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Best Friends Animal Society and the Process Church - blog posts from skepticaltheurgist. These used to be posted on blogharbor but the blog has recently been deleted. These are PDFs of the original posts, unchanged.TRANSCRIPT
skepticaltheurgist :: Best Friends and The Process
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Best Friends and The Process by skepticaltheurgist on Mon 22 Aug 2005 09:49 AM EDT | Permanent Link | Cosmos
In March 2004, the Rocky Mountain
News outed the people running Best
Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab,
Utah, as The Process in its latest
incarnation. The Cone of Silence had
been raised, and the Best Friends
management felt the need to 'fess up.
A few days later, they added a section to
its website, mostly written by Michael
Mountain and giving their own version of
the past. This is still (as of August 2005)
available at http://www.bestfriends.org/
aboutus/oldhistory/intro.htm.
Reading it, I had a strange sense of deja
vu, from around 1969. In that year, the
Sunday Times in England picked up the
story of how in the late 1940s L. Ron
Hubbard, before starting Dianetics and
Scientology, had been involved, magically
and financially, with the rocket fuel
scientist and noted Thelemite, Jack
Parsons. The newspaper had learned
how, after some ritual workings to create
a magical Moonchild, Hubbard took off
with Parsons' girlfriend, a boat they'd all
invested in, and a bunch of cash. It was
classic Fleet Street muckraking at its
salacious best.
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skepticaltheurgist :: Best Friends and The Process
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Scientology's response was a glorious
farrago of a letter to the Sunday Times
that began: "Hubbard broke up black
magic in America..." Ron, it turned out
(according to the Church of Scientology,
and quoted in Russell Miller's Bare Faced
Messiah) had been sent in by the U.S.
government to smash up this dangerous
ring of occultists with which Parsons was
involved. Naturally, he succeeded
magnificently. A stolen girlfriend? No,
not at all. "Hubbard rescued a girl they
were using."
In sum, the facts were all covered off. It
was only the truth that was missing in
action.
I recall Michael Mountain (Father Aaron
as he was in the 1970s) as a charming
man who was often irreverent, and fun to
be around. The Best Friends account of
the early days shows he still has the
ability to charm, even if, as with the C of
$ story about Hubbard, the truth and the
facts have some distance between them.
It might be unfair to critique details
almost 40 years after the events
happened, but I feel otherwise. When
someone publishes 8,000 words of well-
spun baloney, a theurgically (and
otherwise) skeptical person like myself
can't resist teasing it a little.
The primary fiction is that The Process
consisted of a bunch of 1960s counter-
cultural seekers, consensually choosing a
bohemian, back-to-nature lifestyle. No-
one who left England for the Bahamas in
1966, then went on to the Yucatan and
Xtul was arguing about it, but the cult-
like nature of the group is carefully
erased in Mountain's description. Does
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skepticaltheurgist :: Best Friends and The Process
Marjane Satrapi
Home
anyone recall the alliterative headlines in
the British press about "The
Mindbenders of Mayfair"? Only me, it
seems. But then, back before I joined, I
collected all this coverage religiously.
And while Robert De Grimston is airily
dismissed as "the so-called 'Teacher' of
The Process, who had written a number
of books and was becoming well known
in academic and theological circles," his
wife Mary-Ann (see Mary-Ann's photo
and Moon Unseen, from June 2005)
remains "She Who Must Not Be Named".
The Goddess of The Process, its core, is
unmentioned in its own published
history.
And so it goes on. What, us spread
Robert's teachings all over Europe and
North America? All of us wear the Cross
and the Goat of Mendez on our chests or
collars? Go out every day and sell those
books by the "so-called Teacher"? Musta
been some other guys, or some other so-
called Teacher.
Even when I was in The Process (1970-
72), the legends around Xtul, "The Place
of Miracles" were being embroidered. An
abandoned salt factory became a Mayan
ruin, for example. Away from their
civilised backgrounds, but living still in a
soup of heightened consciousness, people
had let their inner barriers drop and
insights, synchronistic happenings and
visions came in plenty. The primal
presences or psychological realities called
the Gods of The Process made themselves
felt.
Beyond that blanket statement, or
something like it, I doubt anyone today
could give a fair account of the weeks and
months spent at Xtul. The three ex-
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skepticaltheurgist :: Best Friends and The Process
members whom I've interviewed all give
varying stories.
Mountain's account adds a fresh spin. As
the group came to Xtul, he says, they
encountered an old man who "just smiled
and said, 'Es para vosotros,' ('It is for
you.') And he waved good-bye and
continued on down the trail."
Neat - except, as anyone who's learned
Spanish finds out, "vosotros" as a second-
person plural form is today used nowhere
in Latin America, only in Spain itself.
