What Is the Order of Nine Angles (O9A)? A Plain-Language Explainer

TLDR: The Order of Nine Angles (O9A) is a decentralized occult-fascist movement from 1970s-80s Britain, calling its ideology the Sinister Tradition. Its texts appear under the pseudonym Anton Long, identified by academic researchers as David Myatt (who denies it). It prescribes transgression, criminal infiltration, and violence as spiritual practice, spreads through autonomous cells called nexions, and has influenced later extremism including Atomwaffen Division and the 764 network.

The Order of Nine Angles in One Paragraph

The Order of Nine Angles, written O9A or ONA, is a decentralized occult-fascist movement that took shape in Britain across the 1970s and 1980s and calls its own ideology the Sinister Tradition. It fuses Satanism, National Socialism, and accelerationism into a system that treats real-world crime, transgression, and violence as stages in a personal spiritual curriculum rather than as tactics toward a political program. Its foundational texts appear under the pseudonym Anton Long, whom academic researchers including Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and Jacob Senholt identify as the former British neo-Nazi leader David Myatt on stylometric, biographical, and photographic grounds; Myatt has denied the identification across four decades, and the academic sources treat the attribution as established while recording that denial. The order has no headquarters, no membership rolls, and no central authority. It propagates through freely circulating texts and through self-declared autonomous cells it calls nexions, and its material and imagery have shaped later extremist movements, including Atomwaffen Division and the 764 network.

What O9A Actually Is

The order presents itself as a Satanic left-hand-path tradition, and the occultism is not decorative packaging around a political core. It is the operating system. O9A doctrine holds that Western civilization is in terminal decline, that its replacement requires the production of new human types capable of acting outside conventional moral constraints, and that those types are produced through a structured initiatory path in which acts of transgression function as developmental milestones. The political content, an accelerationist neo-Nazism aimed at collapsing the existing order, sits inside that occult frame rather than beside it.

Where a conventional hate group recruits members toward a defined political objective, O9A hands a reader a curriculum and a body of texts and tells them to work through it alone or in a small group. The order maintains an open library, including the foundational text “Naos,” “The Black Book of Satan,” and a corpus of essays and ritual documents gathered under the banner of the Sinister Tradition. A reader can identify what the order claims to believe and what it claims its adherents should do, because the material states both plainly. That openness is part of the design. The doctrine is meant to travel without a chaperone. The pillar profile of the Order of Nine Angles traces how that design produced a body count across two continents.

Anton Long and the Founding Question

The order’s own writings claim origins in the Welsh Marches, the English-Welsh border country, in the late 1960s, with a figure named Anton Long said to have been initiated in 1973 and to have begun codifying and extending the tradition’s texts from the mid-1970s. Those origin claims come from the order itself and cannot be independently verified. What the documentary record establishes is a public presence in British far-right print and zine culture by the early 1980s.

The identity behind Anton Long is the central biographical question in the O9A literature. Academic researchers, principally Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in “Black Sun” (2002) and Jacob Senholt in his 2009 Aarhus University thesis, identify Anton Long as David Myatt, a former chairman of the National Socialist Movement of Britain who later converted to Islam and, later still, adopted a personal philosophy he calls the Numinous Way. The attribution rests on convergent stylometric, biographical, and photographic evidence rather than on any admission. Myatt has denied being Anton Long consistently, across every phase of his stated beliefs, for four decades. The academic sources have not treated the denial as displacing the evidence, and they weigh the convergence as sufficient for attribution. The full record is reviewed in the Anton Long and David Myatt identity-evidence analysis. The order’s regional history in the border country is treated separately in the O9A Southern Nexion and UK-origin profile.

The Doctrine: Transgression as Practice

At the center of O9A practice is a multi-year initiatory path, the Seven Fold Way, that presents a synthesis of Satanism, Hermeticism, and National Socialism moving through seven stages. At the lower stages an aspirant studies texts, performs physical endurance exercises, and conducts rituals. At the higher stages the prescribed requirements become criminal.

The most operationally significant element of the doctrine is the concept of insight roles. At a certain stage, an aspirant is instructed to adopt a demanding real-world identity for an extended period, commonly six months to two years, and the role is meant to be genuinely transgressive and to carry real risk. Prescribed roles have included joining a criminal organization, enlisting in the military, or entering law enforcement. The stated purpose is to break down the aspirant’s existing identity and social conditioning. The practical effect is that O9A texts instruct adherents to infiltrate institutions. Beyond insight roles, the texts frame violence, and in their most extreme passages human sacrifice, which the literature calls culling, as legitimate practices for those at an advanced stage. Whether those passages describe literal killing or ritual metaphor is contested, and the evidentiary record on that question is examined in the O9A human-sacrifice claims analysis.

