Post by Admin Horan on Dec 16, 2019 12:19:04 GMT -6
Was it a new religion? A Doomsday cult? A Satanic Thrill Kill club? A pyramid scheme? A pathetic ripoff of Scientology and Crowleyism? In fact, The Process was/is all of these things.
British Scientology pigeons/graduates Robert Moore and Mary Ann MacLean married each other, changed their names to DeGrimston, and started spreading the Gospel of yet another Doomsday sex/death cult. DeGrimston mainly proselytized among two main groups of people: Lost hippies, and existing members of several other cults: The Rosicrucians, The OTO, the Theosophists, LaVey's Satanists, and the far less well known but far more insidious disciples of Idries Shah’s Sufism.
Plagiarizing heavily from some of history’s most successful money-making cults, DeGrimston’s sales pitch for his new “church” can be summarized as follows: If you’re a pathetic loser, it’s not your fault. The real problem is, you are a supernatural being who doesn’t realize that there is a cosmic conspiracy actively holding you back, denying you your opportunity to really shine as the omnipotent, omniscient Master of Your Own Eternal Destiny, blah, blah, blah. But unlike Scientology, which helps sociopaths achieve “self-actualization” Here and Now, DeGrimston preached that first must come the End of the World as We Know It, and THEN his disciples will take power as the ruling Elite of the New blah, blah, blah.
Gnosticism
The first primary element in DeGrimston’s grab bag of Occult mumbo-jumbo is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, all religions are really just a “doorway,” a first step, into the One True Religion. For example, the three “entrances” into Freemasonry are Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It doesn’t matter which one you belong to first, but you must belong to one of them in order to get in. The first “mystery” you learn is that all three of the Abrahamic religions are just three facets of the same crystal. And then one is ready to learn the Higher Knowledge, in order to free oneself from mundane existence on this drab plain of...And so on. If you think that sounds a lot like Buddhism, you’re right. Ancient Gnosticism “revealed” that Satan/Lucifer, Astarte, Set, Yahweh, Beezlebub, you name it, were ALL minor deities serving the purposes of the Great One, etc, etc, etc. It also taught something that Freemasonry no longer emphasizes—that “humans” in this world are really of two types: inferior ape-men destined to serve the Angelic Beings, and lost angelic beings seduced by the pleasures of the flesh and who have forgotten their true identity and are in danger of being trapped in this “hell” of a prison until it’s too late. And by too late, Gnosticism teaches that the Day of Judgment is coming, and any Angelic Beings who don’t snap out of it and get right with the Great One, will be doomed to spend ALL ETERNITY in this (or some other) hell. Etc, etc, etc.
How does one know that one is a lost Angelic Being, and not just another ape-man slave? There are tests. Basically, they are IQ tests. If you pass the tests, you are a lost Angelic Being who can, not to mention NEED, to begin reeducating yourself in the ways of Angelic Beings who’d better get right with the Great One before it’s too late. These lessons are provided by the guru/magickian/priest/whatever--for a fee. Of course, there’s a fee. An increasing scale of fees. It’s pretty much like the Draw Me “tests” to get into mail-order Art “Schools.”
One famous example of an ancient Gnostic text is the Christian Bible’s Apocalypsos (“revelation”) of John. In this book, the world is presented in Allegory and Metaphor (two mind-blowing concepts of the Hellenistic world) with a dire warning: The End is at Hand! The allegories of doomsday in the book serve two purposes—1. They apply to all lands and all times. That is, the Book of Revelation is coming true ALL THE TIME. Every generation for the last two thousand years plus has read that book and realized: “Oh, my God! It’s coming true right now!” It’s like a Yahoo Daily Horoscope—it’s just vague enough you can never prove it wrong. 2. IF you “get it,” if you can “decode” the mumbo-jumbo in such a way that you DO “recognize” that the seven-headed, seven-crowned Beast is a metaphor for The Seven Sister Oil Companies or whatever, then THAT’S the test—and you passed! Congratulations! You’ve earned the right to pay money for further enlightenment! And you’d better hurry, because, as YOU yourself just proved, the End Is Near! In the Gospels, Jesus’s use of “parables,” with the admonition, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” are further examples of this “test.” In the Gospels, however, those followers too dense to “get it” are not excluded from Salvation. The “test” only distinguishes the qualified shepherds/leaders (literally, the “ecclesia”) from the flock of common sheep/believers.