Later, the same man appeared, Mountain
says, as The Process were all pulling out.
"'You are leaving,' he said. 'But one day
there will be another place for you. It is a
beach without an ocean. And the sand is
all red. And there are animals. Muchos
animales.' "For someone who had never
seen red rock canyons and the pink sands
that go with them, it was a fair enough
description of Angel Canyon, the future
home, 20 years later, of Best Friends
Animal Society."
Not bad. I just can't find anyone who was
at Xtul but left the group who remembers
a thing about that 'prophecy'. Zip - or
rather, nada.
Mountain's aim, it seems, and that of the
other members who wrote this story, is to
make it plain that everything before
caring for animals was just prologue, or a
youthful exuberance. There was, he
notes, a Christian ministry phase of
helping other people, as indeed there was
- after a Christ-and-Satan phase of that,
plus a neo-Jewish one, neither of which is
mentioned. Animal welfare was the
direction in which things were guided.
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skepticaltheurgist :: Best Friends and The Process
"The animals were beginning to take
over! For many of us, they'd always really
been our passion. And when a few of us
got together one evening at the ranch to
talk about what next and where next, we
were all feeling that it was time to devote
ourselves to that true passion."
I can't say this is wholly false. Brits (the
remaining core leadership group is
mostly British) are famously dotty about
dogs and animals generally, and She Who
Must Not Be Named always had strong
feelings about cruelty to animals. What
decent human doesn't? But to claim
animal welfare was the central concern in
that first crazy decade spent as The
Process? Or for The Foundation during
much of the second? Back then, the End
of the World and redemption therefrom
overrode all other ideological messages,
even if anti-vivisection was a cause we
intermittently embraced.
As noted elsewhere on this blog, I had a
remarkable experience out of it all,
though the group's most austerely head-
messing phase was over when I joined.
I'm not the only ex-member with mixed
but still fond memories of the
community, the sense of inner calm and
purpose, and the humour we brought to it
all. It's impossible to tell today from the
teachings available on-line, but The
Process could be fun, and very funny. You
needed to accept the premise of the joke -
humanity's utter absurdity - but that
done, a lot of things about life came to
seem less tragic. Perhaps the absence of
such candid detachment about the past is
what saddens me here.
Best Friends, clearly, is a well-run
operation, however much its location
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skepticaltheurgist :: Best Friends and The Process
miles from any cities compromises its
mission. It's an honest endeavour even if
it does support the aging remnant of a
failed cult. We all gotta live, and the BF
operation pulls its own weight.
The roots of my own main beef date back
to a visit four years ago, when I briefly
reconnected with some of the people I'd
known three decades before. What I
found was that it was all just like
Mountain's story would later turn out to
be. The "P word" was not mentioned at
all, and almost nobody would share any
personal stories or opinions unless they
involved saving or helping animals.
Had anyone learned anything spiritually?
Well, everyone was much happier now
than before. What did people feel it was
all about, that wild Gnosticism, that
fervent preaching about an End that
never came? Well, it had been a long
journey for everyone. What wisdom had
they all learned? We need to be less cruel
to animals. And so on.
I drove out of that beautiful Utah canyon
frustrated at feeling stonewalled, with my
conception of shallowness permanently
redefined. I've not been back. Other ex-
Processeans do visit and maintain
friendships, but I couldn't be bothered to
go again.
Do they, under their neo-Romulan
cloaking device, yet have some kind of
wisdom, the way we did, or felt we did, 30
years ago? They won't say in Angel
Canyon. All who stayed surrendered their
personal histories for a distorted
collective one.
From Scientology, The Process borrowed
the idea that all life consists of games,
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skepticaltheurgist :: Best Friends and The Process
played as parts of larger collective games,
and all ultimately part of a cosmic Game
of the Gods. A personal game might be: I
am always ill; or, I will make $15-million
in real-estate then find my kids hate me;
or I will struggle for human rights.
Regardless of the circumstances or
activities involved, they're all about
gaining knowledge; about experiencing
all things that are possible to experience.
In visiting Kanab, after an hour, I could
almost say "Yes, I remember you" in
exactly the same, affect-less manner
everyone I met used. I had three different
people apologise to me spontaneously for
what had been done to me in the past - all
of them in a slightly beaten-dog tone, and
using the same sequence of words. I'd
gone in high anticipation, and without
any grievance or hurt to air, but I came
away with one.
