Jennifer Knight (known in some circles as Bathtub Jen) has launched her own line of books, known appropriately enough as Bathtub Books, and among the early offerings are some titles by our old friend and practicing Discordian, Roldo Odlor.
Next up, among these offerings, is Kerry Thornley‘s The Goetia Discordia: The Book of the Demons of the Region of Thud, which will soon be available for the low, low price of… well, I’m not sure yet, but whatever it costs you’ll probably get 23% off if you act now!
The Original Sacred Chao (OSC). Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.One of the earliest documents charting the development of Discordianism is dated Feb 2, 1964, written by Kerry Thornley not long after he moved from New Orleans to Arlington, Virginia in the aftermath of the JFK assassination brouhaha.
Among the many discordant highlights to be found in this document includes the first ever (hand drawn) image of the Sacred Chao, which it now can be announced was the brainchild of our beloved Mr. Thornley!
Page 3 of the ancient Discordian document dated Feb 2, 1964 written by Kerry Thornley containing the origin of the Sacred Chao. Courtesy the Discordian Archives.
Not long after Thornley cooked up this chaos, Greg Hill gussied the image up and used it for the cover of the first edition of the Principia Discordia: Or How the West was Lost. And the rest, as they say, is Discordian History.
Greg Hill's adaption of the Sacred Chao, created sometime in 1964. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
On page 5 (of course) of this chaotic document, we find what I believe was the first ever reference to the Law of Fives, again straight out of Kerry Thornley’s curious brain:
“The Law of Fives is simply a Discordian law that says everything happens in fives. For example: the pentagon always has five sides; the five day work week has five days; there are five pillars of nonsense; five is a number often found in math books. Oh, the list is endless! At appropriate times therefore, for differentiation, we will refer to the Discordian pentagon as the Sign of Five. Rally ‘round the Five, boys!”
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (watch on Amazon Video) is a 2003 animated film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by DreamWorks Pictures featuring Brad Pitt as Sinbad, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Marina, Joseph Fiennes as Proteus, and (most importantly for Discordians) Michelle Pfeiffer as Our Lady of Chaos, Eris!
The animation is amazing and the story is pretty solid. According to Sinbad‘s IMDb listing, this film was the last hand-animated DreamWorks production and their first use of Linux OS for the computer-animated parts.
(How this wraps back-around to the publishing of the Principia Discordia as the inspiration for the origin of the CopyLeft, FreeWare, Creative Commons, and Open-Source computer movements will be revealed in later posts. Stay tuned!)
The mix of hand and digital animation gives the film a rare style and stunning looking sequences not seen before or since in animated movies.
Roger Ebert’s review of Sinbad: The Legend of the Seven Seas gave it Four-and-a-Half stars, saying “That it works is because of the high-energy animation, some genuinely beautiful visual concepts and a story that’s a little more sensuous than we expect in animation.” And he’s right, there are gorgeously animated moments in the film that marry hand-animation with the digital animation in strikingly unique ways. And the story is smart and well written for all ages to enjoy.
Michelle Pfeiffer’s voicing of Eris as the film’s main antagonist is pure seduction.
Here’s the opening sequence of the Sinbad with Pfeiffer as Eris that sets up the story… be sure to embiggen the video for best viewing of the animation:
As with all things Eris-related, look for the chaos. According to the Wikipedia entry for Sinbad: The Legend of the Seven Seas, the film grossed “$80.7 million on a $60 million budget, DreamWorks Animation suffered a $125 million loss on the film, which nearly bankrupted the company and caused it to abandon traditional animation in favor of computer animation.”
William 'Bill' HelmerI recently contacted William “Bill” Helmer about his days at Playboy and friendship with RAW & Bob Shea. To this end, I’ll be conducting an interview with him in the near future.
In the meantime, Bill shared this essay with us on the origins of the John Dillinger Died For You Society. —Adam Gorightly
The bizarre origins but otherwise True History of
THE
JOHN DILLINGER DIED FOR YOU
SOCIETY
There I was, at The University of Texas, one evening in the summer of 1966, delivering a brilliantly-researched paper to a small but select American Studies class. They were spellbound by my argument that John Dillinger made a few unorthodox withdrawals from banks and therefore deserved much of the credit for improving their security at a time when Americans desperately needed a “People’s Bandit” to distract them from their Depression worries. (The fact that I also brought to class a modified tenor sax case containing a slightly-illegal Thompson submachine gun, for “show and tell,” fascinated everybody.) (You could get away with such things back then.)
