This is, probably, the most fitting event for All Hallows Eve, 2009...and when I suggest it's indeed "fitting" this IS a for real pagan happening. Yet...it's um, also a book release party.

A former member of The Process Church of the Final Judgement, Timothy Wyllie, will be in town celebrating the publication of his book Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of The Final Judgement at the Abbey in Fremont. And the celebration promises to NOT be your normal reading/book release party, rather it's gonna be a "Sabbath Assembly ritual"...just like it would have gone down in the sixties! Well, it's "live performance and multimedia" simulation...I don't think ritual animal sacrifice or virgin deflowering should be expected.

In addition to the ritual, the Sabbath Assembly band will play Process hymns also...folky rock hymns, please don't expect grind or black metal, this cult was a '60s thing. Also excerpts from a documentary on the cult will be screened, author of Love Sex Fear Death, Wyllie (Father Micah), will give a lecture regarding his experience with the cult, and then a Q&A.

The book Love Sex Death Fear uncovers some of the secrets of the sect.

Now, thats not so scary is it? Or is it...?

If you need a bit of back ground on the Process Church...it's after the jump.

The founding members of the cult, Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean, hooked up in London during the early sixties and married the Scientologist system of dumping pyscho baggage, via "auditing", with Alfred Adler's concept of an inferior complex, inventing their own system called Compulsions Analysis. As their cult grew they migrated to Mexico and, after experiencing a violent hurricane, evolved their spiritually into the Process' theology (twin gods of love and violence). Exactly the steps you might reckon for a cult, right? Well, all would be fine and good, but after an English newspaper featured their story/theology a lot of folks got hung up. In their mix with Christ and Jehovah was Lucifer AND Satan.

So, they were...(ahem) Satanists!?

Well...it was an assumption bolstered after they returned to England and opened a coffee shop, Satan's Cave. They also began preaching/lecturing, from under hooded black cloaks, a coming apocalypse.....as well as loading much of their literature, scripture, heavy with violence and doom. But...they were not Satanist pre se, they worshiped Christ AND Satan...the details are a bit vague to me since I was never a member of the cult, but there is an assignment of personality traits to a particular god and if you did not sort it out to be like one of the gods you were "Grey" and would die in the apocalypse. Basically, the Process was a polytheistic pagan cult who recognize more than one god but toss titillating Satan and creepy mysticism into the mix in mid-sixties and you get a LOT of sensational press and attention. Anyways, as a result of some very bad press, pop culture acceptance of the occult, and the Process softening their doom and gloom message, by the mid-seventies the cult split...DeGrimston is said to have literally just walked away.

Oh, as a final note...and I'm not one to judge, but this is the group (some Process members were know as "the Family") that was said to have held sway over (or at least influenced) Manson's philosophy of a coming race war, and couple folks I spoke to, who were aware or in the know of the Process Church in the '60s and '70s were quite shaken at the mention of the Church having a book release party anywhere near them.