It was all supposed to be about accepting
our own reality in its fullness, and thus
open to God. The modus operandi today
has become a sweet, well-intended
deception that seems to have lost what
spiritual truth or honesty was once
present. Best Friends is, as any ex-
member can see, not a rejection of the
structure of The Process or The
Foundation, but a continuation. The
sadness I feel is that while the externals
have changed, the core game is the same
as it ever was: a bunch of people believing
they are an Elect of some kind, grouped
around an aging avatar, very aware of
human motivations yet hopelesly blind
about their own. Saving animals is the
latest version of this, and a nice one, but
at bottom, it's just another game.
The animals, I've heard it said, are a
major comfort for the dozen or so
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skepticaltheurgist :: Best Friends and The Process
remaining Processeans (most people at
Kanab were never involved in the original
group). Animals' natural dignity and
unaffected joy are easily superior to the
human animal's meaner nature. For
someone who has spent 40 years tied to a
cult, that must be reassuring. Personally,
I'm grateful, regardless of whatever
regrets and disappointments I've
accumulated, that I can tell my own story,
and don't have to follow a cultic party line
nor distort my own memories to comply
with one.
I wish the Kanabians were able to do that.
Instead, they still feel compelled to diss
their former associate, Robert, like
Stalinists dumping on Trostky, and to
pretend that so many years of their
earlier lives were a mere bohemian
misadventure. It shows that, rather than
seeing and accepting those years clearly,
and truly moving on, they are endlessly
perpetuating them.
Oh well. The dogs and cats, at least,
clearly appreciate it. Give 'em that.
Keywords: Kanab, history, Friends, Best
Posted to: The Process
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skepticaltheurgist :: Obituary - Mary-Ann
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Next: The Process' Satan
Obituary - Mary-Ann by skepticaltheurgist on Wed 30 Nov 2005 04:05 PM EST | Permanent Link | Cosmos
Mary-Ann De Peyer died on November 14,
2005. She had reportedly been in a comatose
state for two years prior to her death.
She was best known as Mary-Ann De
Grimston, when she was the co-founder and
the primary driving force behind The Process
- Church of the Final Judgement. After her
husband, Robert De Grimston, was ousted in
1974, and she and Robert divorced, she
continued as the effective, though concealed,
leader of the group, which for some years was
called The Foundation Faith of God.
During the past two decades, she was known
as Mary-Ann De Peyer after her marriage to
Gabriel De Peyer, who appears to have taken
on the mantle of spiritual direction of the
inner group at the Best Friends animal
sanctuary in Kanab, Utah. Best Friends is the
ultimate successor to The Process (www.
bestfriends.org), although most of its staff
and supporters have no connection with its
earlier forms or original belief system.
See other posts in the thread on The Process
for more information on her and her life.
Keywords: MaryAnn, obituary, Mary, Ann
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Re: Obituary - Mary-Annby Anonymous on Sun 12 Feb 2006 01:03 PM EST | Permanent Link
Re: Obituary - Mary-Ann by "GrandSpookofLowerBohemia" on Sat 11 Feb 2006 07:47 AM EST | IP: 67.5.149.47 Hecate's Obituary: The Undead Do Not Die Hecate lives!
Yes, Hecate lives and has sent her legions to collect her hell hounds, as the paper registry of her previous incorporation lay rotting in a dirty lake that once was New Orleans.Yes, senior members of the Process Church have together returned to the world stage to do the work of Hecate.Yes, they have been doing the work of Hecate for many years now. I was able to observe them just after Katrina, as they appeared in Louisiana, so deeply engaged and giddy about their new assignment, that with total indifference they stepped over the supine bodies of humans pleading for assistance and then with the quickness of a fast moving storm, collected all the abandoned and lost animals and disappeared into the darkness of a decimated city. Yes, Hecate lives! LONG LIVE HECATE! Leland Cole "Grand Spook of Lower Bohemia" William S Burroughs 1989
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Re: Re: Obituary - Mary-Annby John on Tue 07 Nov 2006 02:05 PM EST | Permanent Link
OK. That was an interesting response to the obituary of Mary-Ann... Stepping over the bodies of people? Um, I don't think so... Anyway... Sometimes I hoped that there would be some kind of reconcilliation
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skepticaltheurgist :: Obituary - Mary-Ann
between MA and everyone... Thanks for the posts... John / Albany
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Re: Re: Re: Obituary - Mary-Annby Grand Spook on Fri 01 Dec 2006 01:38 AM EST | Profile | Permanent Link
Grand Spook Replies Dear John of Albany, I think you have forgotten something. The writer Alan W.Watts once said ,that the human brain has a device known as the "forgetery"- a device so powerful that it can reconstruct memory, or even fully eliminate it. So then, let us both remember the way things really were. 'If we are part of humanity, identified with humanity, in sympathy with humanity, we are doomed. If we attempt to save humanity from its doom, we shall fail, because humanity has chosen its doom and has shown its unwillingness to reverse its choice.Our only valid course of action is to detach from humanity, climb out of the quagmire of its lies, its hypocrisy, its blind desire for its own destruction, find our own truth and create our own destiny."Robert De Grimston So John of Albany, 'step over human bodies' indeed! That is exactly what happened and why not, for the way things were remain the way things are. Humanity is the devil! LONG LIVE HECATE & HER ANIMALS
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skepticaltheurgist :: The Process' Satan
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The Process' Satan by skepticaltheurgist on Mon 30 Jan 2006 09:13 AM EST | Permanent Link | Cosmos
Satan, The Process taught, was the receiver
of transcendent souls and corrupted bodies.