As I pointed out, Dillinger had just the right style–a sense of humor, occasional pranks, treated his hostages like guests (he tied the Racine bank’s Mrs. Patzke to a tree with a shoe string), eluded every police and FBI trap, and when he broke out of the Crown Point, Indiana jail with a wooden pistol, he took a couple of happy hostages and motored out of town singing “Git along, li’l doggie, git along.”
He also was a ladies’ man—playful and romantic—until that terrible night on July 22, 1934, after he, his new girlfriend, and the duplicitous “Woman Red,” had enjoyed “Manhattan Melodrama” at Chicago’s Biograph Theatre. As they were leaving, a bunch of trigger-happy Feds set his spirit free.
(The fact that they also winged two bystanders is rarely mentioned.)
John died with his boots on, so to speak. He previously had stayed up nights nursing his girlfriend (who was ignorant of the plot) after she was banged up in a car wreck. My very own Aunt Meta was a student nurse at Cook County Hospital at the time, and she wrangled her way into the basement Cool Room to see his remains. The next day, despite the city’s hundred-plus heat wave, nearly a thousand Chicagoans patiently waited in line outside the morgue, where they were allowed to file past John’s bullet-ravaged body. Some no doubt wept. And what with the usual odors, the stench of formaldehyde, and the flies attracted to his terrible wounds, this may well have been the inspiration for what now is called “A Taste of Chicago.”
Back in 1966, however, when that particular college class had adjourned to the back-yard area of Austin’s historic Scholz Garten, our Pulitzer Prize-winning professor, Dr. William Goetzmann, after quite a few beers, proposed that we establish The John Dillinger Died For You Society. It was intended to be no more than a spoof of the Elvis Presley fan clubs that were springing up everywhere (and of the “Jesus Died For You” signs that were coming into flower), so you can imagine the enthusiasm that my Dillinger paper inspired among the other students, who also were chuckling over the Presley fan clubs and weary of hearing how anybody “died for you.”
By then Dr. Goetzmann was tipsy enough to further declare that the Society’s founder should be Horace Naismith, a mythical figure who would delegate his authority to me. That name, Horace Naismith, came out of nowhere, but it could easily be mistaken for the fellow who invented basketball. (I don’t believe anybody thought of that at the time, but it later would come in handy: “Naismith? Wasn’t he the guy who…”)
We soon had a few dozen more-or-less official members of the Society and had membership and credit cards printed, but it was not what you’d call a formal organization, like the American Legion or Rotary Club. Everyone in the Society was automatically an Assistant Treasurer authorized to sell memberships to anyone at any time for any amount and then keep it, Because John would have wanted it that way.
The “credit card” had a hole at the top and read simply, “Present this card on the end of a pistol and ask that your purchase be charged. In most states the charge will be armed robbery.”
Dillinger credit card. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives
Also, anyone in the Society could convene a meeting at any time, so long as they left one chair empty for the “Dear Departed Member.” (This would be Mr. Dillinger, of course, although some believed that it referred to his supposedly impressive Private Member, which the Smithsonian still insists it doesn’t have and refuses to display.)
In any case, we had our first official meeting at my residence (a one-time Elks Lodge) on East 12th Street in Austin, diagonally across from the state capitol, after which we amused ourselves with a little target shooting in the basement. Soon after that we instituted what we called The John Dillinger Died For You Society Picnic & Punitive Expedition which included a Thompson submachine gun, a case of ammunition, a case of beer, and a case of dynamite, because our host (who had a ranch west of Austin) was big into blowing things up.
