The Dark Pastoral: Landscape, Time, and Revolt in the Order of Nine Angles

How ONA turned the English countryside into a site of metaphysical revolt against modernity.

“The contrast between country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society.”
— Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973)

Mitchell’s Fold Stone - Shropshire

Introduction

While most twentieth-century English occult revivals gathered in candle-lit city flats or bohemian cafés, the Order of Nine Angles (ONA), at least in the first two decades of its founding, turned its gaze elsewhere — towards the rain-dark hills of Shropshire, the desolate coasts of Wales, and the silent mounds of forgotten Britain. In its fictional cycle, the Deofel Quintet, these places act not merely as settings but as forces: weather, ruin, and soil shape every transformation. The Order’s initiatory imagination begins in the landscape itself. This recalls Lianna’s reflections in The Giving, when she senses that the hills of Shropshire are not passive but watching — an early articulation of landscape as a sentient participant in initiation.

For a movement that arose amid late-industrial Britain, this retreat from the city was more than merely aesthetic. It was, as Latour (1991: 7) writes of anti-modern impulses, an attempt to “unmake modernity” by dissolving the barrier between nature and culture. ONA’s early literature insists on embodiment and locality — to know is to walk, to bleed, to weather.

This ethos recalls what Williams (1973) called a recurring “structure of feeling” in English culture: yearning for the moral clarity of the rural against the corruption of the urban. Yet the ONA sanctifies not innocence but decay. Its pastoral is sinister: the countryside as wound rather than refuge, its beauty underwritten by violence and silence. In The Giving (Deofel Quintet), Lianna senses that “stillness watches”; the landscape itself becomes an observing intelligence. Such moments reveal the Order’s dark inversion of the pastoral idyll.

The ONA’s rural mysticism can therefore be read as a species of occult anti-modernism — a refusal of the urban and the technological as metaphors of progress. It embodies what Bauman (2000: 8) terms re-enchantment through resistance: an instinctive recoil from “liquid modernity” and its endless dissolution of meaning. In the stillness of the countryside — its ruins, forgotten rituals, and sacred geography — the Order constructs a counter-modern esotericism: enlightenment achieved not through mastery but through acquiescence to place.

Cow Stone - Shropshire

Modernity and Its Discontents

Modernity, Bauman (2000) observes, is a world of perpetual motion — unstable, fluid, where identities dissolve as quickly as they form. Against this restlessness, the ONA imagines stability not only in the future but in the archaic. This stance is embodied in the figure of Conrad Robury of The Temple of Satan, whose retreat from the city into rural stillness becomes a protest against the mechanised clarity of modern life. Its pastoral imagination functions as a metaphysical protest against what Berman (1982: 15) called “the melting of all that is solid.”

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (2002: 218) noted that “the Order of Nine Angles represents a synthesis of Satanism, paganism, and the Western mystical tradition, distinguished by its radical elitism and hostility to modernity.” That hostility underpins the Order’s turn to the archaic countryside as both refuge and ordeal. Jacob Senholt (2012: 167) similarly observed that within the group’s fiction, the city symbolises spiritual inertia, while the countryside becomes the locus of transformation and contact with the numinous.

This rural metaphysic aligns with Latour’s (1991) claim that the rupture between nature and culture is illusory. By rejecting technology and urban abstraction, the ONA’s fictional world restores what Latour calls hybridity — a state in which human and non-human are intertwined. Rituals performed under open skies become acts of ontological rebellion.

For Partridge (2004: 68), such gestures exemplify the modern re-enchantment of the West: “Re-enchantment occurs not as a simple return to pre-modern beliefs but as the creative reconfiguration of the sacred within the secular.” The ONA’s anti-modernism thus forms a negative ecology, sanctifying decay and ordeal as the only authentic modes of knowing.

Long Mynd - Shropshire

The Rural as Axis Mundi

For the early ONA, landscape is not a metaphor but metaphysics. Hills, streams, mounds, and ruins are nexions — living points of contact between the human and the acausal. The countryside becomes what Eliade (1957: 36) termed “a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different.” Fiona in The Greyling Owl mirrors this sentiment: she experiences the countryside as a kind of hierophany in reverse — not revelation descending from heaven but meaning welling up from soil and weather.

