Process Cheese: Love Sex Fear Death
By Doug Harvey
Wed, Jul 1, 2009
The Satanic Ritual Abuse (or SRA) conspiracy fad of the 1980s may
have torn apart families, destroyed the lives of innumerable innocent
people and set the credibility of clinical psychology back at least
50 years but for fans of sleazy, poorly researched, exploitative
true-crime books, it was a godsend. While cognoscenti hold a special
place in their hearts for such early fabrications as Michelle
Remembers and The Satan Seller, the pièce de résistance of the genre
was Maury Terry's enthralling 640-page bestseller, The Ultimate Evil,
which attributed the Manson, Zodiac and Son of Sam murders to a
global satanic underground masterminded by a sinister cult known as
the Process Church of the Final Judgment, led by the shadowy and
charismatic Robert de Grimston, who had disappeared from public view
in the early '70s.
The only problem was that, by the time Terry's 1987 magnum opus
briefly rekindled the flames of the dwindling SRA media frenzy, de
Grimston had reverted to his birth name of Robert Moor and was
working an office day job on Staten Island, while the Process Church
itself from which he'd long been excommunicated had morphed into
the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah, the largest no-kill
animal shelter in America. Somewhere between these mundane and
sensationalist extremes lay the truth about the Process Church and
its role in the cultural upheavals of the '60s, but reliable accounts
were fragmentary and scattered.
Enter Adam Parfrey and Genesis P. Orridge. Originally teaming up to
issue a facsimile collection of Process's strikingly designed
apocalyptically charged magazines (which remain highly sought-after
collectors' items), Feral House publisher Parfrey and Throbbing
Gristle/Temple of Psychic Youth founder Orridge quickly realized that
a number of Process insiders were prepared to go on the record about
their years with the controversial sect. The result is Love Sex Fear
Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment,
titled after, and reproducing some pages from the group's glossy
underground zine but dominated by 120 pages of autobiographical
reminiscences by Timothy Wyllie, a.k.a. Father Micah, a.k.a. Mithra,
a.k.a. Father Jesse, one of the original inner circle who founded the
group in London in the early '60s.
Wyllie was friends with former public-school boy and British army
officer de Grimston (then Moor) at architecture school but had lost
contact for a couple of years when, in 1963, he got a call out of the
blue. De Grimston and his new wife, Mary Ann, had decided to leave
Scientology and create their own program of psychological and
spiritual development, based on the use of an e-meter and
self-examination in an intensive interview scenario. In the course of
his reminiscences, Wyllie reveals what has been rumored for some time
that de Grimston was more or less a dummy figurehead for the
megalomaniacal schemings of Mary Ann.
Mary Ann MacLean's childhood was defined by poverty and neglect in
Glasgow, before she became a high-end prostitute in London,
supposedly hooking up with Sugar Ray Robinson for a time, before she
recognized that her particular talents could be put to more lucrative
effect in other areas. As the de Grimstons' "compulsions analysis"
sessions attracted more and more disaffected protohippie types, the
group had remarkable spiritual experiences, and began suspecting that
they were not only on the cutting edge of experiential psychological
research but were also in fact a chosen spiritual elite ordained to
herald the endtimes.
According to Terry and his ilk, what followed was a rapidly
expanding, systematic program of ritual sacrifice and atonal music,
designed to precipitate the apocalypse through the summoning of a
Celtic death god named Samhain. Wyllie's account is somewhat more
prosaic and farcical, following the Process Church's random global
peregrinations, incoherent channeled theology (which gave equal
billing to Satan, Lucifer, Christ and Jehovah) and increasingly
totalitarian bureaucratic hierarchy from the point of view of an
overworked acolyte, de Grimston, who believed he was being guided
along a path of spiritual evolution by an incarnate goddess, or at
least a secret Sufi master.
While there are plenty of juicy bits your flagellation, your sex
orgies, your celebrity cameos (yelled at by Klaus Kinski and Miles
Davis! Who'da thunk?) most of the anecdotes in Love Sex Fear Death
(abetted by numerous shorter memories and period documents) are
sordid in a less titillating sense, a gradual unraveling of a
seemingly sincere moment of collective inspiration into
all-too-familiar routines of coercion and greed, charting Wyllie's
inevitable disillusionment with and departure from the New Religion
he had helped to invent and define. It is an unglamorous saga of
indentured panhandling, Dumpster-diving, child neglect, public-access
proselytizing, and Heathers-level Machiavellianism detailing the
insidious banality of evil more convincingly than Process theology or
Maury Terry ever could.
De Grimston was forced out by Mary Ann in 1974, and after
unsuccessfully trying to start a Process revival, gave up and got a
real job. Mary Ann kept revising and renaming the group, gradually
removing all references to Satan and Lucifer before realizing that it
was easier to persuade the rubes to part with their hard-earned jack
for the protection of poor little defenseless animals than to
facilitate the immanentization of the eschaton. Ultra-ironically,
Wyllie recounts a rumor that her death in 2005 was the result of an
attack by feral dogs that had broken out of their "sanctuary." Who
says Jehovah doesn't have a sense of humor?
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