He represented the extremes: the desire to
rise above all flesh, all mental strife, and
become a free soul, a pure spirit, a master of
space and time; or to sink down into an
oblivion of drugs, alcohol, or downright
madness to escape the pain of living in a
bewildering, chaotic and often loveless
world.
It was the special insight of The Process to
identify Satan as the Love of God. Not the
healing, accepting love of the Processean
Christ, but a pure love that transcended all
human need, fear or resistance. At least, that
was the theory as far as the Upper End of
Satan was concerned.
My own firm belief is that The Process never
came to terms with its Satan. Its failure in
this regard is, I suspect, the reason it has
attracted such ferociously negative publicity
as a 'Satanic' group. What it could not
accept, despite its articulate protests to the
contrary, it had thrown back in its face.
The Gods of The Process emerged primarily
at Xtul, the Yucatan site where the group's
theology arose from its existing post-
Scientology gnosticism in 1966. Jehovah, the
Old Testament God of Battles, came in quite
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soon, reflecting in part the demanding
harshness of the back-to-nature lifestyle.
Jehovah's complement Lucifer followed,
perhaps reflecting the tropical lushness of
the place, as well as a reaction to the hungry
struggle to survive in Xtul. Hurricane Inez,
mosquitoes, lousy diet and the exaggeration
of personal psychological dilemmas in the
spiritually charged atmosphere of the group
mind, all conspired to underline the
presence of Jehovah, and thus the necessity
for Lucifer's balance of.
Satan was a difficult kettle of fire. The group
didn't even admit to his existence publicly
until a year later. This was, I suspect, not so
much that it was trying to conceal him, as
that it didn't have a handle on what its Satan
was about.
The Process had begun as Compulsions
Analysis, an alternative psychotherapy
offered to early 1960s London, at a time
when huge social change was brewing. This
was largely the pre-psychedelic, pre-Sgt.
Pepper, pre-hippie era, but the forces that
broke out later in the Summer of Love were
gathering. Other leaders might have steered
The Process onto a more mystical road, but
Mary-Ann was not a contemplative, and
Robert was an architect, a man to whom
structures were a way of life. They stayed
with a psychotherapeutic model for years,
and thus maintained a bias towards the
mind and ideas.
In Processean theology, Jehovah is the half
of the mind, both cosmically and in each of
us, that carries images of the soul. He
demands sacrifice, work, struggle,
persistence. Lucifer is the opposite, and
encompasses all the mind 's images of the
body. He requires beauty, liberation, sensual
fulfilment. The urges each of these two
represent are not actual spirituality or
physicality, not transcendence or gross
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skepticaltheurgist :: The Process' Satan
physicality per se, but the ideas, the
conception, of each.
Until the end of 1969, the presence and
character of Jehovah were predominant. The
Process was severe in image, dignified in an
almost sinister way, and altogether projected
a darkly charismatic austerity around itself.
It refused the idea of compromise, even
though its official and private perspectives
shifted constantly.
Jehovah's dominance though, was tacit.
Nobody admitted Jehovah was in charge
until a 'Game change' was sensed at the end
of 1969 when a bunch of people, mostly
young Americans, suddenly joined the group
in London. The Process worked in response
to signs, or at least Mary-Ann's
interpretation of events-as-signs, and from
then until the whole thing collapsed in
spring 1974, Lucifer was the officially
dominant God. And so the group expanded,
striving to grow far more than it could. We
did all kinds of social work, we all smiled a
lot, and we burned through quite a bit of
cash as well as burning out more than a few
of our members, myself included.
Satan's Game was officially scheduled to
start later, around 1977. Revisionists say he
came in early and was the force behind the
1974 Schism, but that is, I'd argue, a way of
putting a theological face on a down and
dirty slug-fest between the two divorcing
founders.
The truth is, The Process never did accept
Satan, because it couldn't. Its basic
paradigm was of the mind and its structures.
The Processean Satan, by nature, was too
volatile to be contained within Mary-Ann's
need for a tight organisation, or Robert's
visionary theorising.