Doyle White (2017: 49) emphasises that “the ONA’s rituals encourage direct engagement with the natural world, contrasting sharply with the urban occultism of many contemporary Satanic groups.” These practices echo Eliade’s description of homo religiosus, who “seeks to live as near as possible to the Centre” (1957: 43). Yet the ONA’s version of sacred geography is darker: where Eliade’s sacred space offers order, ONA’s wyrd offers dissolution — the initiate’s identity frays amid the landscape.

Bataille’s (1948: 54) notion of the sacred as “that which ruptures the world of work and utility” clarifies this inversion. The ONA’s ordeals — fasting, solitude, exposure — strip the initiate of social function, staging what Bataille would call sacred waste. The rural ordeal becomes a confrontation with what modernity excludes: death, silence, and uselessness.

This fascination with landscape situates the ONA within a broader current of British sacred geography. From John Michell’s View Over Atlantis (1969) to Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971), post-war writers re-imagined the countryside as an archive of forgotten energy. Michell sought cosmic harmony in ley-lines; Hill recovered a kingdom of ghosts in the Midlands. The ONA share their sense that place itself possesses agency but inverts its moral tone: Shropshire becomes not a pastoral refuge but a theatre of ordeal.

At this point, phenomenology clarifies what is at stake. Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1954) defines dwelling as the way mortals inhabit the earth poetically: to dwell is to “remain at peace within the free, the preserving of the fourfold.” Tim Ingold (2000: 194) extends this into the concept of the taskscape — the lived mesh of activities through which landscape and person are reciprocally formed. The ONA’s emphasis on solitary endurance echoes this phenomenology: knowledge arises not through abstraction but through bodily attention to place. In a world governed by representation, such dwelling becomes a form of resistance.

Devil’s Chair - Striperstones - Shropshire

Mythic Regression and Temporal Inversion

The ONA’s anti-modernism extends beyond place into time itself. Its fiction and commentary treat linear history—progress, novelty, accumulation—as a metaphysical mistake. Senholt (2012: 169) notes that the group’s narratives “reject the modern myth of progress in favour of cyclical aeonic time,” with ages rising and falling not by steady improvement but by exhaustion and collapse. The logic is not Darwinian ascent but what might be called mythic recurrence: the past returns as a force rather than a memory.

This temporal stance is legible within a longer conservative critique of modernity. Julius Evola’s declaration that “the modern world is a world of ruins, yet in those ruins the possibility of a new beginning remains” (1934) reframes breakdown as the precondition of renewal. In that register, the ONA’s “going back” is not nostalgia but method—a kind of ritual time-engineering where decay becomes a vehicle of metamorphosis. The Greyling Owl dramatises this in literary terms: through Fiona’s experience of the borderland farmhouse, the retreat into the rural is revealed not as an escape from time but as a re-entry into another order of it — the rural as hinge, not hiatus, within history.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence offers a second frame. If the highest test is to affirm the repetition of life’s moments, then the ONA’s preoccupation with cycles and regressions reads as an attempt to will recurrence rather than endure it. Each transformation is a repetition that annihilates the previous form. Mattias Gardell (2003: 243) places such cyclical thinking in the broader milieu of folkish pagan revivals: “regeneration through return.” The paradox is central. To become different, one must become the same—again.

Heidegger’s critique of modern temporality clarifies the philosophical stakes. In The Question Concerning Technology (1954), he argues that technological modernity reduces the world to a standing reserve, a realm of things-in-waiting for human use. Linear time is the corollary of this enframing—time as production. By contrast, the ONA’s preferred temporality resembles destiny rather than schedule: the past isn’t behind us but beneath us, a substratum that can be tapped, endured, and perhaps inhabited. If dwelling (Heidegger 1954) is the poetic manner of being on the earth, the ONA’s rural temporality is a strenuous, sometimes violent, attempt to relearn dwelling under conditions of modern estrangement.

Ingold’s notion of the taskscape (2000) insists that time is experienced through doing, through lines of movement and attention that bind people to places. The ONA’s literary fixation on walking, watching, weathering—the patient arts of exposure—offers a counter-technique to the time of measurement. In The Giving (Deofel Quintet), Lianna’s alternating moods—lucidity and fatigue, resolve and dissolution—mark a rhythm closer to seasons than to schedules. Time is felt as a climate rather than a clock.

