Process Church of the Final Judgment
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The Process Church of the Final Judgment, commonly known as the Process Church, was a religious group established in London in 1966. Its founders were the British couple Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston and it spread across parts of the United Kingdom and United States during the latter 1960s and 1970s.
The Process Church was established by MacLean and de Grimston in London in 1966. The pair had met several years previously, when they were both members of the Church of Scientology. The duo were ejected from the Church in 1962 and married the following year. They started a Scientology splinter group called Compulsions Analysis, which gained new religious elements and developed into the Process Church. Its members initially lived in a commune in Mayfair before moving to Xtul in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. They later established a base of operations in the United States in New Orleans. Prosecutors investigating the Los Angeles murders committed by the Manson Family in 1969 suggested that there were links between Charles Manson and the Process Church. Although no proof of such a connection was ever provided, the allegations damaged the Church's reputation.
In the early 1970s, the sociologist William Sims Bainbridge studied the group, producing an in-depth account of its activities. In 1974, MacLean and de Grimston separated. The latter tried to continue the group with a small following, but this folded in 1979. MacLean retained the allegiance of the majority of Church members, reforming the group as the Foundation Church of the Millennium and taking it into an explicitly Christian direction. It was later transformed into the Best Friends Animal Society, based in Kanab, Utah.
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Definition
Various commentators have described the Process Church as a religion,Template:Sfnm and it has also been characterised as a new religious movement.Template:Sfn There has been some debate as to whether to categorise the Process Church as a form of Satanism or not; the anthropologist Jean La Fontaine noted that it was "difficult to decide whether it was a truly Satanist organization".Template:Sfn The sociologist of religion Massimo Introvigne included the group in his study of religious Satanism, although added that "its doctrine was not Satanism in the more classical sense of the term".Template:Sfn He distinguished it from other religious Satanic groups in that it did not have its origins in Anton LaVey's California-based Church of Satan,Template:Sfn and thus was "born on a different field from other contemporary satanic groups."Template:Sfn
History
Foundation: 1963–1966
The Process Church of the Final Judgement was the creation of Mary Ann MacLean (1931–2005) and Robert De Grimston Moor (b.1935).Template:Sfn Born in Shanghai, Moore had served in the British Household Cavalry from 1954 to 1958.Template:Sfn MacLean was British but had spent a year in the United States.Template:Sfn She later claimed that she had had a relationship with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, although Robinson's son later refuted this.Template:Sfn Back in England, from 1959 she worked as a high-end prostitute in London, servicing prominent figures in British business and politics.Template:Sfn Both Moore and MacLean independently involved themselves with the London branch of the Church of Scientology, and it was here that they met.Template:Sfnm MacLean worked as an auditor for the Church, although neither became senior figures within the organisation.Template:Sfn In 1962, they were both declared "suppressive persons" and expelled from the Church.Template:Sfn In 1963, the couple married.Template:Sfn
Together they set up Compulsions Analysis, a group which utilised both the organisational methods of Scientology and the ideas of the psychologist Alfred Adler.Template:Sfn In establishing this company, they were financially assisted by a lawyer friend.Template:Sfn Moore distinguished the methods of Compulsions Analysis from Scientology in that it did not claim that its benefits were "infinite", stating that "we are not offering super powers, but a means that people can live on this side more effectively".Template:Sfn In 1966, the regular clients of Compulsions Analysis formed into a new group, The Process, which took on an increasingly religious character.Template:Sfn In March 1966, twenty-five members of the Process moved into a commune at 2 Balfour Place in Mayfair, an affluent area in the West End of London.Template:Sfn In May, the group left London and relocated to a remote area.Template:Sfn On 23 June, around 30 Church members—accompanied by their six Alsatian dogs—moved to Nassau in the Bahamas.Template:Sfn From there, they spent the rest of the summer seeking a more permanent location.Template:Sfn