As word got around, the Society grew until it could boast some forty or fifty members, and it had become international (I think we had one member in Canada) by the time I moved to Chicago in 1969, where John had fallen. There I encountered other Dillinger buffs (they just didn’t have a society), including two fellow Playboy employees—Bob Shea and Bob Wilson, who just happened to have offices on either side of mine—and were hard at work on Illuminatus!, which ultimately became a cult classic. (Shea would write a chapter that involved conspiracies within conspiracies and then turn it over to Wilson, sight unseen, who would take up the story and elaborate with even more conspiracies. Oddly enough, it held together and actually made sense!)
Needless to say, Shea and Wilson were both Dillinger enthusiasts because of their frequent patronage of the Biograph, and of course I helped them work Dillinger into their story. (Shea and Wilson even mentioned Dr. Naismith as something or other, and me, as the Reverend Mr. Helmer, although the rascals gave me a social disease.)
At the time I was endeavoring to give the magazine its “redeeming social value” by way of the Playboy Forum, which published letters and editorials, and the Playboy Defense Team, with offices in the Playboy Building at 919 North Michigan Avenue (formerly the Palmolive Building); and I fed Shea and Wilson enough Dillinger lore that we soon had not just one but seven Dillingers, thanks largely to a couple of goofy crime-writers who had just co-authored Dillinger: Dead or Alive? (It was our belief that since Mr. Dillinger had been accused of robbing banks all over the country, sometimes simultaneously, he therefore had to employ doppelgängers.)
Meanwhile, I kept encountering more Dillinger buffs, and after a while we began commemorating the passing of John every July 22 at the Biograph Theatre. The management even (grudgingly) cooperated, and that was how I met Richard Crowe, fabled Ghostbuster (I call him), whose several-times-a-week bus tours include Resurrection Mary, Al Capone’s old Lexington Hotel, and, of course, the alley down which the spirit of John Dillinger still walks.
Horace Naismith remained the mysterious master of ceremonies, usually masquerading as an equally mysterious Bill Helmer who maintained an eerie silence, wore a vintage straw boater, steel rim glasses, a pin-striped jacket, and an outrageous 1930s necktie. Mr. Crowe took over the Society, arranging for members (and anybody else) to meet at a nearby tavern and drink themselves into what we’ll call a wake. About 10 PM he would lead his congregation across Lincoln Avenue to the Biograph Theatre (that’s how they spell it) to hear an inspirational speech, after which Mr. Crowe would again lead the way to the nearby alley, accompanied by an honest-to-God, properly-kilted, bagpiper skirling the mournful strains of “Amazing Grace.”
Then everybody (everybody who could remember the words) joined the piper in that sad song because—we again have to presume—John would have wanted it that way.
A John Dillinger Died For You Society Membership Card, click for 300dpi printable JPG (1.4MB). Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
I, under the nom de guerre Horace Naismith, have since “passed the torch” of The John Dillinger Died For You Society to Mr. Crowe, commonly known as Col. Richard Crowe. I am confident that the faithful will continue to pay their respects every July 22, commemorating the most colorful outlaw of the 1930s who never personally killed anyone.
Well, maybe one, but the cop had refused Dillinger’s admonition to stop bouncing slugs off his bulletproof vest–if it was in fact John, for he only was accused, but never had time to stand trial. In any case, he shot low, they say, and as the officer fell, one slug stuck him in the chest. When John himself later was killed, shot in the back, his pockets yielded a mere $7.71, no doubt because some $20,000 in “git” money had been stolen from his pocket by a rogue cop from East Chicago who had set up the shooting because he had been getting it on with Ana Sage, our “Woman in Red.” (Ana later confirmed that she had seen John count out the money at her place before they went to the movie).
Let’s all remember that Mr. Dillinger was crooked but not twisted, and that he disapproved of unnecessary violence. Unfortunately, he had some colleagues who did not share his otherwise conventional (if somewhat flexible) Family Values.
Remember:
CRIME MAY NOT PAY
BUT IT CAN BE A SHORTCUT TO IMMORTALITY
I just received a beautiful new Brazilian version of Principia Discordia (a translation of the Loompanics edition plus some extra goodies tagged on at the end) courtesy of Penumbra Livros.
Cover of the Brasilia Discordia edition: Principia Discordia by Penumbra Livros.
