My personal Quest to gaining a “better” or more personal or intimate understanding of what the ONA terms the “Nine Angles” like most of how I have come to understand the ONA, comes from my own indigenous culture, by accident.
I was asking my aunt-mom to recite the seven days of the week in Khmer for me since I can only remember two. The two I remembered was Sunday and Monday. I remembered those two because for some odd reason, in Khmer the literal translation was “Day of the Sun,” and “Day of the Moon.” In Khmer Sunday is “Ngay [Day] Adit[Sun]” and “Ngay Chan [Moon],” Ngay rhyming with the English word “My” with the “Ng” being nasalized. Chan being the Khmer form of the Sanskrit “Chandra” meaning “Moon.”
I thought it was weird how two different cultures and people with so much time and distance between them could at least have two names of days of a week named after the same sun and moon. So I asked my aunt-mom to name me the rest and explain to me what they were named after. My aunt-mom knew the names, but she did not know what they were named after; but her husband my uncle-dad knew the mythological or astrological history behind each name.
Tuesday is “Ngay Angia” which roughly means the Day of the Red One, or the Day of War. Angia is the shortened version of the formal word “Angaraka” which is also the Sanskrit name/word for the Planet Mars. But the Hindus in India call Mars most often by the name/word Mangala.
Wednesday is “Ngay Budh.” I thought Budh meant the Buddha, but the word “Budh” in Sanskrit is also the actual name/word for the Planet Mercury.
Thursday is “Ngay Brihas.” Every time I hear that name it sounds like they’re saying “Preah Hoss” to me which means a “Flying God,” so I always thought that day was named after some flying god. It’s not. Brihas is the Khmer form of the Sanskrit Brihaspati which is the name/word for the Planet Jupiter. “Pati” in Sanskrit, Hindi, and Khmer means a “husband,” and also a “house.”
Friday is “Ngay Sukh.” I always thought they were saying “Sukkh” which means “Tranquil” or “Undisturbed.” Sukh turns out to be the Khmer form of the Sanskrit “Sukra” which is the name/word for the Planet Venus.
Saturday is “Ngay Sao [rhymes with “Now”]. Sao is the Khmer version of the Sanskrit Sani or Shani which is the name/word for the Planet Saturn.
At first the only thing that got to me was the strangeness of how all seven days in both my culture and the English/European culture[s] seem to match up exactly! But the excitement was short lived and I quickly forgot about it.
Later we were at one of my grandpa’s houses during an eclipse to watch it and have a BBQ. When the eclipse happened briefly my uncles and boy cousins came outside with their guns and beer and started shooting at the moon and cheering.
I was thinking to myself: “What the hell are they doing?” I had to ask my grandpa – who is the only grandpa who speaks English – what they were doing. He said it’s a stupid custom. The ancient Khmer believed that there was a dragon that lived in the sky named Rahu and that an eclipse was caused by Rahu eating the moon. So in ancient days when backwards tribes saw Rahu eating the moon, they got scare and would shoot their arrows at the sky to try and scare Rahu away. My grandpa said that the ancient tribes gave a name to the tail of Rahu which they called “Ketuy” which in Khmer just means “A Tail Of An Animal.”
Since my grandpa likes to talk, he just went on and on about the very silly myth these ancient people believed in. He said in ancient times the wild people believed there lived nine “grapas” [Crocodiles] that lived in the sky, which they later named Adit, Chandra, Angia, Budh, Sukh, Sao, Rahu, and Ketuy. Rahu and its tail Ketuy are treated as two separate things. At the time I thought the tribal myth was so silly I didn’t pay much mind to it and forgot it when the day was over. But I did remember that the seven planets the days of the week were named after were believed to be crocodiles.
The Tree Of Wyrd
So I was studying ONA’s Naos one day. I was specifically looking around the Tree of Wyrd and correspondence sections to see if I can figure out a way to better understand “Satan” in a more Eastern way, since I have a hard time fitting “Satan” into my Oriental Weltanschauung.
Satan in the Tree of Wyrd corresponds with the Sphere of Mercury which also corresponds to the Norse God Loki. So I figured that I’d google and research the Roman god Mercury, then study its Greek counterpart, so that way I can look for a Vedic god to correspond to the exoteric name/word “Satan.”