In The Process Church of the Final Judgment, only those who complete the “process” (get it?) of enlightenment will be spared in the Final Judgment—which is coming real soon!
Mystery Religions
In a “mystery” cult, instead of “remembering” that one is an Angelic Being who has wandered off the path into carnal sin, one is born an ordinary, filthy, flea-bitten apeman, and BECOMES a “god” or demigod or angelic whatsit. In a mystery religion, a known god serves as a role model for the acolyte to imitate on the path to apotheosis. In ancient Egypt, Osiris/Horus was the role model for Pharoah to imitate along his path to godhood. In Mithraism, Mithra is the deified hero. In Christianity, saints were those who had relived Jesus’s martyrdom. The Last Supper might be read as a Mystery reenacted in churches today as communion. The Greek word “Christianos” literally means, “He who is like Christ” and the goal of Christianity is to become more Christ-like. To this day, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and other cults retain extensive elements of mystery-ism, although not always with the goal of literal apotheosis. Crowleyism (plagiarized from Theosophy, etc) is a good example of a modern mystery cult.
Unlike “gnosis,” which is something that the practitioner comes to “know,” a “mystery” is something that a person DOES. The initiate performs and experiences certain key events from the life of the hero-god, thereby transforming himself, just as the hero-god transformed himself. Mormonism is a modern religion that guides initiates toward a god-like state. A word that might describe this series of mysteries/rituals/experiences is, of course, “process.”
In the Process Church of the Final Judgment, initiates perform mysteries that have two goals: 1. The (more or less) apotheosis of the initiate, and 2. The hastening of the Judgment Day, so that we Superior Beings can get down to running the Cosmos ASAP. In his specific theology, DeGrimston “borrowed” heavily from Gnosticism, Crowleyism, Satanism, Sufism, and other moth-bitten hocus pocuses that were already experiencing revivals in the West by the end of the 19th Century.
In DeGrimston’s theology, God had been shattered into four distinct parts, much as a mirror can be shattered. In fact, DeGrimston’s Man, as the “image of God,” is an image shattered into four shards (sub-gods) of what was once the One Mirror (THE God:) Jehovah, Satan, Lucifer, and Christ. In order to reassemble the Mirror, or at least, reassemble oneself into a complete Image of God, one needed to perform various mysteries and learn various wisdoms that would integrate the four elements of---you get the point. For example, in order to "become" Adolf Hitler (the son of Satan,) one must relive key events in Hitler's life path. And so on. In order for the Final Judgment to take place, the One God would himself have to be reassembled from the four shards. How? Well, according to DeGrimston, it was Adam (and Eve’s) rebellion against the Will (“thelema.” Sound familiar?) of God that shattered God’s World and God himself. Not to mention Man. When the Body (membership) of the Church had achieved the necessary numbers of followers (pieces of the shattered Mirror) who had completed the Process of integrating within themselves Jehovah, Satan, Christ, and Lucifer into one coherent Image of God, then the Church itself would become God reassembled, triggering the Final Judgment. It was/is the Mission of the Process Church of the Final Judgment to bring about this reunification of Man/God, and to bring about the initial conditions for the Final Judgment.
Scientology
What, you thought Enlightenment was free? Graduates of the Newest and Best Pyramid Scam, Scientology, Robert and Mary Ann got the same idea that a lot of “cleared” suckers wake up and get: Hell, I could start my OWN horseshit pyramid scam, and get rich like Hubbard! Hubbard himself stole the idea from Crowley, who stole it from Blavatsky, who stole if from the Freemasons. You see, in gnostic mystery cults, paying is part of the cure.
