Why Neo-Nazis Are Obsessed With the Occult
It’s a religion of edgelords who’ve cliff-dived over the edge into madness.
The chief tenet of the Order of the Nine Angles, though, is chaos. It’s a religion of edgelords who’ve cliff-dived over the edge into madness. The creation of chaos—ideally through violence, particularly murder and rape—is a form of magic, which, if enacted often enough and brutally enough, will destabilize a moral order dominated by “Magian” (Jewish) and “Nazarene” (Christian) morality. The ultimate goal of the Order is a climactic race war, which will usher in a new “Aeon,” or age—in essence, a Thousand-Year Reich. With enough chaos magic unleashed on the world through acts of violence—the more spectacular the better, like Casap’s would-be assassination of Trump—the “Dark Imperium” led by evil wizards will commence.
“According to the ONA, Judeo-Christian morals, such as ‘Don’t rape and murder people,’ and ‘racial equality, human rights’—those are part of a worldwide illusion,” Barrett Gay, a threat-analysis researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told me in an interview. “Part of becoming self-actualized and pursuing the eternal Imperium is to act out the taboos of that system, and by doing so you take away its power. They practice a more mystical form of accelerationism: They believe they can destabilize the entire moral fabric of our civilization through mystically boosted, but also very real, murder and rape.” They also, Gay added, “get into some weirder stuff, like an Aryan empire in space.”
The movement made the transcontinental jump from the U.K. to the United States by the mid-1990s, but took off in the early 2000s. One early and prominent American branch got the cheesily murderous name the Tempel ov Blood. The cult spread among neo-Nazis on the now-defunct white supremacist forum Iron March; according to Gay, until quite recently, information on the Order was hard to come by unless you already knew what you were looking for, deep in the fever swamps of Telegram. It isn’t, in and of itself, a path to radicalization: It’s a method of making murderers out of those already inclined toward white supremacist ideals; an instrument of self-justification and self-aggrandizement. It isn’t especially innovative, either: The Ku Klux Klan wore robes and called themselves wizards too.