In BI 19, Robert laid out the basic scheme of
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skepticaltheurgist :: The Process' Satan
The Process' theology. It derived in part
from mediumistics, the system of working
with levels within ourselves, each of which
had a specific identity and character. These
identities coincided (Robert and Mary-Ann
insisted) with a fourfold format
corresponding to a soul, a Jehovah-mind
personality, a Lucifer-mind personality and
the mundane consciousness, which was
identified as the physical, outer self. There
were also other entities within us, but these
were the primary elements.
Satan, in BI 19, was the God of the primal
spark of being, which Robert (contrary to
other thinkers and writers, like St. John of
the Cross) called the soul. On both the
macro-level and the personal level, this soul
created a body so that it could play a Game;
or at least have something with which to
hold a dialogue. Both the body and the soul
were viewed as being different 'ends' of
Satan.
The problem was, the soul is perpetually
antagonistic to the body. The soul wants
purity and at the least a clear view of the
Ultimate, while the body wants to eat, drink
and party. The soul in fact wants to get rid of
the body, as the body wants to be rid of the
soul. In the context of the times, a Jim
Morrison or a Jimi Hendrix or a Janis Joplin
overdosing was doing something Satanic:
but was it a soul trying to ditch its limiting
body, or a body trying to lose its restrictive
soul? Or both at once?
Anyway, to buffer this primal antagonism,
the being comprising this sublime Satan-
soul and profane Satan-body created an
interface, the mind. One half contained the
urges and imagery of the soul (Jehovah), the
other the urges and imagery of the body
(Lucifer).
The Process had a selection of ways to
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skepticaltheurgist :: The Process' Satan
address this mental universe and the
dichotomies it produced. But it had almost
no purely spiritual techniques beyond
simple meditation on a set theme, the
mediumistics exercises mentioned above
and a lot of work done with various forms of
telepathy and psychic empathising. It had
little in the way or ritual and ceremony, nor
any formal forms of invocation and
evocation.
Interaction with life moment-by-moment
was seen as enough of a spiritual
methodology, rather in a Zen or Chasidic
fashion, and this worked to a certain extent.
Our going out onto the street with
magazines every day was our main and
ongoing encounter with God, where we
learned about who we were from the
encounters we had, good and bad, and
discovered how to communicate our
particular spiritual light to those open to
listen and receive it.
But that still left us with a conceptual or
mental spiritual vision. We had our intense
moments, our occasionally vibrant contact
with each other and outsiders, and we had a
vision of what we hoped would come to pass.
But there was no method available to break
through a certain ceiling of thought and
ideation to a mystical perspective. In fact,
Mary-Ann feared such experiences in her
followers because they could lead them away
from dependence on her and the Processean
cultic structure. And our Christ-in-waiting,
Robert, couldn't be outflanked by anyone
having visionary ecstasies or realisations of
Oneness beyond his own idealised
explanations.
So, while we preached the Unity of Christ
and Satan ad nauseam (at least, I was
personally near nausea towards the end), we
simply weren't at a point where the reality of
those two Beings, let alone their Unity, could
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skepticaltheurgist :: The Process' Satan
be grasped. We came close at times, but
mystical illumination is not a game of near
misses. Combine that, as noted above, with
Mary-Ann's trepidation around independent
spiritual growth in others, and the problem
becomes clear. We couldn't have a fully
realised Christ, and we weren't about to
explore the significance of a realised Satan.
That would have involved too much personal
experimentation and an increase in private
freedoms. For a tight little cult, it would
been collective suicide, whatever protests we
uttered to the contrary.
Few outsiders saw the problem, since our
overall performance was pretty cool. But
increasingly, our growing number of critics,
who were tired of being pestered on the
streets, began picking at our weak spot.
When Ed Sanders (see post Ed Sanders)
decided we had influenced Charles Manson
and his followers, he created a lie that still
seems plausible to people today. Our Satan
was not redeemed and united with our
Christ, but latent and indigestible within the
cult that professed to have the lowdown on
the Great Lord S. The irony was that, not
only did we have nothing to do with Charlie
and his murderous mayhem, but that
despite a few tentative moves towards
addressing the Lower-End Satanic side of
sex behind closed doors, The Process was
unable to express or release Satan to any
significant degree.
Or, to put it in specifically Processean terms,
we couldn't realise the Upper End of Satan,
and remained without the fulfilling power of
Love. We were a would-be
psychotherapeutic organisation, and as such
essentially bound within our Jehovah-
Lucifer mindset, even if we were talking
about Christ and Satan. Like other people
with an apparently nice, rounded view of the
universe, we were in fact stuck inside an
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skepticaltheurgist :: The Process' Satan
angular box we'd created.
