A pdf of this text is available for download here – Toward the Sinister-Mysterium
Toward The Sinister Mysterium
Editorial Note: Below are answers to some questions submitted to Anton Long over the past few months by a variety of individuals.
How do you understand the relationship between the sinister way and the numinous way?
Here I shall assume that by ‘sinister way’ you refer to the complete esoteric philosophy and praxis of the ONA (including its mythos) rather than to the practical ‘seven-fold sinister way’ as a method of esoteric training from Initiate to Adept and beyond.
One way is an intimation – a presencing – of what is conventionally (if incorrectly) termed The Dark Forces and thus of certain energies/influences/archetypes within the psyche of the individual.
The other way is an intimation – a presencing – of what is termed the numinous, and thus of what is conventionally (and again incorrectly) termed The Light Forces.
Hence, they both express an aspect of the acausality (that I/we assume exists) beyond our causal perception, and thus intimate and can manifest what lies beyond the mundane reality of phenomenon we experience by means of our physical senses and by the causal learning acquired from others and by the abstractions (the theories, -isms and -ologies) we have manufactured over millennia to try and understand ourselves and Reality.
If one desires to place both in the context of terms used (incorrectly) by many Occultists, then one Way re-presents the LHP and the other the RHP – although that is not how our Adepts understand them.
For us, they re-present two different types of ‘acausal knowing’ and when these two types of knowing are combined (that is, acquired, learnt from personal experience not from books or from someone else), one has the apprehension of Reality that lies beyond what is conventionally termed The Abyss – that is the perception and the understanding of a genuine Mage [aka Grand Master/Grand LadyMaster], and which perception and understanding is the genesis of wisdom, and a knowing, an understanding, of all causal forms (including so-called conflicting opposites) as just limited often distorted causal forms of The Essence beyond them.
Part of this wisdom is a knowing of the reality of what we signify by the term Aeons, and thus a placing of the individual human being – and human beings in general – into a Cosmic perspective. [Where by the Cosmos is to be understand the totality of the causal continuum and the acausal continuum.]
Of course, what we understand by a Mage is very different from what other esoteric groups and traditions understand by the term.
In somewhat oversimplified esoteric terms one might describe the relation thus – (1) the Sinister (LHP) Way are types or modes of apprehension applicable to those who, while following the Seven-Fold Sinister Way as a system of training and individual development, have not yet reached the stage beyond Internal Adept; (2) the Numinous Way is a type of apprehension, complimenting the former, which apprehensions (plural) those beyond Internal Adept acquire and meld with their former (LHP) modes of apprehension to begin the esoteric/alchemical process of (re)unification that forms the essence of what is known as The Passing of The Abyss.
What we call an Internal Adept acquires the beginnings of that specific acausal knowing (modes of acausal apprehension) during the Rite of Internal Adept – that is, spending three months in solitude in an isolated location, and by using such techniques as The Advanced Star Game. Traditionally, this type of acausal knowing was ‘the knowing’ of the Rounwytha, who were a few individuals (often women) who were naturally gifted with certain abilities deriving from their faculty of empathy, and which empathy encompassed what we now term Nature.
What The Sinister Way – in its casual/acausal totality – does is make this knowing of those few gifted individuals available (at least potentially) to all human beings, and thus enables them to proceed Beyond The Abyss and become almost a different type of human being, not in terms of low-level sorcery (external or results-sorcery) and the like, but in terms of understanding, knowing, of being, of Aeonic sorcery – in terms of being wise and having, manifesting, a reasoned, individual, unique, judgement.
Obviously, both of these apparently diverse ways have significance and possibly value in their own right (that is, exoterically) – and thus are or can be an affective and effecting means of change for various, diverse, individuals (not involved in Occultism) over decades and centuries, and thus contribute in their own manner to some of the changes I understand as necessary for us as a species.
Thus, like all Ways or forms that presence The Unity beyond the illusion of causal conflicting opposites, they have both an exoteric and an esoteric meaning and purpose. Also, just like individuals beyond a certain Occult stage of understanding and experience who of necessity has experienced in a practical manner the Light and the Dark, both Ways can easily be misunderstood.
Given all the huffing and puffing of people like Blackwood and Venger about taking over or owning the ONA, why don’t you ever release a statement about such matters?
For two basic reasons. First, as I wrote in a recent reply to someone:
I personally do not assume any direct authority, nor make ‘pronouncements’, nor ascribe any grandiose title to myself. I just let things develope, in their own natural ways in their own species of causal Time, and occasionally pen a few of my own intimations based upon my own reflexions and experience, which are only my own fallible reflexions and my own poor attempts to explain – and which words, which intimations, can and should be surpassed by others and are thus not imbued with any kind of grandiose or pretentious ‘authority’.
