Traditional Satanism
This is a slight departure from my usual Buddhist ramblings. You know sometimes I wonder what a Buddhist is doing in the ONA. Actually I know why, it just looks odd if I were a different person looking in. This essay was inspired by an event yesterday which has nothing to do with the ONA. A nice elderly lady came over yesterday and shared her Jehovah’s Witness message with me. I invited her into the living room to have a seat and talk to me. Being the properly raised person I am, I treated the lady kindly and tried not to disrespect her in any overt way. But once I closed the door and securely had her in my living room, I spent 30 minutes interrogating the poor thing. It wasn’t even an argument of whose religion was better then the other. I told her from the very beginning that I was a Theravada Buddhist and that because I was, I cannot accept anything at face value. The Buddha even tells us to question what he teaches and that Dhamma must be observable, testable, and replicable for it to be Dhamma.
So after pointing those out I asked her to share her message with me. She did and I led our conversation into talks about science and archaeology, and such. How in such fields we empirically observe things, hypothesize, test and try, and come to a rational understanding of things, where that in the end, faith and belief are non-applicable. I interrogated her by asking her to give me what she knows about how her Jehovah’s Witness religion developed historically, to give me secular proof that Jesus or any body in his ancestral line existed, and for carbon dating of biblical scrolls etc to determine if such biblical books were written before or after so called prophecies. I also asked her to bring me back ingredients used in the parchments that made up the ink used in the book of Isaiah, as well as documents from a secular academic who shows in a research paper the dialect of Hebrew used and the state of development of the Hebrew used in such books. I then gave the poor thing a long lecture on how I cannot accept anything at face value when given to me outside of that thing’s proper time and contextual matrix. The elderly lady excused herself to me saying that she is only an old woman trying to spread the message of Jehovah’s paradise. But she was a sincere and sweet lady and told me that she would take my long list of questions and demands and return with research work to give to me.
Contextual Matrix
In certain conditions I get obsessively over analytical about things. For my own good. So when it comes to things like religions, philosophies, etc, I approach those things like a detective. For example with me and Buddhism, what I do is take all that people tell me about it and throw it in the trash or set it aside to compare notes later. Then I remove Buddhism out of the 21st centure, and as best as I can, stick it back into 500BC ancient India. Once I get that Buddhism into its Native Time and Contextual Matrix, then I spend my time researching on the political, sectarian, and social climate of that time, as well as the languages used, idiom, meanings of words back then, and frame of mind or worldview-model people back then were using. Once I collect all that information I start to build up a picture of how Buddhism may have been in that specific time and place to those people. Once I get a picture of what Buddhism looked back then, I start to move forward to come to my own understandings of Buddhism from that recreated point. The only time I ask anybody alive in the 21st century anything is when I am stuck on something and can’t figure things out on my own. Usually your Buddhist elder will respond to your questions with questions and tell you to go away and figure things out on your own anyways.
This is something I just do naturally, which the friends I have in life don’t seem to do. I try to explain to them that it is like being a paleontologist or archaeologist. You don’t remove artifacts completely disregarding the matrix such artifacts came from. You will not be able to figure out anything about the dinosaur you dug up if you are just staring at its bone. 90% of the data of its life, what it ate, how it lived, the climate it lived in is in the matrix – dirt – it was found in. It’s like being a detective at a crime scene. You’re not gunna know shit about anythings if you remove a gun from a scene and just study the gun in your office. You have to wholistically consider the entire crime scene as a whole – Samma in Pali/Buddhism – together, in order to piece together a realistic Buddhi/Understanding of what may have happened. This includes studying the character and psychology of your suspects. If you are a Buddhist, do a total background check on the Buddha. If you are a Jesus freak, check Jesus’s background, records, etc. Profile the hell out of them, racial profiling, sexual profiling, everything. That’s one thing which bugs me about Jesus. He wants you to think like he “understands” humanity, he tried to incarnate as a human in the flesh, and even dies for us so we can believe that he really does sympathizes with our human condition and like he knows what it’s like to be human. Yet the guy [Jesus] died a fucking virgin. He never had a girlfriend. Never been in love. Never had his heart broken. Never masturbated perhaps. Never been a father or a husband. Never seen his mother or father die of old age even. Isn’t all that the actual stuffness of being human? He’s a freaking 30 year old suicidal virgin who thinks he is god, and his mom doesn’t even really know who his real daddy is. That’s not a religion, that’s a Jerry Springer show. But that’s what I mean by profiling your prophets and gods. It amazes me how much time and effort [and money] the generic American public puts in to questioning presidential candidates, vet them, does all these background checks, but when it comes to gods and religious figures running their lives, they just let in any Nazarene-nutter, pedo-priests, kid-caressing-cardinals, and stuff.
