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The Process / Process Church / Processeans

Ali_Strachan

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
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Regarding The Process [FT134:34-39], Robert and Mary Ann DeGrimston seem to have become the subject of urban myth-like sightings, judging by a letter from Opal and Jimmi Rocket to Nox ("The magazine of the Abyss"), no.7, Jan 1990. (The editor of Nox was Stephen Sennitt, who had then just self-published his book The Process, an unacknowledged source for Gary Lachman, maybe?).

The Rockets claim to have spotted the same mysterious couple, whom they later identified as the DeGrimstons, in 1969, 1977 and 1984 at different locations in the US and Canada - on a ferry, on a train, by a lake - and also as the lead actors in Raiders of the Living Dead, a 1982 Canadian film. They describe Robert DeGrimston in 1984 as "Six foot three, short wavy light brown hair with black roots, no beard, with dimples in the cheeks and fortyish" - apparently not having aged significantly since 1969!

Naturally, they do not account for the fact that the couple had separated 10 years previously, and the whole - very weird and telepathic - scenario says more about the Rockets’ state of mind than anything else. But I wonder if anyone knows of other such "sightings"?

Richard Warren
[email protected]
 
I just checked out that 'Raiders of the Living Dead' movie (the one that's supposed to have the deGrimstons in it) - almost the entire cast was also in 'Hells Angels on Wheel'. How weird is that?

Joe McNally
 
... have you all ever heard of the Process Church of the Final Judgement? (i bet you have, since this is an FT Message Board! :) ) that organization was begun in the 1950s by two folks who split away from the Scientologists. but therein lies another tale! ...
 
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This reminds me of what I read in a sociologist's book about the Process Church of the Final Judgement.

(It was either Rodney Stark who wrote it, or that other guy who does new religious movements, you know, the one whose name begins with a "B" -- the hard drive in my head is corrupted, and my memory is gone).

WHOEVER it was who wrote the book had studied the Process Church (with their knowledge) in the late 1960s--early 1970s. He had a diagram of the way their street proselytisers dressed BEFORE the Manson Family murdered Sharon Tate and friends, and the La Biancas, and a diagram of how they dressed AFTER.

BEFORE they dressed in monk-like robes with hoods pulled up over their heads. They looked scary.

AFTER they wore ordinary clothes, and went out in groups of 2, a guy and a woman. They had open neck safari shirts with a big cross pinned to each collar.

I thought of that because the symbol of the "Volunteer Ministers" looks like a badge to me.

HOURS LATER, HE RETURNS TO EDIT POST:

the book I referred to above was by the sociologist whose name begins with a B: W.S. Bainbridge. Here's the info about it:

W. S. Bainbridge "Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult", University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, (1978).
 
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Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist, started a branch of Aleister Crowley’s satanic religion called Thelema based in Pasadena, California. He later changed his name to Belarian Armiluss Al Dajjaj Antichrist, and pledged himself to fulfil the work of the Beast 666. An earlier attempt, in March 1946, was to try to call down the biblical Whore of Babylon into the womb of a living woman by a combination of strenuous copulation and incantation for three days. The female was a member of Ordo Templi Orientis. Keeping detailed records of Parsons unsuccessful black magic ritual was friend and scribe Lafayette Ron Hubbard. Four years later Hubbard lay the foundations for his own religion, Scientology, by publishing Dianetics. Scientology later spawned the DeGrimstons, a British couple who were to establish the overtly satanic Process Church of the Final Judgement that took root in the counterculture of the early 1960s. It was founded by Robert Moore and Mary Anne MacLean, who were later to rename themselves the DeGrimstons. According to Process literature, they worshipped a trinity of Jehovah, Lucifer and Satan. The rôle of Satan as executioner was further expressed in the following utterance by the church: “My prophecy upon this wasted earth and upon corrupt creation that squats upon its ruined surface is: THOU SHALT KILL!” The Process venerated Adolf Hitler and their chosen symbol was four Ps conjoined in a derivative of the swastika. The Process Church, predating the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set, emerged from the cult of Scientology.
 
