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(Credits: Far Out \/ The Process Church of The Final Judgment \/ Sabbath Assembly)<\/p>\n
Thu 4 December 2025 22:00, UK <\/p>\n
It\u2019s no coincidence that the countercultural explosion sweeping across music, art, and politics in the 1960s<\/a> found an easy home for the surge in various new religious movements.<\/p>\n It was a perfectly febrile time for life\u2019s ever-wandering \u2018truth\u2019 chasers, be it the sincerely spiritually curious or the many bewildered stragglers chewed up and spat out by the day\u2019s hedonistic abundance. The youthful rejection of social mores and traditional consensus ran rife throughout rock and pop, be it the softer Rishikesh retreat by The Beatles to glean the Transcendental Meditation light, toward a much darker collision of fringe cultism that embroiled The Beach Boys into The Manson Family\u2019s bloody lore.<\/p>\n Amid the flurry of answers supposedly offered by a myriad of underground groups was the UK\u2019s Process Church of the Final Judgement. Founded in 1966 by former Scientologist<\/a> couple Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston, the Process\u2019s essential doctrinal beliefs centred on the idea of the existence of four deities ensconced within every personality, being Jehovah\u2019s strength, Lucifer\u2019s light, Satan\u2019s separation, and Christ\u2019s unity.<\/p>\n Collectively called the \u201cGreat Gods of the Universe\u201d, each member was instructed to embrace two of the \u2018Gods\u2019 that best served their perceived character, in protest at the conforming masses around them and in good preparation for the impending end times\u2019 anticipated convergence of all four divinities.<\/p>\n Despite officially petering out across the 1970s into various factions and splinter groups, two stalwarts of the US metal world sought to reignite the Process\u2019s esoteric teachings for the 21st century. Forming Sabbath Assembly in 2009, David Nuss and Jessica Toth corralled an ever-evolving line-up of millenarian metal merchants to wield the movement\u2019s \u201cmost sacred scripture\u201d, music, to score a hard rock-leaning ensemble setting original Process hymns to a sonically eclectic songbook of heavy coven attack, cosmic psychedelia, and stirring, communal sermon in the church tradition. Before long, Sabbath Assembly would pen original numbers praising the Process\u2019s good word.<\/p>\n \u201cOur intention isn\u2019t to attract any followers to the Church,\u201d Nuss revealed to Echoes and Dust in 2014. \u201cThe Church is definitely long past, and we haven\u2019t met any original members who still believe or practice. As with all the new religious movements from the 60\u2019s, there is a super fascination there, but that moment in history was so different from ours now.\u201d<\/p>\n Nuss was quick to stress a lack of dogma in Sabbath Assembly\u2019s efforts, however. \u201cThe Process Church was very primitive sociologically, hence the mind control that was happening, and for us, what\u2019s most important now is psychic liberation rather than entrapment. Even though the Process theology is relevant for the band to share, we are definitely not defining our success by the number of new recruits to these beliefs. What does success mean to us? That\u2019s a good question. I suppose it\u2019s more about connecting rather than convincing.\u201d<\/p>\n The Process had found some prior musical representation. George Clinton\u2019s Funkadelic had included snippets of the \u2018Process Number Five on Fear\u2019 hymn on Maggot Brain\u2019s liner notes, industrial group Skinny Puppy had explored the Church\u2019s themes on 1996\u2019s The Process, and Throbbing Gristle\u2019s Genesis P-Orridge co-opted some of the Process\u2019 rituals for their similarly cabalistic Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth<\/a>, as well lending their vocals to Sabbath Assembly\u2019s Ye Are Gods in 2012.<\/p>\n Sabbath Assembly finally came to a close in 2020 after a decade of relentless touring, mainly in Europe due to their heretical allegiances, and seven studio albums. Announcing their disbandment on their official Facebook page, Sabbath Assembly stated a resolution to their creative journey with the Process, as well as hinting at something of a leaden burden on the members involved, paraphrasing the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: \u201cThe spell has been broken, and the albatross falls like lead into the sea\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ The Process Church of The Final Judgment \/ Sabbath Assembly) Thu 4 December 2025…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331593,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[107012,88,1708,1739,216,2229],"class_list":{"0":"post-331592","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-cult","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-homepage","11":"tag-metal","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-religion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}