But another element that DeGrimston ripped off from Scientology is, the sales appeal of telling people, “Go ahead and be bad!” Enabling people’s selfish desires is always profitable. Alcohol is the world’s number one selling drug, and the point of drinking alcohol is to inhibit one’s inhibitions. The problem with alcohol is, the hangover. Scientology offers converts the promise of guilt-free greed. For that matter, so do most TV “evangelists” like Pat Robertson and Joel Osteen. “Jesus was wrong! You CAN serve both God and Mammon!” But at least they don’t give converts permission to rape, murder, molest children, and traffic in narcotics. Scientology maintains a veneer of preaching “ethical” behavior in their teachings, but on every other page is the permission to step over “suppressive persons,” who are defined as anyone who gets in your way for any reason. In The Process, wallowing in one’s own animal (“satanic”) urges is a REQUIRED step in the “process” toward you-know-what. Ironically, the REQUIREMENT to behave Satanically actually put a damper on recruitment. It turns out most people don’t really want to hurt other people, even if they do like the idea of getting their particular jollies without interference from “lawgivers.” But it was the converts who DID like the idea of the Goodness of Being Bad that has made The Process Church of the Final Judgment a flock of evil-feathered birds of prey. If they still exist at all. But, whether the Church still exists or not, quite a few of their disciples ARE still running around loose, inflicting their “mysteries” on innocent and not-so-innocent bystanders.
Sufism
The Muslim/Iranian version of Gnosticism is usually called Sufism in the West. It’s also sometimes called Ismai’ism. The branch of Sufism (if there really ever was such a thing) that DeGrimston borrowed from was specifically headed by two Near Eastern “sufis” proselytizing in Britain in the early to mid 20th Century—an Armenian mystic named Georgi Gurdjieff, and the Father of Western Sufism, Idries Shah. DeGrimston learned much from the disciples of Gurdjieff and Shah, even stealing the word “Process” from Shah himself. Shah described American CIA/Langley Porter/Stanford University psychologist Robert Ornstein as “my deputy in America.” DeGrimston would successfully recruit Processans from among Ornstein’s victims down in the Haight, and from among his disciples up the hills at Stanford.
Crowley’s OTO (Ordo Templis Orientalis or some such pig “Latin.”)
Aleister Crowley is the most famous Westerner to fuse Freemasonry Gnosticism, Mystery Cults, Rosicrucian Alchemy, and Kundalini Yogic Sufism into “Thelemic Magick.” (Hubbard pretty much chucked out the sex magick, tossed in some basic Freud, and called the resulting dog’s breakfast “Dianetics.”) Far more important than Crowley are a handful of his disciples. These include Grady Louis McMurtry, Wilfred Talbot Smith, and Jack Parsons. And of course L Ron Hubbard. Crowley set himself up as a rival to Gurdjieff, and pretty much lost that contest. But the OTO lived on in San Francisco and Pasadena...
Freemasonry
The main influence of Freemasonry—the Grandaddy of all Mystical Mumbo-Jumbo Pyramid Scams—on The Process mostly came down to finding a mailing list of likely suckers. Like Scientology, the OTO, the Rosicrucians, and others, The Process sought new members from among the wider world of Masons. Masons tend to be the kind of narcissistic conspiracy theorists who are naturally attracted to Ubermensch cults like Thelema and The Process. Freemasonry generally upholds much higher standards of ethical and moral behavior by its members than Scientology, but again, there is often a gap between official teachings and individual behaviors. The main attraction for new cults is, Masons are good at keeping secrets, there are secret “orders” within the order, they believe the whole world is a conspiracy against them, they’re used to shelling out good money for mystical gobbledygook, and Masons like to think of themselves as smarter than other people—too smart to admit they’ve been fooled or ripped off. The perfect marks. Customers. Converts. Whatever.