Of all the Principia Discordia knock-offs I’ve seen over the years, I would submit that this version stands out above all the rest, and if you’re a Principia Discordia aficionado this version is certainly a gem to add to one’s collection—whether you understand a lick of Portuguese or not.
Back cover of the Brasilia Discordia edition: Principia Discordia by Penumbra Livros.
I asked the Penumbra Livros publisher—a fellow named Vinicius—to tell story of how this PD came to be:
“It all started with a stolen Steve Jackson Principia Discordia. My wife stole it years ago from a former boyfriend and kept it in the bottom of a dusty old box. I have heard about PD before, but for me it was sort of like the Necronomicon—one of those books you hear a lot about, but possibly never existed, and there are some copies around, but none of them is the real thing. I decided to give it a read anyway. I decided that, real or not, it was profoundly disturbing, which is a good thing. So I went to look for a Portuguese edition, and discovered there were only some PDFs hanging around on the Internet. I took a look at them, and was deeply impressed by the effort the Discordian community (which, until that time, I assumed did not exist) took to translate it. But, having read the original version, I knew many jokes, word plays and puns in general were lost in translations. The idea to produce an “ultimate Brazilian version” clung to my head for a while, but I had other things to do. I did not work with books back then.
“Some time (years?) later, I was working with books about magic, occult, and stuff. I needed to publish some book about alternate religions, and considered The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But the thought of PD came back to my mind. It was going to be a lot of work, with all the images, and lack of high quality sources, and word plays, and it being a sacred text, and all. But I did not give up. My wife was studying Photoshop and all those graphic software packages, and needed to work on a series of fictitious assignments. So she made a King Kong saint image, a fake book cover, a fake flyer for a fake book launch, all that kind of thing for a Brazilian PD that did not exist. I made a little marketing research and found out there are some very active Discordian clusters in Brazil, and quite a few people who are generally curious about it. Which makes a lot of sense, because everyday life in Brazil is quite surreal at times, and some degree of Discordianism seems to be in everyone’s blood, regardless of people knowing or not about it. That got me excited about making it happen. So I gave the PD a ‘go.’
“Since every major edition of the PD adds some new pages to it (Loompanics/SJ/etc), and there are many active Discordians here, we decided to add some pages of original content. We opened up for public submissions. We got some shitty material, but in the end managed to filter out about 10 very good pages. We also made an effort to guarantee those new pages were not exactly in the spirit of the older PDs, but were representative of the current zeitgeist and the life we live in our country.
“The art adaptations were complicated, but feasible. But some translations were really tough. We looked a lot to other sources of information, such as Historia Discordia (and, of course, the Goddess) to find enlightenment. It came in most cases. In some cases, in which things were completely untranslatable, such as the thinking cow on p. 00028, we just threw a similar joke, which would make sense for the reader. The songs and rhymes were tricky too but I guess we made it without major casualties. The whole process, nevertheless, took a few months longer than originally predicted.
“When the book was sent to the printers, we had trouble making them understand page numbers were inverted (odd pages on the left, even pages on the right). We had to sign a document telling them they were not screwing up. The launch event was funny too. We picked a cool bar to do the event, and the owner of the place, knowing what the book was about, did not believe many people would come. In the end, the place was crowded, and the owner had to work in the kitchen, and had to call his father to help him (none of the employees were willing to show up on such a short notice on a Sunday). That was a good sign. And there were hot dogs for everyone.
“We received some curious orders via our e-commerce. One of them asked for a side order of a hot dog, a singing Rabbi and five tons of flax. Other asked for a ‘no thanks.’ Many orders contained cryptic messages about the Illuminati and Pelé (the soccer player).
“Before the book hit the bookstores, we carefully hid some PDs on major bookstores and instructed our Facebook followers that the books were gifts for the first ones who could locate them and gather the courage to leave a bookstore with a new book out of the front door. Technically that is not stealing—we, the publishers, are giving the book away—but it certainly did mix people’s feelings. All hidden books were found after about two days.