Christ, of course, was the Unifier in the
Processean system, and as such the
necessary means of bringing the two ends of
Satan back together. But Christ in The
Process was also problematic.
The Gods were seen as distinct, but they
were best known through those whose God-
patterns they informed. People were born
with their patterns - there was no conscious
choice, or philosophically based decision
involved, despite some writers' statements to
the contrary. All of us came into the world
with dominant attributes from either Satan
or Christ (the 'ex-mind' parts of our pattern)
and from either Jehovah or Lucifer (the
mind-based parts). Our Christians were seen
as unifiers, but also, among a group of other
characteristics, felt weak, with a sense of
hollowness inside. The Christian tended to
lean on the intellect, the emotion-starved
'martyred body of Christ'. The very need to
balance and to unify, to be a conciliator,
often disarmed the Christian when faced
with the generally greater emotional effects
of the Satanist. The situation was not viewed
as hopeless - its resolution in the Unity of
Christ and Satan was our core assertion to
the world - but while this Unity was taken as
being present on both a very fundamental
level and more or less within The Process
itself, it was acknowledged to be lacking
from 'the world'.
The same problem, then, was present with
Christ as with Satan. We had a
psychologically based praxis that just
couldn't stretch far enough to embrace its
own theory. We were perpetually in a
feedback loop, waiting for the intrusion of
grace to trigger the final ending of the
human nightmare and the New Beginning.
Except even grace was a suspect notion,
because we were a structured cult that could
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skepticaltheurgist :: The Process' Satan
only accept such things passing from the
leadership through to the masses. A Catholic
perspective, for example, where saints are
seen as holier than most bishops or Popes,
was not possible.
So, eventually, it all blew up. Satan, the
power of separation, succeeded in the wrong
way, and The Process splintered into Mary-
Ann's core group, which became initially The
Foundation and, finally the leadership of
Best Friends; and a number of Processean
revival groups that never did more than talk,
quote Robert, and hold very occasional
ceremonies. I would also include in the
splintering a bunch of misconceptions about
the entire business that won 't ever go away,
because The Process was not just its
membership and our beliefs, but the effects
we created and finally disowned.
There was, in The Processean Satan, a drive,
a sense of transcendence. When we became
Acolytes, the first step in belonging, we were
given an exercise in spiritual contact
wherein it was explained to us that Satan
drew out fear as Christ drew out guilt. We
should thus confess our sins to Christ, and
our fears to Satan. I personally found this
exercise, simple as it was, one of the most
affecting experiences The Process offered
me, and the Satanic portion was what did
this. For a few minutes each time, I stepped
beyond my own fear.
At the end of the channelled Processean text
Satan on War, Satan says:
I am the epitome of both death and life. I
am the body in the depths of dark
depravity, and I am the soul in the heights
of sublime spiritual ecstasy. The legions of
the damned are of Me, as is the great
company of archangels. And when the
bonds of matter hold Me no more, then shall
I and My people, My Army, My legions, all
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skepticaltheurgist :: The Process' Satan
My followers, rise from the depths of the
blackness of the Pit and transcend the stars.
I am the body and the soul of man. Whilst
the Fiend of the body is enslaved by the
fearful mind, the soul is imprisoned. Only
when the Fiend is released can the soul be
free.
I still find this provocative even today,
despite Satan's very English choice of words
like 'whilst', and an occasional clunking
cliche. (The whole text can be found at
URLURLURLURL) Yet The Process
understood that this perspective was only
one part of the truth, one aspect of the
possibilities, and that a supernal balance
was necessary. What it failed to understand,
I think, was that the fear and mistrust it
inspired in so many people was a direct
reflection of its own repressed doubt of its
ability to direct or contain that Fiend.
It simply never found the means to voyage to
the Star of its own vision.
*****************************
The concept of the Unity of Christ and Satan
was, in the end, just that - a concept. Yet it is
essentially familiar territory to many
gnostics, tantrics, Qabalists, Dzogchen
practitioners and others. For myself, looking
at it all nearly four decades later, I'm still
seeking the inner - and outer - reconciliation
that would be the realisation of that Unity.
Thelema was something that put me off for a
very long time, because it seemed too
Satanic, in the specifically Processean sense
of the term. And some Thelemites I've met
confirm that impression. "I have crushed an
Universe; and nought remains," says Ra-
Hoor-Khuit in verse 72 of Chapter III of the
Book of the Law. I've met Thelemites who
find that expression exhilarating enough on
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skepticaltheurgist :: The Process' Satan
the most superficial terms that they make no
effort to look deeper into its significances.