Thus, mythic regression functions not as a wish to live “as before,” but as a practice of temporal inversion: the present is read through the past, and the future is expected to arrive not as novelty but as the return of what was forgotten. In that metaphysic, modernity’s line straightens into a circle—and the circle, if the literature is right, opens downward into depth.

Manstone Rock - Striperstones - Shropshire

The Technological as the Sinister Other

The modern city and the machine together form the ONA’s sinister Other. The city’s continual hum suggests administration without end; the machine’s logic suggests legibility without remainder. Against both, the group’s fiction seeks a “remaindered” world—things that resist being put fully to use.

Heidegger’s formulation remains decisive: “The essence of technology is by no means anything technological. It is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve” (1954: 20). If that is the danger, then the antidote is not simply “less technology,” but a different mode of revealing—one that admits opacity. The ONA’s literature is obsessed with opacity: the night that doesn’t yield, the stone that does not speak plainly, the weather that won’t be forecast. This is less misanthropy than epistemic humility: a refusal to know at the speed and clarity demanded by the machine. This opacity is also evident in The Temple of Satan, where the scholar learns that knowledge pursued as mastery collapses into exhaustion — an epistemic humility that resists the machine’s demand for clarity.

Baudrillard’s account of hyperreality (1981) adds a cultural dimension. In the endless circulation of signs, the “real” recedes behind simulation. Here the ONA’s emphasis on body and ordeal—fatigue, cold, endurance—operates as a rupture technique. The point is not pain for its own sake, but contact that cannot be simulated. As Senholt (2012: 172) notes, the group’s orientation becomes “a programme of sacred anti-production”: acts that expend rather than produce, waste rather than manage, in the Bataillean sense of dépense (1949). The rural ordeal wastes time, comfort, and effort—sacred waste that returns value to what cannot be priced.

Bauman’s characterisation of the liquid-modern self as “disembedded, a networked ghost adrift in systems” (2000: 29) shadows each of these claims. The literature’s counter-technique is re-embodiment: vivid location, slow movement, the refusal of mediation.

Wenlock Priory - Shropshire

Hauntology and the Eerie

Mark Fisher provides two concepts that crystallise this aesthetic: the eerie and hauntology. In The Weird and the Eerie (2016), Fisher defines the eerie as an ontological disturbance: “a particular kind of felt absence or presence.” The ONA’s countryside is precisely such a field—alive where it should be inert, indifferent where it should be welcoming. In their fictional Shropshire, hills and ruins are agential in a way that unsettles the human. The inhabitant of the rural cannot tell whether the silence around him conceals threat or recognition — a mood that captures Fisher’s ‘felt absence or presence.’

Hauntology, from Ghosts of My Life (2014), names the condition of living among the lost futures of modernity. Culture no longer believes in progress, but it has not learned to believe in anything else. The result is an ambient melancholy, “the slow cancellation of the future” (2014: 8). The ONA’s temporal inversion addresses that melancholy by ritualising it: if the future has stalled, go back—deliberately, methodically, to what might still harbour intensity. Seen this way, the ONA’s literary fixation on old paths, ruined chapels, border farms, and decommissioned sites takes on an uncanny resonance with Fisher’s England: a landscape of broken promises.

This is also where the aesthetic collides with folk horror. From The Wicker Man (1973) to contemporary rural-uncanny films and novels, the English countryside is not the scene of redemption but the stage of regression. Rituals are not celebrations but traps; villages are not communities but conspiracies of memory. The ONA’s literary ruralism fits that topology: their characters’ returns to the land rarely end in peace. Instead, they end in contact—a contact that Fisher might call eerie agency (2016: 11). The land acts. It offers not instruction but confrontation.

If Fisher’s hauntology is a cultural diagnostic, the ONA’s dark pastoral is a response—not political, not even social, but existential. It asks what a person can do when there are no futures left to inhabit. Its answer, however troubling, is to inhabit the depth beneath the present: to steep the self in what the land still remembers.

Old Oswestry - Shropshire

Ecological Despair and the Return of the Sacred

We are now close to the environmental edge of the argument. The literary ruralism of the ONA can be read as misanthropy; it can also be read as an anticipatory ecological mourning. The countryside is not the scene of harmony but of indifference—a recognition that the world does not answer back. That recognition has become the signature emotion of the Anthropocene: marvel mixed with dread, care with powerlessness.