Traditions and Culture
As I was saying: contextual matrix. So personally when I approach the ONA to gain an actual objective understanding of it, I treat the ONA as a crime scene. Most people approach the ONA out of context and time. I’m not here saying that seeing ONA in context and time will reveal some truth. But it may help us gain a different perspective of ONA. So I’ll analyze ONA here objectively, and I may hurt a few people’s feeling in ONA doing it. But I’ll keep in mind that we see what we want to see in things, so Robert Anton Wilson once said. Our Prime Suspect is DM allegedly also known as “Anton Long.” However the ONA was said by me or whoever to have come about, what we know is that first came DM, and then out of him came the ONA. So those are our two biggest clues. Our Prime Suspect DM leads us to the Native Time frame or era of any “crystallization” or influence that may have affected him consciously or unconsciously. We know DM was born in 1950. Which means that he was an impressionable and rebellious teen during the 1960′s. So it’s to the 60′s and 70′s when he was in his early 20′s that we must start looking for data. What does a rebellious teen boy in England get involved with or is exposed to in 1960 England if he wanted to be counter culture to a dying post-Victorian frigid zeigeist? Besides National-Socialism which we already know had a visible influence on him.
A man by the name of Gerald Gardner in the 1950′s in England came out with something he originally called “Wica,” or “The Witch Cult,” or “Witchcraft.” Later Gardner’s cult became known as “Traditional Wicca,” during the 1960′s. Then later on, this Gardnerian Traditional Wicca with the spin offs it spawned collectively became know “British Traditional Wicca.” So now we can compare the descriptor “Traditional Wicca,” with the descriptor “Traditional Satanism,” and ask ourselves if we see anything which may look similar. If we do then we go in deeper to dig for more data. I see a potential similarity. Knowing that British Traditional Wicca was risque in the 1960′s and appealing to the young counter culture generation, I’d have a closer look. So lets briefly see if we can find any parallels between Traditional Wicca and Traditional Satanism [ONA]. We should keep in mind that ONA first coined and used the term “Traditional Satanism” before it was usurped by theistic Satanists.
In Gardnerian and Alexandrian Traditional Wicca you have something called a Book of Shadows which contains the Tradition’s rites and ceremonies. In Traditional Satanism [ONA] you have something called the Black Book of Satan which contains all of ONA’s rites and ceremonies. The most important part about Traditional Wicca which makes one a legit Traditional Witch/Wiccan are a set of 3 initiatory degrees. In Traditional Satanism [ONA] you have a vital part of the Tradition which are the 7 initiatory degrees/grades called the Seven Fold Way. In Traditional Wicca you have a “Duodeistic” centered pantheon which are the Triple Goddess and Horned God. In Traditional Satanism you have the Dark Goddess Baphomet and the Dark God Satan. Gardner is the Grand Master of his Tradition. Alex Sander is Grand Master of his Alexandrian Traditional Wicca. “Anton Long” is the Grandmaster of his Tradition.
Those are the major parellels. There are minor parallels. Such as where in Traditional Wicca they usually – more so in contemporary eclectic Wicca – have a private body of magickal and esoteric teachings. Usually these magickal and esoteric teachings are similar to what you’d find in the Golden Dawn with its Kabbalah, mixed with eastern inspired tantra, meditation on the chakras, and so on. Traditional Satanism [ONA] similarly has its own corpus of magickal and esoteric practices expounded in Naos, except the stuff in Naos is unique in the sense that it’s not a word for word copy cat occult or some Jewish mysticism or some deluded Indic mysticism and pranayama. Another minor parallel is Traditional Wicca will use special alphabets or cipher scripts to write their things in. We see a similar concept in Naos with a couple or few special alphebets, and later we see the Dark Immortal Script develop. Another minor – yet key – similarity is that in Traditional Wicca each Tradition spawns what are called covens. Judging the fact that Gardner’s 3 initiatory degrees and their oaths are 80-90% the same as the initiation rituals of British Craft Freemasonry, I’d venture to say that a “coven” is based on the idea of a “lodge.” Like a lodge puts the culture of an OTO or Freemasonry into living practice, a Coven also puts the culture/Tradition of their Wicca into practice. We see the same basic concept in Traditional Satanism [ONA] where in the early days a “coven” or constituent cell of the Tradition was called a “Temple,” which today is most often referred to as a “Nexion.”
So based on those numerous parallels, I’d personally say that there was an influence that took place in the very early days of the ONA. But this should not in any way make the ONA look “bad.” To me personally, knowing that Traditional Wicca may have directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously inspired or influenced the ONA actually helps me gain a better grasp of what the term “Traditional Satanism” might mean. With the old skool Traditional Wicca the word “Traditional” is interchangeable with the word “Lineage,” “Custom,” and “Culture,” where we can say Gardnerian Traditional Wicca is Wicca according to the Gardnerian Tradition. This concept of Tradition referring to Initiatic Lineage, Custom, and Culture will make more sense if you are savvy with the Traditions and politics of Initiatic Orders such as the OTO, Golden Yawn, and Masonry. The key idea to keep in mind is “Initiatic,” meaning that you belong in a legitimate way to the Lineage, Custom of Rites, and Cultural Praxis, of the Tradition you were duly initiated into. That word “Traditional” is most often mistaken as meaning some sort of passing down from one generation to another from grandparent, to parent, to child. If there is a passing of the Tradition – aka corpus of customs and rites – from one generation to another it is from one generation of Initiates to a new set of Initiates. In this very context the word “Tradition” has the exact essence as the Pali-Sanskrit word “Sasana” which is used most often only to describe Theravada Buddhism and Shaivism. A Sasana being a body of instructions, observances, rites, rituals, ceremonies, customs, and culture of praxis or cultivation of practice.