The Children
In the early 1950s, following the explosive demise of her rocket scientist/Crowleyite husband, Jack Parsons, military intelligence artist and former L Ron Hubbard shill Marjorie Cameron Parsons retreated to the remote Mexican mystical mecca of San Miguel. There, she attempted, via blood rituals, to astral-project herself onto the Ethereal Plane to contact Jack. Maybe she did; maybe she didn’t; but she DID consume a TRUCKLOAD of peyote and ganja. Returning to Beaumont California, Cameron gathered about herself various Hollyweird friends and lovers of Jack, plus some black jazz musicians, initiating them into a new blood cult of mystery mumbo-jumbo she dubbed The Children. As in, children of Horus/Osiris. As in, acting as High Priestess Isis, she supervised the ritualistic interracial mating of members in an attempt to beget The Moonchild aka the Wormwood Star. Cameron herself participated, but with a history of (drug and alcohol-worsened) miscarriages, she did her best to recruit the healthiest (if not by today’s standards) mystical breeding stock, just to spread her bets. Between the bizarre sex magick and the massive doses of peyote and hashish, the end result was one confused love child and a bunch of illegal abortions. While there, Cameron prophesied that the imminent H-Bomb test on Eniwetok atoll would trigger The Big One in California, resulting in, among other things, Hollywood itself sliding into the abyss—that's right, Marjorie Cameron is responsible for that particular urban legend.
Some of the Magick mysteries acted out by the Pasadena OTO under Smith’s and Parson’s leadership can be seen in the Kenneth Anger Technicolor extravaganza, “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.” Anger would make another film, this time of the blood and sex magick rituals of the Pasadena OTO/Children, but that film, featuring ritualized orgies and human sacrifice, would be destroyed by the crew at the film processing lab, out of fear that they would end up in legal trouble for making pornography. Rumors about that “banned” and “lost” film would be the genesis of urban legends about “Hollyweird snuff films.” Many members of The Children were participants in the production of that film and other Anger projects, including, but not limited to, Cameron (Hubbard, OSS, Rocketdyne) herself, Joan Whitney(Ford Models, NYC and Paris,) Samson de Brier (waaayyyy more important than you think,) Renate Druks (artist and bisexual lover of Cameran and Anais Nin, among others) Curtis Harrington, and others. Several of whom show up as interesting figures in the Son of Sam, Manson Family, Process, and other cult-related murders. Anger’s later film, Lucifer Rising, features Anger’s live-in boy Bobby Beausoleil as “Lucifer.” Anger called Bobby “My Lucifer.” Perhaps as in, Jehovah, Satan, Christ, and Lucifer.
But it’s one particular belief of this little group that intrigues Son of Sam investigators—Jack told Marjorie that their pet German Sheperd dog, Freya, was her “Familiar,” the Other half of Marjorie’s spirit self, and only by an effective and careful ritual sacrifice of Freya could Marjorie hope to rejoin the two halves of her soul, thereby becoming a superhuman, self-empowered Thelemite. Blah, blah, blah.
And of course, over time, some Children went on to lead and inspire their own little groups of devoted sycophants...
The Process
In nutshell, this all ends up being cooked up into a pudding known as DeGrimston’s Process Theology: The True God was shattered into four minor gods: Jehovah, Satan, Lucifer, and Christ. For example, Hitler is worshipped as the Son of Satan, just as Jesus is worshipped as the Son of Jehovah. Or maybe Lucifer. DeGrimston and his wife sometimes changed their minds about certain points of dogma. In fact, Mary Ann eventially quit and opened an animal shelter. Anyway, it is the duty of Mankind to reintegrate the four shards of God in themselves (to become Images of God) by worshipping, in turn, the four minor gods. This is accomplished by first performing what amounts to a Scientological “self-auditing” in order to determine which god you’re closest to mirroring now. Once enough members of the Church have completed the Process of reintegrating the four gods within, then the One God Himself will finally be reintegrated. The Final Judgment will destroy the Existing Order, sort the Worthy from the Unworthy, and the Golden Age of blah, blah, blah...The details of the “process” are heavily plagiarized from Scientology and Crowley’s A:.A:.
What makes disciples of The Process dangerous is, the REQUIREMENT of worshipping Satan. That means, doing what the Son of Satan, Adolf Hitler did, Crowley did, Jack the Ripper did, blah, blah, blah. And the Church itself is supposed to consist of, at any given time, ¼ of the members going through their Jehovah phase, ¼ in the Christ phase, etc. Some branches of the Church settled on members pretty much staying forever in their current phase and calling that good enough. The point is, as a Satanist, a Processan is SUPPOSED to wallow in one’s own crapulance, indulging every filthy whim and murderous passion. This causes various problems for society at large. For example, the murder of Arlis Perry in Stanford Memorial Church.
