Deep in northwestern Westphalia, Germany, stands a twelfth-century castle conceived by Heinrich Himmler, leader of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel, as a kind of “Camelot” for the triumphal knights of the Aryan race. The Wewelsburg Castle was also a fantasy nerd’s dream come true. In its bowels lies an occult enclave straight out of Cecil B. DeMille: an Arthurian-style set of catacombs designed to look medieval but actually made of concrete. Above, in the Hall of the Supreme S.S. Leaders, there’s a marble floor inlaid with a design of the Black Sun, or Sonnenrad—a circle containing swastika-like arms that epitomizes Nazi striving to create an idealized Norse-Aryan past for themselves. Himmler started renovations on the castle in the mid-1930s; the Nazi paradise he built was meant to host S.S. ceremonies, such as handing particularly distinguished murderers the Totenkopfring, a ring adorned with the signature S.S. skull but also a variety of quasi-Nordic runes and symbolic oak leaves, designed by Himmler’s personal occultist, a purportedly clairvoyant mystic by the name of Karl Wiligut.
The Nazis, in short, were obsessed with legend and magic. Consider the swastika itself: First written about in Germany by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the symbol in the ruins of Troy in 1868, the swastika was seized on by Hitler—whose birthday falls on Easter Sunday this year—as emblematic of the idealized, quasi-mythical Aryan race he sought to recreate. More to the point, the Nazis were murder nerds, LARPing as wizards of racial superiority as they committed very real atrocities. And the same is true of their successors today. Partly aping their dead heroes and partly engaged in a similar delusion—self-mythologizing as the scions of an ancient white race—neo-Nazis are a remarkably myth-oriented bunch. This manifests in a lot of different ways, like engaging in werewolf-themed cultic neopaganism or dedicating themselves to Norse gods. Or, in a recent newsworthy example, following the Order of the Nine Angles, a late-twentieth-century neo-Nazi pseudoreligion that seeks to turn its adherents into racially pure Satanic wizards.
Earlier this week, a Waukesha, Wisconsin, teenager and devotee of the Order of the Nine Angles, or ONA, was charged with murdering his mother and stepfather and plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump, in order to further the Order’s goals of a world plunged into chaotic violence. “Jewish occupied governments must fall. The white race cannot survive unless America collapses,” the 17-year-old, Nikita Casap, wrote in a manifesto. “Huge amounts of violence will be required.” He called himself a “niner” (a Nine Angles devotee) and encouraged his imitators to read a variety of extremist books. In doing so, Casap drew on nearly a century of blood-drenched legacy in his pairing of violent death with a potent dose of magical thinking.
The symbol of the Order of the Nine Angles looks, more than anything, like a mutilated cat’s cradle, just as their ideology is a muddle of inverted myths, profligate cruelty, and pure bigotry. It’s a religion of shock and destruction, and as such, it has appealed particularly to young men—teens seeking to break away from their parents, and aimless mid-twenties men who want to blaze a path of dubious glory by blood.
The movement was created in the 1970s by a British neo-Nazi named David Myatt, nicknamed the “Cat Strangler” by his friends because of his affinity for torturing animals. His ideology reflects the charming sobriquet. In 1999, a 22-year-old man reportedly inspired by Myatt’s book A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution planted bombs embedded with nails in areas frequented by London’s minority and gay communities, injuring 129 people and killing three. In Myatt’s work and speeches, an increasingly elaborate cosmology is paired with direct calls to terrorist action, all in the service of ushering in an eschatological race war. Affiliated with the so-called “Left-Hand Path” of magic—dark or black magic—the ONA offers such occult hokum as a world divided into the seven branches of the “Tree of Wyrd,” a creator deity named Vindex, and individual cells called “nexions.”
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.
All of the Order of the Nine Angles’ seminal texts are written in a pseudo-elevated tone, larded with jargon that reads like a particularly depraved D&D campaign. Rites such as the “Black Mass of Heresy” open with adulation of Hitler and include chants like:
We believe in justice for our oppressed comrades
And seek an end to the world-wide
Persecution of National-Socialists.