“Now PD is on all main Brazilian bookstores, and there is yet another funny thing about it. Shelf placement. Some bookstores place it on the Greek mythology shelf, some on comics, some on biographies, some on young adults, some on self-improvement, some on political sciences. And honestly, I have no idea where they should place it. Maybe it should be close to the Bible, the Quran, or the Torah. But on a higher shelf, closer to eye height. Who knows?”
May Eris of the Month 2017, Eris Pepe. Eris/Pepe mash-up ripped from the pages of The Pepe Report.
One of the crazier rabbit holes to emerge from the 2016 Presidential campaign was the viral meme of a frowning frog named Pepe, who in the election’s aftermath all of the sudden got this shit eating grin on his face (his frown turned upside down) and MAGA cap planted on his head.
For those unfamiliar with Pepe the Frog (aka Kek), there’s a whole mythology around this meme that’s indeed quite mind warping. Long story short, Pepe became a sigil for 4chan trolls to focus on; a sort of mental image for a magickal working. It’s a story filled with more sordid synchronicities than you can shake a magick stick at, all of which ostensibly got Trump elected.
Pepe also had a hand (“some people are saying”) in creating—or giving some oomph to—the movement now identified as the Alt-right, which pretty much appeared out of nowhere not so long ago. And a faction of the Alt-right are those who frequent Reddit, 4chan and the deeper regions of the dark web doing whatever it is they do in dim-lit basements, their 400 pound fat guy faces illuminated by the eerie glow of computer screens. This, theoretically, included birthing Pepe into pop culture like some kind of right wing Rosemary’s Baby.
Many Cult of Kek enthusiasts were quick to make this Pepe/Discordian association, which is way off base IMHO, at least in terms of how I view the Early Discordian practice of Operation Mindfuck (OM).
Just the same, these Pepe/Discordian comparisons could be considered valid in a limited sense, or as its writ in Principia Discordia:
“All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.”
Discordianism (such as it is) has greatly morphed over the years. Some who nowadays identify themselves as Discordians bring all sorts of divergent political baggage to the party—left, right, or off the map—hence the old adage: “We Discordians must stick apart!” In other words, there’s no formal agreement as to what a Discordian is—let alone what the meaning of “is” is— other than Discordians often agree to disagree—or agree on some things, but not so much on others. Hence what might be true for one is false for another. Much of what presents itself these days as Discordianism (ala social media) comes in the form of the sort of shitposting that Discordian founder Greg Hill would have no doubt recoiled from in horror.
Some have also compared Pepe-ism to Chaos Magick, which itself is tangentially linked to Discordianism. The Early Discordians, for the most part, were never all that much involved in ritual magick—chaotic or otherwise—except of course for Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), easily the most famous Discordian of all who dabbled in various forms of ritual magick.
There was a network of chaos magicians that emerged in the 1970s (many of them influenced in part by RAW) who were likewise into Quantum Physics theories in terms of influencing physical reality and consciousness using memes akin to sigils; for instance, the Discordian practice of focusing on the number 23, and the more you concentrated on it, the more it would manifest, the same sort of mindfuck more recently observed with the whole 11:11 phenomenon. Seek and ye shall find…
These earlier Discordian practices
Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page. (ala the 23 Enigma) were conducted on an informal and often individual basis or through small group experiments—or simply by those who stumbled upon RAW’s Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1—all of this occurring long before the Internet was but a glint in Al Gore’s eye.
Back in the day, it was word-of-mouth-high-weirdness; the memes spread gradually over time in contrast to the Internet age information overload where a simple meme (posted to social media) can spread like wildfire over the course of a few hours.
To this end, the Cult of Pepe is, in essence, a sort of chaos magick working that took some elements from all of the above and projected them across a cyber landscape gone wild, making The Illuminatus! Trilogy look comparatively like a Sunday stroll through the park.
Another Pepe/Discordian connecting point concerns elements of the hacker community (aligned with Pepe) pushing Operation Mindfuck “fake news” memes as a magickal working ostensibly designed to alter physical reality or create a new paradigm; in essence planting a weird seed to see how it will sprout throughout culture and grow tentacles.
With the early Discordians such OM endeavors took the form of injecting into pop culture a fake or alternative Illuminati mythos that was partly true and partly false, fact mixed with fiction which—in turn—created a viral mutation of how we now, as a culture, collectively view the Illuminati.
