Promo for CosmicTrigger the play
May 4th-27th The Cockpit, London.
Cosmic Trigger Broadcast 05//
Visual Propaganda meme for the Robert Anton Wilson
based, audio visual stage performance
extravaganza that is cosmictriggerplay.com
by Daisy Campbell
Greg Hill relocated to New York from 1973—1975 and while there one of the Discordian projects he launched (under his Discordian persona of Rev. Dr. Occupant) was…
The Confusion Contest or ConCon.
As part of his official duties overseeing the Confusion Contest, Rev. Dr. Occupant issued the following report:
And drum roll please…
Here are the winners of ConCon 75!
One of the ConCon entries “came” courtesy of Discordian poetess and one-time lover of Kerry Thornley, Judy Abrahms.
Here’s another ConCon entry promoting “Hot finger-size Chicken Sandwiches.”
In 1968, Roger Lovin began publishing the first French Quarter underground newspaper. Initially titled Balls: The Ungarbled Word it later became known simply as The Ungarbled Word.
The first issue was a rather crude, Xeroxed affair and although it came across as amateur in appearance, Balls featured top notch content including an excerpt from one of the first Discordian writings by Bob McElroy (aka Mungojerry Grindlebone) titled “The Gadfly’s Glossary.”
The third issue of Balls:The Ungarbled Word featured an excerpt from Greg Hill’s “Draftee’s Dictionary.” The full version, like Mungo’s “Gadfly’s Glossary”, is part of the Discordian Archives. Links to both are provided here and here.
Ungarbled Word occasionally ran Discordian recruitment advertisements, such as the following:
Sometime in 1958 or ’59 Lord Omar Khyyam Ravenhurst, K.C. was seized by a Mystic Fit. When he revived, he stammered, “How blind we have been. All of this confusion could not just have HAPPENED! SOMEBODY had to PUT all this discord here!” Whereupon Malaclypse the Younger, K.C. had a vision of Eris in which she gave him instructions quite incompatable with those received by Lord Omar, and the DISCORDIAN SOCIETY was born.
SINCE THEN, membership has more than tripled, and the Society has been brought to dynamic Discordian perfection by Fang, the Unwashed, W.K.C., etc., and Mungojerry Grindlebone, C.T.E., etc.
THE DS is the hottest item to hit the holy market since Islam. If you have the wit, come join the gathering sages – If you have but half the wit, join somebody else’s flock and get fleeced.
Why the Discordian Society?
THE PURPOSE of the DS is to provide false, comforting answers to the otherwise unanswerable questions that plague mankind; to give metaphysical reasons for the disorder around us; to promote the unworkable principles of discord – In short, to provide the world with a workshop for the insane, thus keeping us out of mischief as Presidents, Priests, Ministers, or other Dictators.
How to Join
Membership in the Legion of Dynamic Discord is open to anyone who asks for it.
A Few Saints
Some of the major saints are St. Bokonon – see CAT’S CRADLE by Vonnegut; St. Quixote – DON QUIXOTE by Cervantes; St. Oberosia – see PENGUIN ISLAND by France; Sr. Yossarian – see CATCH-22 by Heller; and Jt. Pkflrmids – see YOUR EYE DOCTOR by tomorrow.
For more information contact:
The Discordian Society
P.O. Box 501 – Rayville, La.
After his Army discharge in 1968, Greg Hill returned to California and immersed himself in the burgeoning counterculture, penning a regular column called Happenings Westcoast published by Lovin in the August edition of The Ungarbled Word.
Happenings Westcoast became a regular feature in The Ungarbled Word and the title was soon changed to Etcetera Pacifica.
Hill produced the column for just a few months until December ’68 when he called it quits on account of his mounting frustration with anti-establishment militants.
In the next installment of this series, we’ll examine how Roger Lovin got caught up in the Jim Garrison investigation madness.
Mucho thanks to Tim Cridland (aka Zamora the Torture King) for his assistance to this and future installments of our Roger Lovin series.
The method to this madness included mixing fact with fiction so that you were never quite sure how many of the Illuminati references in Illuminatus! were based on “real” sources, such as a quote from a radical Chicago newspaper, The Roger Spark (July 1969), which stated that Adam Weishaupt had murdered George Washington and served in his place for his two terms as President. This article also promoted the theory that Mayor Richard Daley was “…one of the top agents of the infamous and long legendary Bavarian Illuminati.”
