It was the special insight of The Process to identify Satan as the Love of God. Not the healing, accepting love of the Processean Christ, but a pure love that transcended all human need, fear or resistance. At least, that was the theory as far as the Upper End of Satan was concerned.
My own firm belief is that The Process never came to terms with its Satan. Its failure in this regard is, I suspect, the reason it has attracted such ferociously negative publicity as a 'Satanic' group. What it could not accept, despite its articulate protests to the contrary, it had thrown back in its face.
The Gods of The Process emerged primarily at Xtul, the Yucatan site where the group's theology arose from its existing post-Scientology gnosticism in 1966. Jehovah, the Old Testament God of Battles, came in quite soon, reflecting in part the demanding harshness of the back-to-nature lifestyle. Jehovah's complement Lucifer followed, perhaps reflecting the tropical lushness of the place, as well as a reaction to the hungry struggle to survive in Xtul. Hurricane Inez, mosquitoes, lousy diet and the exaggeration of personal psychological dilemmas in the spiritually charged atmosphere of the group mind, all conspired to underline the presence of Jehovah, and thus the necessity for Lucifer's balance of him.
Satan was a difficult kettle of fire. The group didn't even admit to his existence publicly until a year later. This was, I suspect, not so much that it was trying to conceal him, as that it didn't have a handle on what its Satan was about.
The Process had begun as Compulsions Analysis, an alternative psychotherapy offered to early 1960s London, at a time when huge social change was brewing. This was largely the pre-psychedelic, pre-Sgt. Pepper, pre-hippie era, but the forces that broke out later in the Summer of Love were gathering. Other leaders might have steered The Process onto a more mystical road, but Mary-Ann was not a contemplative, and Robert was an architect, a man to whom structures were a way of life. They stayed with a psychotherapeutic model for years, and thus maintained a bias towards the mind and ideas.
In Processean theology, Jehovah is the half of the mind, both cosmically and in each of us, that carries images of the soul. He demands sacrifice, work, struggle, persistence. Lucifer is the opposite, and encompasses all the mind's images of the body. He requires beauty, liberation, sensual fulfilment. The urges each of these two represent are not actual spirituality or physicality, not transcendence or gross physicality per se, but the ideas, the conception, of each.
Until the end of 1969, the presence and character of Jehovah were predominant. The Process was severe in image, dignified in an almost sinister way, and altogether projected a darkly charismatic austerity around itself. It refused the idea of compromise, even though its official and private perspectives shifted constantly.
Jehovah's dominance though, was tacit. Nobody admitted Jehovah was in charge until a 'Game change' was sensed at the end of 1969 when a bunch of people, mostly young Americans, suddenly joined the group in London. The Process worked in response to signs, or at least Mary-Ann's interpretation of events-as-signs, and from then until the whole thing collapsed in spring 1974, Lucifer was the officially dominant God. And so the group expanded, striving to grow far more than it could. We did all kinds of social work, we all smiled a lot, and we burned through quite a bit of cash as well as burning out more than a few of our members, myself included.
Satan's Game was officially scheduled to start later, around 1977. Revisionists say he came in early and was the force behind the 1974 Schism, but that is, I'd argue, a way of putting a theological face on a down and dirty slug-fest between the two divorcing founders.
The truth is, The Process never did accept Satan, because it couldn't. Its basic paradigm was of the mind and its structures. The Processean Satan, by nature, was too volatile to be contained within Mary-Ann's need for a tight organisation, or Robert's visionary theorising.
In BI 19, Robert laid out the basic scheme of The Process' theology. It derived in part from mediumistics, the system of working with levels within ourselves, each of which had a specific identity and character. These identities coincided (Robert and Mary-Ann insisted) with a fourfold format corresponding to a soul, a Jehovah-mind personality, a Lucifer-mind personality and the mundane consciousness, which was identified as the physical, outer self. There were also held to be other entities within us, but these were the primary elements.
Satan, in BI 19, was the God of the primal spark of being, which Robert (contrary to other thinkers and writers, like St. John of the Cross) called the soul. On both the macro-level and the personal level, this soul created a body so that it could play a Game; or at least have something with which to hold a dialogue. Both the body and the soul were viewed as being different 'ends' of Satan.
The problem was, the soul is perpetually antagonistic to the body. The soul wants purity and at the least a clear view of the Ultimate, while the body wants to eat, drink and party. The soul in fact wants to get rid of the body, as the body wants to be rid of the soul. In the context of the times, a Jim Morrison or a Jimi Hendrix or a Janis Joplin overdosing was doing something Satanic: but was it a soul trying to ditch its limiting body, or a body trying to lose its restrictive soul? Or both at once?