So for example we have with the OTO several actual rival bodies spawned from the original Academia Masonica of Karl Kellner, which was later renamed Ordo Templi Orientis under Reuss. During which time all of its degrees were word for word Masonic degrees. When after Crowley took over the OTO, in an attempt to gain favour from the regular United Grand Lodge of England as an “regular” Masonic rite, Crowley removed the first degrees of Masonry of the OTO and constructed his own to substitute them. The ass kissing didn’t work since Crowley’s entire Masonic credentials were not of Mainstream Tradition. Here meaning that the United Grand Lodge of England has a Tradition of their own rites, ceremonies, and rituals, rules, and regulations, and all lodges in their jurisdiction which conforms to such established Traditions are deemed as “regular” or “recognized” lodges. Whereas Mr. Crowley was initiated in a lodge not recognized by the Mainstream Grand Lodges and he got his 33rd degree in an unknown lodge somewhere in Mexico. Meaning that because Crowley was not Initiated in a lodge of the United Grand Lodge of England “Tradition” that he thus did not belong to such Tradition of established Masonry. After Crowley’s death a power battle arose and from that struggle was born the rival OTO bodies of today. So that now you have distinct established OTO Traditions, where that if you get initiated into the SOTO you are not tied to the Typhonian OTO or any other OTO but the one you were initiated into. In this regard that old day Traditional Wicca worked in the same way. If you were initiated by a coven of Alexandrian Traditional Witches you really have no ties to Blue Star Wicca since that species of Tradition of Wicca has their own unique set of rites, ceremonies, rituals, practices, and pantheons. You belong to the “Tradition” you were initiated into. And that word “Tradition” or “Traditional” tries to mean a specific established body of customs, observances, rites, ceremonies, rituals, practices, beliefs, and pantheon, as well as lineage, and not something necessarily “passed down by tradition.” Lineage here simply meaning that if you were Initiated into Gardnerian Wicca, you are connected thru your initiator, to their initiator, to their initiator back to Gardner, which linearly constitutes a “Lineage,” traced back to the originator of such established Tradition.
Traditional Satanism
And so, once we get a grasp of the “politics” and structuring or organization of such groups and understand that the words “Tradition” and “Traditional” points to a group of organized people’s peculiar customs, observances, rites, ceremonies, rituals, beliefs, pantheon, culture of practice, etc, we can thus better understand – or at least gain a different understanding of – what the term “Traditional Satanism” may mean in context and time to the period and era the ONA coalesced into a codified institution.
Traditional Satanism would thus simply mean a school or species or vehicle of Satanism according to a certain Tradition: customs, observances, rites, ceremonies, rituals, beliefs, pantheon, culture of practice, and lineage. So in Traditional Satanism [ONA] you have books like the Black Book of Satan & Naos which teaches the rites, ceremonies, initiatic degrees, magckal and esoteric cultural practices and observances of such Tradition. You have a specifically established pantheon expressed primarily as the Dark Goddess Baphomet and the Dark God Satan, plus the several other Dark Gods. Then of course you have the established system of initiation of such Tradition which would be the Seven Fold Sinister Way. Here I should try to point out that the word “Sinister” is the Latin for “Left” and most often when used by ONA means “Of The Left Hand” and not simply ‘evil’ and wicked as it is generally assumed to mean. “Sinister Way” and “Left Hand Path/Way” should be fungible, if the word is understood correctly. It’s just easier to say “Sinister Praxis,” or “Sinister Nature” as opposed to “Left Handish Practice,” or “Left Hand Pathish Nature.” Traditional Satanism also ends up meaning the set of philosophical teachings, beliefs, and paradigm specific to such Tradition. Then lastly Traditional Satanism [ONA] has its “Lineage” which is traced back to the originator or founder of the actual Tradition in question, “Anton Long” being the founder or originator or “presencer” of the Tradition.
When I break things down in this way to myself, it is easier for me to understand ONA as it was back then, as it still should be today, and as it should continue to be in future. As I said, in my own culture we have a word which has the same meaning as “Tradition” in this context which is Sasana. Our Sasana Preahput is not in any way the same thing as the Buddhism which exists up in the North in China, Tibet, and Japan. Our word “Sasana” points to a specific established Tradition or culture, customs, sangas, teachings, beliefs, rites, worldviews, folk-culture, unique and different from Mahayana Buddhism. The word “Sasana” as a borrowed Pali word goes further and has an even more specific meaning because the “root” word “Sas” means a Race, Breed, or People in Khmer. Or more accurately the word “Sas” is an indigenous Khmer word, which just so happens to have an audible twin in the word “Sasana,” so after many centuries of “folk etymology” the borrowed Pali Sasana comes to gain the extra meaning in Khmer as a Tradition specific to a Race or People. But Sasana does not mean “Religion.” For example when I eat with a fork at the dinner table and my elders are eating with spoons or chopstickes, they talk to themselves and say: “That grand daughter has gone into the Sasana of the White People, she eats with a fork like them.” In this case, eating with a fork is not a religion or philosophy or ideology White People believe in. It is a Traditional Practice, or custom, or cultivated [culture] observance or shared or established behaviour peculiar to a group of people. But in this case the hybrid term “Sasana Satanism” ends up having no meaning, because then the question arises: Sasana of Satanism according to what people? In our case the answer would be: according to the ONA. So we’d have to call it: Sasana Satanism poohg ONA, which in English would be the Tradition of Satanism of the ONA people. Like we say: Sasana Preahput Khmer [Buddha Tradition according to the Khmer], or Sasana Phraputa Thai [Buddha Tradition according to the Thai], Sasana Preahput poohg Jen [Buddhism according to the Chinese people].