Timothy Morton called a version of this sensibility dark ecology (2010): love of the world without illusions about its order or our centrality. In that sense, the ONA’s literary ordeals—rain, cold, long nights in difficult places—are a way to feel this condition rather than merely know it. If climate change is numerically clear but emotionally inert, then the rural ordeal becomes a kind of affective pedagogy: this is what it is like to live without control.

That is also why the pastoral returns with such intensity to British culture. The pastoral is where the modern subject goes to test their limits. Fisher’s hauntology sharpens the point: it is not simply that the countryside holds the past; it is that the countryside withholds—it keeps some of the past’s power back from modernity’s circuits. In The Giving (Deofel Quintet), Lianna’s attunement to the landscape resists any therapeutic or restorative reading: it is a costly alignment, a relinquishing of identity that enables another form of perception. The text reimagines ecological contact not as a resource but as a ritual of sacrifice.

The sacred returns here not as consolation but as limit-experience. Eliade’s hierophany becomes more Bataillean than serene: the sacred appears where utility fails (Eliade 1957; Bataille 1948). The ruin, the moor, the derelict farm—these are not vistas but limits. They force a suspension of the ordinary calculus of gain and loss. In that suspension, the literary imagination places its wager: perhaps something more-than-human is still legible in the world; perhaps meaning can still be found rather than made.

St. Oswald’s Well - Shropshire

The Sinister Arcadia Revisited

The Order of Nine Angles remains, as a literary object, an enigma: a system of images and plots that refuses dissolution into a single meaning. Its rural, anti-modern vision can appear reactionary; it can also appear as a harsh realism about what is left to us. As Partridge (2004: 68) writes, re-enchantment now tends to occur “as the creative reconfiguration of the sacred within the secular.” The ONA’s fiction stages precisely such reconfiguration by withdrawing from the secular’s central promises: comfort, clarity, control.

Eliade’s “terror of history” (1957) offers a name for the anxiety the literature animates. When time is felt as a crisis field rather than a neutral medium, human life becomes an effort to orient within turbulence. The ONA’s answer, read as literature, is not doctrinal but topographical: find a place that resists, then let it change you. The pastoral becomes ordeal, the walk becomes vigil, the ruin becomes sanctuary precisely because it is broken.

Fisher’s eerie and hauntology help to translate this for the present. The ONA’s landscapes feel possessed not because they are magical in a folkloric sense, but because they retain agency in a nation that doubts the future. If modernity’s promise has stalled, the rural returns as a site of intensity—not pleasant intensity, but the kind that demands verdicts about value and fate. In that sense, the ONA’s dark pastoral is less an alternative than a diagnosis: it names the cost of wanting the sacred back.

Coda: Dwelling After the Future

Heidegger proposed that to dwell is to guard what endures; Fisher, by contrast, suggests that to dwell in the present is to exist among the remnants of modernity—among the ghosts of industries, cultures, and unrealised futures. The ONA’s dark pastoral registers this condition with particular acuity. The return to the countryside does not signify the recovery of lost wholeness but the persistence of a residual order—that which the technological world could not entirely subsume or exhaust.

Ingold’s conception of dwelling as a mode of attentive engagement offers a means of interpreting this literature without recourse to nostalgia. The rural environment is presented not as an uncorrupted refuge but as a field of difficulty—a network of tasks, climates, and materials through which human orientation is reconstituted. The ONA’s protagonists who attempt to attend to place—to discern what the hills “say” or what the ruins “retain”—encounter an epistemology grounded in endurance. Their achievement is not enlightenment but positional knowledge: an awareness of relation rather than transcendence.

Fisher’s theory of hauntology provides a further interpretive frame. If contemporary culture is defined by the persistence of its own cancelled futures, then the turn towards the archaic and the rural can be understood as an aesthetic strategy for negotiating this temporal impasse. The ONA’s dark pastoral articulates this tendency in heightened form: it proposes a descent rather than a restoration, a movement into depth rather than elevation. Within that descent, the literary imagination locates a form of sacred opacity—a recognition that meaning may arise from resistance rather than transparency.

Thus, the ONA’s rural imagination may be read as a critical reflection on the limits of modernity’s emancipatory narratives. Its significance lies not in its doctrinal claims but in its capacity to render visible an alternative mode of engagement with time, place, and endurance. In this sense, the literature demonstrates how the remnants of the pastoral can be mobilised to interrogate rather than affirm the assumptions of progress.

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