Second, because there is no necessity since if someone presents themselves as ONA or claims to own it and some people are duped by such things, and mistake such fakes for us, then it just reveals those people for the mundanes they are.
Such things – such pretenders – are and have been expected, and are a useful test. A test of the sinister numen/charisma of the ONA; of its growth and influence; and test for those who are interested in the ONA, or rather interested in the Way, the living tradition, we represent.
For such pretenders are a sure sign of our growth, influence, and sinister charisma. Just as if some individuals are duped by these pretenders and their groups, then those individuals are not of us; they do not have to potential to become part of our family, and thus such pretenders, such fakes, save us some trouble and can provide us with some amusement at their expense and at the expense of such easily duped individuals.
Those who are of our kind will find us and know us even if we do not name ourselves or describe ourselves by some term. Just as we have and will continue to teach our Way – sans a name and restrictive terms – person to person, generation following generation.
Also, as I have said and written several times over the past few years, no one now controls or owns the ONA – or can control or own the ONA. For it is a sinister kollective of nexions, a cooperative, disdainful of copyright, dogma, restrictions, and hierarchy. In truth, it is a new type of organism – partly causal and partly acausal, and thus a living, changing, evolving, long-living entity which no one finite fallible mortal with a limited causal life-span can control, contain, or own.
Dreccs/Niners – who now increasingly re-present what was known exoterically as the ONA – do not depend on me, or on any one person. Just as the tradition I inherited did not depend on, or need, a name – and indeed had no name for centuries. It was just an inherited way, a reclusive tradition, part of a particular folk culture, passed on aurally.
Our outer name is therefore not that important; indeed esoterically it is irrelevant, and a causal Time will arise in this Aeon when the outer, exoteric, name I gave to the tradition as I expanded and developed it – the ONA name – will no longer be required. Names by their causal nature restrict, and our essence – which sinister-empathy reveals – cannot be so restricted.
You say the ONA is the exoteric name. There is therefore I presume an esoteric name?
Yes, and no. No there is no such esoteric ‘name’ since it is not a name as mundanes understand names, but yes in that what there is expresses something of our acausal essence. No – because it is an actual presencing of an aspect of the acausal, as a particular esoteric chant, correctly performed, is, as for example I tried to outline, in respect of esoteric chant and the ‘names’ of acausal entities, in theEsoteric Chant as Language section of my essay Some Notes Concerning Language, Chants, and Acausal Entities.
Yes there is an esoteric name – because like The Star Game, it is a new type of language devoid of the subject-object division implicit in current language. An illustration might be a mathematical equation, which represents some physical phenomena. Thus, if someone asked what ‘gravity’ was, the reply might be:
That is, the equation describes or re-presents what ‘gravity’ is and the explanation does not involve words, but symbols.
Similarly, if someone enquired who and what we are, the reply might be in our numinous esoteric language, using the numinous symbols of one of our newmysteriums – such as a combination of images, music, and so on.
This takes us far far beyond the causal apprehension that a name such as The Order of Nine Angles imputes, just as before that name our way was re-presented in such things as a living Rounwytha and in The Ceremony of Recalling rather than in a given name or by some single symbol or sigil. The tradition was the Rounwytha, for example.
You have mentioned the mysterium several times recently. What exactly do you mean?
To be precise, we should perhaps write sinister-mysterium, of which there are various types. Some already exist, some are in development, and more will be manufactured in the future.
All manifest the acausal, in their different ways. One type of mysterium is a new esoteric form, a performance, which supersedes Occult ritual, both ceremonial and hermetic, and which employs, among other things, moving images and a new type of music.
The Esoteric Star Game – when used with a specific aim over a period of causal Time, as for example in star mapping as outlined in The Grimoire of Baphomet – is another type of mysterium appropriate to our New Aeon.
Basically, our mysteriums take us beyond both Old Aeon sorcery and Old Aeon language, and two aspects which they all share are: (1) that they all involve the presence of and an interaction with a living human being or beings (and are thus an alchemical symbiosis), and (2) that they are not overtly Occult or overtly associated with some existing or past -ism or -ology because such associations imply a certain duality and a bland causality, which means they cannot be described by any single old-style term or word, such as Satanism, or even the LHP. For they are what they are – a living wordless presencing, and are to be experienced, be part of our living, rather than blandly described in limited causal Old Aeon words.
Anton Long
ONA
122 Year of Fayen