Oh, and EVERY Processan is supposed to be destroying the World—as the first stage in the Process of bringing on the Judgment Day.
British Scientology pigeons/graduates Robert Moore and Mary Ann MacLean married each other, changed their names to DeGrimston, and started spreading the Gospel of yet another Doomsday sex/death cult. DeGrimston mainly proselytized among two main groups of people: Lost hippies, and existing members of several other cults: The Rosicrucians, The OTO, the Theosophists, LaVey's Satanists, and the far less well known but far more insidious disciples of Idries Shah’s Sufism.
Plagiarizing heavily from some of history’s most successful money-making cults, DeGrimston’s sales pitch for his new “church” can be summarized as follows: If you’re a pathetic loser, it’s not your fault. The real problem is, you are a supernatural being who doesn’t realize that there is a cosmic conspiracy actively holding you back, denying you your opportunity to really shine as the omnipotent, omniscient Master of Your Own Eternal Destiny, blah, blah, blah. But unlike Scientology, which helps sociopaths achieve “self-actualization” Here and Now, DeGrimston preached that first must come the End of the World as We Know It, and THEN his disciples will take power as the ruling Elite of the New blah, blah, blah.
Gnosticism
The first primary element in DeGrimston’s grab bag of Occult mumbo-jumbo is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, all religions are really just a “doorway,” a first step, into the One True Religion. For example, the three “entrances” into Freemasonry are Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It doesn’t matter which one you belong to first, but you must belong to one of them in order to get in. The first “mystery” you learn is that all three of the Abrahamic religions are just three facets of the same crystal. And then one is ready to learn the Higher Knowledge, in order to free oneself from mundane existence on this drab plain of...And so on. If you think that sounds a lot like Buddhism, you’re right. Ancient Gnosticism “revealed” that Satan/Lucifer, Astarte, Set, Yahweh, Beezlebub, you name it, were ALL minor deities serving the purposes of the Great One, etc, etc, etc. It also taught something that Freemasonry no longer emphasizes—that “humans” in this world are really of two types: inferior ape-men destined to serve the Angelic Beings, and lost angelic beings seduced by the pleasures of the flesh and who have forgotten their true identity and are in danger of being trapped in this “hell” of a prison until it’s too late. And by too late, Gnosticism teaches that the Day of Judgment is coming, and any Angelic Beings who don’t snap out of it and get right with the Great One, will be doomed to spend ALL ETERNITY in this (or some other) hell. Etc, etc, etc.
How does one know that one is a lost Angelic Being, and not just another ape-man slave? There are tests. Basically, they are IQ tests. If you pass the tests, you are a lost Angelic Being who can, not to mention NEED, to begin reeducating yourself in the ways of Angelic Beings who’d better get right with the Great One before it’s too late. These lessons are provided by the guru/magickian/priest/whatever--for a fee. Of course, there’s a fee. An increasing scale of fees. It’s pretty much like the Draw Me “tests” to get into mail-order Art “Schools.”
One famous example of an ancient Gnostic text is the Christian Bible’s Apocalypsos (“revelation”) of John. In this book, the world is presented in Allegory and Metaphor (two mind-blowing concepts of the Hellenistic world) with a dire warning: The End is at Hand! The allegories of doomsday in the book serve two purposes—1. They apply to all lands and all times. That is, the Book of Revelation is coming true ALL THE TIME. Every generation for the last two thousand years plus has read that book and realized: “Oh, my God! It’s coming true right now!” It’s like a Yahoo Daily Horoscope—it’s just vague enough you can never prove it wrong. 2. IF you “get it,” if you can “decode” the mumbo-jumbo in such a way that you DO “recognize” that the seven-headed, seven-crowned Beast is a metaphor for The Seven Sister Oil Companies or whatever, then THAT’S the test—and you passed! Congratulations! You’ve earned the right to pay money for further enlightenment! And you’d better hurry, because, as YOU yourself just proved, the End Is Near! In the Gospels, Jesus’s use of “parables,” with the admonition, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” are further examples of this “test.” In the Gospels, however, those followers too dense to “get it” are not excluded from Salvation. The “test” only distinguishes the qualified shepherds/leaders (literally, the “ecclesia”) from the flock of common sheep/believers.
