Timothy Wylie
(ed.) Adam Parfrey
Feral House
2009
The Process Church of the Final Judgment was a religious movement that emerged out of England during the 1960s. The church was founded by Mary Anne and Robert deGrimstone. They were highly influenced by The Church of Scientology and adopted some of the features of that organization, including the use of the e-meter (a device Scientologists use to measure the reactions of individuals to interview questions during ‘auditing’) and the idea to publish a cultural magazine. Otherwise, according to Wylie et. al., the church was big on animal rights (every member had its own dog, for example) and the use of charismatic cult-style tactics to break down traditional family structures, and the personality of the individual, such as assigning names, and of removing children from their parents, arranging marriages and designating times when couples could be together.
Author Timothy Wylie was once a high level member of the Process Church. He contributes the bulk of the textual material of Love, Sex, Fear, Death, which is, in essence, an expose of the church’s functioning. Founder Robert DeGrimstone left the church after a while, leaving his ex-wife Mary Anne as the unchallenged leader who, according to Wylie, took to her position of authority with great enthusiasm. Mary Anne exercised her control of her religious subjects to the extent that Wylie’s text exhibits his continued deference to her power. His writing about his former spiritual guiding light shows a gleefulness at the freedom to speak about her at the same time, much like how Daniel Domscheit-Berg spoke about Julian Assange in his Wikileaks expose. Anyways, the Process Church was very much a product of its time: there was a rock band made up of church members, and also its members, in full church vestments, sold a pop-culture magazine inspired by underground press publications on the streets of various cities, including Toronto’s once ‘hip’ (and currently very lame) neighborhood of Yorkville. Otherwise, Mary Ann had a Nazi infatuation and appeared, by Wylie’s telling, to be more concerned with magazine sales rather than spiritual exploration.
Much of the book is Wylie’s account of living within the church although contains a number of other short pieces written by former members or, in the case of Genesis P-Orridge, by friends of Feral House editor-in-chief Adam Parfrey. After Wiley’s written piece, the largest section of the book are the images, as almost one hundred glossy pages are devoted to photographic reproductions of the Process members, and most importantly to the art of their promotional materials and their magazine, which fully embraced the psychedelic style of the underground press of the period. The magazine covers show the preoccupations of the church as they take on concerns such as sex and death alongside features about celebrities like Mick Jagger.
Feral House has more recently published another book about The Process church, this time an anthology of their written work. Love, Sex, Fear, Death ends with excerpts of some of Robert De Grimstone’s esoteric writing and the subsequent volume explores such writings more fully.
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