The Process Church is long dead, now, but it still lives online and in print media.
Most cults of that era are long gone by now, but the Process lives on. Almost 30 years after Mary Ann and Robert parted ways, and Mary Ann and her followers 'exorcised' Christ and Satan in each Process Chapter house (literally, with a bell, book, and candle), Robert's original vision is what remains.
Mary's does, too, of course, in a sense - the Best Friends Society certainly is a testament to her unique anti-animal cruelty stance within the cult. Long gone is the worship of Jehovah, or the preeminence of Jewish members (both aspects of the Foundation Faith), and certainly long gone are Satan, Lucifer, and Christ.
In a sense, it never really left. After Sanders' book, the Process achieved a certain noteriety that, while not at all condusive to garnering converts, certainly made them well-known, and despite PR attempts to refashion their image, the Process never recovered.
However, they lingered in the popular imagination, due to the lurid prose of Sanders.
In 1978, sociologist William Sims Bainbridge published a book known as "Satan's Power." Unfortunately, it was an academic study, and thus unlikely to be read by a mainstream audience, but in it, Bainbridge recorded his experiences with "The Power" - his code-name for the Process Church.
It's been quite some time since I've read it, and it's very pricey these days ($120 used, on Amazon) and I can't find any review I wrote of it anywhere online. Weird.
All of that being said, the book showed the cult to be a weird, but generally non-dangerous group of religious oddballs. They didn't literally 'worship' Satan (or the other gods), they were Scientology based, etc. He described some of their rituals, and was there when the Omega split, communicated with Robert as he tried and failed to re-start the Process, was involved when the Process was rechristened the Foundaition Faith of the Millennium, etc.
Unfortunately, as I said, the work was academic in scope and not really for the lay reader, so it made no impact on the public at large, in which hushed voices claimed that the Process was involved in all sorts of scary, nefarious deeds.
One of the biggies started with the shooting of two young women in a vehicle, at point-blank range, on July 29th, 1976. Terror, due to the media-dubbed ".44 Caliber Killer," gripped New York until August 10th of 1977, when David Berkowitz, the so-called "Son of Sam" was arrested by the NYPD and the shootings ended.
While Berkowitz was enjoying his reign of terror, journalist Maury Terry began investigating the case, writing articles that suggested multiple gunmen in New York papers, based on eyewitness accounts and wildly differing sketch artist renderings of those accounts.
Even after Berkowitz was arrested, Terry remained unconvinced that he was the sole culprit, and continued to contend for a multiple-killers angle. Correspondence and interviews with Berkowitz only enhanced his belief that something weird was going on. Reports of bloodless, skinned german shepherds, like those in Santa Cruz almost a decade earlier, were surfacing from Untermyer Park in Yonkers, not far from the home of Berkowitz.
In 1987, Terry released THE ULTIMATE EVIL, a key book in the late 80s "Satanic panic" craze - in it, he outlined a purported Satanic network responsible for a large number of deaths, as well as drug trafficking, prostitution, child pornography, and all other manner of vice. It should be noted that, like the notorious Four P movement, Terry doesn't pin the blame on Robert and Mary Ann - splinter groups from the Process were involved.
I'll probably discuss the Son of Sam case at some point on here (see my obsessions?) but needless to say, this book fed into interest surrounding the cult.
However, oddly, I will note that despite the prominence of the Process Church in conspiracy lore, I don't recall any Christians ever picking up on the meme. In the 70s and 80s, the evangelical and fundamentalist circuit was filled with testimonies of "former witches," like Mike Warnke and Michelle of "Michelle Remembers" fame. Most of these have since been proven to be frauds (Warnke's timeline doesn't work at all, Michelle was clearly being used by her therapist) - not even John Todd seemed familiar with the Process, despite the fact that he claimed to be a high Satanist, Mason, Illuminati agent, and claimed to possess evidence that JFK survived the assassination and was the Beast foretold in Revelation.
Wherever there's the hint of evil or general "naughtiness," people will flock, and among those to first adhere to the defunct Process as more than just a Satanic-panic meme was Brit Genesis P-Orridge, of Psychic TV, Temple of thee Psychic Youth, Throbbing Gristle, and other noise/electronica bands.
P-Orridge is a weird, weird, weird person - occultist, transgendered, fan of the esoteric, excellent and prolific musician and author - but eir (here I use the spivak pronouns because I am not sure what gender is proper for Genesis) interest in the Process brought it to the attention of the 80s underground.
As a Brit alive during the 60s, Genesis no doubt was familiar with the Process in eir own country, and I would imagine that E was instantly attracted to their flamboyance, garish artwork, and bizarre, misanthropic, theology. When Genesis made the Process known to the industrial underground, other artists, like Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy, also picked up on it - Skinny Puppy even made an LP called Process.
The Process meme worked its way through the underground to men like Adam Parfrey, of Amok media, Feral House media, etc. where some of DeGrimston's writings were published in Apocalypse Culture - since The Process was very much convinced of an Apocalypse, they meshed well with the theme of Apocolypse Culture, and their Scientology/Christian gnosticism was refreshing in an age of begging televangelists who were constantly being caught with their pants down and droves of cash in their pockets and Satanism was just Ayn Rand with robes.
I remember being interested in the Process when I first got the Internet, all of those years ago - and one of the earliest sites I found contained the old writings of DeGrimston from the magazine, many of which had probably been transcribed by P-Orridge and uploaded to FTP sites and circulated amongst industrial music newsgroups before http became prominent.
I was never much part of the industrial subculture - give me hippie folk music, sorry - but it was good to read the writings of this allegedly Satanic group that I'd learned about in books like SATAN WANTS YOU from Arthur Lyons and, of course, THE ULTIMATE EVIL, which I'd read in high school, along with Sanders.
Now the Process has become something of an underground touchstone, I suppose - especially with the release of LOVE, SEX, FEAR, DEATH, the Feral House reprints of the old Process magazines, and the Sabbath Assembly albums (both of which are excellent, btw...)
The final verdict is that they were hardly "the ultimate evil." They were sincere spiritual seekers in an age awash in them - and with the changes in society, the Vietnam war, the racial violence, etc. the Process were hardly the only people calling for the Apocalypse. People familiar with a very sanitised version of the 60s - all peace, and love, and smoking grass - are unaware of the fact that the decade that more or less began with the assassination of a sitting president and ended with the brutal murder of a beautiful young acctress was filled with terror, horror, dark visions, fear, and a belief in the imminent end of all things. This was a belief that stretched from the burgeoning Jesus freaks to the mainstream conservatives to the radical leftists to, yes, even the crazy cultists. Your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions, as the book of Joel says.
Rather a shame, though, that the imminent end of humanity didn't come, though, isn't it?
Instead, the ultimate evil still occupies its positions of power in governments and in banks, and no end is in sight. Let's hope for more crazies that can, for a moment at least, give us hope that our desire for liberation from the evil of wicked men is possible before they finally crush us all under their boots.
Incidentally, in the conspiracy lit, even written about by Adam Gorightly, there's claims that Mary Ann founded an occult shop in Toledo, Ohio as "Lady Circe," part of the "Circe (or Kirke) order of Dog Blood," a cult centering around murdering dogs in ritual.
Lady Circe is dead, but she was a lady known as Jeffrey B. Cather (that's a lady's name, weirdly enough) and not Mary Ann at all.
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