In The Process Church of the Final Judgment, only those who complete the “process” (get it?) of enlightenment will be spared in the Final Judgment—which is coming real soon!
Mystery Religions
In a “mystery” cult, instead of “remembering” that one is an Angelic Being who has wandered off the path into carnal sin, one is born an ordinary, filthy, flea-bitten apeman, and BECOMES a “god” or demigod or angelic whatsit. In a mystery religion, a known god serves as a role model for the acolyte to imitate on the path to apotheosis. In ancient Egypt, Osiris/Horus was the role model for Pharoah to imitate along his path to godhood. In Mithraism, Mithra is the deified hero. In Christianity, saints were those who had relived Jesus’s martyrdom. The Last Supper might be read as a Mystery reenacted in churches today as communion. The Greek word “Christianos” literally means, “He who is like Christ” and the goal of Christianity is to become more Christ-like. To this day, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and other cults retain extensive elements of mystery-ism, although not always with the goal of literal apotheosis. Crowleyism (plagiarized from Theosophy, etc) is a good example of a modern mystery cult.
Unlike “gnosis,” which is something that the practitioner comes to “know,” a “mystery” is something that a person DOES. The initiate performs and experiences certain key events from the life of the hero-god, thereby transforming himself, just as the hero-god transformed himself. Mormonism is a modern religion that guides initiates toward a god-like state. A word that might describe this series of mysteries/rituals/experiences is, of course, “process.”
In the Process Church of the Final Judgment, initiates perform mysteries that have two goals: 1. The (more or less) apotheosis of the initiate, and 2. The hastening of the Judgment Day, so that we Superior Beings can get down to running the Cosmos ASAP. In his specific theology, DeGrimston “borrowed” heavily from Gnosticism, Crowleyism, Satanism, Sufism, and other moth-bitten hocus pocuses that were already experiencing revivals in the West by the end of the 19th Century.
In DeGrimston’s theology, God had been shattered into four distinct parts, much as a mirror can be shattered. In fact, DeGrimston’s Man, as the “image of God,” is an image shattered into four shards (sub-gods) of what was once the One Mirror (THE God:) Jehovah, Satan, Lucifer, and Christ. In order to reassemble the Mirror, or at least, reassemble oneself into a complete Image of God, one needed to perform various mysteries and learn various wisdoms that would integrate the four elements of---you get the point. For example, in order to "become" Adolf Hitler (the son of Satan,) one must relive key events in Hitler's life path. And so on. In order for the Final Judgment to take place, the One God would himself have to be reassembled from the four shards. How? Well, according to DeGrimston, it was Adam (and Eve’s) rebellion against the Will (“thelema.” Sound familiar?) of God that shattered God’s World and God himself. Not to mention Man. When the Body (membership) of the Church had achieved the necessary numbers of followers (pieces of the shattered Mirror) who had completed the Process of integrating within themselves Jehovah, Satan, Christ, and Lucifer into one coherent Image of God, then the Church itself would become God reassembled, triggering the Final Judgment. It was/is the Mission of the Process Church of the Final Judgment to bring about this reunification of Man/God, and to bring about the initial conditions for the Final Judgment.
Scientology
What, you thought Enlightenment was free? Graduates of the Newest and Best Pyramid Scam, Scientology, Robert and Mary Ann got the same idea that a lot of “cleared” suckers wake up and get: Hell, I could start my OWN horseshit pyramid scam, and get rich like Hubbard! Hubbard himself stole the idea from Crowley, who stole it from Blavatsky, who stole if from the Freemasons. You see, in gnostic mystery cults, paying is part of the cure.