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... In The Satanic Bible, LaVey proclaimed that he was seeking to “not advance things in print which make my position untenable” lest he find himself behind bars, and further stated that his followers were to commit human sacrifices by proxy:

“We perform human sacrifices, by proxy you might say—the destruction of human beings who would, let’s say, create an antagonistic situation toward us—in the form of curse and hexes, not in actual blood rituals because certainly the destruction of a human being physically is illegal.”

Note that the only reason LaVey concedes that he is not publicly advocating actual physical human sacrifice is because it is against the law, implying that if they could get away with it they would do it. In fact, LaVey takes credit for the deaths of Jayne Mansfield and her boy friend and lawyer Sam Brody, stating that it was the result of a ritual curse on Brody, and Mansfield happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. LaVey also believes that he was responsible for the Manson family murders. Manson was heavily influenced by the satanic cult known as the Process Church of the Final Judgement. The Process also acknowledged that Satan is a real entity. Their particular twisted spin in an effort to get unwitting recruits was not to pretend Satan was not a true entity but to claim that Satan was actually a Jesus loving Devil. The Process claimed that they, Jesus and Satan had reconciled and that all would work out well in the end for everyone including Satanists, because Jesus had supposedly forgiven the Devil. Ridiculous as this spin was it proved successful in garnering more than a few recruits. The bodies have piled up and the idea that Satanism is not behind the death of countless multitudes of innocent people is a lie only believed by the incredibly naîve. Manson, who was a confessed Satanist, was responsible of up to thirty-five murders if the admissions of some of his former followers are to believed. Charles Manson, whom Marilyn Manson cites as one of his pre-eminent inspirations and a brilliant philosopher, has stated, “Jesus Christ is for real and so is that other guy [ie Satan].” Charles Manson knows that Satan, whom he serves, is a real entity and has been more candid than has his follower Marilyn Manson. Son of Sam, who was part of a Process coven made up of twenty-two Satanists and connected to several other satanic covens, also murdered several people at the direction of the coven. Richard Ramirez, who followed The Satanic Bible and met with Anton LaVey before his satanic killing spree, killed twenty people. Ramirez even went so far as to torture his victims and made some “swear to Satan.” ...
 
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The Process was my first thought too, never heard it described quite that way before but I can't think of anything else more similar.
 
An interesting group if I remember rightly, read an interesting article about them someplace, with a load of reproductions from the magazine (don't think it was FT). All very new age etc. in the beginning but went decidely wacko in the 70s.

I'd advise your friend, Goldstien, not to get involved with them as they're definately cultists and use Scientology brain washing techniques. CoS are bad enough, but at least they don't believe in Satan :eek!!!!:

Now if it had been Zoroastrianism, I wouldn't complain ;)

The big Z thought that there were two forces in the universe, one corporeal and good the other with no form, but evil. Kind of similar, but actually it was a metaphysical construct to explain our internal battles - at leat that's the modern interpretation, practising Farsis don't believe anything of the sort, most of them think it's an actual god they're praying to in the fire, which I don't believe it ever was meant to be, but hey, what do i Know?
 
IS what you are thinking about the Process Church of the Final Judgement?
disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id275/pg1/
Link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090409202437/http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id275/pg1/

See later post for an excerpt from this webpage.
Here's the main posting from the MIA webpage. The webpage also includes a number of relevant links as of 2009.
the process church of the final judgment
by Nick Mamatas - July 28, 2002