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea , it so happens, helped publish The Roger Spark during the period the two worked at Playboy in the late 1960s. The article in question, “DALEY LINKED WITH ILLUMINATI,” contains a mix of fact vs. fiction (do we sense a theme here?) with no actual byline; it’s simply credited to The Spark, but in reality it was RAW/Shea who were responsible for the piece, so in essence they were quoting themselves in Illuminatus! (ala The Spark), another example of OM-styled Guerrilla Ontology. Grab the full issue in PDF here.
Elsewhere in Illuminatus! an article titled “THE MOST SINISTER, EVIL, SUBVERSIVE CONSPIRACY IN THE WORLD” by Sandra Glass (TeenSet Magazine, March 1969) is referenced concerning an investigation into the mysterious Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria (A.I.S.B.). This article was ominously prefaced with an editor’s note: “Before her recent death, Miss Glass was an expert on subversive affairs.” The source—for many of the revelations in the article—came allegedly from an anarchist named Simon Moon, who would later turn up as a character in Illuminatus! This article, like the one from The Roger Spark, was surreptitiously written by RAW and Shea, and much of its content would later appear in Illuminatus!
According to the TeenSet article, Adam Weishaupt founded the A.I.S.B. in Ingolstadt on May 1st, 1776, and their slogan—or secret password—was “Ewige Blumenkraft” which translated to “Flower Power Forever.” At first glance, this motto seemingly refers to May Day, the date the A.I.S.B. officially came into existence. However—as revealed in Illuminatus!—the complete version of the motto was “Ewige Blumenkraft und ewige Schlangenkraft,” which translates to “eternal flower power and eternal serpent power” and apparently suggests that the fertility rites of spring are connected to the kundalini force—or serpent power—which itself relates to the practice of Tantrism, or sex magic. And that, in essence, is the True Secret of the Illuminati: Sex Magic.
The TeenSet article intimated that during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when Senator Abraham Ribicoff criticized police violence against anti-war demonstrators, Mayor Daley responded with an animated retort, and “…his lips were forming the words that by this time have become frighteningly familiar: ‘Ewige Blumenkraft!’”
The article further asserted that, “…the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria has infiltrated, allied itself with or taken over all TV networks and wire services, the Federal Reserve System, the John Dillinger Died For You Society, the Chicago Tribune, the Discordian Society, the Communist Party (USA), the Paratheo-Anametamystikhood of Eris Esoteric (P.O.E.E.), Hell’s Angels, the Sophisticated Sisters of Blessed Saints Claustrophilia and Theophobia, the Mafia, the Black Lotus Society, the Lawrence Talbot Memorial Society and enough additional organizations to fill a book the size of the Manhattan telephone directory (yellow pages).”
Over at our Early Discordians facebook group, Sirius Mazzu posted a rather illuminating link that seemed to be news to everyone in the group concerning a 1978 H. R. Giger Illuminatus! illustration, which incorporated Tim Leary, H.P. Lovecraft, and possibly Aleister Crowley as characters in addition to little alien dudes on stilts numbered 5, 17, and 23!
John discovered this poster at an online archive for The Rag, an underground mag published in Austin, Texas during the early 1970s.
Among other things, John was wondering who designed the poster, and if the illustration of Emperor Norton was original to it.
I immediately recognized the poster as the work of none other than Discordian Malaclypse the Younger (aka Greg Hill) and, in fact, an original print of this same poster resides in The Discordian Archives, along with a couple other iterations.
While I couldn’t specifically pin down the date of the Norton poster, I would say sometime around 1970 is my best guess. Hill’s interest in Norton began around 1969 when he formed the Joshua Norton Cabal, and it appears Hill sent out this poster to a variety of underground newspapers, among them The Rag.
As to the artist of the image, it appears Hill lifted it from one of the San Francisco newspapers (the Chronicle or Examiner) as revealed in this newspaper clipping I came across which Greg Hill evidently used as clip art (old school style) for the poster.
The clipping in question appears to have been some sort of ad or campaign dedicated to the good Emperor. In the Archives there is also a pin that says “Emperor Norton lives” which evidently was part of this same campaign. This leads me to believe that the phrase “Emperor Norton Lives” inspired Greg Hill’s “Live Like Norton” motto.
In the Norton files, I also noticed an Examiner newspaper article from October 13, 1982, which indicated at one time or another there was an annual Joshua Norton Awards that had been established by a group called the Friends of Emperor Norton.
I’m guessing this news article must have spurred renewed interest with Greg Hill, as that same year he concocted this new iteration of the Norton poster that incorporated an assortment of images taken from the pages of Principia Discordia.