When Hill, Kerry Thornley, Wilson et al. first launched their OM Illuminati conspiracy, it was uncertain (at least to those of us now on the outside looking back) whether they had any sort of end game in mind—or if OM was all just good fun.
Conversely, the Cult of Kek’s modern and—some might say—twisted form of OM took stories that were partly true—like John Podesta’s real emails—and OM’d them into such beasties as Pizzagate, which is—in essence—a mash up of several pre-Internet conspiratorial yarns, including the Hillary-satanic-lesbian story that was first rolled out in one of the weirder mind control/conspiracy books of the early 1990’s, Cathy O’ Brian’s Trance: Formation of America (archive.org TXT file / Amazon).
Add to that secret tunnels below Comet Pizza—a throwback to the alleged McMartin Pre-School tunnels where children were purportedly transported and used as sex slaves during the height of the Satanic Panic craze—all of which has been recycled into this lurid story of a modern day pizza parlor gone bad!
So the modus operandi was similar (re: Cult of Kek vs. the Discordian Society’s OM) where you take factual elements and conflate them with misinformation/disinformation thus turning these stories into viral Molotov cocktail’s launched into the body politic, the end design to burn it all to the ground—or at least deliver a fully loaded monkey wrench into the works and gum the fuck out of The System.
Perhaps the foremost Pepe chronicler these days is a fellow named A.T.L. Carter who maintains a twitter page called—appropriately enough—“The Pepe Report” where I recently posited that perhaps this whole Pepe craze was on its last (frog) legs. In response, one agitated pro-Pepe commenter suggested I was nothing more than a worthless sack of you know what (ouch, that hurt!) and that if we sorry lot of Discordian losers were as adept as the Cult of Kek in the art of doxing, trolling, and shit posting, we would have elected our very own Discordian President by now instead of talking smack about poor little Pepe.
The agitated tweeter in question also posted a mash-up of Eris meets Pepe—green skin and all—which I must admit is pretty cool and sort of reminded me of an Orion slave girl, and for these reasons we have selected her our Eris of the Month!
In any case, I immediately screen-capped this Eris/Pepe mash-up because you know how these things have a tendency to disappear. This turned out to be a wise move because shortly afterwards our Green Skinned Lady of the Golden Apple was deleted for some reason—by the agitated tweeter in question, I presume—or maybe A.T.L. 86’d it because he didn’t want his Pepe Report devolving into a flame war about who is the superior agent of chaos: Pepe or Eris?
Just the same, A.T.L. referred to me as a “cuck” for my crack about Pepe’s possible demise, which I guess suggests that being called a cuck isn’t quite as bad as being called a worthless sack of stuff.
Twitter exchange, Pepe Report vs. cuck Adam Gorightly.
Whatever the case, A.T.L. seems like an alright (A.L.T. right?) guy, the cuck comment notwithstanding. Of course, I wasn’t entirely clear what “cuck” meant at the time, aside from being a popular Pepe enthusiast putdown.
‘Cuck’, it turns out—after some master class googling—has multiple meanings related to ‘cuckold.’ However, the more recent Breitbartian application (often employed by that creepy Milo guy) seems to describe your average limp-wristed liberal types who get their jollies letting black men do it to their wives while voyeuristically watching from the sidelines. (For further information on the meaning of “cuck” consult your pineal gland and/or Roger Stone.)
Discordian social media forums have been infiltrated—to a certain extent—by this Cult of Pepe crew with the sort of shitposting that some consider hip cutting edge political incorrectness. This type of political incorrectness—it could be argued—eventually led to Milo’s (whatever his last name is) fall from grace due to remarks made on the Joe Rogan Show implying he was cool with underage gay sex—comments that turned out to be a bit much for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) organizers who had scheduled our favorite Alt-right rock star for a speaking gig at their shindig, but thought better of it once his creepy comments made the rounds of social media. Soon after, CPAC withdrew their invite to Milo, who in short order got the boot from Breitbart, as well, probably because it’s kind of hard to promote cheesy Pizzagate stories when your fair-haired Aryan boy is endorsing the very same illicit activities that John Podesta was supposedly party to at Comet Pizza!
