Much has been written about the QAnon conspiracy theory and how believers have begun mingling with armed and dangerous extremist groups such as the Proud Boys. Since QAnon (and its core belief that Hollywood celebrities and political and financial elites are all part of a Satanic cabal that secretly rules the world while kidnapping and torturing children) is something of a gateway belief system through which people become radicalized into joining these groups, one might draw the conclusion that these and other alt-right groups would be diametrically opposed to Satanism and Satanists. While this is true of the aforementioned groups, the alt-right is unfortunately broad enough that it has something for everyone—even white nationalist, occultist groups who (wrongly) declare themselves to be Satanists. The stereotypical image of the alt-right as Christian, nationalist Trump voters is only part of the picture. While they may be a minority among the movement, recent events in which a devil-worshipping neo-Nazi, former U.S. Army Private Ethan Melzer, was found guilty in a plot to murder United States soldiers in a “jihadist attack” suggest that these kooks might actually be more active, and more dangerous than previously believed. It would be prudent, therefore, for us to not limit our understanding of who identifies with the alt-right.
The alt-right has been home to practitioners of new religious movements. As Brian Regal pointed out in his 2019 article for Skeptical Inquirer “Everything Means Something in Viking,” groups such as the Vinland Folk Resistance (named for a failed settlement of Leif Erickson’s) have adopted a racist interpretation of Asatru and Odinism—religions based on the ancient Norse gods. Combining a fascist weltanschauung with neo-Pagan practices, these groups cast themselves as heroes in epic Tolkienesque fantasy in which they’re defending the white race. So, what kind of mythos are the devil worshippers bringing to the Himmlerian round table?
Melzer was a member of The Order of Nine Angles (O9A), an extremist group claiming to be part of a “Sinister Tradition” and to practice “Traditional Satanism”—that is, they claim to be part of a religious tradition of Satanism that predates the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966, despite the fact that experts agree there’s no evidence to suggest any such groups existed. Such claims to antiquity are not unique in the world of the occult. Wiccans, who consider themselves modern witches, have long claimed that their religion is based on ancient pagan practices dating all the way back to the Stone Age, when in fact, Wicca was created in the early 1940s by Gerald Gardner. A more familiar example might be the humble tarot deck. Some occultists (such as Aleister Crowley) believed the tarot originally came from ancient Egypt. Most experts, however, agree that the modern tarot deck evolved from playing cards introduced to Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, and the occult tradition associated with the cards is “based on nothing plausible and is essentially a fantasy created in an attempt to carry back the origin of tarot to the ancient civilizations.”
According to Jacob Christiansen Senholt, the Order claims they are descended from “a thousand-year-old tradition, worshipping ‘dark gods’ from Albion (England).” More likely, they were established in 1973 by one “Anton Long” who, along with the concept of “nine angles,” is likely a reference to Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. LaVey published a ritual, the “Ceremony of the Nine Angles” in his Satanic Rituals (LaVey 1972). While the true identity of “Anton Long” remains a mystery to this day, according to an April 1998 issue of the British magazine Searchlight, “Anton Long” was the nom-de-guerre of David Myatt, a prominent figure in the British neo-Nazi movement who in 1998 converted to radical Islam before repudiating his extremist past entirely in 2010. While Myatt has always denied being Anton Long, in 2015, a member of the O9A known only as R. Parker explicitly stated that the person behind the pseudonym “was David Myatt.”
The O9A teaches a mystical initiatory system referred to as the “Seven Fold Way,” or “Hebdomadry,” which the Order believes will “lead to the creation of strong, really dangerous, ruthless individuals which are so subversive that no laws could ever outlaw them, and that attempts to restrain them, to outlaw them, would only make them more attractive to some individuals.” O9A cosmology maintains that human history passes through time periods referred to as “Aeons” culminating in a sixth Aeon, the Aeon of Fire, in which the Aryan race will establish a galactic civilization by conquering the galaxy. Currently, Western civilization is being poisoned by a “Nazarene/Magian Ethos” the likes of which only a violent revolution can overcome. This is not hyperbole. The O9A has praised Nazi Germany as “a practical expression of the Satanic spirit … a burst of Luciferian light-of zest and power-in and otherwise Nazarene, pacified, and the boring world (Goodrick-Clarke 2003),” and unambiguously advocate for ritualistic human sacrifice, stating:
We, on the contrary, are dark and really sinister—and propound culling. That is, we uphold human culling as beneficial, for both the individual who does the culling (it being a character-building experience) and for our species in general, since culling by its nature removes the worthless and thus improves the stock. Naturally, there are proper ways to choose who is to be culled—each victim is chosen because they have shown themselves to be suitable. They are never chosen at random, as they are never “innocent.”
