Order of Nine Angles - On Being Unpopular

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On Being Unpopular
Discernment, Pathei-Mathos, and the Initiatory Occult Quest

An Occult Way
As we have emphasized for over thirty years, the Order of Nine Angles is an esoteric,
and Occult, group. Which in essence means that - beyond exoteric propaganda and
rhetoric; beyond adversarial incitement, heresy, japes, and toying with mundanes our primary concern is the interior change of individuals by means of particular
Occult methods and Arts and which Occult methods and Arts form the basis of our
particular esoteric Way. These particular Occult methods and Arts include and have
included the Seven Fold Way, the Rounwytha tradition, traditional Satanism, amoral
adversarial-heretical praxis, and sinister tribes.
As I mentioned in my essay O9A Adversarial Action - Success or Failure?
" Our real work, both as individuals and as an Order - our Magnum Opus is genuinely esoteric and Occult, and thus concerned with lapis
philosophicus and not with some purely causal self-indulgence, or some
ephemeral outer change in some causal form or forms, or with using such
forms to try and eect some external change. For it is this esoteric, this
Occult, work which will, aectively and eectively, introduce and maintain
the Aeonic changes we desire and plan for - in its own species of acausal
Time."
In practical terms, the interior change of individuals, this esoteric alchemy, involves
individuals: (1) developing a certain type of personal character; (2) acquiring certain
skills both exoteric and esoteric; (3) acquiring - from both personal experience
(pathei-mathos) and from an intellectual learning - a certain initiated knowledge and
insight; and (4) living in a particular manner as a result of the foregoing.
Occult Orders such as the ONA primarily exist and are maintained in order to
facilitate and encourage this interior, personal, change in those individuals such
Orders have recruited or in such individuals as have succeeded in nding such Orders
and overcoming the various obstacles placed in their way.

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Such facilitation and encouragement most usually takes the form of a practical and
structured Way or Ways, simply because such a Way or Ways have been shown, by
experience, to work. There is thus for the individual, both in archetypal and in
practical terms, a very personal journey of learning, experience, and discovery - that
is, a structured and an initiatory Occult quest, since given the nature of human beings
with their psyche being a nexion, a formal declaration, as in Initiation and subsequent
rites, is a necessary prelude to inner, long-lasting, personal change, just as some
structure is practical, eective, providing as it does that necessary supra-personal
perspective and a tangible goal.
As mentioned in the essay Knowing, Information, and The Discovery of Wisdom,
" In terms of esoteric, Occult, matters, to know is both to learn from
personal experience and to place what is so learnt in a particular context,
that of one's personal internal and external journey along the particular way
or path that one has, by initiation, chosen to follow."
The Ways of the ONA - our Dark Arts and methods, and thus our provided structure
and rites, initiatory and otherwise - are simply our collective pathei-mathos, the
results of our hereditary practical experience and learning, forming as this 'ancestral
pathei-mathos' does the essence of our O9A esoteric culture, and a practical
experience and learning, an Occult knowledge, which just is what it is: a tradition
concerning a certain esoteric alchemy.

Pathei-Mathos
Our particular Occult style, our ethos, can be usefully and accurately described by
one term: pathei-mathos. For us, pathei-mathos is a particular Occult method (one of
the Dark Arts) and this Dark Art may be said to be the basis for all of the Ways - and
for many of the techniques - we employ and have employed, from the Seven Fold Way
to Insight Roles to adversarial action to grade rituals such as Internal Adept and the
Camlad Rite of the Abyss.
Pathei-Mathos as a Dark Art involves the individuals in: (a) personal suering, (b) a
learning from adversity, (c) the development of certain Occult skills, and (d) acquiring
practical personal experience.
As mentioned elsewhere, all these diverse experiences are meant by our use of the
term pathei-mathos, and therefore all such experiences are necessary for interior,
esoteric, alchemical, change within the individual. Not just 'personal practical
experience'; not just Occult skills, and not just a 'learning from adversity/challenges',
but also and importantly a learning from personal suering: from grief, severe trauma
(physical and/or emotional), personal loss, and an encounter (or many encounters)
with the imminent possibility of one's own death.