If you understand this much, then each ONA person will understand that there is no ONA without the Traditional Satanism, or without the established Tradition, lineage, customs, ceremonies, culture, observances, etc peculiar to the ONA as it was established by a founder or the founder(s) when ONA was established. Traditional does not necessarily suggest that such established customs and traditions have been past down AS IS from some ancient past of ancient Traditional Satanist. Meaning that it’s not likely that ONA as we know it since 1972 existed with a BBS, Naos, 7FW, etc, since ancient times immemorial. Anton Long even goes through the trouble of stating quite the opposite, where he states that he took the old Aural Tradition and Added new elements to it. There is thus a specific date the Tradition was established. And to get specific there are criteria for what constitutes a “Tradition.” For instance in Traditional Wicca a practice is only “Tradition” if it has been initiated down thru 3 generations of adherents, not necessarily meaning grandparent, parent, and offspring. In my own culture a “Tradition” is only a Tradition if and when you ask a person: “Hey who started this cultural practice anyways?” And everybody around how shrugs their shoulders and says: “I don’t know. The old people before us.” Or if your grandmother – who is already old – answers: “My grandfather started it, or one of the old people started it when I was a child,” that means its official Tradition, since if your granny is old, the people she refers to as “old people” are long dead. Another thing which makes something a “Tradition” especially inside the limits of a family/clan is if say someone started a family reunion on your grandmother’s birthday – which is what my family does – and it is observed several times effortlessly by every one of your relatives and does not stop being observed, it is officially part of our Sasana as a family. It doesn’t matter who started it and why. As long as everybody just observes it together effortlessly.
Which means that my own cultural understanding of the word Sasana or Tradition has its implications in the ONA since I identfy myself as being an ONA person. The implication is that rites and ceremonial observanced such as the Self Immolation Rite and other stuff created by Beesty Boy [and other new stuff in future], because of the years that have past and the continued observance of them by those who affiliate with the ONA’s Traditional Satanism, is to me a rightful living part of the ONA. It is how a Culture builds onto itself. Drinking tea was not always a practice observed by English people. That cultural meme was introduced by somebody – whoever, it doesn’t matter – which was perhaps infected from China, and the English/British as a whole people just kept on doing the tea sipping thing at “tea time,” whenever that is. I’m Asian-American so I don’t actually know when British Tea time is. Tea time for those of us of spawn of Chinese people means in the morning at breakfast with noodle soup, after lunch, in the evening, on cold days, and whenever other people are over. As long as everybody continues to effortlessly observe it over time, it is a Tradition observed by a people plain and simple. Because what does the word Culture mean? A Culture is essentially something which you and/or others do/CULTIVATE over and over again. That is the most simplest definition of a Culture which actually works with most living cultures.
Tradition in Buddhism [Theravada] is important, at least per the Tipitaka cannons. There is a part of the Tipitaka where a group of people had so many leaders in their town who established all sorts of traditional observances that they lost their native traditions. So they went to the Buddha to tell him of their dukkha: the troublesome problem of not having a native tradition like other people. The Buddha tells them to gather everyone in their town together and collectively come to an agreement on which practices and observances everyone likes and make those as their people’s tradition to pass down. In another instance the Buddha was teaching his monks key words and the meaning of each key word. One of those key words meant “Impression From Outside.” And the Buddha says: “Bhikkhus! [Beggars! Vagabonds!] what is the meaning of Impression From Outside? It means when a people are ignorant and have no traditions of their own. Being so ignorant with no traditional observances of their own Bhikkhus, such people are open to the influence of outsiders influencing them with their foreign traditions and customs by impressing such on the ignorant people.” That Dhamma is extrapolated in various ways to sometimes mean or suggest that if you are Buddhist and in the business of controlling your own Mind, Emotions, and Life, then not having a sure foundation such as a Tradition, you make yourself open to being controlled by others, which in turn leads to dukkha. Buddha in a different place states that Dhamma must be observable, testable, and replicable for it to be real Dhamma. So all we have to do is observe the Black People in America as an example to prove and test that Dhamma. Black People had their entire way of life taken away from them. They even lost their ancestral name. They went by the White man’s name, believed in the white man’s gods, saw the world with the white man’s paradigm which placed them in an unlucky servile position socially, etc. So we ask ourselves: having lost their Traditions as a people and having been forced to adopt the foreign traditions of another culture/people, were these Black people Free socially? No. Were they Free to believe their own beliefs? No. Were they Free to be their own people? No. Where they Happy? No. Did the white man’s ways and traditions and gods make the Black People Free, sovereign, autonomous, self-determined? No. Does the white man love and respect the Black people more because they have adopted the white man’s traditions? No, they are still disliked. Are they “Free” and happy today after 300 something years?