There is another verse in the same chapter,
verse 35, that speaks of "The half of the word
Heru-ra-ha, called Hoor-paar-kraat and Ra-
Hoor-Khut." Like much of the Book, this is a
highly concise expression, in this case of a
spiritual formula that contains both a
receptive (Hoor-paar-kraat) and dynamic
(Ra-Hoor-Khut) aspect to the "visible object
of worship" mentioned in verse 22.
Robert and Mary-Ann doubtless read the
Book of the Law at some point. Robert
especially looked into all sorts of spiritual
material; though I seriously doubt he
understood much of this text. He spoke a lot
about significance and symbols, but I
wonder how much he truly grasped of
spiritual symbolism and its many levels.
It would be a gross over-simplification to say
that the Book of the Law is 'about' the same
notion as the Unity of Christ and Satan. It is
a compendium of wisdom that, in my view,
goes far beyond what The Process could or
did say and teach. But I believe that The
Process was, quite unconsciously, one of
very many efforts that have attempted to
realise what the Book announced: a new
Aeon that is based around a liberating
spiritual awakening, and a remaking of the
world we have known.
The Process blew it, of course. Thelema
began as just such a cult, built around the
person of Aleister Crowley, but it has grown
into something far healthier - a movement -
which inevitably develops its own checks
and balances. By its own lights, it is
essentially compelled to assist every questor
in his or her Grail-quest, and there are
clearly Thelemites around who have attained
to realisations about which The Process
could only fantasise.
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skepticaltheurgist :: The Process' Satan
But I remain grateful that I did spend those
few years in or around the mind-world of
Jehovah+Lucifer; and that I was granted a
few hints of the realm that Christ+Satan
might offer. I respect those who find that
whole set-up bizarre or merely inept, for I
sometimes agree; but I believe that if we are
going to take a sorrowful mis-step, as I did,
it might as well be a big enough one to be
truly educational.
"Remember all ye that existence is pure joy;
that all the sorrows are but as shadows;
they pass & are done; but there is that
which remains." (Book of the Law, II, v. 9).
Keywords: Satan, Process, Lucifer, Jehovah, Christ
Posted to: The Process
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Muddied streams by skepticaltheurgist on Tue 29 Jan 2008 04:17 PM EST | Permanent Link | Cosmos
The Process was an ephemeral fringe
movement that, largely because of a couple
of seedy authors’ conspiratorial
speculations about Charles Manson and
his group, has had a second life as an
internet punchbag. It was started using a
bunch of practices derived from
Scientology, along with concepts of Alfred
Adler taken from his theories on the
inferiority complex. Over time, it absorbed
inputs from various gnosticisms and
schools of enlightenment, to create a
system that was rich in explication and
psychological insight, and rather poor, I
feel, in realised spirituality. Old-timers tell
me Adler’s ideas were very prominent in
the early days. I accept this, while finding
far more of Scientology’s approach in its
worldview than that of Adler’s variant form
of Freud’s thinking. Both groups though,
had, as a key assumption, the notion that
by illuminating the knots in the mind, a
form of illumination could be achieved.
The Process spoke rather vaguely of
detachment from the mind as its goal for
the individual, and avoided the heavily
stratified systems of grading Hubbard
preferred for Scientology. It also better
accepted that we have ups and downs, and
no stable state of mind is lasting. Over
time, it developed its mythos of universal
existence being a laboratory or theatre for
a cosmic Game being played between its
four Gods. This compares with Hubbard’s
space opera featuring Xenu the evil cosmic
mastermind traumatising us all in a
volcano and through nuclear explosions.
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This blog seeks to examine the various kinds of changes happening in our world as the 'Thelemic current,' the immense change initiated in 1904, gradually transforms human consciousness, individually and collectively.
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Skeptical Theurgist may be contacted at: [email protected]
The Processean view, while simplistic and
often over-rationalised, still strikes me as
psychologically more viable than
Hubbard’s Flash Gordon-esque fantasies.
Books such as Russell Miller’s biography
Bare-Faced Messiah or Jon Atack’s rather
better A Piece of Blue Sky have kept alive
the story of how Jack Parsons, Aleister
Crowley’s scientist-follower in California,
worked briefly with Hubbard on a
Thelemic magical enterprise in the 1940s.
Both books, tediously, perpetuate the idea
that Crowley was “a black magician” (why,
precisely?) who saw himself as the
AntiChrist, rather than recognising his
perspective was fundamentally post-
Christian. Similarly, the name Babalon, a
spelling deriving from Crowley’s work with
the Enochian magical system, is muddled
with the Babylon of Revelations. Atack
even says Babalon is the same thing as the
Beast, presumably having misinterpreted
the Thelemic formula, Babalon and the
Beast conjoined.