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Thus the Dark Art of pathei-mathos requires the individual to willingly

experience/seek-out certain dicult practical experiences in order to test themselves
and learn from such experiences, with each type of experience of necessity involving
both the sinister and the numinous and of necessity being of several years duration.
Why of necessity? Because of our nature, our physis, as human beings; a nature which
it is one of the tasks of an initiatory Occult quest - where certain Occult skills are
developed and used - to reveal, to discover. A human nature the inner
changing/transformation of which - to be eective, to last - takes a certain duration of
causal Time, amounting to years. A changing of which occurs and has occurred, in
human beings, sometimes - though rarely - naturally; and a changing which Occult
Ways and Dark Arts, and esoteric Orders, are designed to produce in more human
beings in a somewhat shorter duration of causal Time.
Such willingly sought, decades-long, practical individual experiencing of 'the dark'
and of 'the light' does not - should not - make the individual popular with the likes of
Homo Hubris or the hubriati. Nor even understood by the majority of those who
regard themselves as Occultists, 'satanists', or whatever.
Such years-long, practical individual experiencing, with the commensurate and
necessary 'rites of passage and learning' - such as the grade ritual of Internal Adept also produce an individual (whatever shapeshifting cloaking they may exteriorly
employ in the world of mundanes) who is, interiorly, out-of-phase with the world
around them, and who thus understands, who knows, who feels, who has felt, far
more than the majority of human beings so that communication with 'these strange
others', these strangers, this majority, such mundanes - trying to inform such
strangers of such knowing, such feelings - is either an unwanted burden for one of
our kind or, more usually, regarded as unnecessary, irrelevant, counter-productive.
For the sinisterly-numinous has to be experienced to be known, breeding as such
experience does discernment, a distaste for mundanity, and that Aeonic perspective
that is disparaged by or unknown to those vulgar, plebeian, humans we describe by
the term Homo Hubris.

Being Unpopular
Given the nature and aims of esoteric Orders such as The Order of Nine Angles, they
are not concerned about mundane matters such as being 'popular' nor about being
understood by mundanes. Our nature is to discover, by experience of the sinisternuminous, the Reality hidden by abstractions, beyond the illusion of opposites.
This discovery involves an esoteric - a living - alchemy, given that we, as human
individuals, are nexions, a nexus between causal and acausal, with a living (a sinisternuminous) psyche capable of change and development. An esoteric alchemy - an
initiatory Occult quest - where we become a new type of symbiotic life, part of a living
cosmic matrix, and which symbiotic living, far beyond the ego, the unbalanced hubris,
of mundanes, can, through our discovery of Lapis Philosophicus, gift us with our aims
of wisdom and perchance the possibility of an existence beyond the causal death of
the mortal self.
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Thus our Order, our O9A, remains - of necessity, intentionally - small in numbers;
discerning, and, through Dark Arts such as pathei-mathos, for and the genesis of the
discerning minority among those beings termed human. Yet this very aristocratic
intentionality, imbued as it is with our esoteric ethos and thus with the sinisterlynuminous, with archetypal mythos, is - over aeonic durations of causal Time - both
aective and eective in provoking, being the genesis of, changes within a larger
number of human beings.

Anton Long
Order of Nine Angles
123 yfayen

^^^

Some Terms Explained

Note: These explanations are taken from various published ONA texts - including A Glossary of ONA
Terms (v.3.07) - and also from some unpublished ONA texts dealing with alchemy.

Aeonic Perspective
The expression the Aeonic perspective also known as the Cosmic perspective is
used to describe some of our pathei-mathos, some of our experience; that is, to
describe some knowledge we have acquired through a combination of practical
experience, through a scholarly study, and through using certain Occult faculties and
skills, such as esoteric-empathy.
This knowledge concerns several matters, some to do with how we understand the
individual human being, some to do with our perception of Aeons, and some to do
with our praxis and the purpose and eectiveness of our methods and techniques
both exoteric and esoteric.
In terms of causal forms, there is the initiated understanding that what, for human
beings, is esoteric, evolutionary that what presences acausal energy and thus Life
is inner not outer change. That is, that no causal form, no non-Occult praxis, produces
or can produce Aeonic change, although such forms, such praxis, may occasionally
result in some, a few, individuals each century, via pathei-mathos, achieving a certain
insight and understanding and thence becoming changed, more evolved, human
beings.
Or, expressed dierently, the changes wrought by causal forms by wars, revolutions,
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empires, nations, and through means such as politics or social reform, or by

governments are transient, and do not, over centuries, aect human beings en
masse. For humans remain and have remained basically the same; rather primitive
beings, dependant on and in thrall to abstractions, to their emotions, to archetypal
forces, and never developing their latent faculties, never fullling their Cosmic
potential, with only a rare few human beings achieving wisdom.
Alchemy

al- [ from ] - 'the changing'.

