Author: themgt

A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim.

Categories
discordianism greg hill letters robert shea writings zines

Greg Hill Article for Robert Shea’s Underground ‘No Governor’ Zine: ‘Why I Am Not An Anarchist’

Greg Hill: Why I Am Not An Anarchist, cover mailing,
June, 1975.
Courtesy the Discordian Archives.

With the approaching release of Illuminatus! way back in 1975, Robert Shea was still producing underground zines, in particular Shea’s then-new endeavor NO GOVERNOR (issues of which can still be had as PDFs on bobshea.net thanks to Shea’s son, Mike).

During this pre-release era of Illuminatus!, Shea and Discordian co-founder Greg Hill were furiously exchanging letters and articles. Of course, “furious” being defined at this time, a decade before publicly available email, as maybe half-a-dozen letters over as many months. Crazy stuff.

Hill submitted an article to Shea’s NO GOVERNOR and Shea responded via letter:

Greg—

“Why I am Not an Anarchist” will be a welcome addition to NO GOVERNOR #2. I like it. It says something that needs saying—at least once a year. Also, I am very grateful to you for sending me something I can publish.

For your pleasure and research purposes, here is the original article ‘Why I Am Not An Anarchist’ by Greg Hill, including the original proofing notes. Hail Eris!

 
 
 

WHY I AM NOT AN ANARCHIST

Gregory Hill
June 1975

Greg Hill: Why I Am Not An Anarchist for Robert Shea's No Governor, June 1975, Page 00001.
Courtesy the Discordian Archives.
About five years ago I considered myself an anarchist (anarchopacifist, in particular), because I believe that the highest authority available to any individual is one’s own honest experience and that any other authority provides only vicarious information at best.

I’ve not changed my opinion about this, but I have ceased referring to myself as an anarchist. The reason is basic and simple: TOO MANY DAMN RULES.

OK, it’s a joke. But it’s a TRUE JOKE. The incompatibility is not between my position and some anarchist theories, but between my position and the position of most of those who use the label “anarchist.”

It seems that Rule Number One of anarchy, as understood by authoritarians and by most who call themselves anarchists, is that a government is an enemy. Rule Number Two is that to gain freedom the individual is politically or morally or somehow obligated to fight this enemy.

Greg Hill: Why I Am Not An Anarchist for Robert Shea's No Governor, June 1975, Page 00002.
Courtesy the Discordian Archives.
In my opinion, these rules represent a position which would be better referred to as anti-archy. The prefix “a” means “without” and it need not imply “against.” There is an exact parallel with the word atheist—it is usually used and understood, by those for it and against it, as thought eh word was anti-theist.

I can respect the anti-archist position, but I don’t share it. The government is not my enemy because there is no government. OK, another joke, but still a TRUE joke. I know good and well that there are people with guns who restrict my free decisions, and I know about groups of people collecting taxes from me, and all of the rest of this government business. I perceive it in the same manner that I perceive (for example) a big rock in my path which necessitates stepping around and compromising myself. Frankly, I don’t believe in rocks either—I just step around and compromise (which is actually easier than is believing in them). I think that there is a big difference in degree between (a) existentially responding to a phenomenon and (b) conceptualizing it as an “enemy.” If everything in the universe that has ever thwarted my purpose is my enemy, then only nothing can be my friend—and that excludes even myself. But, still, I respect the anti-archist position. After all, if one does perceive a phenomenon to be an enemy then one would be a damn fool to do other than defend ones’ self.

Greg Hill: Why I Am Not An Anarchist for Robert Shea's No Governor, June 1975, Page 00003.
Courtesy the Discordian Archives.
Much of this essay is futzing around with labels. Still, I feel free to futz, and in any case what I’m trying to do is to avoid the assumption by others that I am at war with certain people just because those people think that they are a government and go out of their way to forcibly impose their notions on me.

I’m not at war with them or with them or rocks either. And insofar as anyone thinks that an anarchist is one who is supposed to believe something or another, or is obligated to do something or another, then there are too damn many rules for me and to hell with the whole business.

Categories
book brother-in-law discordianism greg hill illuminati illuminatus! kerry thornley letters robert anton wilson robert shea

Letters: Robert Shea and Greg Hill: ‘We are definitely dealing with volatile materials.’

Discordian Guerrilla Ontology advert for the release of The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Several posts ago, we presented a letter from Robert Shea to Discordian co-founder Greg Hill concerning the Illuminatus! book cover art proofs that proved quite interesting with some great background insights into that effort before the release of the book.