Even if we say they are free and happy in America, that freedom is superficial. Because when the Black man goes to the white man’s church to worship Jesus, you are bound to follow those rules of that religion which has nothing to do with Africa or the ancient and ancestral Tradition of Africa. The minute you do something Their religion, Their social rules, Their ideologies are against, you are shunned and treated like a criminal or evil doer. Whereas for me I’ll burn incense to a statue of a Buddha like my people’s Tradition has it. I don’t give a shit of some group of White people or Mexican Catholics or fucking Somali Muslim called me an evil pagan idolator. Fuck you and you whole Hubris breed too. Take your asses back to church and your mosque and mind your own fucking business. The only White people I like and respect are mostly the Aryan kind who have it in their blood and breed to be proud of their own people, be Traditionalists to their own ancient ancestral traditions, and conservatively pass that pride and culture down to their well bred children. I don’t care if you hate me because I’m not “Aryan,” cuz we’re still kinfolk Traditionalists, still on the same level of mind and heart where we each still have a love and pride for our folk and culture. If we can be friends that’s cool, if not than we’ll stay out of each others way. If we can be friends and retain and maintain our unique differences that would be awesomer. But I have no ounce of respect for any white American punk who is ignorant of his own roots. You know the type. You ask them where they come from and they say Alabama, fucking Ohio, California. That’s not what I mean dummy. I mean your roots, your seed your grandparents gave you, your culture your people gave you, your blood, your roots as a white person, the ancient tradition your ancient ancestors gave you, where the fuck did that come from, where has your blood been for the past 1000 years? What’s really funny to me is when one of these White Hubris American Mundanes [WHAM as opposed to WASPs] come up to me and try to sell me their Mormon shit or Jehovah’s Witness shit. Like I’m gunna fucking give up 1000 years of my own people’s ancestral traditions, for a lunatic religion founded merely in the 1800′s by a couple nutcase white devils. So I can do what exactly? How do they “practice” their religion? You sit your ass in a church and listen to some hubris white devil yap for an hour about a Jew. Do I look like a Jew? Do I look I want to worship a Jew? I got my own pantheon of Chinese gods to worship, shit. And they act like their mere 200 year old Joseph Smith shit is “better” than all other people’s Tradition. Whatever skin color you are, be proud of your folk and blood, Mind your culture and ancestry, and do your children right and proper by somehow passing some sort of stable ground, roots, and identity for them.
You think it’s just only one person when you are liberal and let your kids drift away from your roots. But there are 300 million people in America, and of those 300 million how many other parents and grandparents are mindless and liberal like you. Those numbers add up and aeonically devastates you as coherent people. Like you pick a hypothetical race for example. In the first generation you have the young people from this race practice a little Chinese Kung Fu, some listen to rap and act Black. Next generation more of the new young people do the same and instead of being rooted in their own Traditions and Culture they drift off like loose canon balls rolling a round aimlessly on the deck of a ship. As each generation passes and more young people in this race goes into some other people’s Traditions, in Time where will your people be? And you think seriously about, if you have the brain cells to think aeonically as a WHAM, you are being surrounded by other peoples that stay true to their own folk culture, and the Black People you messed up are slowly developing their own folk culture. So while you WHAMs drift further apart incoherently, every other people around you maintains their status, community, families, extended families, traditions, and culture. Divide & Conquer. Your people started it and were good at it. There was a time when you divided ethnic races and made them into incoherent groups fighting each other to control them. Now its payback time, and the best part is, YOU yourselves are Dividing your own people into cultureless individualized units. Half of you don’t even have a real family anymore with two parents. I fear that as a hubris and arrogant breed that you WHAMs are, you are too stupid to wake up and change your ways. If you are the few to wake up and know something is wrong: DIG. Start digging deep in your blood and ancestry and find your roots and dormant Tradition your people left for you and live them once again. Make a Tradition up if you have to, just stabilize yourself with a Tradition for your progeny’s sake, not yours. Reichsfolk. Not many in or out of ONA speak of Reichsfolk now, but the simple lessons it teaches keeps your Blood and Roots flowing deep over Time. /Rant.
