Re: Occult Yorkshire: Family Secrets & Fabian Schools
Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2015 5:27 pm
Thought this might be a suitable place to put some paragraphs on the Process from Robert Irwin's Memoirs of a Dervish:
Now that I was in London, investigating secretive spiritual and occult groups became my hobby. (I think that, as much as anything else, I needed to have an interesting enough life to write about in my diary. I blame my diary.) That summer I made several visits to the headquarters of the Process at 2 Balfour Place in Mayfair. The Beatles record Revolver was playing over and over again in the all-night coffee bar known as Satan’s Cave. Adherents of the cult in long black capes and wearing silver crosses drifted in and out. They had an air of certainty and superiority. It was an interesting place to get a cheap light dinner. The speciality was corn-on-the-cob. But one evening I took a friend, Chris Brockway, there and after we had finished our corn-on-the-cob a black-robed attractive blonde waitress came to our table. ‘Would you like some cake? Are you sure you won’t have some cake?’ This seemingly neutral proposition from the waitress seemed to Chris to have a triple tier of reference. On the one hand, she might just have been persuading him to have some cake. On the other hand, this might have been a way of getting to know her, a sexual thing then. (Chris was very good-looking.) But perhaps not everything was at it seemed and it might be that this agent of Process was manoeuvring him to accept a bit of cake as the preliminary to luring him into the nefarious toils of the Process. Chris refused the cake, mostly because of the third consideration, but also because I was not having cake. I hate cake, but I did want to see if he would accept a slice of cake as the first stage of getting on with the girl. What fun we had in those days.
Though the men had long hair and beards, these were trimmed and groomed. The cult, headed by Robert and Mary DeGrimston, attracted smart young professionals. Adherents had to dedicate themselves to one of three ways, that of Jehovah, Lucifer or Satan. But the big thing was not to be identified with the ‘Grey Force’ of ‘hypocritical compromise and respectable conformity’. They also had to hand over their wages, all but one pound a week, to the Process. They claimed that it was as if they were on a permanent LSD trip. From talking with them, I gathered that they, like the Scientologists, from whom they had broken away, were trying to break down people’s psychological defence mechanisms and then use the consequent excess energy to develop telepathy and other psychic powers. They did psychic exercises such as gazing into people’s eyes for prolonged periods of time. Or they would pair off with another person to spend five minutes attacking that person, followed by five minutes of compliments. This sort of thing anticipated the imminent arrival of encounter groups. I took part in a session of the Telepathy Developing Circle which lasted an hour and twenty minutes, during which we sat on the floor in a candlelit room. We were supposed to develop psychic powers through brief spells of meditation.
Later, I attended a black mass there ‘based on the performance of the Beast’, meaning the performance of Aleister Crowley. A lot of Crowley’s terrible poetry was read out early on. We sat around the stairwell looking down on what was enacted below. The main part of the ritual was like something out of the film version of Dennis Wheat-ley’s The Devil Rides Out and it was aesthetically rather pleasing, as it featured black and gold robes, a dark vessel containing a mysterious black potion, a silver mirror, black candles and The Book of the Law. The robed celebrants were the Deacon, the Priest, the Virgin Priestess and two long-haired acolytes. The Priestess wore white, the men black. The high point was when the Priestess was stripped down to her underwear and made to lie spread-eagled on the altar, where she was kissed all over by the Priest. There were no dark manifestations and I heard someone mutter that the Priestess was not really a virgin. It was not Satanism, but merely theatre. It was about this time that Peter Fuller went back to visit our old school. ‘How are the Irwin brothers?’ our former housemaster (‘the Gnome’) enquired. ‘Irwin major has become a practising Satanist and Irwin minor is a frog in a pantomime’ was the reply. ‘oh.’