It might be easy to dismiss the O9A as what journalist and fellow Church of Satan member Gavin Baddely referred to me as “self-radicalized fruit loops and fantasists.” However, recent events have shown the O9A’s rhetoric of hate is more than mere talk. On June 24, 2022, Melzer “pled guilty to attempting to murder U.S. service members, providing and attempting to provide material support to terrorists, and illegally transmitting national defense information.” More odiously, back in 2020, Melzer conspired with fellow members of an O9A “nexion” (a clandestine cell) named “Rapewaffen” to plan an attack on his own unit by divulging intelligence related to their location, movement, and security details. Melzer and his coconspirators referred to their plan as a “jihadi attack” with the express purpose of creating a “mass casualty event” that would lead to a prolonged conflict in the Middle East. Or, as Melzer so eloquently put it “who gives a fuck … it would be another war. … I would’ve died successfully … cause … another 10-year war in the Middle East would definitely leave a mark.”
In the wake of Melzer’s arrest, more members of the United States armed forces have come under investigation for ties with the Atomwaffen Division. In 2019, Pfc. Corwyn Storm Carver was found to have used O9A hashtags on social media and posted a picture of the Order’s book, The Satanic Tradition, and was subsequently “administratively separated” from the Army (essentially he was fired). A year later, Pfc. Shandon Simpson of the National Guard was discovered to be an active participant on the RapeWaffen Division channel of the Telegram messaging app, who posted content from the group to his Facebook page while simultaneously promoting a complimentary group, “RapeKrieg,” according to Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group. When the Ohio National Guard was deployed to Washington D.C. to assist the Trump administration’s attempts to put down protests, Simpson enthusiastically declared “RaHoWa,” a neo-Nazi acronym for “racial holy war.”
While the tragedy was averted in the case of Melzer, the O9A has been linked to a number of terroristic murders. On September 18, 2020, the website Antihate.ca reported that Toronto Police had arrested thirty-four-year-old Guilherme “William” Von Neutegem and charged him with the first-degree murder of fifty-eight-year-old Mohamed-Aslim Zafis. A YouTube channel linked to Von Neutegem’s social media accounts featured videos in which “chants associated with the O9A ceremonies play as a black and white POV shot shows a nine-pointed star—a symbol of the O9A—adorning the monolith of what looks to be a homemade altar.”
It’s difficult to say exactly how serious one ought to take the threat of the O9A, as a report authored by the US National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security states that “a small subset of RMVEs (racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists) have been influenced by O9A” while acknowledging “We lack reliable reporting on the number of O9A adherents, the extent of the group’s international presence, and whether it has a defined leadership structure.” If knowing is half the battle, the advantage seems to be with the O9A. There simply isn’t enough information to conclude whether or not the O9A poses a significant threat to an individual or national security. Certainly, the events of January 6, 2021, give us cause for concern. That said, the aforementioned report also pointed out that
RMVE groups that associate with O9A are likely to experience internal conflict and loss of members because O9A only appeals to a small subset. … In addition, we asses that RMVE groups influenced by O9A’s violent extremist interpretation of Satanism face a heightened risk of being ostracized by others in the broader RMVE movement, who often view these beliefs as a sign of a group being infiltrated or ideologically impure.
Or, as Gavin Baddely succinctly put it to me, “The last thing most sincere right-wingers want is these wingnuts on their side, making them look crazy.” In short, while the O9A do exert some degree of influence on radicalizing extremists, they also tend to have a destabilizing influence on extremist groups.
While the aforementioned report from the US intelligence agencies brings up valid points, I would argue they get it wrong when they characterize O9A as a “violent extremist interpretation of Satanism” and define Satanism as “a religion with multiple variants, most of which are not violent extremist.” Satanism does not have variations. Often, a comparison is made between religious denominations or splinter groups (e.g., Catholics and Protestants, Shia and Sunni) and Satanic “types.” This classification scheme fails because it does not rigorously define what beliefs or practices are to be included or excluded as religious categories normally do. Also, this scheme obfuscates the fact that Satanism is codified by Anton LaVey as an atheistic religion, and therefore Satanists do not worship the Devil (“Theistic Satanism” is an oxymoron, and Theistic Satanists are simply morons).
Restricting the use of the word Satanism to refer only to Satanism-as-codified-by-Anton LaVey has some precedent. As the final report for the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, Satanism in America states “The public repeatedly uses the same criteria to differentiate between Christians and Christian-pretenders” (Carlson and O’Sullivan 1989). People might accuse the Church of Satan of being gatekeepers, but if conceptual clarity is not maintained, Satanists will be associated, albeit tangentially, with groups like the O9A. Who really wants that?
While the O9A’s influence on the alt-right may be small, it’s worth understanding how broad an ideological movement the alt-right is when news media tend to present only a narrow conception of whom the movement appeals. If attention becomes too narrowly focused on a certain profile of what it means to be a part of the alt-right, there is a chance some dangerously disturbed individuals who pose a legitimate threat won’t be taken seriously or even noticed at all before it’s too late.
References
Carlson, Shawn, and Gerry O’Sullivan. 1989. Satanism in America: How the Devil Got Much More Than His Due. El Cerrito, CA: Gaia Press.
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. 2003. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York, NY: New York University Press.
LaVey, Anton. 1972. The Satanic Rituals. New York, NY: Avon Press.