So this Traditional Satanism which is the ONA and a part of the ONA is a species or Tradition of Satanism. If we don’t try to see that Traditional Satanism grow into being inside its original native time and context, you can’t fully grasp the ONA and will be prone to assumptions, speculations, and misunderstandings of what may have been intended. The ONA proper first started off with that Traditional Satanism soil. Everything else, such as the philosophical writings “Anton Long” and others have written, grew out of that fertile Tradition, within the matrix of that soil. You have to try to study what the ONA is today within that soil in a wholistic way. As you would study a flowing river. Not in bits and pieces, but in consideration of the whole river, from the mountain spring it springs from, to the rapids and gorges in the middle, all of the twists and turns, and ending at the great delta where it flows into the ocean. To fully understand ONA you have to consider ONA of 1970, consider its decades long slow twistings and turnings, and consider what it is today, as one Flowing. As one Tradition moving and growing slowly. But that Flowing begins at the spring of Traditional Satanism. Which in itself is something to be proud of if you recall your history. The ONA’s Traditional Satanism was one of the first three “institutionalized” or codified schools of Satanism that started this whole Satanism thing back in the 60′s-70. CoS came out in 1966. ONA cropped up in England in 1972ish. ToS was miraculously reborn when Set woke up from a 3000 year sleep and gave birth to the Universe in 1975. If I were Set I would have picked an Egyptian in my “home country” to be my prophet of a new aeon, rather than a Grandpa Munster of America; but that’s just me, maybe Set has a sense of humour? But ONA is one of three that started this whole Satanism thing off in the West. It’s Tradition is still here, still influencing contemporary Satanists’ understandings of their Satanism. Sans the competitive BS, Satanism as a single memeplex is a great thing with a lot of potential. You guys as Satanists have a good thing going, if we consider Satanism all together as one newly emerged system in the West. Sans the rivalry BS, when each Satanist adds their own thoughts and understandings to the common body of knowledge, it in turn ripples and helps evolve all of Satanism as a single pool of ideas. But we can’t get all egalitarian and liberal with this shit or we’ll ruin a good thing. Not every meme is equal, some will make this growing and very young pool of Satanism sick and weak. A little capitalistic competition is good for the gene pool as it breeds and encourages innovation and creativity.
There is an old Greek philosophical concept mostly translated into English as “Justice,” which is something worth considering and applying if as Satanists “we” all wish to help it move forwards into the future, for the next generation. Justice according to some of the olden schools of thought is the proper balance between One’s own self interests, and the Interests/needs of a collective/other. Justice is the balancing line between one’s own duty to Self, and Duty to Other [wife, husband, children, family, clan, kin, tribe]. Justice is the the Balance between One’s own needs and the needs of Other. Too much to one side or the other causes an imbalance. And being in a causal system, such imbalance causes chain reactions of fruit. Too much leaning towards Self Interest/Need/Duty destroys Community and Family. Which in turn disrupts the sensitive clockwork and causes it to be dysfunctional. What is dysfunctional stops working, and what stops working dies in Time. Too much leaning to the other side vanquishes the Individual as a slave to a mindless collective. There is a balance or Equilibrium where the Self and Other Naturally comes to a Balance, which was once called Justice. Where there must be a Balance between the collective Interest of those that “govern” and the Interests or Needs of those that are “governed.” That was Justice. Where there is a Balance between the needs of a corporation and the needs of its market. That Balance is Justice. Where there is the Balance between the Needs and Interests of the individual Satanist and of Satanism as a whole-Thing. That is Justice and Equilibrium. A little competition and self interest in Satanism is healthy. But without that Justice, either way we lean, the clockwork stops. If this ancient notion of Justice is a living phenomenon in Nature, then it must be observable, testable, and replicable. Thus, nobody should have to take my word for it. All I’ll say is that a Satanism with only one school of thought and one paradigm will be like a USSR with only one party making all the products. Shit’s gunna be cheap. In this regard, I will keep ONA going as long as I can, even if I am the last ONA person alive. There is plenty of room in Satanism as a whole-Thing for the atheist, theist, materialist, spiritualist, or whatever. There are retards and geniuses in all camps. We need all the genies and thinkers, even if they don’t like each other or get along. The retards, they can go, well actually, they should stay to support the infrastructure. Just like there is room in Life or the Cosmos for every perspective and angle of understanding. It’s all of it added up that gives us the clearest picture of things. Satanism as a whole-Thing limits itself, if it struggles to only have one “right” and one “acceptable” perspective and weltanschauung.
Narcissistic Paradigm
I was thinking of the mentality some people have for things such as weltanschauung, world-views, politics, religions, philosophies, etc, and I noticed something which lacked a word but I gave it a term to refer to it. Thinking about this mentality caused me to remember a weird Sufi story I once read a long time ago. The Sufi story I read – as I later found out – is a twist or slant of a well known Greek myth, used as an esoteric jape with Mainstream Islam. This esoteric jape runs along the same vein as the Sufi saying that goes something like: “The only way to Know Allah is by riding the dragon’s tail.” Meaning here that it is from being familiar with Iblis or Shaitan and his ways that you truly come to know Allah. So we read in the Holy Qur’an that when after Allah had made Adam, he called the angels of heaven down to the earth to behold Adam and commanded all of the angels to kneel and worship Adam. All did as they were commanded except Iblis who stood in defiance. The Qur’an does not go any further into the details as to why Iblis did not worship Adam, but the Sufis continues that story saying that Allah demanded Iblis why he did not worship Adam, and Iblis answered Allah: “Because I am better than him. Because I am made of the Flame of Heaven, and he [Adam] is made from the soil of the ground.” Allah now angry ordered Iblis to do as the other angels and kneel before Adam to worship him. Iblis refused to do so. And so Allah threatens to send Iblis into the lake of fire to punish him if he did not worship Adam. Iblis still refused and said he’d rather burn in hell than worship a creature made of the lowly earth. So then Allah one last time threatens Iblis with the punishment of eternally being outside of His Divine presence for ever and ever. When Iblis heard this, he rushed to Allah’s feet and said to Allah: “La ilaha illallah; There is no God but God, and only he is worthy of worship.” After hearing this Allah turns to the angels that fell and worshiped Adam and cursed them to forever serve Mankind. But to Iblis, who genuinely loved Allah, that he would defy Allah’s word to be True to his Love, Allah gave him the Earth to rule. This little Sufi story has the esoteric teaching that God made a facsimile of his own divine self out of something worthless [dirt] as a test to see if his angels loved Him of their own free will, or because out of fear of being punished. Only Iblis refused to serve and fall before that false idol Adam. In other words, in life we either Submit [Islam] to the Divine [numinous], or to man made idols. What or whom do you serve in life? The Natural, or the Artificial? The esoteric jape hidden in this Sufi story is that mainstream Muslims today worship and serve Adam, or the teachings and words of men, and not the Divine Essence of Allah.