But another element that DeGrimston ripped off from Scientology is, the sales appeal of telling people, “Go ahead and be bad!” Enabling people’s selfish desires is always profitable. Alcohol is the world’s number one selling drug, and the point of drinking alcohol is to inhibit one’s inhibitions. The problem with alcohol is, the hangover. Scientology offers converts the promise of guilt-free greed. For that matter, so do most TV “evangelists” like Pat Robertson and Joel Osteen. “Jesus was wrong! You CAN serve both God and Mammon!” But at least they don’t give converts permission to rape, murder, molest children, and traffic in narcotics. Scientology maintains a veneer of preaching “ethical” behavior in their teachings, but on every other page is the permission to step over “suppressive persons,” who are defined as anyone who gets in your way for any reason. In The Process, wallowing in one’s own animal (“satanic”) urges is a REQUIRED step in the “process” toward you-know-what. Ironically, the REQUIREMENT to behave Satanically actually put a damper on recruitment. It turns out most people don’t really want to hurt other people, even if they do like the idea of getting their particular jollies without interference from “lawgivers.” But it was the converts who DID like the idea of the Goodness of Being Bad that has made The Process Church of the Final Judgment a flock of evil-feathered birds of prey. If they still exist at all. But, whether the Church still exists or not, quite a few of their disciples ARE still running around loose, inflicting their “mysteries” on innocent and not-so-innocent bystanders.
Sufism
The Muslim/Iranian version of Gnosticism is usually called Sufism in the West. It’s also sometimes called Ismai’ism. The branch of Sufism (if there really ever was such a thing) that DeGrimston borrowed from was specifically headed by two Near Eastern “sufis” proselytizing in Britain in the early to mid 20th Century—an Armenian mystic named Georgi Gurdjieff, and the Father of Western Sufism, Idries Shah. DeGrimston learned much from the disciples of Gurdjieff and Shah, even stealing the word “Process” from Shah himself. Shah described American CIA/Langley Porter/Stanford University psychologist Robert Ornstein as “my deputy in America.” DeGrimston would successfully recruit Processans from among Ornstein’s victims down in the Haight, and from among his disciples up the hills at Stanford.
Crowley’s OTO (Ordo Templis Orientalis or some such pig “Latin.”)
Aleister Crowley is the most famous Westerner to fuse Freemasonry Gnosticism, Mystery Cults, Rosicrucian Alchemy, and Kundalini Yogic Sufism into “Thelemic Magick.” (Hubbard pretty much chucked out the sex magick, tossed in some basic Freud, and called the resulting dog’s breakfast “Dianetics.”) Far more important than Crowley are a handful of his disciples. These include Grady Louis McMurtry, Wilfred Talbot Smith, and Jack Parsons. And of course L Ron Hubbard. Crowley set himself up as a rival to Gurdjieff, and pretty much lost that contest. But the OTO lived on in San Francisco and Pasadena...
Freemasonry
The main influence of Freemasonry—the Grandaddy of all Mystical Mumbo-Jumbo Pyramid Scams—on The Process mostly came down to finding a mailing list of likely suckers. Like Scientology, the OTO, the Rosicrucians, and others, The Process sought new members from among the wider world of Masons. Masons tend to be the kind of narcissistic conspiracy theorists who are naturally attracted to Ubermensch cults like Thelema and The Process. Freemasonry generally upholds much higher standards of ethical and moral behavior by its members than Scientology, but again, there is often a gap between official teachings and individual behaviors. The main attraction for new cults is, Masons are good at keeping secrets, there are secret “orders” within the order, they believe the whole world is a conspiracy against them, they’re used to shelling out good money for mystical gobbledygook, and Masons like to think of themselves as smarter than other people—too smart to admit they’ve been fooled or ripped off. The perfect marks. Customers. Converts. Whatever.
The Children
In the early 1950s, following the explosive demise of her rocket scientist/Crowleyite husband, Jack Parsons, military intelligence artist and former L Ron Hubbard shill Marjorie Cameron Parsons retreated to the remote Mexican mystical mecca of San Miguel. There, she attempted, via blood rituals, to astral-project herself onto the Ethereal Plane to contact Jack. Maybe she did; maybe she didn’t; but she DID consume a TRUCKLOAD of peyote and ganja. Returning to Beaumont California, Cameron gathered about herself various Hollyweird friends and lovers of Jack, plus some black jazz musicians, initiating them into a new blood cult of mystery mumbo-jumbo she dubbed The Children. As in, children of Horus/Osiris. As in, acting as High Priestess Isis, she supervised the ritualistic interracial mating of members in an attempt to beget The Moonchild aka the Wormwood Star. Cameron herself participated, but with a history of (drug and alcohol-worsened) miscarriages, she did her best to recruit the healthiest (if not by today’s standards) mystical breeding stock, just to spread her bets. Between the bizarre sex magick and the massive doses of peyote and hashish, the end result was one confused love child and a bunch of illegal abortions. While there, Cameron prophesied that the imminent H-Bomb test on Eniwetok atoll would trigger The Big One in California, resulting in, among other things, Hollywood itself sliding into the abyss—that's right, Marjorie Cameron is responsible for that particular urban legend.
