“A BALEFUL LIFE”

Order of Nine Angles

A Baleful Life

How would you sum up your life?

As a practical esoteric quest – an inner alchemy – combined with Presencing The Dark in practical ways. My nature has always been to prefer direct, personal, experience to theoretical study, to be curious and defiant, and to use the faculty of conscious Thought, the faculty of Reflexion, to try and understand myself, other human beings, and life in general.

I have always felt – since a quite early age – that human beings have great potential and can and should consciously change themselves. Given my baleful nature, I was never satisfied with the answers of others, and had to find things out for myself, often the hard way.

Your life certainly has been full of variety and a certain mystery. Is their a hidden pattern behind all this variety?

Yes, and that is my following of a certain esoteric Way, what is traditionally termed The Seven Fold Sinister Way, from Initiate, to Internal Adept, to Master, and beyond. A progression of inner change due to outer experiences, both esoteric and exoteric. With these experiences including such esoteric techniques as Insight Rôles, and practical sorcery.

In essence, I have, for over forty years, been a Sorcerer of The Left Hand Path: someone who has employed both Internal and Aeonic Sorcery (Magick) to achieve certain goals and as a means to Presence The Dark, both within myself and exterior to myself.

Thus, there is nothing really mysterious about me – I have simply been someone dedicated to living a certain esoteric Way of Life. Someone who has made quite a few mistakes along the way – often due to stubbornness or an unbalanced arrogance – but who has been able to be honest with themselves, admit their mistakes, learn from them, and move on.

Turning now to the Order of Nine Angles, it certainly seems to have changed over the past few years. Any comment?

The ONA is now a new type of living-being, a new type of acausal sinister entity manifesting in the causal, and thus one that affects, and which can affect, human beings, in a variety of ways, with many of these ways being new.

It is not that we give the ONA life, as if it were a kind of anthropomorphic, separate, demonic or vampiric entity that “lives off” or feeds off us, but rather that, collectively, we are this new type of sinister life; we are a new nexion, accessing and presencing acausal energies, and which energies can change us, in an internal alchemical way, and also be directed, by us, to provoke causal changes, or which energies we may shape into some-Thing partly causal (a causal form; an archetype and so on) with this also partly acausal some-Thing we have conjured into causal existence then causing, bringing, Chaos, and change to others, or being disruptive of existing causal forms, and so on.

Thus, the ONA is now a Kollective – a nexus of certain human beings who share the same ethos, who possess the same baleful spirit, who possess within themselves the essence of the sinister – and this Kollective, by its very nature, is free from Old Aeon restrictions, old causal forms.

Which is why there is no Old Aeon type hierarchy in the ONA. No restricting formal authority. No one individual leading it, or claiming to run it. No one “authorized” to speak or write on its behalf (not even me); no “titles” awarded by someone to someone else. Not even any Old Aeon (and mundane) type “membership”. It – we – have broken the barriers of the past; we are not mundanes and do not imitate the ways of mundanes, and are now entering a new phase of human life where there are quite different ways of living, of doing things, to the ones we have previously known.

Expressed in a simple but somewhat inexact similitude, the ONA has now become the young, sinister, capricious daughter, of the founder of the ONA, who has grown up, left home and is now living her own life. No doubt she will make some mistakes, but she has the intelligence, the character, the arête, the ability, to learn from these mistakes, from her experience, and so will move on, and evolve, and form her own family.

Would you say that something like the Complete Guide to the Sinister Way, the traditional approach, is still relevant?

Yes, certainly, for many people need a map, some guidebook, drawn or produced by those who have gone that way before them. As mentioned in several ONA texts, the traditional Seven Fold Sinister Way, with its Grades, its training techniques, its Insight Rôles, its physical tests, is a guide, a map, produced by those who have already travelled along the Sinister Way and reached that strange, wyrdful, destination that lies beyond the Abyss.

While such a map, such a guidebook, is not essential, not strictly necessary, it can be exceedingly useful in shortening the time-scale of those who subsequently travel the same route, or who seek the same destination by a different route.

My own life is one example of someone travelling without a good map, without a guidebook; an example of someone who pushed on, into (for him) uncharted territory, and who after many trials and tribulations, after over forty years of travelling and exploring, finally reached the place he set out to find.

Thus, in one sense, the ONA is the map, the guidebook, I produced as a result of my travels, my exploration

Yet, the ONA has now evolved to become much more than that – much more than simply some guide, some map, I produced, for others. The ONA has become far more than one individual named Anton Long. It has become, as mentioned above, a living-being, that is, a living Kollective, a sinister nexus composed of sinister nexions, with these nexions consisting of independent individuals, of sinister groups (such as Traditional Nexions), of sinister tribes, of Balobians, and so on.

This change, this evolution, of the ONA is necessary, welcome; exactly what should occur. But the map, the guidebook, I produced are still there, still part of this living, changing, evolving, ONA, and still useful and relevant, which those interested can use to guide them along their own sinister journey if they choose to use such a map, such a guidebook.

Expressed simply, these particular esoteric means, this map and guidebook, are one way to produce more and sinister Adepts in a shorter time than it took me.

But didn’t you inherit a map, a guide, from the Lady Master who guided you?

Yes, but it wasn’t all that useful when I came to use it. It was rather like those ancient maps which were not drawn “to scale”, which were in black and white, which had a number of charting errors, which had loads of gaps with the legend “Here Be Dragons”, and which more often than not lacked the names of places, and which did not give topographical features.

So, I went out and made a new map, charting my progress along the way. A scale map, in colour, with grid references, with places named; with topographical features highlighted, and so on. This took a while – several decades, in fact.

Any regrets?

Regret is a causal limitation, involving a certain causal apprehension; and redolent of that mode of causal being which constrains us, as individuals, and has constrained us, as a species.

Instead of this old, limiting, causal way, one has to open the nexion within one’s being, and perceive and feel things in a more acausal manner. That is, one has to: (1) have the perspective, the understanding, of Destiny, of the individual moments of one’s own life as a process of one’s own change, one’s own transformation and evolution, as a potentiality of a new type of being; and also (2) have the perspective, the understanding, of Wyrd, of how one’s own life is in flux with Aeonic forces, with the change of Aeons, of Nature, of Life, and of the Cosmos itself, in both its causal and its acausal modes of being.

What this means in practical terms is that one feelings, one’s emotions, are or can be useful vectors of one’s own inner change; that pathei-mathos – a learning from the hardships, the pains, the suffering, of personal experience – is not only beneficial, a means, a process, to enable us to evolve, as human beings, but also testing, a means, a process, whereby the best, those possessed of arête, flourish.

In brief, pathei-mathos is a good test for human beings; what keeps mundanes as mundanes, or – more often than not – what destroys, what breaks, mundanes. But also, a means to attain, and to reveal, arête.

So, no, I have no regrets – I have only a learning from my experiences and mistakes.