Anyway, to buffer this primal antagonism, the being comprising this sublime Satan-soul and profane Satan-body created an interface, the mind. One half contained the urges and imagery of the soul (Jehovah), the other the urges and imagery of the body (Lucifer).
The Process had a selection of ways to address this mental universe and the dichotomies it produced. But it had almost no purely spiritual techniques beyond simple meditation on a set theme, the mediumistics exercises mentioned above and a lot of work done with various forms of telepathy and psychic empathising. It had little in the way or ritual and ceremony, nor any formal methods of invocation and evocation.
Interaction with life moment-by-moment was seen as enough of a spiritual methodology, rather in a Zen or Chasidic fashion, and this worked to a certain extent. Our going out onto the street with magazines every day was our main and ongoing encounter with God, where we learned about who we were from the encounters we had, good and bad, and discovered how to communicate our particular spiritual light to those open to listen and receive it.
But that still left us with a conceptual or mental spiritual vision. We had our intense moments, our occasionally vibrant contact with each other and outsiders, and we had a vision of what we hoped would come to pass. But there was no method available to break through a certain ceiling of thought and ideation to a mystical perspective. In fact, Mary-Ann feared such experiences in her followers because they could lead them away from dependence on her and the Processean cultic structure. And our Christ-in-waiting, Robert, couldn't be outflanked by anyone having visionary ecstasies or realisations of Oneness beyond his own idealised explanations.
So, while we preached the Unity of Christ and Satan ad nauseam (at least, I was personally near nausea towards the end), we simply weren't at a point where the reality of those two Beings, let alone their Unity, could be grasped. We came close at times, but mystical illumination is not a game of near misses. Combine that, as noted above, with Mary-Ann's trepidation around independent spiritual growth in others, and the problem becomes clear. We couldn't have a fully realised Christ, and we weren't about to explore the significance of a realised Satan. That would have involved too much personal experimentation and an increase in private freedoms. For a tight little cult, it would been collective suicide, whatever protests we uttered to the contrary.
Few outsiders saw the problem, since our overall performance was pretty cool. But increasingly, our growing number of critics, who were tired of being pestered on the streets, began picking at our weak spot. When Ed Sanders (see post Ed Sanders) decided we had influenced Charles Manson and his followers, he created a lie that still seems plausible to people today. Our Satan was not redeemed and united with our Christ, but latent and indigestible within the cult that professed to have the lowdown on the Great Lord S. The irony was that, not only did we have nothing to do with Charlie and his murderous mayhem, but that despite a few tentative moves towards addressing the Lower-End Satanic side of sex behind closed doors, The Process was unable to express or release Satan to any significant degree.
Or, to put it in specifically Processean terms, we couldn't realise the Upper End of Satan, and remained without the fulfilling power of Love. We were a would-be psychotherapeutic organisation, and as such essentially bound within our Jehovah-Lucifer mindset, even if we were talking about Christ and Satan. Like other people with an apparently nice, rounded view of the universe, we were in fact stuck inside an angular box we'd created.
Christ, of course, was the Unifier in the Processean system, and as such the necessary means of bringing the two ends of Satan back together. But Christ in The Process was also problematic.
The Gods were seen as distinct, but they were best known through those whose God-patterns they informed. People were born with their patterns - there was no conscious choice, or philosophically based decision involved, despite some outside writers' statements to the contrary. All of us came into the world with dominant attributes from either Satan or Christ (the 'ex-mind' parts of our pattern) and from either Jehovah or Lucifer (the mind-based parts). Our Christians were seen as unifiers, but also, among a group of other characteristics, felt weak, with a sense of hollowness inside. The Christian tended to lean on the intellect, the emotion-starved 'martyred body of Christ'. The very need to balance and to unify, to be a conciliator, often disarmed the Christian when faced with the generally greater emotional effects of the Satanist. The situation was not viewed as hopeless - its resolution in the Unity of Christ and Satan was our core assertion to the world - but while this Unity was taken as being present on both a very fundamental level and more or less within The Process itself, it was acknowledged to be lacking from 'the world'.
The same problem, then, was present with Christ as with Satan. We had a psychologically based praxis that just couldn't stretch far enough to embrace its own theory. We were perpetually in a feedback loop, waiting for the intrusion of grace to trigger the final ending of the human nightmare and the New Beginning. Except even grace was a suspect notion, because we were a structured cult that could only accept such things passing from the leadership through to the masses. A Catholic perspective, for example, where saints are seen as holier than most bishops or Popes, was not possible.
