There was a house in the plush district of Mayfair where the mindbenders lived, and things were getting weird. For the robed erstwhile architect Father Micah, formerly known as Timothy Wyllie in his youth, things had always seemed weird in this wicked, ne’er-do-well world.
“We lived in Sloane Street,” he said of his posh upbringing, “where there were these very large gardens that had absolutely been bombed to smithereens out in front, and that’s where I used to play. I used to play among these unexploded bombs. It was an introduction to the devastation.”
That’s an apt vignette of an origin story not just for the cult that came to be known as the Process Church of the Final Judgement, but the whole counterculture movement. If you grow up amid unexploded bombs, hearing tales of the attempted extermination of an entire race, and the impending nuclear armageddon, you may well be moved to think about doing things a little differently.
Rock stars and cults alike were bonded by this search for difference. In fact, Mick Jagger’s aim with music wasn’t too many miles away from the self-same stance of the Process Church; he had hailed from a fairly well-off family and was on the brink of a career in economics when the swinging sixties swivelled his head towards Soho.
Robert de Grimston, obviously not born with that name, who co-founded the Process Church alongside his partner Mary Ann MacLean, hailed from an even more well-off family, and after a stint as a Scientologist, he decided to bin off a career in architecture and form a cult that placed Christ, Lucifer, Jehovah, and Satan on an equal pedestal.
While the church has since been linked to several haywire conspiracy theories, the truth is that the most interesting thing about the Process is that they were a cult of international disrepute, garnering audiences with rock stars, and yet they weren’t really interesting at all. They were simply rich kids following the zeitgeist’s bent towards ditching normality, wearing robes, and spouting a very casual philosophy that could be surmised as thus: true spiritual wholeness comes from integrating all aspects of human nature.
They believed there was oneness between Christ and his fallen angels that must be reconciled to foster a divinely transformed world, and to spread this word, they looked to nondescriptly shock people and set up groovy cafes, among other things, but their primary outreach was a magazine simply titled Process.
Thanks to the lure of darkened imagery in an age angling towards the weird, de Grimston’s gripping writing, and aggressively pamphletting Pink Floyd gigs in satanic garb, Process proved wildly popular, so, Jagger attended some of their mildly orgiastic meetings in swanky Mayfair and eventually agreed to be interviewed.
His slightly rambling responses may well prove he was potentially intoxicated at the time it was conducted, but it certainly offers a stunning insight into his mindset and the philosophy of the sordid Rolling Stones. As he puts it in the main pull quote, “If anything, I’m guilty of trying to stop everyone being normal”.
The Process Church saw itself as being in a similar battle against “the Greys”, and Jagger was sympathetic to that cause. He extends the sentiment of the fabled pull quote a little further when he comments, “It is safer, obviously [to be normal], it’s much safer to be the same, and this is why everybody wants to be the same!” adding, “And, of course, in any society, the only way one can be safe within it, is by obeying the rules. And since the society is creating such high things, it has to have a lot of rules, and a lot of people together, and therefore they have to think alike; otherwise they lose their security.”
He then goes on to mention that he spent two months working “in this mental home”, and that he gained a greater empathy and understanding during that time of what society views as “malices” in others, somewhat waywardly explaining, “They think they’re mental, but it’s only because they think they are being harmed and have lost control. I mean they just don’t know what they are one can give answers and point out the moral principles that one thinks have been broken, but there still exist fantastic problems; this applies to so many things, things like drugs as well.”
At one point, he even gave Christopher de Peyer a glimpse at a thought that he would later neaten up and flesh out into the classic ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, when he quipped, “The moment one of us says you should do that, because of this and this, and all the reasons… we’re bound to be wrong… more or less what they did, only better, was my scene.”
He then arguably laid out the basis of ‘Start Me Up’, a song long thought of as vapid, catchy chanting, but when placed in this co-option theory laid out by Jagger, it actually proves to be one of his most prescient points. “The system itself manages to keep on its feet by absorbing all the reforms. There are people standing in Parliament today who were bigger thinkers and rebels than I will ever be in our lives,” he says.
He then further commented how they were radicals who were angry, and that attitude shouldn’t have been taken on before slightly rambling about the nature of reforms and the rle individuals play in it, noting, “That’s why reforms are not for long. It starts by you. I feel that if you start with yourself, you can have the effect. And you can’t start on me. It’s got to be me. I mean, it’s got to come from the individual.”
Then he observed his integration into the bourgeoisie as a commercial rock star, commencing, how he uses “mass techniques” as he participates wholesale in an unlikeable part of society, recognising his complacency in the world he lives in: “Suddenly I’m in this scene and I’ve used it and I’m guilty, guilty. You know I don’t think that is right”.
From this odd interaction between a cult that came to an end when it disastrously contacted an incarcerated Charles Manson and inadvertently incriminated itself in far more sinister situations than simply battling against “the grey forces” that “reduce people to the state of normality” through group meditations and not much else, and a musician who actively courted cotroversry and dabbled with wilful co-option, we can glean a great insight into the 1960s.
In a manner akin to Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, the highs and lows of the era, its pitfalls, its platitudes, and its attempted defiance of those platitudes can all be seen in one brief rambling chat between two apparently wildly opposing forces of the ‘60s, who briefly found themselves on the same page.
In brief, a desire to be different doesn’t prove pointed enough to poke a hole in society’s veil of normalcy, and following Jagger’s credo, I’ll let you read into that what you will.
