It’s time now to speak of the mysterious “Order of the Black Sun,” a secretive Traditionalist society that I have had occasion to mention from time to time in previous essays in this Substack.
The Order of the Black Sun is more correctly known as the Ordo Solis Atri; it is under this Latin formulation that the organization operates, and it is how it appears in such infrequent literature as mentions it. Simply put, the Ordo Solis Atri is a furtive and little-known Traditionalist splinter group that is said by most exoteric accounts to trace its origins ultimately to the College of Seth.
Now, it is here, in the matter of the Order’s “origin story,” if you will, that things tend to get rather murky. That’s not infrequently the case with these secret societies of less recent vintage and more ancient pedigree; one has only to consider the case of the Freemasons, for instance, or the Rosicrucians, among many others. The same can even be said of the Chaldean Fellowship, or the College of Seth itself, for that matter—though the latter has a somewhat better-attested genealogy.
In any case, the commonly accepted story is that the Ordo Solis Atri formed as an unauthorized and officially proscribed offshoot of the College sometime in the 1970s. In short, the Order was founded by a somewhat mysterious cabal of expert metaphysicists, erudite esoterists, and deeply learned Evolians and Guénonians that had formed as a kind of secret Traditionalist chapter within the College of Seth. Some of these individuals—whose names I am not at liberty to reproduce here—even claimed to have at one point corresponded with or even studied under both Julius Evola and René Guénon.
Initially, this Traditionalist “study group” within the College was formed under the auspices and with the express sanction of the board of governors of the College itself; nevertheless, the Traditionalist, metaphysical, and anti-modern and virulently anti-materialist leanings of the group quickly attracted the suspicion and even active dislike of fellow Collegians, with whose more materialistic and evolutionistic leanings these philosophies agreed in about the same fashion as water and oil. By the late ’70s, the group had become subjected to ever more intrusive scrutiny and general censure, and was finally proscribed and disbanded altogether by an official act of the board of governors. The last straw, so to speak, had come in the form of the “criminal behavior” of several members of the group, who were apparently implicated in certain right-wing political movements of the time, including the so-called Anni di Piombo (the “Years of Lead”) in Italy1 as well as what was described to me as an attempt to undermine or perhaps even overthrow the government of the United States during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
All of this was in direct contravention of the College’s prohibition against any involvement in political matters. The members were dealt with internally through the College’s “legal” mechanisms, which—as an outsider and non-member (one of the οἱ σκοτεινοί in the official terminology)—I am not permitted to review. The point is, a number of the group’s members were excommunicated from the College of Seth, and the Traditionalist chapter was prohibited from meeting again; this action compelled several of its other members to resign their membership in the College and disavow any future linkage with it.
That is, of course, hardly the end of the story. These excommunicated and disgruntled former members of the College of Seth decided to form their own, Traditionalist splinter group, which was for all intents and purposes merely the resurrection of the organization they had formed within the College. This was the Ordo Solis Atri, the Order of the Black Sun, and it early proclaimed itself to be a resolutely Traditionalist secret order opposed in every way to the materialism and degeneracy of the modern world, and more importantly opposed to the workings of the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation in history.
Naturally, the Order includes the College of Seth among the roster of those groups and organizations wittingly or unwittingly acting to advance the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation.
So, that is the official history.
But the story as I had it of some members of the Ordo Solis Atri itself differs materially in several very important respects. Principally, they claim that the founding members of the Order had created no mere “study group” within the College of Seth, but had fostered and rekindled a very ancient secret society that can trace its pedigree and initiatic chain to a period nearly a thousand years ago, and perhaps much further.
As the story goes, one of the founders of the group belonged by birthright to the original Ordo Solis Atri, a secret society that had largely lain fallow since the eighteenth century, but whose roots extended as far back as the Norman conquests in Southern Italy of Robert Guiscard during the eleventh century. It was said that the crafty Duke had patronized the creation of a kind of occult religious order following his taking of Rome in 1084. According to this tale, Robert Guiscard—or more likely certain doctores peritissimi of the Church who had the Duke’s ear—had uncovered the stirrings of what we would now call a Counter-Traditional conspiracy in Rome, and that it was this rather than the sedition of its citizenry that prompted the Duke’s order of a general sack of the Eternal City. The Order, we are told, originally comprised the Duke’s most favored knights and nobles, and it is said its members accompanied his bastard son Bohemond during the First Crusade and ensconced themselves in Antioch, and thence spread throughout the Crusader Kingdoms in the following decades.