We believe in the magick of our wyrd
And curse all who oppose us.
This is, to put it mildly, dorky; it’s generally a social faux pas to chant loudly about the “magick” of your “wyrd.” It’s also part of a murderous doctrine of total amorality. These two things go together better than you think; as events around us are illustrating all the time, things can be ridiculous and awful all at once. The “Sevenfold Way” of the Order dictates an incremental increase in violence—with a particular focus on sexual violence, which is something of an obsession in the creed—along with personal asceticism and the military or paramilitary training common among neo-Nazi groups of all stripes. To put it another way: The rigmarole of the order is an occult support structure for the endgame of creating a decentralized army of racist rapists and murderers. And it’s been quite successful.
There’s been a lot of murder, and a great many terror attempts and attacks, inspired by this ideology. It’s been taken up by a number of neo-Nazi groups as their chosen niche sub-ideology, and has inspired lone gunners like Casap, along with multiple rapes and widespread dissemination of child pornography (in keeping with its doctrine of sexual depravity). In 1997, members of a Swedish affiliate group murdered a gay Algerian man in a Gothenburg park, as part of a human sacrifice (which ONA literature refers to as a “culling”). In 2008, eight young Russian Satanists killed four teenagers in the Yaroslavl region, fried their hearts over a bonfire, ate them, and buried the bodies in a peat bog; an ONA cult dedicated to their deeds sprang up in the region. The pace picked up in the 2010s and 2020s; affiliates of the Order were charged with possessing child pornography, planning terror attacks, multiple child rapes, and murders. In 2022, a U.S. soldier and Order member was caught plotting to ambush members of his unit in order to cause “the deaths of as many soldiers as possible.” The same year, an 18-year-old in London murdered two sisters in a park after signing a pact with a demon in blood, promising to “sacrifice only women.”
Why are murder and magic so intertwined for these adherents? Whether you wear Crusader gear, don a skull ring bedecked with runes, chant black masses, or sacrifice to Odin, it all serves the same goal: It’s a process of bonding and becoming. Neo-Nazis lean so heavily on myth because their ideology is prima facie absurd; the purported oppression of whites needs tortuous, even mythological explanations to ring remotely true. Hence the dorky architecture propping up all that manic violence. It serves social and psychological purposes too: The commission of crimes in service of an ideology binds one tighter to it. Embracing a faith that is repugnant and outlandish to outsiders shuts one off from the rest of the world. And the profession of belief in concert with others is one of the most ancient, and simple, forms of human communion.
It’s also a big confidence booster, at age 17, to think you’re at one with the underlying forces of the cosmos. Even if you’re not one hundred percent sold on the “magick” of your “wyrd,” it’s exciting to be part of a secret scary movement that does scary things, and know you can scare or impress people just by being part of it. It’s one thing to post racist things online from the comfort of your home; another thing entirely to embrace the notion that you are a master of magic, a powerful wizard whose bloodletting will usher in an “Imperium” of racially pure enlightenment. To wield that kind of power is to be wondrous; to stride atop multiple planes of reality.
In other words, the appeal of evil wizardry is, on some level, the same as the desire to be Harry Potter: to be the most special boy in the world. These ideologies dangle just that promise, convincing people around the world that shooting your mother will make you a wizard, instead of just another killer. That’s what creates murder nerds, and the myths and legends that support them: the urge to achieve a great apotheosis and to do so via the blunt instruments of the knife, the gun, and the pain of others.
In Westphalia, the Wewelsburg Castle is now a museum of the horrors of the S.S. Despite Himmler’s grandiose desire to drench his murders in myth and mystery, the elaborate occult ceremonies he and his pet clairvoyant hoped for didn’t materialize; there were unfathomable atrocities to commit. Less than a kilometer from Himmler’s faked-up magic playground stand the remnants of a concentration camp where over a thousand people died, conscripted as slave labor to build ever-grander extensions to the castle. The tombs in the great S.S. catacomb are empty; they always were. But the graves are full, the only true monument to the small, sadistic men who dreamed they were the kings of legend. All they ever made was a heap of bones.