I have not written on our dear friends Bobby and Mary for a while, due to lack of inspiration. But tonight, I am going to give it a shot.
However, this will not strictly be about the Process, but about other groups that were around at the same tme, and much later, and how their existence brought the Process unwanted infamy.
I suppose the best time and place to start would be Frisco, on April 30th, 1966.
According to Germanic folklore and superstition, April 30th was the night when witches and demons ran amok on the mountain known as the Brocken, the tallest mountain in the Hartz mountains. It is called Walpurgisnacht, after the Anglo-Saxon saint who preached to the Franks, Walburga.
She was canonised on May 1st, which was traditionally the first day of spring in the Germanic countries, and the evening before May 1st was celebrated even by witches and demons - this is probably a holdover from older pagan spring rituals that would call in the spring throughout the night.
On April 30th, 1966, Howard Levey shaved his head, declared himself to be 'Anton LaVey,' and founded his 'Church of Satan.'
The Church had its origins in Friday evening get-togethers that Levey would hold in his home, wherein he and his guests would discuss topics of an occult nature.
Levey claimed he had a colourful history long before he founded his church. He said that he quit school to join the circus, that he was a photographer for the Frisco PD and photographed a number of homicide scenes, and even claimed he slept with a pre-fame Marilyn Monroe while he performed music at a burlesque house called the Mayan.
It's likely that these were all lies. There's no record of any of his supposed career as a SFPD photographer, or for his claims that he was involved in the circus.
While Miss Monroe has long since passed away, no one from Monroe's crowd - agents, friends, family - have any knowledge of this supposed affair. Furthermore, the owner of the Mayan has stated that not only was the place not a burlesque house, but that no Howard Levey performed there, nor did a pre-fame Monroe (birth name: Norma Jean Mortenson, then changed to Baker while still a child).
According to neo-pagan Druid Issac Bonewits, Levey had no real grounding in the occult arts. From his article, "My Satanic Adventure" (located on the web here: http://www.neopagan.net/SatanicAdventure.html):
During this time, I became a regular at the Church of Satan. I attended LaVey’s lectures, went to his Friday night rituals, and quickly became one of his regular altar boys and a “Satanic Minister.” I’ll never forget the evening when I decided to ad lib some fake “Enochian” invocations during one of the ceremonies. I dramatically intoned a lot of gibberish, using the same guttural tones that Anton always used, and everyone in the ritual acted very impressed. Afterwards, I asked Anton, “How’d you like my Enochian?” and he gave me a look that would have melted sheetrock. He did not, however, warn me of the dangers of mucking with this ceremonial language, as any real Enochian magician would have done out of sheer self-preservation (since they all believe that it is a terribly powerful magical tongue), nor did he complain that I had ruined his magical intent, as he would have done if he had actually been doing any magic. It was at that point that I realized two important things about Anton: he really didn’t know very much about Enochian and he wasn’t actually trying to do magic in his supposedly magical rites. I began to wonder if he even knew how.
...
To me it was all just another part of the adventure. I continued to listen admiringly to Anton’s tales, though I was somewhat shocked when he claimed that his huge library of occult books had been swindled from rich widows. I was more shocked when I realized that he had read only a tiny fraction of them, and that at seventeen I had read far more books on parapsychology, comparative religion and the occult than he had, despite his twenty years’ head start.
Nevertheless, an organisation known as the "Church of Satan" gained quite a bit of publicity, leading to LaVey becoming the poster-boy for the emergence of Satan in the so-called Age of Aquarius.
Another group, far less influential, but far more notorious in the annals of 60s cults was The Solar Lodge. Founded in 1962 and based loosely on Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis, the Solar Lodge became best known for the controversy surrounding the "boy in the box" incident.
This incident involved a six year old named Anthony Saul Gibbons, whose parents were members of the group, in 1969 - just a few weeks before the Manson murders made cult-based crime a topic on everyones' lips.
At that point, a woman by the name of Georgina "Jean" Brayton was then head of the Solar Lodge, and according to press reports, she ruled the group with an iron fist.
The boy reportedly set a fire - whether it was accidental or intentional has not been fully resolved. According to members of the Solar Lodge, it was intentional.
The official Lodge story (as reported in the LA Free Press, September 17, 1971, in a piece by an Ed Hoffman) is thus:
The group had established a base of operations 38 miles north of Blythe, California, in the desert. From humble beginnings, they had established a main office, areas for livestock, and apartment buildings (reportedly built from piano boxes and A-frames).
While the group had originally all lived together in the main office building, growth forced the building of more areas to live. These areas were certainly not up to code or very habitable, but the members of the Solar Lodge moved to them anyway.
Two children, Anthony Saul Gibbons and Kathy Myer, set fire to the apartment building they lived in, because they wanted to go back to living in the main building. However, the fire soon went out of control, and before long, much of the group's construction had been destroyed, and two goats were killed.
The children were said to be 'problem children,' from broken homes. The mother of Kathy, Marge Myer, could not support her daughter, and begged for the group to keep her. Gibbons' father, Jim Gibbons, did the same. Jim was a probation counselor in Los Angeles who was separated from his wife, Beverly, who lived with the Lodge.
The children were separated, and two months went by, while construction was underway on rebuilding the apartments. Finally life was settling back to normal, when Saul was found once more trying to set a fire, this time in a kitchen of a new building.
The group contacted his father again, who was enraged, and told them that he'd be there to pick up Saul in the morning. He told them to lock him up somehow, so that he could no longer get into trouble, and leave him be until the next morning.
Saul was therefore put into a storage shed and locked in for the rest of the night.
I want to end it on that note, because, well, it's a good note to end a story on! There's more to it, and even more weirdness coming.
You may wonder what any of this has to do with the Process Church. The answer is: nothing and everything. There were lots of fringe religious groups in California, many of which were later tied to Manson, or tied to the Process Church, or both. These are just two. There are more, and to get a fuller understanding the Process Conspiracy, and the final collapse of the Process Church, it is important to understand that. I hope that in coming entries, I can tie this all neatly together to make a well-rounded story and, of course, to share my own bizarre obsessions wtih long-gone cults and genuinely strange personages.
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