In Art Forum, our pal Andrew Hultkrans wrote about a Process Church event held in New York. Several former members of the strange and defunct religion were in attendance, as were our friends, Feral House book publishers Adam Parfrey and Jodi Wille, who have a book about the history of the Process Church, called Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment.
Andrew’s article includes a nice brief history of the creepy organization:
Formed 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. 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.
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. (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. 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.”
A Processean “Sabbath Assembly Ritual and Salon”