The Acausal (David Myatt)
The acausal is the proposed counterpart to the physical universe in David Myatt’s account of life. He describes living beings as connections between the two, with their life originating in the acausal. He developed the idea over several decades, incorporating it into his Numinous Way and later philosophy of Pathei-mathos.
Origins
In the preface to Time As Emanation of Being (2013), Myatt traces the idea to 1972, during his imprisonment in Armley jail. He recalls reading Carl Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis and Psychology and Alchemy, then developing his explanation of life. According to this retrospective account, he drafted Emanations of Urania in 1973 and circulated copies the following year.
Myatt also places the development of the Star Game during another imprisonment, in 1975–1976. He describes its alchemical symbolism as an attempt to represent the acausal theory and some of its possible applications, including Jungian individuation.
Life, time, and nexions
Myatt calls the observable physical universe causal. He proposes a separate acausal continuum with its own space and non-linear time. He argues that acausal energy from this continuum gives matter the quality of life. A living organism is, in this account, a nexion: a connection between the causal and acausal. He assigns this role to living beings generally.
His discussion of time develops the distinction further. In Time and the Separation of Otherness (2012), he treats clock time as an abstraction useful for measuring movement. He argues that it fails to convey the nature of living change. His example is a tree: recording its height, girth, and the position of its branches describes measurable changes, while, in his view, leaving something of the living being itself unrecognised.
For Myatt, time expresses a being’s physis, its nature and its relationship with other beings. He associates living change with psyche, which he uses for life or the animating principle of life. His acausal therefore has its own conception of time; describing it simply as “timeless” loses part of his argument.
Empathy and pathei-mathos
In Toward Understanding the Acausal, revised in 2014, Myatt describes acausal knowing as a personal, wordless understanding disclosed through empathy. It concerns one’s relationship with other living beings and the possibility of ceasing to harm them. He denies that such an experience authorises a universal doctrine or knowledge of another person through a category imposed upon them. He treats it as a complement to observation and reasoning.
The ethical emphasis belongs to the development of his later philosophy. In Concerning the Development of the Numinous Way, Myatt describes his former commitments to National Socialism and militant Islam, and acknowledges the violence and suffering he helped to encourage. He connects his subsequent change of outlook with bereavement and a growing recognition of his own failures. These are his explanations of that change, given in an autobiographical essay.
He describes the revision of his Numinous Way during 2011–2012 as a process of removing generalisations and political prescriptions. What remained he called the philosophy of pathei-mathos, with an emphasis on humility, compassion, and restraint. In his 2013 preface, he explicitly retains acausality as central to that philosophy and connects it with empathy.
The Order of Nine Angles
The acausal also appears in the cosmology of the Order of Nine Angles (ONA or O9A). In this setting it is associated with the Dark Gods and with forces believed to enter the ordinary world through nexions. ONA writings connect the opening of these channels with magical practice and the transformation of civilisations. Shanon Shah’s account in the Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements places these beliefs within the movement’s expectation of a future civilisation extending beyond Earth.
This occult use has a political context. In their study of ONA texts, Shanon Shah, Jane Cooper, and Suzanne Newcombe examine how its cosmology combines with esoteric Nazism and, in some writings, the justification of criminality and violence.
The relationship between Myatt and Anton Long, the principal author associated with the ONA, remains disputed. Shah, Cooper, and Newcombe find textual grounds for identifying Long with Myatt, while recording Myatt’s denial and declining to make a definitive identification.
Scientific status
Myatt acknowledged in his 2010 account that no experimental observations verified acausal energy. His proposed continuum remained speculative.
That essay also incorrectly claims that living beings do not obey the second law of thermodynamics. Organisms are open systems: they exchange matter and energy with their surroundings. They maintain their internal organisation by using energy, with an accompanying increase in the entropy of their surroundings. Their growth therefore presents no contradiction of the second law.
Movement likewise involves physical processes. Cells use chemical energy, including energy made available through ATP, to power activities such as muscle contraction and the beating of cilia or flagella. The growth and movement of organisms therefore do not establish the need for a separate acausal energy.