In September 1966, the group members moved to Mexico City. They obtained an old bus and began driving across the Yucatan Peninsula for a place to settle.Template:Sfn They found a location known as Xtul; its name meant "the end" in the Mayan language, and the group took this as a portent that they should settle there.Template:Sfn They set about establishing a community, although would only remain there for a month. They faced opposition from both locals and from the parents of several Church members, who enlisted anti-cult groups to try and recuperate their children through legal means.Template:Sfn It was while there that the group clarified its hierarchical structure, with the De Grimstons at the top, who were referred to as "the Omega", followed by those regarded as masters, then priests, then prophets, and finally "messengers".Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In late September, a tropical hurricane devastated their settlement, and while some of them elected to stay, the De Grimstons and most of their followers decided to leave.Template:Sfn The Yucatan experience remained an important part of the Process Church's own mythology.Template:Sfn After that point, there would be a crucial division within the group between those who had gone through the Xtul experience and those who did not.Template:Sfn
Establishing a presence in the United States: 1966–1973
By November 1966, most of the Process members were back in London.Template:Sfn Between the end of that year and 1967, the Process began to operate as a church.Template:Sfn It became increasingly evangelical and focused on attracting new members.Template:Sfn It opened a library and an all-night coffee shop known as Satan's Cavern.Template:Sfn It also began issuing a magazine, at first titled The Common Market and later renamed The Process.Template:Sfn The Church's activities attracted the interest of a number of celebrities active in the realms of music and cinema, among them Marianne Faithfull.Template:Sfn
In 1967 and 1968, the De Grimstones made various further international travels, spending time in East Asia, the United States, Germany and Italy; in the latter they visited the ruins of Thelema Abbey on Cefalu, the commune established in the 1920s by British occultist Aleister Crowley.Template:Sfn From late 1968 onward, they began spending most of their time in the United States.Template:Sfn The Church opened chapters in many U.S. cities, the first of which was in New Orleans, where the remaining members of the Xtul colony settled.Template:Sfn Several European chapters followed, in Munich, Rome, and London.Template:Sfn In the early 1970s it opened its largest chapter, in Toronto, Canada.Template:Sfn Introvigne thought that at its maximum capacity, the Process Church had "a few hundred active members."Template:Sfn
San Francisco and the Charles Manson Murders
During its existence, the Process Church attracted much publicity.Template:Sfn In urban myth, the Process Church came to be associated with ritual murders, although no evidence of any such connection was ever forthcoming.Template:Sfn Rumours spread that a number of Alsatians had been sacrificed around San Francisco, with these actions sometimes being associated with the Process Church, which kept Alsatians as pets. Nothing was ever proved that substantiated any of these rumours.Template:Sfnm Baddeley later related that the Process Church "has become legendary, both in the annals of hippie history and Satanic lore".Template:Sfn
Police investigating the Tate-LaBianca Murders which were carried out by members of the Manson Family suspected a possible connection between the Family's leader Charles Manson and the Process Church. When they asked Manson if he knew Moore, he responded: "You're looking at him. Moore and I are one and the same".Template:Sfn Two members of the Church subsequently visited the district attorney to stress that the group had nothing to do with Manson or his Family.Template:Sfn The Church then included a brief article on Manson in the 1971 Death issue of its magazine, in which it included a short essay by Manson himself next to another by the Roman Catholic writer Malcolm Muggeridge.Template:Sfnm The inclusion of Manson's piece—gained by interviewing him in prison—was, according to Introvigne, because the De Grimstons "probably wanted to take advantage of the strange popularity the criminal was enjoying in some youth groups."Template:Sfn
Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor of the Manson trial, later suggested in his book Helter Skelter that Manson may have borrowed philosophically from the Process Church.Template:Sfn Introvigne suggested that while Manson had never been a member of the Process Church, he likely knew about it given his base in Haight Ashbury.Template:Sfn Although no connection between the Process Church and Manson was ever substantiated, the group's reputation was damaged by the association.Template:Sfn The number of donations received began to decline and Church members sometimes received abuse in public.Template:Sfn To shift the group's image, its leaders played down their image of black garments and Alsatians and presented a softer interpretation of their four divinities doctrine to limit the Satanic elements.Template:Sfn
