Order of Nine Angles

The Order of Nine Angles is included in this atlas because it exists, is written about, and has influenced people who have committed serious crimes. Nothing in this entry should be read as endorsement, and its own texts are described only as evidence of what it says.

It is not an organisation in any ordinary sense. There is no membership, no roster, no dues, no leadership, and no body that can authenticate anything. It is a decentralised network of autonomous cells, which it calls nexions, together with a larger number of individuals working alone from published texts. That structure is deliberate, and it is the reason the thing cannot be dissolved by removing anyone.

What it teaches is an extreme antinomianism: that conventional ethics are a constraint imposed by a decadent civilisation, and that transgressing them is the mechanism of personal development. Its Seven-Fold Way is a graded programme. Its texts prescribe insight roles, in which the practitioner joins an extremist or criminal organisation for a period as an exercise, and culling, which in that literature means human sacrifice.

It also promotes neo-Nazi ideology explicitly, praises Hitler and Nazi Germany, and denies the Holocaust. Analysts describe it as an esoteric militant accelerationist network, and its material has been taken up by violent far-right groups including Atomwaffen Division and National Action.

Almost nothing about it can be verified from outside its own texts, and that is a property of the design rather than a gap in the research. Anyone describing the Order is therefore largely describing a literature.

The bulk of the Order's corpus is attributed to a pseudonymous figure called Anton Long. Who that is has been argued over since a 1998 article in an anti-fascist magazine identified him as David Myatt, a prominent British neo-Nazi.

Myatt has denied it consistently for decades, and continues to deny it. He maintains that he had no involvement with the Order and that the resemblances exist because it borrowed his ideas. That denial should be recorded, because it is his position and it has not changed.

The scholarly balance nonetheless runs the other way. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Jacob Senholt and others endorse the identification. Senholt pointed to a statement Myatt published in 2003, in which he described conceiving a plan to use, or if necessary create, secret occult groups, and infiltrating several existing ones while creating a new one, as being about as close to an admission as one is likely to get. Massimo Introvigne noted in 2016 that the Order itself had more or less acknowledged that Anton Long was a pen name of Myatt's. This is therefore a contested attribution, with a clear weight of expert opinion on one side and a standing denial on the other, and it should be reported as exactly that and not as settled.

The Order's claimed origins, a survival of pre-Christian tradition in the Welsh Marches, encountered in the late 1960s, are regarded by researchers as invented. Its documented history begins with the publication of its texts: the Black Book of Satan in 1984, the journal Fenrir from 1988, and wide internet dissemination from around 2000.

No count of participants is possible, and the estimates that circulate, from a few hundred to a few thousand loosely associated, are guesses about a network designed to be uncountable.

What is documented is the trail through criminal courts. New Zealand designated the Order a terrorist organisation in 2025. A Russian court ordered its texts banned from distribution following proceedings at St Petersburg in 2024. In the United Kingdom the anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate publicly called for proscription in 2020, and no decision to proscribe is recorded in the sources available for this entry. Ryan Fleming, described as heading a Yorkshire cell, was convicted of sexual offences in 2011 and again in 2017. Material by Myatt was cited as an influence on David Copeland, who carried out the London nail bombings of 1999. During the 2021 prosecution of an Atomwaffen Division leader it emerged that an Order-linked figure, Joshua Caleb Sutter, had been an FBI informant since 2003. Further prosecutions in Britain and the United States have referenced its material.

Two observations follow. The first is that the boundary between the Order as a religion and the Order as an extremist recruitment vehicle is not a boundary its own texts attempt to draw. The second is that the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, which imagined an organised criminal Satanism where none existed, has made it harder rather than easier to describe the one group that does approximate the description, because the vocabulary was spent on a fantasy, and because every other Satanist organisation, all of them law-abiding, has a legitimate objection to being discussed in the same breath.