So, eventually, it all blew up. Satan, the power of separation, succeeded in the wrong way, and The Process splintered into Mary-Ann's core group, which became initially The Foundation and, finally the leadership of Best Friends; and a number of Processean revival groups that never did more than talk, quote Robert, and hold very occasional ceremonies. I would also include in this sumamry of the splintering a bunch of misconceptions about the entire business that won't ever go away, because The Process was not just its membership and our beliefs, but the effects we created and finally disowned.
There was, in The Processean Satan, a drive, a sense of transcendence. When we became Acolytes, the first step in belonging, we were given an exercise in spiritual contact wherein it was explained to us that Satan drew out fear as Christ drew out guilt. We should thus confess our sins to Christ, and our fears to Satan. I personally found this exercise, simple as it was, one of the most affecting experiences The Process offered me, and the Satanic portion was what did this. For a few minutes each day, I stepped beyond my own fear.
At the end of the channelled Processean text Satan on War, Satan says:
I am the epitome of both death and life. I am the body in the depths of
dark depravity, and I am the soul in the heights of sublime spiritual
ecstasy. The legions of the damned are of Me, as is the great company of
archangels. And when the bonds of matter hold Me no more, then shall I and
My people, My Army, My legions, all My followers, rise from the depths of
the blackness of the Pit and transcend the stars.
I am the body and the soul of man. Whilst the Fiend of the body is enslaved
by the fearful mind, the soul is imprisoned. Only when the Fiend is released
can the soul be free.
I still find this provocative even today, despite Satan's very English choice of words like 'whilst', and an occasional clunking cliche. Yet The Process understood that this perspective was only one part of the truth, one aspect of the possibilities, and that a supernal balance was necessary. What it failed to understand, I think, was that the fear and mistrust it inspired in so many people was a direct reflection of its own repressed doubt of its ability to direct or contain that Fiend.
It simply never found the means to voyage to the Star of its own vision.
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The concept of the Unity of Christ and Satan was, in the end, just that - a concept. Yet it is essentially familiar territory to many gnostics, tantrics, Qabalists, Dzogchen practitioners and others. For myself, looking at it all nearly four decades later, I'm still seeking the inner - and outer - reconciliation that would be the realisation of that Unity.
Thelema was something that put me off for a very long time, because it seemed too Satanic, in the specifically Processean sense of the term. And some Thelemites I've met confirm that impression. "I have crushed an Universe; and nought remains," says Ra-Hoor-Khuit in verse 72 of Chapter III of the Book of the Law. I've met Thelemites who find that expression exhilarating enough on the most superficial terms that they make no effort to look deeper into its significances.
There is another verse in the same chapter, verse 35, that speaks of "The half of the word Heru-ra-ha, called Hoor-paar-kraat and Ra-Hoor-Khut." Like much of the Book, this is a highly concise expression, in this case of a spiritual formula that contains both a receptive (Hoor-paar-kraat) and dynamic (Ra-Hoor-Khut) aspect to the "visible object of worship" mentioned in verse 22.
Robert and Mary-Ann doubtless read the Book of the Law at some point. Robert especially looked into all sorts of spiritual material; though I seriously doubt he understood much of this text. He spoke a lot about significance and symbols, but I wonder how much he truly grasped of spiritual symbolism and its many levels.
It would be a gross over-simplification to say that the Book of the Law is 'about' the same notion as the Unity of Christ and Satan. It is a compendium of wisdom that, in my view, goes far beyond what The Process could or did say and teach. But I believe that The Process was, quite unconsciously, one of very many efforts that have attempted to realise what the Book announced: a new Aeon that is based around a liberating spiritual awakening, and a remaking of the world we have known.
The Process blew it, of course. Thelema began as just such a cult, built around the person of Aleister Crowley, but it has grown into something far healthier - a movement - which inevitably develops its own checks and balances. By its own lights, it is essentially compelled to assist every questor in his or her Grail-quest, and there are clearly Thelemites around who have attained to realisations about which The Process could only fantasise.
But I remain grateful that I did spend those few years in or around the mind-world of Jehovah+Lucifer; and that I was granted a few hints of the realm that Christ+Satan might offer. I respect those who find that whole set-up bizarre or merely inept, for I sometimes agree; but I believe that if we are going to take a sorrowful mis-step, as I did, it might as well be a big enough one to be truly educational.
"Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains." (Book of the Law, II, v. 9).