In his 1972 book The Family, Ed Sanders alleged that Manson had been a member of the Process Church, as evidence citing the fact that Manson once lived in the same road as the Church's San Francisco location.Template:Sfnm That year, the Church took legal action against Sanders and his U.S. publisher E. P. Dutton in the District Court of Chicago; the allegation was subsequently retracted from future printings of The Family.Template:Sfnm It also brought legal action with the book's British publisher, although in a British court, the publisher won the case.Template:Sfn By the late 1970s—when the Church itself had disbanded—it was common for anti-Satanist literature to allege that Manson was a member of the group and that both were linked to blood sacrifices.Template:Sfn In his 1974 book America Bewitched, the journalist Daniel Logan cited the Process Church alongside Manson, the Church of Satan, and the British occultist Aleister Crowley.Template:Sfn The journalist Maury Terry—whom Baddeley described as "a sensationalist reporter with a nose for good scare stories"Template:Sfn—linked the Process Church to the Ordo Templi Orientis and claimed both as part of a grand Satanic conspiracy in his 1987 book The Ultimate Evil.Template:Sfnm Claims about the Process Church being linked to a vast Satanic conspiracy and wide range of crimes were also endorsed by members of the LaRouche movement.Template:Sfn
A detailed account of the history of and life within the Process Church as told by a participant-observer is contained in William S. Bainbridge's book Satan's Power. A sociologist, Bainbridge encountered the Process Church in 1970, while he was studying Scientology.Template:Sfn Bainbridge had conducted several months of fieldwork with the group during the early 1970s, particularly in its Boston branch.Template:Sfn His observation took place largely in 1970–71, when he was an active group member, but became episodic between 1972 and 1974.Template:Sfn In his book, he disguised the names of people to preserve their identities.Template:Sfn Adam Parfrey noted that Bainbridge provided a "more even-handed view" of the Church than that provided by the likes of Sanders and Terry.Template:Sfn Bainbridge's study was later described as "the main source of information" about the group by La Fontaine.Template:Sfn
Breakdown
The relationship between the De Grimstons grew strained; Robert had begun a relationship with a younger woman, Morgana, who later became his third wife.Template:Sfn They also disagreed on the direction of the Process Church; MacLean believed that they should declare the "Satanic" phase to be over, to be replaced by a "Christian" phase, although Robert disagreed.Template:Sfn In 1974, the De Grimstons separated.Template:Sfn Robert took a minority of the group members with him, seeking to continue the Process Church in a manner akin to his original form, although abandoned the project in 1979, when he moved professionally into business.Template:Sfn
Most of the Church's members retained their allegiance to MacLean.Template:Sfn She renamed the Church as the Foundation Church of the Millennium, which in 1977 became the Foundation Faith of the Millennium, and in 1980 the Foundation Faith of God; followers generally referred to it simple as "The Foundation."Template:Sfn The group defined itself as "a Christian church" which required its members to believe in the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus Christ, and his second coming.Template:Sfn It also promoted a healing ministry which was influenced by Pentecostalism.Template:Sfn Like the Process Church, membership was organised according to a hierarchical system of degrees, and it was led by a nine-member Council of Luminaries.Template:Sfn MacLean's principal collaborator in the group was longstanding Church member Timothy Wyllie. In 1977, he founded a group in New York City called the Unit, which he regarded as being part of the Foundation. MacLean disagreed with this move and sued Wyllie, although she lost. The Unit soon disbanded.Template:Sfn Wyllie then pursued an independent career in the New Age milieu, with a focus on communicating with extraterrestrials, angels, and dolphins.Template:Sfn
In 1982, the Foundation Faith of God moved its base to Utah, where it established an animal rescue refuge in Kanab.Template:Sfn In 1993, the organisation changed its name to Best Friends Animal Society; it removed all reference to religious ideas from its statutes.Template:Sfn In 2004, a feature article in Rocky Mountain News publicly revealed Best Friends' origins in the Process Church.Template:Sfn In 2005, MacLean died, and the management of her charity was left to her second husband, Gabriel De Peyer, a former Foundation Faith of God Church member.Template:Sfn