To my surprise it turns out that in Hindu astrological mythos Budh/Budha – Mercury in Sanskrit – not only matched up in description to the Buddha of Buddhism, but also to the Greek Hermes, and the Roman Mercury, and even the concept of Lucifer being the archetype of Light and Illumination. So I figured that I can synchronize Satan with the Buddha via the Tree of Wyrd’s Sphere of Mercury. But that got me curious about the other Vedic astrological entities and the Tree of Wyrd. So I did some more research, and stumbled upon all Nine Angles in the most unlikely of places: ancient Vedic astrology.
So in the ONA we learn to understand that the term “Nine Angles” often comes from the Seven Spheres on the Tree of Wyrd; which are planets; plus two extra Nexion, making Nine “Angles.” The Angles are not geometric Angles. They are just words used to describe something that somehow influenced the causal via Wyrd.
It turns out that the crazy tribal myths my grandpa had told me about actually have their origins in much older – more ancient – Vedic astrological mythos. In the Vedic astrological mythos the 9 celestial entities are collectively called the “Navgraha,” or the “Navagraha.” “Nav/Nava” meaning “Nine.” The Sanskrit word “Graha” originally meant a crocodile or an alligator or a monster in a lake that grabs people with its mouth. Which must be where the ancient Khmer got the word “Grapa” from meaning a crocodile.
In Sanskrit the word Graha ends up meaning something that “Grabs or Catches.” The Navagrahas in Sanskrit are: 1. Ravi [sun]; 2. Chandra [moon]; 3. Mangala/Angaraka [Mars]; 4. Budha [Mercury]; 5. Brihaspati [Jupiter]; 6.Sukra [Venus]; 7. Shani [Saturn]; 8. Rahu, & 9. Ketu.
The interesting thing to note is that although most of the Navagrahas are associated with planets, Graha does not mean a “planet,” and the last two are not planets themselves. These Nine Grahas are said to instead be “things” that influences mortal existence and Karma. Karma corresponding to what Europeans may have understood as “Fate,” and the older – more pagan word – “Wyrd.”
I find it very interesting that both mythos – ONA & Vedic – tries to intimate or approximate “something” via words like “Angle” and “Graha” to mean “something” that influences. After thinking about how “Angle” doesn’t literally mean Angle, and Graha doesn’t literally mean Planet but crocodile, I thought it was funny that an Angle looks like the open mouth of a crocodile!
Ancient Traditions
What a very nice coincidence. Not just the strange coincidence in how a European people and a people all the way in India and the Southeast Asian Peninsula can have all seven of their days named after the same seven planets in the same exact order. But also a nice coincidence in that if we looked far enough around the world and past enough in our collective human history, that what mythos and ideas we find in the ONA has similarities and corresponding counterparts in ancient human cultures.
It’s as if a small weird group of people in Shropshire England, and ancient Vedic astronomers/astrologers were trying to put into words, intimating, the same single Nine Natural Phenomena? Just that one group called it “Nine Angles,” while another so long ago called it “Nava Grahas.”
Of course there are implications here related to the ONA’s Tree of Wyrd. The implicative question is: Which is older, the qabalah and its 10 sephiroths, or the 9 Grahas? When I say the qabalah I don’t mean esoteric exegesis of the Torah, the use of Gemetria, etc. I just mean the Tree of Life, its 10 sephiroths, their mystical meanings, and the mystical meanings they later inspired. If I remember, it was sometime in the 11th century in Spain somewhere that the Tree of Life and the “qabalah” began to coalesce.
The more I personally look into the ONA’s mythos, the more I personally see its mythos in an ancient past in India. The ONA’s Baphomet resembles Kali, and this can be said to be a mere coincidence or matter of one inspiring the other. The ONA’s “Satan” seems to pair up with Rudra-Shivaya very well in mythic and archetypal quality and essence. But again, this can be just a coincidence or one inspiring the other. I’ll take that. But now with the ONA’s “Nine Angles” of its Tree of Wyrd, matching up with the Navagraha, we have a coincidence within a coincidence. There are far more parallels and coincidences that I have personally dis-covered.
But I’ll keep those to myself. Hoping that what little I have shared here and in my other essays I have written will inspire other ONA Initiates to go on their own historical and cultural Quest to at least broaden their perspective and horizon, to uncover their own things. All I can say is that with my present vantage point I have today, it would not be hard for me to completely switch over from being ONA to practicing a more primal-animistic proto-vedic Tradition. The only thing required for such a transition would be a simple superficial substitution of names and words. Otherwise the Essence remains intact.
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Order of Nine Angles
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