Speaking of CPAC, one of the more Discordian acts I’ve seen of late was perpetrated by a couple young pranksters who had a bunch of Russian flags made up with “Trump” printed on them, and then passed them out to clueless CPAC participants entering the event who either weren’t smart enough to know better—or just plain didn’t care that they were waving around Trump/Russia flags. When CPAC organizers caught wind of this gag, they sent their goons into the crowd to retrieve them, but even then some of the recipients refused to hand-over their prized blue, white, and (commie) red banners, the treasonous bastards.
Afterwards, the two pranksters who pulled off this jake were interviewed outside the event, employing mock Russian accents.
According to Judith Mackrell in the April 21, 2017 edition of The Guardian:
“Against a rising tide of fake news and conspiracy theories, choreographer Rosie Kay and film-maker Adam Curtis have found a timely subject for their new collaboration, MK Ultra. Splicing together documentary footage and a pumped-up stream of dance and music, this two-hour work tells the story of how a generation of under-25s have come to believe in the Illuminati, a shadowy cult they say is attempting world domination through mass brainwashing.
“According to popular myth, the cult operates by grooming targeted individuals to become celebrities, using pop stars such as Britney Spears to disseminate the cult’s agenda through the content of their songs and videos. MK Ultra is an exceptionally stylish production. Illuminati imagery percolates through every aspect of its design, from the pyramid-shaped film screen to the arcane symbols that decorate the seven dancers’ costumes.
“Curtis’s documentary uses a characteristically sophisticated blend of contemporary interview and archive footage to narrate the rise of the Illuminati myth, while Kay’s choreography portrays a group of dancers who have apparently been signed up to the Illuminati programme, drilling themselves for stardom through a relentlessly competitive (and cleverly parodic) regime of twerking, urban, sexy moves.”
So if you’re lucky enough to be in the UK this month, you can totally get your Eye in the Pyramid groove on by attending both MK Ultra and the Cosmic Trigger Play at The Cockpit in London.
In addition, there will be an extended Cosmic Trigger Play extravaganza on May 27th including talks by Alan Moore and Adam Curtis. Find out more here.
Rosie Kay Dance Company: MK Ultra. Photo by Brian Slater.
In my Historia Discordia book, I included some specs that Greg Hill sketched (back in the day) for an Honest-to-Goddess Discordian Society decal and patch.
Greg Hill's sketch for a Discordian patch and decal. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
More recently, I happened upon these specs once again and thought: “What they hey, I oughta see if I can get this patch made online!” And so I sent Hill’s specs to an online site and within a few days I had these beauties burning my hot little hands. Afterwards, I handed some out at the annual Paramania event.
Discordian patch photo courtesy of Paramania attendee Red Pill Junkie.
To get a sense of the Paramania experience, check out this episode of Greg Bishop’s Radio Misterioso podcast for your possible listening pleasure. I took part in this historic broadcast, and as I recall (and I use the words “recall” quite loosely because the booze was flowing ever so freely) at some point we got into a deep discussion about the meaning of chaos. (Hail Eris!)
If you would like your Very Own Discordian Patch, you’ll have to earn it by making a contribution to the Historia Discordia site—like submitting an Eris of Month artwork we select, for instance—or something that contributes to our overall cause of world domination or Bunless Hot Dog proclivities.
Contact us k00ks with your contributions at the bottom our Contact THE MGT. page and you could get an unofficial official Discordian patch!
Some of the Paramania bunch at the devilish Devil's Gate! Photo courtesy of Greg Bishop, I think.
April Eris of the Month 2017: Kalis is a Kali and Emperor Eris Page by Cpt. Bucky Saia Kalis is a Kali and Emperor Eris Page (Emperor Furiosa Eris and Betty Page Morph) Stands for destruction and renewal. Sombunallwhere between the Season of Aftermath and the Season of Chaos. Courtesy Cpt. Bucky Saia.
) is a 2003 animated film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by DreamWorks Pictures featuring Brad Pitt as Sinbad, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Marina, Joseph Fiennes as Proteus, and (most importantly for 
