1. A Most Unusual Order The Order of Nine Angles (ONA, O9A) is a controversial occult group for a variety of reasons. For it has been claimed that they "represent a dangerous and extreme form of Satanism" {1} having, as a reading of the voluminous ONA corpus {2} reveals, "a distinct praxis, advocating as it does not only practical physical ordeals and what it terms Insight Roles, but also practical adversarial acts such as culling (human sacrifice), criminality, political extremism, and even terrorism." {3} In addition, the ONA is unlike most, if not all, contemporary Occult orders or organizations in that it has no centralized organization, no person claiming to be its leader, no formal membership, and as the ONA holds no public activities, meetings, or events, issues no public statements, and detests the use of titles. Instead, it is a particular type of secret society; a collection of covert localized groups (small clandestine cells) and anonymous individuals who identify with or who support its aims, methods, and goals; who apply its praxis to their own lives, and who often establish their own local ONA nexion and recruit people to join it. According the Order of Nine Angles themselves, they have always been based on the principle of "self-replicating self-contained units; that is, based on the seeding, development and propagation of certain causal forms, and thence on the establishment of independent groups and independent individuals who would be freely provided with all the texts and materials necessary to either: (1) if they chose, to follow the Seven Fold Way on their own without any direct personal [centralized] guidance; or (2) to develop their own system based upon or inspired by the ONA, its causal forms, praxis, and mythos. These groups and individuals then would or could be the genesis of other seedlings." {4} It would be thus be more appropriate to talk and write not about the ONA as if it were an ordinary occult organization akin to the Church of Satan, or the Temple of Set - which it is not but rather about the particular occult philosophy that is being propagated and has been propagated under the name the order of nine angles' and which occult philosophy influences or inspires and has influenced or inspired those who describe themselves as ONA and who therefore personally apply its praxis, who establish their own ONA nexion, or who develop their own praxis or occult system "based upon or inspired by the ONA, its causal forms, praxis, and mythos". This occult philosophy is the sinister tradition', the O9A way', or more accurately the modern esoteric philosophy of the pseudonymous Anton Long as described in the 2013 e-text by Richard Stirling entitled The Radical Sinister Philosophy of Anton Long, which details its ethics, epistemology, ontology, and praxis, and which ethics, epistemology, ontology, and praxis, mark it as a distinctive esoteric philosophy within the Western occult tradition. An esoteric philosophy which includes, but is not limited to, (i) the self-initiatory Seven Fold Way of individual occult training with its ordeals, practical insight roles {5}, sorcery, grade rituals, esoteric chant, star game, and dark gods mythos {6}; (ii) the code (the praxis) of kindred-honour and the amoral utilization of mundanes; (iii) an adversarial, practical, individualistic, non-hierarchical, and subversive, form of Satanism and of the Left Hand Path {7}; (iv) the way of the Rounwytha {8}. To develop such a "dangerous and extreme" esoteric philosophy, and to then propagate it, world-wide, by means of independent self-replicating' clandestine cells and covert operatives, is surely unique in the annals of modern occultism. Little wonder, then, that the O9A has attracted criticism. Early and Later Writings It is convenient to divide the writings of Anton Long his esoteric philosophy into two parts, before and after around c. 2000. Some of the later writings extensively elaborate on some of the topics mentioned in the early writings, with many of these later writings apparently dealing with altogether new topics. Certainly, the majority of these later writings, especially those dating from 2009 onwards, have a different tone, with the rhetoric and propaganda and the satanic diatribes' of the earlier writings replaced by sometimes lengthy, staid, metaphysical musings. However, as I described in my 2012 essay Developing The Mythos, The Order of Nine Angles In Perspective, "...throughout its more than thirty years of public notoriety, the ONA has been consistent in its mythos, with their more recent texts (of c. 2009-2012) often or mostly just elaborating on this mythos or with the mythos merely being re-expressed using some newly developed terminology, such as the terms dark empathy and acausal-knowing." That is, most definitely before 2000, and probably in the early 1980s, the philosophy was complete, if only in respect of some of the more advanced aspects as yet untried, untested, by Anton Long himself. For what these later writings seem to show is a writing from personal experience; with the early writings, for instance, just mentioning or more often than not dealing only in a cursory manner with topics such as the Abyss, pathei-mathos, and the cultivation of dark empathy. In effect, therefore, the later writings are those of a wiser man who, following his own journey along the Seven Fold Way, ventured into and beyond the Abyss to reach the penultimate stage of that Way. 2. Roots and Influences