Teachings and activities
In the initial phase of the group's beliefs, Moore and MacLean taught that there was only one supreme divinity, God, and the focus of the group's activities was to transform those aspects of human nature which defied God.Template:Sfn Many of the group's therapeutic practices or "processes" (hence the name) and concepts were derived from Scientology, including the term "processing."Template:Sfn In these therapy sessions, the group utilised an electronic meter titled the "P-Scope", which was based on the Scientology E-meter.Template:Sfn
In 1967, Moore introduced the notion of four divinities to the group's beliefs.Template:Sfn MacLean and Moore were influenced by Jungian psychology, in particular Carl Jung's interpretation of the Christian Trinity.Template:Sfn Jung had argued the Trinity concealed a fourth element, hidden in the human subconscious, which was the Devil. He believed that omitting this fourth component of the "Quaternity" resulted in psychological unbalance.Template:Sfn
In his study of Satanism, Gareth Medway described the Process Church's beliefs as "a kind of neo-Gnostic theology".Template:Sfn The Process Church preached the existence of four gods, who were regarded not as literal entities but as inner realities existing within each human personality.Template:Sfn Accordingly, these deities were not worshipped.Template:Sfn The names of its deities were drawn from traditional Judeo-Christian religion.Template:Sfn They were known as Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan, and Christ, and were collectively referred to as the "Great Gods of the Universe."Template:Sfn
The Church stated that "Jehovah is strength. Lucifer is light. Satan is separation. Christ is unification."Template:Sfn Each member was instructed to follow the god, or gods, which were best suited to them.Template:Sfn Each individual was understood as a combination of two of these gods.Template:Sfn The Church taught that an individual's personality and relationships could be explained by reference to which gods they manifested.Template:Sfn Moore for instance described himself as a blend of Luciferian and Christian traits, while MacLean regarded herself as a combination of Jehovan and Satanic traits.Template:Sfn None of the deities were considered evil, but "basic patterns of human reality."Template:Sfn Moore taught the real "devil" was humanity or the "Grey Forces", which were understood as representing the compromise and conformity typical of the masses.Template:Sfn
As indicated by the group's name, The Process Church of The Final Judgment, the Church taught a form of millennialism.Template:Sfn According to Process eschatology, the four separate divinities would be unified in the endtimes.Template:Sfn The reconciliation of opposites was seen by Moore in Matthew 5:44, where Christ tells his followers to love their enemies.Template:Sfn Moore taught Christ's enemy was Satan, and the "reuniting of the Gods" was achieved through love.Template:Sfn
The communal life of the Church members was strictly regulated.Template:Sfn Among group members, sex and the use of drugs and alcohol were strictly rationed, with these practices being regarded as a distraction from spiritual work.Template:Sfn Unlike other Satanic groups active during the same period, the Process Church did not practice magic.Template:Sfn The Process Church strongly opposed vivisection.Template:Sfn
The Church held public rituals similar to Christian practices, such as baptisms, marriages and a weekly gathering titled the Sabbath Assembly.Template:Sfn Baptisms were performed at every elevation of status in the hierarchy of the Church.Template:Sfn The Processeans sang solemn hymns to the four deities during the assemblies.Template:Sfn
The group used a swastika-like symbol ("the P-Sign") as its insignia.Template:Sfn The symbol had four superimposed P letters, and was also seen as representing the trumpets of the four "Great Gods."Template:Sfn The group also used a second symbol, "the Sign of the Union", which featured the letter Alpha inside the letter Omega, representing the intercourse of male Lucifer with female Jehovah.Template:Sfn
Influence
[[File:Psychictv-cologne-2004.jpg|thumb|right|Among the musicians and occultists to have been influenced by the Process Church have been Genesis P-Orridge and the Psychic TV band (pictured)]]
In 1989 and 1990, several former members of the Church attempted to recreate it in Round Lake, New York.Template:Sfn There were also reports of a revival group being based in Yorkshire, England.Template:Sfn
Funkadelic included an excerpt from the group's "Process Number Five on Fear" in the liner notes for their seminal album "Maggot Brain."
In 2009, Adam Parfrey noted that the original Process Church "enjoys cultural influence."