So the other Sufi story I remembered is like the backstory to the one I just told, which took place just before the creation of Adam. The story goes that one day Allah having found the earth walked around it and found the dark water of the earth. He looked into it and for the first time in eternity saw Himself in the dark water. Seeing a reflection of himself he fell in love with it and reached out to try and Behold it. But could not because his fingers went thru the image disturbing the reflection with ripples. Out of a deep desire to Behold that image God took mud and formed from that mud Adam and loved Adam above all other creation. The hidden esoteric jape is directed at mainstream superficial Islam’s God and Muslims. It is saying that their God is essentially narcissistic and thus cannot be the Divine Artist of the Cosmos. It also is japing the mainstream Muslims in saying that they are so captivated by their own facsimile of God that they reject the Divinity in all other things of Creation. Or, as the saying goes in English: “Like Father, like son.”
I notice this same mentality in people. It’s not narcissism as the word is generally used. I’ll try and explain what I mean. For example you have these materialist who can’t get themselves to See the world any other way beyond their material world model. And so like this delusional God, these materialist fashion for themselves a memeplex or weltanschauung that is merely a reflection of themselves: materialistic. Or you see them being drawn, engrossed, enchanted, captivated, only by idea that are reflections of themselves: materialistic. You see them being oblivious and out right rejecting and denying other possible models of reality. You see the same engrossment of/for ego/self with theists and spiritualists who do the opposite. They are in love with ideas and world views only which are reflections of themselves. They become enraptured and engrossed in ideas where only the spiritual is real, only “our god” is real, only the god we can picture is real, everything else is fake. You see this in politics. Conservatives are drawn only to that which is merely and simplistically a reflection of their inner self. Libertines [modern usage] are drawn to and attached to only what ideologies are merely and simplistically reflections of their inner egos. And the delusional aspect of this is that they are oblivious to and deny or reject everything that is not a personification of their egos. Libertine in the olden days around the 1700′s or so meant a person or breed of people without culture or proper upbringing.
Just like their symbolical narcissistic God, you see these people also acting out their narcissism when they make things, like ideologies. They make their cults and religions in a self-perspective narcissistic “utopian” manner. When I say “utopian” I simply mean the artificial desire to create a system of some type which is “perfectly” a reflection of their egos. Like when you see a group of peasants get together and watch them create a political memeplex, you see them enter that narcissistic utopian mentality where the Bourgeois who hurt their egos are evil and peasants should rule, where religion that was used to control them is bad, etc. You take a group of Jesus nutters and watch them create their sectarian memeplexes. They relocate themselves to a paradise, name it Jonestown, get all enraptured in only stuff which are a reflection of their own ego-perspective of reality. And the same goes unfortunately with mainstream materialist science. Where you see these very intelligent scientists get lost in the same delusional game of seeing reality only insofar as reality is a reflection of their ego/self, and every other theory is fake or not worth considering. And of course Buddhists and Satanists do this too. Buddhist create for themselves a narcissistic utopian world model based on their simple single ego-perspective. And Satanist will do the same with their Satanism. Their Satanism has to be a utopian reflection of their ego-perspective and narcissism. You can almost hear them say to themselves in their heads: “I can’t fucking wrap my head around anything else beyond my self and my puny grasp of reality, so any religion or type of Satanism that is beyond that is fake.” The funny part is we tell ourselves that we are “thinking outside” a box, when most of us never left that box. Because that box is the self and the walls of the box are the person’s limited grasp of things or his own amorousness for their own beauty. So the question is: Can there be growth, if we remain within the confined limits of our ego-perspectives of life and reality? Can a Self grow, evolve, or truly gain an understanding of things, if all it sees is it Self?
Everything to such narcissistic people has to be a perfect utopian reflection of their egos. A materialist will reject something like Buddhism because the Buddhism has elements such as “reincarnation,” karma, spirits, etc which are not paradigmatic elements in their ego-based world-model. Those things are not a reflection of their self, so they reject it. It becomes so predictable that you can literally read a person’s inner topography just by reviewing their beliefs or analyzing what memplexes they are drawn to and which memeplexes they reject and deny. That’s how simplistic mundanes have become. The complexities and diversity of Life are non-existent to these people. What is real – what can only be reality – must be a personification of their self/ego.