Whatever. The workings took place, and
while Hubbard left with some of Parsons’
cash as well as his girlfriend, he also took
with him a much enhanced understanding
of magical and hermetic philosophy.
Although he later protested Scientology
has affinities with eastern religions, it is at
odds with these in key ways. For example,
it rejects what Hubbard called “join
nirvana,” seeing Buddhist and Yogic forms
of enlightenment as sinkings into
unconsciousness.
“We are Scientologists,” he wrote in April
1963. “We won't fall into the abyss. And we
won't join Nirvana. We have meters and a
map. We know the rules and the way.”
The reference to the abyss is also
intriguing, since crossing (not falling into)
the Abyss is a key stage in Qabalistic
practice, akin to attaining enlightenment.
Dualistic thinking fundamentally changes
in someone reaching that point.
From hermeticism, Hubbard adapted the
four classical elements into matter (earth)
energy (fire), space (air) and time (water),
the four forming the acronym MEST, a
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term used to describe material existence.
Perhaps more important, he took the
concept of the Knowledge and
Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel,
whereby everyday or material
consciousness is stilled and vastly
expanded by emerging spiritual awareness,
and equated it to a state he called Clear.
The subsequent grades of Operating
Thetan, of which eight are formally
marketed in Scientology, parallel the
notion of the sub-grades of adeptship and
the supernal grades in the hermetic
systems.
Traditional gnostic systems see souls as
having been enticed or tempted, or simply
falling into, material existence. Thelema is
less pessimistic, regarding existence rather
as an ecstatic plunge into the world of
form. The 24th verse of Chapter Two of its
primary text, the Book of the Law, says:
Behold! these be grave mysteries; for there
are also of my friends who be hermits. Now
think not to find them in the forest or on
the mountain; but in beds of purple,
caressed by magnificent beasts of women
with large limbs, and fire and light in their
eyes, and masses of flaming hair about
them; there shall ye find them.
But both Scientology and The Process
viewed our initial participation in
incarnate existence as a deliberate choice,
a searching for a huge game to play.
Significantly, given the two groups’ need to
control their members, neither
organisation opted for mystical ecstasy as
its summum bonum preferring a more
world-focused perspective. The Process
saw humanity’s game as winding down
towards a catastrophic climax, while
Scientology sees us as caught in a mesh of
implanted or acquired lies from which we
must struggle to rescue ourselves.
What the two cults took in common was an
attitude of focused determination. Where
Crowley spoke of ‘energised enthusiasm,’
Hubbard insisted on the virtues of
certainty as a condition of mind; The
Process adopted a Scientology usage,
‘intention,’ as in telling someone out
raising cash on the street, “Put some
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intention into it.” All three derive, by direct
or devious routes, from the Thelemic
concept of True Will, the essential vitality
and raison d’etre that operates in and
through each of us.
Thus, if you watch a Scientology
spokesperson on TV, you will see an
attitude of crisp affirmation. Tom Cruise,
for example, never expresses doubt; being
in a condition of doubt is a serious failing
in Scientology.
Similarly, in The Process, we learned not to
be affected by challenges or hostile
questioning, seeing this as a means of
channeling our positive message. We also
used the Scientology expression, “Don’t
become the effect of someone,” so that we
didn’t “go into agreement” with a critic
such as a born-again Christian (or a
Scientologist) we met while out selling
literature. Though, while we would have
denied it fiercely, we were not being true to
ourselves, but to a collective attitude and
collective consciousness.
While I have nostalgic moments about The
Process, increasingly I see it as less than
wonderful, even if it never did the harm
Scientology has. The Anonymous online
attacks this past weekend were a protest
against Scientology’s penchant for stifling
all its critics, where The Process adopted
the principle of “resist not evil” toward its
own foes.
But I have to acknowledge that both
movements tried to embody the quest for
self-realisation and expression of the
individual True Will. Where the postulant
to a Thelemic order goes through a process
of magically triggered experiences that
slowly tease out various personality traits
for inspection, people in Scientology and in
The Process were put through a form of
psychotherapy to accomplish the same
end.
While for many years I accepted the
mainstream view of Aleister Crowley as
dysfunctionality incarnate, I finally
realised that in The Process I’d
encountered an ember of the torch he lit.
Despite its tendency to enmesh itself in its
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own verbalisations, and ignore serious
spiritual questing, The Process did rectify
some of the wrong turns the Thelemic
impulse took in Hubbard’s slippery hands.
It was unconsciously recognising my old
affiliation in Thelema that led me past my
own reluctance to engage Crowley, and
recognise his maddening but inescapable
genius. Whatever the failings of these two
bastard children of his life’s work, I’m not
the only person who has found them to
indicate, at least, a source of water from a
far purer spring.
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