The Order worked to combat the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation both in the Holy Land and then in Europe in after centuries—primarily in Italy, but also in southern France, as well as in Constantinople and the Greek successor states to the Byzantine Empire following the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Along with many other occult orders, it was essentially forced underground in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century.
Anyhow, that is what I was told; as with others of these occult orders, including the Sodales Chaldaici, the Ordo Solis Atri trickled into the twentieth century as more or less the preserve of a few or even one family, before it was resurrected, tentatively at first, as a Traditionalist group within the College of Seth by a member who belonged to one of the aforesaid families.
That, at any rate, is the story as I had it of a member of the Ordo Solis Atri. But regardless of its origin story, mythological or otherwise, there can be no doubt that in its most recent incarnation, at least, the Order has been remarkably active. The reference to the “Black Sun” is, admittedly, a puzzling one to me. There may be a connection to the infamous Sonnenrad or “sun wheel” symbol, often called the “Schwarze Sonne” or “Black Sun,” and linked to the German National Socialists through Himmler’s Wewelsburg castle mosaic. In the historiography of the College of Seth, this symbol is associated with the so-called entitas infanda—variously (and inaccurately) rendered as “eldritch being” or “eldritch entity” in contemporary literature—that is mentioned in ancient texts, and is assimilated in the College’s “mythology” with something called “the Inhabitant.” This demiurgic force or entity is said to be at the root of the Counter-Tradition and Counter-Initiation, at least according to the College of Seth, and I suppose I’m not too far afield in equating it with a kind of Satanic or at the very least malevolent and subversive principle.
So why the Ordo Solis Atri should have received its name is a mystery to me; all the more so if its genealogy is in fact as ancient as some of its members claim for it. The “Black Sun,” after all, ought to represent the Counter-Tradition, and so it is unclear to me why it should be adopted in the name of a secret society dedicated to opposing this evil historical current in all its forms. I suspect, however, that there is in this a kind of mysterium innominatum that it is not permitted a non-member such as myself to understand.2
I’ll close this essay by observing that in recent decades the Order of the Black Sun has been very active in working to “subvert,” so to speak, the subversive currents of our age, and through a number of different avenues. It has fomented a great many of what “the new barbarians” in our society are pleased to call far-right movements and organizations; this is done both through crassly material means (i.e., through direct funding), and through much subtler philosophical, intellectual, and “metapolitical” methods, in which members of the Order have been secretly tweaking the prevailing intellectual currents of our debased societies to tack in a Traditionalist direction.3
As to what success they have reaped in this endeavor, I’ll leave it to the reader to decide for himself. Suffice to say, however, that wherever the liberal-democratic order has begun to founder, sinking under its manifold inconsistencies, the “secret hand” of the Ordo Solis Atri is actively seeking to exploit its weaknesses and thereby oppose the Counter-Tradition.
Members of the Order tell me that this is done not so much to overthrow or reverse the Counter-Traditional and Counter-Initiatic currents—which are after all destined to prevail and increase their conquests during the Kali-Yuga—but rather to seek out and cultivate those who shall foment and cherish the Tradition, and carry it forward as in an Ark during the Period of Rectification, the Dies Ultimi Iudicii, and transmit it to the men and women of the Golden Age of the future Manvantara…
Several members of the group were said to be active in Italian far-right groups of the period, including the Ordine Nuovo (dissolved in 1973), the Movimento Sociale Italiano, and especially in the Avanguardia Nazionale and the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari. There was a strong (and incontrovertible, as it happens) belief by the founders of the Ordo Solis Atri that the forces of leftism in society were actively and virulently Counter-Traditional, and that it was necessary to employ political and sometimes even violent measures, not so much to halt its advance, but merely to delay it somewhat so as to buy a breathing space, as it were, for future preparation.
It may—and this is only my speculation—refer to the fact that the Ordo Solis Atri often employs, in order to combat the great evil, some of the very same methods and tactics pioneered by the agents of the Counter-Tradition and Counter-Initiation themselves.
There are rumors, though I stress that they are only rumors, that the Ordo Solis Atri has also inherited a potent initiatic and magical chain through the centuries, which it has fruitfully employed to achieve its objectives, even unto deflecting the course of entire civilizations into a desired direction; moreover, there are whispers that the Order has made use of the magia sexualis to impressive effect in certain rituals that smack more than a little of the Counter-Initiation, or at the very least the Left-Hand Path (cf. note 2, above).