The Process Church of Tthe Final Judgment holds a special place in occult lore. Supposedly borne of disaffected Scientologists and later accused of being the inspiration for both the Manson family and the Son Of Sam shootings, the Church faded from view in the 1970s. Now however it is back where it belongs, on the World Wide Web alongside every other crazy religion.
The Process Church combined community activism with a peculiar set of beliefs: Jehovah, Christ, Satan and Lucifer were not enemies, but all equal parts of Creation. These four personalities were all venerated, though only the 'good guys' were truly worshipped at first. Like many cults that formed in the late 1960s, the Processeans depended on both youthful enthusiasm and cultish practices of separation, unquestioned beliefs that they were the chosen ones, and an apocalyptic worldview. The Church's use of Scientology 'techniques' in order to determine the subconscious drives of members (drives personified by the four archetypes), and its misuse of Alfred Adler's view of the subconscious, helped keep members in line while 'The Teacher' Robert DeGrimston and 'The Oracle' Mary Anne Maclean waited for the end of the world. The world didn't end, but the 1960s did, with the Manson murders. Manson was originally associated with the Process by several writers (he contributed a meditation on Death to a Process newsletter), most notably in The Family: The Manson Group And Its Aftermath (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971), a book about Manson written by Ed Sanders, and now available in a revised form as The Family: The Story Of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (New York: Panther, 1973).

By the early 1970s, the group was beginning to collapse in on itself. DeGrimston's increasing fascination with group sex, a neo-military social hierarchy and the increasing importance of Satan in his writings, alienated many unsuspecting Processeans, and Satan really made fundraising difficult as well. Predictably, it was DeGrimston's exploration of Satanic/Luciferian archetypes which attracted the most interest from critics, although Processean philosophy was closer to the Jesus Freak phenomena than neo-religious Satanic institutions like the Church of Satan or Temple of Set. The best scholarly study of this period is Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult by William Sims Bainbridge (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1978).

DeGrimston was ousted and a new group arose from the ashes. The Founders kept going until the late 1970s, but were little more than a newsletter. The David Berkowitz slayings of 1977 didn't help the splinter group, as both the Process and a supposed Satanic fringe group were implicated in the murders. This worldview was widely promoted by Maury Terry's The Ultimate Evil: The Truth About the Cult Murders: Son of Sam & Beyond (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1999), a sensationalistic book written at the height of the Satanic Ritual Abuse rumour panic in 1987, and later released in a revised edition. Terry was succesfully sued by the Solar Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) for being erroneously linked to David Berkowitz and Charles Manson.

There is no evidence that The Process had anything to do with David Berkowitz or the Son Of Sam murders, outside of Berkowitz's own confused and contradictory testimony.

Today, the Church is back, as the largely secular Society Of Processeans. Interest in the group has been bouyed by magician Genesis P-Orridge's sampling of DeGrimston in the Psychic TV classic track 'Smile", which enabled Processean aesthetics to subtly infiltrate the Industrial subculture. The Society Of Processeans group is secular (having swept Satan under the rug), but still quotes DeGrimston liberally. Their projects include Safe Houses for battered women and Retrieval Networks which solicit donations from official nonprofits. This may sound good at first, but some hallmarks of a cult are isolating vulnerable people from the world at large, and depending on the "comfort of strangers."
 
This 2015 disinfo.com article claims the Process Church is still active, and it includes an interview with a Processean about the group's (then-) current activities.
The Process Church of the Final Judgment Lives On
by Brian Whitney on July 20, 2015

A church that, in theory, worships Jesus and Satan equally, was tied to Charles Manson, and has a symbol that looks more than a tad bit like a swastika is bound to get a little attention. And it did. ...

For a while, the Process Church rose high, but then it had a rather hard fall. In Ed Sanders’ book The Family, Sanders basically attempted to link the Church to everything evil that had ever happened, namely that they mentored Manson and used the swastika as a symbol.

Soon the Process Church faded away as did DeGrimston. Although it didn’t.

I spoke to Mike Scott, a member of the Process Church of Final Judgment and whose band Lay it on the Line is inspired by the church, about what is happening with the Final Judgment today. ...
SALVAGED FROM THE WAYBACK MACHINE:
https://web.archive.org/web/2016010.../2015/07/process-church-final-judgment-lives/
 
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