The surprisingly young crowd, composed of ex-hippies, goths, hipsters, and Process veterans, was rapt as Genesis led the service and the youthful band-a talented acid-folk combo fronted by two female singers (Jex Thoth and Sophie Gontier) and a striking male falsetto (Lichens’s Robert Lowe)-performed Process “hymns” with high sincerity.Īfter the service, Parfrey ascended the stage, described his past research into the Process, and showed a fragment of a film in progress about the Church by Skinny Puppy member William Morrison. (née Mr.) P-Orridge, Process magazine designer Timothy Wyllie, and the Sabbath Assembly Band, the first half of the sold-out evening was a reverent re-creation of a Process service, with prayers, songs, chants, declarations, convocations, prophecies, etc. Hosted by Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey, who first heard of the Process while researching his book Apocalypse Culture, and “starring” Ms. So what the hell was I doing at Anthology Film Archives on a Sunday night for a Processean “Sabbath Assembly Ritual and Salon” in 2009? Well, partly to see what all the fuss was about back in the day and partly because the magazine was a fascinating high-water mark of DIY publishing. Left: Process magazine designer Timothy Wyllie. Routinely condemned as diabolical Satanists, blamed for the Manson Family and the Son of Sam, and assumed to have high-level connections to the intelligence community, the Process Church also had a formative influence on Funkadelic’s George Clinton (who reproduced DeGrimston’s writings inside his band’s album covers) and Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV ringleader Genesis P-Orridge. The Process Church regularly published a truly bizarre, groundbreaking magazine-full of lurid, hand-cut four-color collage graphics and baffling yet seductive apocalypse-theology writings by DeGrimston-with blunt issue titles like “Sex,” “Fear,” “Love,” and “Death.” Church members would sell the magazines in the street dressed in full-length black robes bearing the Process logo, originally four thick lines inside a circle intersecting to form a small square at the center, later the same pattern composed of four trumpet bells. (It’s likely that the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request and “Sympathy for the Devil” were inspired by Jagger’s flirtation with the Process.) As with any successful cult or totalitarian state, aesthetics were key to their appeal. Returning to England, the Processeans (named after their “processing” of one another during their encounter-group days) quickly attracted the attention of the hipoisie of Swinging London, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull most famously. By 1966, the tightly knit group began to believe they were in touch with “Higher Beings” and decamped to an abandoned salt mine in Xtul, Mexico, where the last-minute diversion of a powerful hurricane confirmed to the couple’s followers that they were indeed connected to divine forces. Less known is a far smaller rogue offshoot of Scientology that exerted disproportionate influence on late-1960s and early-’70s bohemian culture in London, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and other epicenters of radical chic: the Process Church of the Final Judgment, or, simply, the Process.įormed in 1963 in London by two disenchanted Scientologists-Mary Ann MacLean, a former call girl from Glasgow, and Robert DeGrimston, a well-educated Englishman of more noble birth-the group made unauthorized use of Hubbard’s “E-meter” to identify and exorcise compulsions and complexes. Ron Hubbard once bragged to his friends that he was going to start a religion and make a million dollars.
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