Beyond Ego
Such people never emotionally or intuitively realize that Life/Reality is so big, it is beyond our puny ego-based paradigms. Life is so big it is uncomfortable. You can be a hardcore materialist and if you study reality too deep you’ll find quantum physics where reality is not as material as you wish it to be. You can be a hardcore moralist and if you venture too far outside your ego, you will observe that life and Nature is oblivious to morals. You can be a hardcore Darwinist and if you look too far outside your narcissistic utopian personification of self, you’ll see that ecosystems are called systems for an actual reason. You’ll see that nature does not compete with itself, but is symbiotic and co-evolutionary, which is scary and blasphemous to a Darwinist who is conditioned inside an urban matrix to see life as a “survival of the fittest” game. Things like religions – cyberreligions – philosophies, and ideologies, have today become mere vanity mirrors and security blankets to protect people from an uncomfortable reality. A reality that is much bigger than us, much more beyond our graspings and assumptions and speculations of it.
If you haven’t picked up already, what I am trying to say and what the esoteric value of that second story is that there can be no true growth or inner development when a person is trapped inside the limits of his/her own ego. I should quickly define how I’m using the word ego and self. I mean to say the conscious mind and what it thinks it knows or what it believes in. And so religions, philosophies, and ideologies today are are not a means to self-development, but merely a means to perpetuate our already existent ego-based world-models. If you really think about it and we say a materialist will be inside a materialist belief system for 50 years, during those 50 years will that materialist ever be anything different outside what that materialist paradigm allots? If Life/Reality behaved in such a remarkably simplistic manner, where reality is merely a comforting reflection of what we can grasp, what we wish to believe is true, would anything even be here? You know how many Muslims have been born and raised inside an Islamic paradigm for the past thousand years who have not ever thought outside or developed beyond what their paradigm has allotted for them? There is even a word to explain this phenomenon: Orthodoxy. And tellingly, there is even a word to describe the act of crossing that line of orthodoxy: Transgression. How many theists have ever Transgressed their theistic worldview into uncharted territory? How many materialists have ever Transgressed their materialistic paradigm for uncharted territory? The most powerful limits are those that we ourselves set for our own selves, because of our life long conditioning. It’s like domesticated elephants in Thailand. You take a baby elephant and tie its feet with chains so it grows up conditioned mentally and emotionally to Believe that it can’t break that chain, and when it grows up all you have to do is tie a thin rope to its feet and it will not even try to break the rope. Because it is trapped in the conditioned Belief that it cannot break free. You have people who condition themselves – hypnotize themselves – into being “trancefixed” inside the limits of their own narcissistic paradigm, and these same people believe they are free thinking, or free people. You give these same people anything that is not a reflection of their egos and they will say: “Oh your ideology is retarded. It looks nothing like me. Those aren’t my opinions. I disagree with anything not a reflection of my opinions.”
I’m bringing this Narcissistic Paradigm thing up because a lot of Satanists – and more nonsatanists – will not and do not like ONA because it is not a reflection or personification of their egos. It is not a comfy and cozy box. It’s got weird chants, a pantheon of unproven entities, it looks nothing like the average mundane ego, it’s just big and bloated and ugly to them. That ain’t shit though. You wanna know bloated, go read the Pali Canons. 40 volumes, 25000 pages of 2500 years of gibberish and nonsense. Nothing makes any sense. We’re just good at faking sense. Nobody knows what the hell Buddha was tripping on when he said: Anatta. Even more bloated than that is the Universe. It’s so big the universe doesn’t even fit into a book. The greatest minds like Hawking have pondered on it their whole lives and all they produce are black holes. We don’t know if it is finite or infinite, if it’s flat, round or saddle shaped, if it’s eternally expanding or if entropy will force all things back to Chaos [void, absolute stillness/inertia].
But the beauty about Life or the universe is that it is big, and in trying to understand ever nook and cranny of Life, we actually grow in our understandings of reality and ourselves as a part of Life or the Cosmos. In essence it is like we grow into Life, in the same way we grow into our hand-me-down our older siblings and cousins passes onto us. They are uncomfortable in the beginning, but the extra room allows us to grow to fill them in.
Most of Buddhism doesn’t even make sense to me, but I don’t bitch about it and look for something comfy to fit my ego. Many things about ONA and its Traditional Satanism hardly make any complete sense to me. I still don’t know what an acausal is. But I let things be and slowly work my way to filling in the nooks and crannies. Which takes time. So the whole point to this in regard to ONA is don’t be so self absorbed where you reject things left and right because your religion, or philosophy, or whatever does not fit you perfect like a glove. That perfect fit is not something you really want long term wise. Have you ever heard of Chinese Feet Binding? Back in the old days men use to think girls with tiny feet were beautiful so girls feet were tightly bounded with silk or cloth from a small age. So that as they grew older, the binding kept their feet from growing their proper size. It was actually disfiguring and rendered them crippled and unable to walk. Don’t Spellbind your own self with your own words and beliefs. Let Traditional Satanism and the rest of the ONA be big. If we disagree with certain things in ONA fine, but just leave it and instead nurture it so it can grow bigger in time. The more room in ONA, the more space we have to grow in perspective and understanding.
[Download a PDF of major ONA MSS on: TraditionalSatanism. The PDF is 1692 pages and 71 Megz.]
Chloe 352
Order of Nine Angles
123 yfayen