After the release of Illuminatus!: The Eye in the Pyramid, co-author Shea and Hill continued their correspondence through the fall of 1975, attached below for your reading pleasure. Shea is referenced and signs as “Josh” in two of these letters acknowledging his Discordian nom de plume “Josh the Dill.”

From this exchange, we learn some interesting tidbits about the publication of Illuminatus!, such as the book’s publisher, Dell, initially printed only 75,000 copies of The Eye in the Pyramid. We also gain some insights into how the book was being received and what efforts were being made by Shea and his co-author Robert Anton Wilson to market the book via radio interviews.

In the November 11, 1975 letter from Hill to Shea, Hill enclosed a copy of the fake Illuminatus! review he and Wilson had been working on under the name of Mordecai Zwack and were sending out to various newspapers like The New York Times as a part of their ongoing “Operation Mindfuck.”

This exchange of letters also contains an extensive discussion and analysis of Discordian co-founder Kerry Thornley’s recent-at-the-time state of mind, his growing paranoia, and his theories regarding his involvement in the JFK Assassination, including Thornley’s experiences with the mysterious “Brother-in-Law” Gary Kirstein. Shea and Hill’s take on Thornley and what he was personally going through around this time is quite revealing in context of what this whole era of realization would eventually mean for Thornley and his life in the years to come.

Also of note is Shea’s response to various Illuminati “true believers” during his promotional radio interviews leading him to confide to Hill, “We are definitely dealing with volatile materials.”

Indeed, Hail Eris! Enjoy.

 
Letters: Robert Shea and Greg Hill, Fall 1975

Letter: Robert Shea to Greg Hill, October 1, 1975, Page 00001. Courtesy of bobshea.net from the Discordian Archives.
Letter: Greg Hill to Robert Shea, November 11, 1975, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

 

Letter: Greg Hill to Robert Shea, November 11, 1975, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Letter: Greg Hill to Robert Shea, November 11, 1975, Page 00003. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

 

Letter: Robert Shea to Greg Hill, November 22, 1975, Page 00001. Courtesy of bobshea.net from the Discordian Archives.
Letter: Robert Shea to Greg Hill, November 22, 1975, Page 00002. Courtesy of bobshea.net from the Discordian Archives.

 
Categories
art book discordian timeline discordianism greg hill hacking illuminati illuminatus! letters robert shea writings

Letter: Robert Shea shares the Illuminatus! Cover Artwork Proofs with Greg Hill

Robert Shea letter to Greg Hill, discussing Illuminatus! book cover proofs, Page 00001,
dated June 25, 1975.
Courtesy of bobshea.net from the Discordian Archives.

One of my favorite finds in the Discordian Archives is this letter from Robert Shea to Greg Hill sent the summer before the release of Illuminatus!.

The letter includes some great Erisian Mysteries insights. Such as Shea’s back-story on how cover artist Carlos Victor (Carlos Ochagavia) learned about Illuminatus! to create the individual book covers. I find this amusing as it must have been quite an endeavor by editor Fred Feldman and the interpreter to communicate to Victor such a strange and bizarre concept, which Victor nails solidly.

Another great nugget is Shea’s admiration for the latest in 1975 photocopier tech, provided by his employer, Playboy magazine, used to photocopy the Illuminatus! book cover proofs attached to the letter.

Photocopiers as hip-tech were something Shea and the Early Discordians used-well in the production of personal zines, like Shea’s No Governor mentioned in the letter, and various Erisian tracts, including the Principia Discordia.

Robert Shea letter to Greg Hill,
The Eye in the Pyramid book cover
proof attachment, June 25, 1975.
Courtesy of bobshea.net
from the Discordian Archives.
Robert Shea letter to Greg Hill,
The Golden Apple book cover
proof attachment, June 25, 1975.
Courtesy of bobshea.net
from the Discordian Archives.

Greg Hill had, by the time of this letter, long-ago hacked how photocopiers could be used with paste-ups to produce artwork that left no cut-marks or seams when reproduced and liberally employed this production technique for Third and Fourth Editions of the Principia Discordia. Eventually this approach was ubiquitous in the mid-to-late-80s zine scene explosion, no doubt also helped along by Kinkos’ great photocopier equipment and liberal policies of photocopy production (while looking the other way on copyright infringement).

One can imagine “Faster/Clearer/More Gradients!” as a mantra that Shea and Hill would have embraced in their pursuit of top-notch photocopier tech of the time.

