alternatehistory.com

I'm reading a book about the Process Church of the Final Judgement, a cult of the '60s and '70s. They were best known for allegedly being Satanists and allegedly inspiring Charlie Manson; the first was only sort of true - they were big into "unification of opposites", and worshiped Jehovah, Jesus, Satan, and Lucifer - and the second was definitely false. They dressed up in black, sold magazines on street corners, abstained from drugs and (sometimes) sex, anticipated the imminent end of the world in a nuclear apocalypse, and preached a radical reorganization of society. They also believed they were telepathic and thought they were in direct contact with their four divinities - that Jesus and Satan talked to them.

Like a lot of cults, then and now, they were keen on recruiting celebrities. And, at least according to Timothy Wylie's account, they actually came close with one - Dr. Timothy Leary.

The story goes that late 1967, Wylie met Timothy Leary at a meeting of various hip types. Dr. Leary ended up inviting Wylie and a friend up to the house he was staying with, and talking to him for days. According to Wylie, Leary seemed in need of a confessor - that he'd realized that the whole dream of turning on society with LSD was turning sour. To quote the book:

By this time, late in 1967, he [Dr. Leary] was just starting to open his eyes to some of the more unfortunate consequences of his relentless promotion of LSD... Haight-Ashbury was becoming an embarrassment. Kids were turning from acid to the harder drugs. The Golden Age delusion, so assiduously boosted by Leary, and which finally collapsed at the Altamont concert a couple of years later, was starting to dissolve for him. Under that wonderful, ever optimistic smile was a much more troubled soul.

Wylie claims that the culmination of all this soul-clearing, over a period of days, was a decision by Leary to publicly renounce LSD and join the Process Church. And that this almost happened, except that when he brought Leary back to New York City to see a Process Church ceremony, they got unlucky and had a particularly clunky speaker who turned Dr. Leary off to the group.

Now, I'm kinda skeptical of this whole story. But let's assume that the tale is true - and that, ITTL, they have a good speaker that night and Dr. Leary sticks around, and ultimately decides to join. I have a hard time believing he'd stay for very long - the Process Church was a group that demanded extreme commitment, even by the standards of NRMs, and I doubt that both Leary and Mary Anne's egos could ever fit in the same organization. But let's say he makes a public commitment to the church, renounces LSD in favor of less chemical means of achieving altered states, and spends at least a few months as a member. What are the consequences for Leary, the Process Church, and for the counterculture generally?
Top