According to aural tradition, esoteric alchemy - the secret alchemy - is a symbiotic
process that occurs between the alchemist and certain living 'things'/elements, the
aim of which symbiotic process is to acquire or to produce Lapis Philosophicus, and
which 'jewel of the alchemist' is reputed to possess both the gift of wisdom and the
secret of a personal immortality.
Alchemy, correctly understood and appreciated, is not - as the mis-informed have
come to believe or been led to believe - concerned with the changing, the
transformation of inert, lifeless, substances (chemical or otherwise) but with the
transformation of the alchemist by a particular type of interaction with living 'things',
human, of Nature, and of the Cosmos, and of living 'things' existing both in the causal
and the acausal realms. [Hence the old association between alchemy and astronomy.]
This interaction, by its nature - its physis - is or becomes a symbiotic one, with the
alchemist, and the substances/things used, being thus changed by such a symbiosis.
That is, it is concerned with what we describe as 'the sinisterly-numinous'; with
accessing and using/changing the acausal energies of living beings, and which
acausal energies of necessity include the psyche of the alchemist.
Hence, esoteric alchemy is a particular type of 'internal change' within and of the
individual as well as a practical esoteric Art involving the manufacture/use of
particular types of esoteric - living - substances/'beings'/things.
A minor example of one such alchemical substance, symbiotically produced, is
petriochor. Another is the particular type of energy produced when a human being or
(more eectively) when a collocation of human beings in symbiosis among
themselves, use particular esoteric chants in conjunction with a shaped crystal during
a propitious 'alchemical season'.

Esoteric
By esoteric we mean not only the standard denition given in the Oxford English
Dictionary, which is:
" From the Greek -. Of philosophical doctrines, treatises, modes

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of speech. Designed for, or appropriate to, an inner circle of advanced or

privileged disciples; communicated to, or intelligible by, the initiated
exclusively. Hence of disciples: Belonging to the inner circle, admitted to
the esoteric teaching."
but also and importantly pertaining to the Occult Arts and imbued with a certain
mystery, and redolent of what we term 'the sinisterly-numinous'.
Lapis Philosophicus
The jewel of the alchemist; the goal that the alchemist, through alchemy, seeks.
Possession of this jewel is, according to aural tradition, sucient to gift the alchemist
with both wisdom and the secret of a personal immortality.

Occult
By Occult we mean both: (1) concerned with The Dark Arts, with what is esoteric, and
(2) beyond the mundane, beyond the simple causality of the causal, and thus beyond
conventional causal-knowing.

Psyche
The psyche of the individual is a term used to describe those aspects of an individual those aspects of consciousness - which are hidden, or inaccessible to, or unknown to,
the individual. Basically, such aspects can be considered to be those forces/energies
which do or which can inuence the individual in an emotional way or in a way which
the individual has no direct control over or understanding of. One part of this psyche
is what has been called "the unconscious", and some of the forces/energies of this
"unconscious" have been, and can be, described by the term "archetypes".
In practical terms, the psyche of the individual is a nexus, between causal and
acausal.

Sinister-Numinous
The term sinister-numinous is used to describe the living unity beyond the abstract,
the lifeless, division and dialectic of contrasting/abstractive/ideated opposites. A
division most obvious in the false dichotomy of 'good' and 'evil', and a division not so
obvious in denotatum.
The Dark Art of pathei-mathos is one means to know, to experience, the sinisterlynuminous, and thus to discover the Reality beyond the illusion of opposites. What is
uncovered is The Sinister-Numen, which is the genesis of that which, and those
whom, re-present certain types of acausal energy in the causal.
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Certain archetypes, and archetypal forms, are - exoterically - sinisterly numinous, and
hence have the ability to inuence and inspire human beings - as well as, in some
cases, having the ability to direct certain individuals beyond the ability of those
individuals to control such direction.
One of the most practical manifestations (the most practical presencing) of the
sinister-numen in the causal realm is The Law of Kindred-Honour, and which Law
serves to dene, and to manifest, that which is not-mundane, and thus that-whichis-ONA.

Wisdom
By term wisdom we mean not only the standard dictionary denition - a balanced
personal judgement; having discernment - but also the older sense of having certain
knowledge of a pagan, Occult, kind to do with livings beings, human nature, and
concerning Nature and 'the heavens'. To wit, possessing certain faculties, such as
esoteric-empathy, a knowing of one's self; possessing an Aeonic knowing; and thus
knowing Reality beyond, and sans, all causal abstractions.
ONA/O9A
Order of Nine Angles / Order of The Nine Angles
Ordem dos Nove ngulos / Orden de los Nueve ngulos
Orden der neun Winkel /

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