Christ of Carnaby Street: The guru who made Mick Jagger sympathetic for the devil
The idea of a religious cult becomes a lot more palatable when you consider how worshipped rock stars are. What’s sillier? Believing someone who says they have the power of the universe locked inside their mind, or crying and breaking into fits of tongues when the Rolling Stones play ‘Miss You’? Both seem pretty dumb. And both are interlocked as one cult in the late 1960s attracted rock stars from across the globe.
The Process Church of the Final Judgement, otherwise known as the Process Church, was a religious group established in London in 1966. The two founders, Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston were formerly Scientologists who were kicked out of the church and married shortly after.
The Process Church initially started as an offset of Scientology but eventually gave rise to other practices. One such practice encouraged people to tap into the four inner gods that (apparently) all human beings have within them and follow their teachings. The Gods were not worshipped, as they were possessed by people rather than supreme beings.
While the practices of various religious branches frequently sound silly, The Process Church had a lot of followers. Initially set up in Mayfair, it garnered the attention of many famous faces who were playing into the counterculture movement. This included the likes of Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Brian Epstein, all of whom would attend meetings and buy into the church’s practices.
The idea of the church was that each of us has different characteristics. These characteristics came in the form of the deities Jehovah, Lucifer, Christ, and Satan. All of these beings existed and represented a different part of your soul. Jehovah was strength, Lucifer was light, Satan was separation, and Christ was unification.
The church gained a lot of popularity, as while it was difficult for people to work out whether it was a form of satanism, it did represent a new way of looking at things that many people were open to. The issue with the church came following its move to America in 1969.
The church moved to New Orleans, and later that year, members of the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate. The murder of Sharon Tate marked an incredibly dark period in Hollywood, and a lot of people call the moment the signifying end of the ‘60s. The Process Church had trouble because they were linked to the murders. There was never anything that officially linked the two, but it damaged the organisation’s reputation enough that it eventually disbanded.
Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones eventually had to put their spiritual beliefs elsewhere. However, if he followed his inner deities that represented light and separation, then there was a very real period during the band’s history when Mick Jagger had a genuine sympathy for the devil.