More to come of such correspondences betwixt these Erisian Masters. Stay fnord!

Categories
book discordianism illuminati illuminatus! robert anton wilson robert shea writings

Fnord: The Illuminatus! Trilogy group read starts Monday, February 24

Discordian Guerrilla Ontology advert for the release of the Illuminatus! Trilogy.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Tom Jackson, who runs the right-fine RAWIllumination.net site, has organized a group reading of The Illuminatus! Trilogy set to begin this coming Monday, February 24, 2014.

Here’s more info from the press release for the group reading:

The ostensible subject of the book is the Illuminati, an alleged secret society that seeks to control the world and is still the subject of many conspiracy theories. Many of the book’s protagonists are either battling the Illuminati or struggling to figure out what is really going on.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy, 'candy apple red' edition from Dell Trade Paperback, January 1984. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
The work makes liberal use of Discordianism, a tongue-in-cheek religion devoted to worship of the Greek goddess Eris, who was blamed for starting the Trojan War, and of the Kabbalah, an esoteric mystical system that began as part of Judaism. The text also reflects the authors’ strong interesting anarchism and libertarianism.

Readers of the RAWIllumination.net website will participate in an online discussion of the book beginning on Feb. 24. The discussion will proceed at a pace of 10 pages a week, to give readers time to untangle many of the esoteric references and meanings in the text. The slow pace also will allow time for readers who missed the initial announcement to get caught up and participate. The standard paperback edition has 805 pages, so the discussion is expected to take well over a year.

Each week, an entry on a 10-page section of the book will be posted on the website’s blog, and readers will be invited to weigh in using the comments.

If you’ve never read The Illuminatus! Trilogy, this is a fine opportunity to get in on this underground classic of subversion.

As one character in the book, Epicene Wildblood, puts it while reviewing Illuminatus! in Illuminatus!, it’s “a fairy tale for paranoids.”

Categories
official business

And Now Available with NEW & IMPROVED FNORDS!

 
 
 

fnord
 
 
 

Categories
official business

By order of the Golden Apple Corps, comments are now enabled for fellow Discordians and other shifty types.

No comment.
Categories
art charles manson discordianism kerry thornley letters writings

A Very Merry Manson Christmas To All

Charles Manson's Christmas Postcard to Kerry Thornley, "Front." Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Twenty years ago this holiday season in 1993, Kerry Thornley, the Discordian Co-Founder & Pope known as Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst or more simply Lord Omar, was corresponding with a friend who was an inmate at the time in Georgia’s prison system. This friend of Thornley’s, as it were, just so happened to be a pen pal with none other than notorious Tate-LaBianca murders mastermind, Charles Manson, then being housed at Corcoran State Prison in California.

As Thornley told The Atlanta-Journal Constitution at the time, “I have a friend in jail who was a tattoo artist. He got into drawing pastels, and he drew a picture of Manson and sent it to him. And Manson wrote him back, and then he asked Manson to write me.”

Charles Manson's Christmas Postcard to Kerry Thornley, "Back." Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Charles Manson responded by sending Thornley a Christmas postcard of sorts. The card was a folded-up piece of paper featuring a sketch by Manson of a dark-haired Santa Claus on the “front” with hand-written rants ranging from God to Buddha to Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys on the other “sides” of the postcard.

During this period, one of Thornley’s Little Five Points friends from Atlanta, a young lady known as Molly, who Thornley characterized as “little brown-haired Molly,” traveled to Los Angeles where she was brutally attacked and sexually assaulted.

According to Kerry’s friend, Chris Wilhoite, “Molly had a mental breakdown over that and ended up in a public asylum. She wrote Kerry, asking for help and we Xeroxed the Manson Xmas card and raffled off the original to free Molly.”

Kerry Thornley rounding up support in Little Five Points, Atlanta for Molly's safe return. Photo courtesy of Tim Cridland.
Thornley made up flyers, as was his wheelhouse, and contacted local press to announce he had an authentic Christmas card from Charles Manson and would be raffling off tickets to win the Manson postcard for $5 a pop. As Thornley stated on some of the flyers, “So we Friends of Molly Moonie Rainstar, a slightly schizoid but very warm and wonderful young Discordian lady in her late teens, are raffling off my Manson letter. According to all I have been able to learn on short notice, any letter from Manson is worth at least $850.00 to collectors. Some have auctioned for tens of thousands.”

