Thou moon unseen of men! Thou huntress dread!

Thou crowned demon of the crownless dead!

Thus Aleister Crowley, in his Invocation to Hecate from Orpheus (1904). Crowley didn't like witches, as you can probably gather, and the goddess of the witches was not high on his list of faves.

Since I posted the photo of Mary-Ann, she has continued to fascinate me as I've gazed into those uncompromising eyes. In The Process, she took the name Hecate for herself, doing as all the senior people did, taking on a new identity. And I do mean identity - not just a label, but something with which we identified wholly and wholeheartedly.

I've said elsewhere that we didn't practise occult rituals; ritual per se was a tiny part of Processean life, and nobody ever cast a ritual circle, chanted the barbarous Names of Power or called down elementals. We didn't have to. Why? Because essentially, we never left the invoked circle, so we were always in the midst of whatever current flowed into and through The Process. A magician clears a ritual space, invokes, performs his working then banishes and resumes normal consciousness and the normal identity. Processeans never banished the spell. And Mary-Ann was the primary caster of that enchantment.

Not everyone took to Mary-Ann. One former master told me once: "I think there was a period in which I felt we were all together in it, and that their hearts were in the right place; and that they had answers to a lot of questions. Robert was more convincing that he liked everybody. Mary-Ann always had a fierce aspect to her, where she kept people at a distance."

Others, favourites who passed the initial tests better, were drawn in closer. As Compulsions Analysis developed into The Process and began to formulate its own religious philosophy, Mary-Ann confided to some of these intimates that she was the Goddess in human form.

The people I'm thinking of were not uneducated fools. They were - are - among the more intelligent and perceptive people I've known. The conclusion is that early on, she was identified with Hecate or some precursor of the archetype underlying that goddess-form, and convincingly so.

Born without an acknowledged father, and neglected as a child, Mary-Ann had a rough deal from the get-go. Children without clear hopes, and many with a promising future, easily develop a dream-world, in which they have special powers and unimpeachable authority. So, an imagined divine status isn't an extraordinary outcome for a girl in her position.

But she impressed a bright, educated group of people with her Scots intuition, her skill in reading people's motivations, and an ability to inspire confidence. Whether or not she missed her goddess A-rating, she definitely had certain abilities more usually ascribed to Adepts. Like another inspired woman from an abusive upbringing, the US-born Buddhist teacher Jetsunma Akhon Lhamo, she acquired a coterie of devoted admirers and an aura of sacred power. Unlike Jetsunma, though, she sought the safety of the shadows, not the public arena.

So many people who knew her have badmouthed Mary-Ann, that to say anything good about her can be seen as camouflaging the hurt she caused. My own problem here is that, while my Process experience ended up in a bad place, and I see the whole thing as a failed cult, in one sense I had a blast. It was an adventure, something that pulled me out of my fears and helped me live my life in a more fulfilling way. It took away my fear of being weird, oddball, not of the mainstream, which otherwise could have paralysed me. My basic attitude to it all at this point is one of gratitude, not grief, and I extend that to this extraordinary woman.

I've never been able to think of her without wanting to understand her better, while suspecting that even she doesn't wholly grasp who and what she is. Protected by essentially uncritical admirers, she is insulated from further self-knowledge, and, I suspect, feels deeply frustrated by it. When Robert left in 1974, her only true equal was gone.

But what was it that made her into, if not a goddess, then at least a reasonable facsimile thereof? I too have dreamed of getting super-powers, but I always wake up as the same me I was the night before.

She told Britain's Oz magazine in 1967 that she had studied astrology, palmistry and Tarot as well as "anatomy and physiology in Bayswater", a reference to her call-girl past to head off any future revelations. Prostitution is something I scarcely understand, but it seems to offer some of those who practise it a version of being loved and needed; and it confers a power on the prostitute, who is catering to a need in his or her client, not merely meeting a conventional "consumer demand." There are risks of disease, violence and exploitation; and there are rewards of humbling the client, whose lust/rage usually subsides after the act is done and paid for, and also of the power that comes from knowing one's own body is the primary working tool.

For a woman prostitute, then, men become objects for manipulation. Denied worldly rewards by the conventional economy, she can obtain them, sometimes richly, via the unconventional one.

I've never known quite what to make of the astrology, palmistry and Tarot quote. Occultism is a common recourse of the powerless, as it is also the province of a few truly advanced or accomplished souls. I have no idea if she was an initiate of anything other than Scientology, but she was working as a Scientology auditor when she met Robert. That means she would have been introduced to some forms of psychism or supra-sensory awareness.

But on her own, she has never been an organiser. Another analogue to her, apart from Jetsunma, might be the Golden Dawn's Moina Mathers. As depicted in Mary K. Greer's marvellous book Rebels and Priestesses, she was a powerful intuitive who was quite lost after her husband MacGregor Mathers died at the end of World War I. Moina knew her way around the astral realms, but the physical one rather defeated her.

Robert, Mary-Ann's first husband, was the organising principle she needed, and she knew it as soon as she met him. He had briefly been a supply officer in the army - an organiser of the organised - and had a broad circle of friends to call on. Collectively, he and they balanced Mary-Ann through the early years. They brought their different experiences, hopes and goals to the group mind. These things became the raw material of The Process, the substance for Mary-Ann to work on and transform, datum by datum, life-anecdote by life-anecdote, into a cosmic saga.

As the chief therapist/auditor of the group, her own vision either repelled those drawn temporarily to The Process, or permeated the minds of those who stayed. Some were more rapidly predisposed than others to accept the mythic view of themselves and the group that she gradually wove from the strands of personal fibre presented to her, but she was patient and persistent. If Robert was needed to be the Christ, then that was how his self-image was teased out and re-formed.

As noted above, many of us have these secret perspectives on ourselves. If my own view is correct, we all do in some hidden place within. The idea of a far greater self, with vast potential and depth of vision and purpose, is innate in human beings, and ultimately valid. For those who joined The Process before 1966, and took off on the adventure of finding a private island to end up in Xtul on the Yucatan coast, it became a living, present reality. The banishing of the outer world, like the invocation that followed it, was successful. For some years, at any rate, the enchantment was complete.

In Hermetic Qabalah, Hecate is attributed to Binah, as are opium and other stupefying drugs. She fascinates and she transfixes, and that power transfers into those who would identify with her.
Crowley's Invocation to Hecate ends thus:

Thee, thee I call! O dire one! O divine!

I, the sole mortal, seek thy deadly shrine,

Pour the dark stream of blood,

A sleepy and reluctant river,

Even as thou drawest, with thine eyes on mine,

To me across the sense-bewildering blood

That holds my soul for ever!