Some of the Magick mysteries acted out by the Pasadena OTO under Smith’s and Parson’s leadership can be seen in the Kenneth Anger Technicolor extravaganza, “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.” Anger would make another film, this time of the blood and sex magick rituals of the Pasadena OTO/Children, but that film, featuring ritualized orgies and human sacrifice, would be destroyed by the crew at the film processing lab, out of fear that they would end up in legal trouble for making pornography. Rumors about that “banned” and “lost” film would be the genesis of urban legends about “Hollyweird snuff films.” Many members of The Children were participants in the production of that film and other Anger projects, including, but not limited to, Cameron (Hubbard, OSS, Rocketdyne) herself, Joan Whitney(Ford Models, NYC and Paris,) Samson de Brier (waaayyyy more important than you think,) Renate Druks (artist and bisexual lover of Cameran and Anais Nin, among others) Curtis Harrington, and others. Several of whom show up as interesting figures in the Son of Sam, Manson Family, Process, and other cult-related murders. Anger’s later film, Lucifer Rising, features Anger’s live-in boy Bobby Beausoleil as “Lucifer.” Anger called Bobby “My Lucifer.” Perhaps as in, Jehovah, Satan, Christ, and Lucifer.
But it’s one particular belief of this little group that intrigues Son of Sam investigators—Jack told Marjorie that their pet German Sheperd dog, Freya, was her “Familiar,” the Other half of Marjorie’s spirit self, and only by an effective and careful ritual sacrifice of Freya could Marjorie hope to rejoin the two halves of her soul, thereby becoming a superhuman, self-empowered Thelemite. Blah, blah, blah.
And of course, over time, some Children went on to lead and inspire their own little groups of devoted sycophants...
The Process
In nutshell, this all ends up being cooked up into a pudding known as DeGrimston’s Process Theology: The True God was shattered into four minor gods: Jehovah, Satan, Lucifer, and Christ. For example, Hitler is worshipped as the Son of Satan, just as Jesus is worshipped as the Son of Jehovah. Or maybe Lucifer. DeGrimston and his wife sometimes changed their minds about certain points of dogma. In fact, Mary Ann eventially quit and opened an animal shelter. Anyway, it is the duty of Mankind to reintegrate the four shards of God in themselves (to become Images of God) by worshipping, in turn, the four minor gods. This is accomplished by first performing what amounts to a Scientological “self-auditing” in order to determine which god you’re closest to mirroring now. Once enough members of the Church have completed the Process of reintegrating the four gods within, then the One God Himself will finally be reintegrated. The Final Judgment will destroy the Existing Order, sort the Worthy from the Unworthy, and the Golden Age of blah, blah, blah...The details of the “process” are heavily plagiarized from Scientology and Crowley’s A:.A:.
What makes disciples of The Process dangerous is, the REQUIREMENT of worshipping Satan. That means, doing what the Son of Satan, Adolf Hitler did, Crowley did, Jack the Ripper did, blah, blah, blah. And the Church itself is supposed to consist of, at any given time, ¼ of the members going through their Jehovah phase, ¼ in the Christ phase, etc. Some branches of the Church settled on members pretty much staying forever in their current phase and calling that good enough. The point is, as a Satanist, a Processan is SUPPOSED to wallow in one’s own crapulance, indulging every filthy whim and murderous passion. This causes various problems for society at large. For example, the murder of Arlis Perry in Stanford Memorial Church.
Oh, and EVERY Processan is supposed to be destroying the World—as the first stage in the Process of bringing on the Judgment Day.