A Kerry Thornley Flyer: A Letter From Charles Manson. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Molly was soon released and brought back home to Atlanta due to Thornley’s fundraising efforts. Thornley thus declared, “Charles Manson, by the way, has been appointed Superintendent of Sunday Schools in the Discordian Society.”

As Wilhoite recalls of Molly, “She turned out to be a handful and I remember babysitting her during a dissociative episode. Kerry eventually managed to reconcile her with her mum in Maine, so we sent her home…”

And Charlie bless us, everyone.

Categories
book discordianism illuminet press jfk kerry thornley lee harvey oswald ron bonds warren commission writings

A Christmas Story: Excerpt from Kerry Thornley’s THE IDLE WARRIORS

What was Lee Harvey Oswald really like?

In 1962, Marine Corps Pvt. Kerry W. Thornley (and Discordian Society co-founder with Greg Hill) finished writing his first novel based on a friend and fellow Marine buddy, Lee Harvey Oswald, who strangely ended up defecting to the U.S.S.R. in the middle of the Cold War.

Little did Thornley know that his former friend, Oswald, who he used as a template for his main character Johnny Shellburn in his oh-so-hot-new-first novel, The Idle Warriors, would soon become the most-hated-man-in-America, unbelievably accused of assassinating President John F. Kennedy. As a founder of Discordianism, perhaps a young Kerry should have expected some turn-about-is-fnord-play from his sweetheart Eris, the Goddess of Discord, in this matter.

Through the book’s fictional Oswald-based character Johnny Shellburn, The Idle Warriors gives a rare and first-hand insight into the mind of the man who allegedly committed the most infamous crime of the 20th Century.

The Idle Warriors is Thornley’s fictional book written about Lee Harvey Oswald before the John F. Kennedy Assassination, making the work the only unique and pre-assassination artifact completely free of later events and their subsequent biases regarding Oswald and the JFK Assassination. Unfortunately, after the events on 11/22/63 in Dallas, Texas and the subsequent Warren Commission investigation which ended-up hauling Thornley into testify about his personal relationship with Oswald in the Marines and included interest of Thornley’s own pre-Assassination writings about America’s First Lone Nut Assassin, the original type-written manuscript was somehow lost by Kerry Thornley to his eternal dismay.

Believed by Thornley himself and others to be forever misplaced and forgotten, a copy of the The Idle Warriors‘ original manuscript was miraculously rediscovered and rescued from the National Archives in the early 1990s by an unlikely pair of fellows attending a Dairy Queen Christmas-time franchisee convention in Washington, DC, who happened to have a side-interest in JFK Assassination lore, research, and materials.

Thornley gave his a copy of The Idle Warriors manuscript to the Warren Commission as background information to Oswald’s life and motives, and it languished as an obscure evidence item in the National Archives. Originally submitted as exposition to his testimony, the manuscript by Thornley had mostly been forgotten. Over the years, Thornley came to misplace his only other copy of The Idle Warriors and came to believe he had lost all copies of the manuscript.

By some Discordian Xmas miracle, the Dairy Queen franchisee amateur researchers requested, and were oddly granted, special permission by the National Archives to deconstruct the Warren Commission’s copy of the manuscript page-by-page and allowed to photocopy Thornley’s type-written The Idle Warriors pages.

Eventually this photocopy was handed over to infamous conspiracy and innovator publisher Ron Bonds of IllumiNet Press who immediately published The Idle Warriors, in conjunction with Kerry Thornley with a new introduction by Best Evidence author David S. Lifton, in 1991 under the IllumiNet Press imprint, launching the Ron Bonds conspiracy publishing empire.

The only book about Oswald before the JFK Assassination was finally published. Hail Eris and Dairy Queen dip cones!

Here’s your Christmas miracle fnord excerpt from The Idle Warriors:

Continue reading “A Christmas Story: Excerpt from Kerry Thornley’s THE IDLE WARRIORS”
Categories
audio music robert anton wilson video

Robert Anton Wilson and The Golden Horde

Robert Anton Wilson first met Ireland’s most fnord notorious “psychedelic/garage/trash punk” band, The Golden Horde, while on vacation in Dublin in the early-80s. In 1985, The Golden Horde released their first LP, The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy!, on Hotwire Records with co-credit to Wilson, who provided lyrics and spoken word vocals on several tracks.

The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy! had four weeks on the 1986 UK Indie Charts, peaking at, you guessed it, #23. Hail Eris!

Categories
official business

fnord