The Nexion Structure

O9A was never built as an organization in any conventional sense. There are no membership cards, no dues, and no hierarchy answering to a national leader. The order propagates instead through autonomous cells it calls nexions, a term the literature glosses as a gate through which the sinister is made present. Any individual or small group can declare itself a nexion, adopt the corpus, and begin practicing, without permission and without contact with any other cell.

That architecture is what makes the order difficult to disrupt through conventional counterterrorism. Arresting the leader of one nexion does not affect any other nexion, and infiltrating one cell yields no intelligence about the next. The ideology is the organism, and the people carrying it are interchangeable. It is also the structure that governments cite when they decline to proscribe the order, on the argument that proscription requires a defined group with identifiable leadership. Critics counter that the structure making O9A hard to proscribe is the same structure making it dangerous.

The Influence on Modern Extremism

O9A’s significance in current threat assessments comes less from its own membership, which is small and uncounted, than from what its texts and imagery seeded downstream. Atomwaffen Division, the American neo-Nazi accelerationist group tied to multiple killings, borrowed from the O9A model, and members of its leadership studied and promoted O9A material within the group. The clearest documented pipeline runs through Joshua Caleb Sutter, who founded the American nexion Tempel ov Blood and ran the publishing imprint Martinet Press, and who served as a paid FBI confidential informant from 2003 through at least 2021 while producing radicalizing texts. That case is covered in the Joshua Sutter FBI informant investigation and in the Tempel ov Blood and Sutter leak reporting.

The same publishing operation later supplied material to the 764 network, a 2020s online formation founded by a Texas teenager and built around the coercion of minors into producing self-harm content and child sexual abuse material. 764 adopted O9A’s aesthetic and its framing of transgression as spiritually valuable, while stripping out most of the initiatory structure and explicit political content. The two are not the same organization, and treating them as identical obscures both; the distinctions and the shared infrastructure are set out in the O9A versus 764 comparison and the 764 network explainer. O9A’s occult framing has also fed the broader tendency to read modern violence through a Satanic lens, a tendency whose documented and undocumented cases are separated in the analysis of ritual-abuse cases. Additional connected reporting is gathered at the Order of Nine Angles hub.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Order of Nine Angles a real group or an internet myth?

It is real in the sense that a body of texts, a set of practices, and self-identifying adherents demonstrably exist, and that individuals acting on the ideology have been convicted of serious crimes. It is not real in the sense of a conventional organization with a roster, an address, or a chain of command. The order is best understood as a decentralized ideology that spreads through documents and self-declared nexions.

What does “nexion” mean?

Nexion is the order’s term for a cell, an individual or small group that adopts O9A texts and practices its rituals. The literature describes a nexion as a gate through which the sinister is made present. Anyone can declare a nexion without permission from any central authority, which is why the order has no reliable membership count.

Is David Myatt definitely Anton Long?

Academic researchers treat the identification as effectively established on convergent stylometric, biographical, and photographic evidence, and it has not been displaced in the four decades since it was first raised. Myatt has denied it consistently across every phase of his stated beliefs. The honest formulation is that the academic attribution is strong and the subject denies it; the fuller record is reviewed in the dedicated identity-evidence article.

Does O9A actually order people to commit crimes?

Its texts prescribe criminal infiltration through insight roles and, in their more extreme passages, frame violence and human sacrifice as legitimate stages of initiation. Whether specific passages describe literal acts or ritual metaphor is contested. What is documented is that people who engaged with the material have gone on to commit terrorism and serious criminal offenses, and that several have been convicted.

Why hasn’t it been banned?

New Zealand designated O9A as a terrorist entity in December 2025, the first country to do so. The United Kingdom and the United States have not proscribed it, citing in part the decentralized nexion structure, which complicates the legal test for proscribing a defined organization. As documented, possession and distribution of O9A texts remains legal in both the U.K. and the U.S.

Sources

• Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, “Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity,” New York University Press, 2002
• Jacob Senholt, “The Sinister Tradition,” MA thesis, Aarhus University, 2009
• Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “The Order of Nine Angles” explainer
• Counter Extremism Project, “Order of Nine Angles” profile
• Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “The Order of Nine Angles,” 2023
• Middlebury Institute CTEC, “Dangerous Organizations and Bad Actors: Order of Nine Angles”
• Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), reporting on the 764 network and its O9A links
• New Zealand Government, designation of O9A as a terrorist entity, December 2025
• Contemporaneous British anti-fascist reporting (Searchlight, Hope Not Hate) on National Socialist Movement leadership