Paganization: The Virtual Revival of a Cult Online

Abstract

This chapter explores some of the alternative online pathways for religious innovation in a time of sacred disintegration, using the example of the Process Church of the Final Judgement, which the author studied ethnographically during its period of popular visibility, 1970–1976. Originally a British deviant psychotherapy growing out of Scientology and Psychoanalysis, the Process became a communal, polytheistic religion in the US and Canada. Its theology was a social psychology theory, postulating four gods that defined the variety of human personalities and interaction issues: Lucifer, Jehovah, Christ and Satan. The result was fragmentation. One faction became monotheistic, and then withdrew from public activity for two decades, before morphing into a very successful animal rescue non-profit corporation, collecting tens of millions of dollars per year through online blogs and videos, thereby illustrating extreme specialization in which a small sector of a radical culture survived. The other faction retained its radical polytheism but could not hold members, and apparently vanished. A few members kept in touch over the years, and when Internet blossomed into the World Wide Web, the original Processean culture revived but in the absence of formal organization. Most strikingly, a number of musical bands either revived the music of the original Process, or more often were inspired by its intellectually rich counterculture in creating their own music. Several of the original Processeans began copying and sharing their scriptures online, and a few commercial publishers began promoting them. After two decades of communication via email, Processean Facebook groups were formed, with the apparent potential to expand and diversify even further. Interacting with larger quasi-Satanic and Ritual Magick groups in Facebook, the Process contributed to a growing radical religious subculture. Some members describe it as the left-hand path, implying not evil in comparison with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic right-hand-path, but individualism and dynamism, rejecting orthodoxy enshrined in formal organizations, and using Internet rather than local congregations to unite members.