — Samuel Woodward Sentenced for Hate Crime Murder of Blaze Bernstein — Press release, August 2024
• DOJ — U.S. Marine Sentenced for Child Exploitation — Press release, 2024
• Robert Mackey, “The Informant and the Nazis” — The Intercept — December 2023
• Senholt, Jacob C. “Secret Identities in the Sinister Tradition” — ESSWE Conference Paper, 2009
• Introvigne, Massimo. Satanism: A Social History — Brill, 2016
• FBI — 764 Threat Classification, Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings, 2024
• New Zealand Government — Designation of O9A as Terrorist Entity, December 2025
• Public Safety Canada — Listed Terrorist Entities: 764
• Counter Extremism Project — Order of Nine Angles Profile
• Leidig, Eviane. “The Women of the Order of Nine Angles” — ICCT Policy Brief, 2023
• BBC News. “Ryan Fleming: O9A-Linked Man Convicted of Sexual Assaults.” 2023.
• S.2457, Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act. 118th Congress, introduced 2023.