Pope Card by St. Mae for the RAW Meme-Orial, front, 2007. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Pope Card by St. Mae for the RAW Meme-Orial, back, 2007. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Sticker: Lysergide by St. Mae. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives. While on the topic of Pope Cards, a fine addition to the theme was created a few years back by my friend St. Mae over at Discordian.com, a card made specifically for The Robert Anton Wilson Cosmic Meme-Orial back in 2007.
Mae passed on a bundle of these beauties to me during a visit last year to Emperor Norton’s groovy grave site which she orchestrated.
In addition, Mae gave me a few Lysergide stickers that she and her crew created a while ago, which in short order I stuck on the back of my keyboard synthesizer, just because it looked cool there.
Lysergide, for those not in the know, was the trademarked name for LSD back when a group of someones were trying to market the drug before it became illegal.
Pope Card: POEE Side Temple in Omaha, Nebraska, front. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Pope Card: POEE Side Temple in Omaha, Nebraska, back. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Your humble Discordian documenter has just discovered a “new” pope card in the Archives that apparently originated from the POEE Side Temple in Omaha, Nebraska, produced by The Green Ink Cabal, date unknown.
The unique feature of the card is the backside that includes 5 privileges which, of course, correspond to the fabled Law of Fives.
Framed Discordian Artifacts. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.A couple years ago or so, I was given Emperor Norton’s gravestone rubbing from an East Coaster named Fred McCann, a young twenty-something fellow who had read my book The Prankster and The Conspiracy and, due partly to it, traveled out to California to interview Early DiscordiansLouise Lacey and Bob Newport.
Along the way, Fred made a pilgrimage to Emperor Norton’s grave and the rest, as they say, is history.
Afterwards, I got the notion to take said rubbing and combine it with some other Discordian Archives artifacts, which I only finally got around to doing the other day. Anyway, here ‘tis, including the third edition of Principia Discordia, flax notes from both Omar and Mal, not to mention a Hail Eris bumper sticker designed by RAW himself, as well as several fnords!
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.”
Marquee for the RAW Meme-Orial, February 18, 2007. Courtesy of Tim Cridland.On February 18, 2007, I had the privilege of attending what was dubbed The Robert Anton Wilson Cosmic Meme-Orial held at the Coconut Grove Ballroom in Santa Cruz, CA, the town where RAW lived the last couple decades of his life.
At the time, Louise Lacey was visiting Santa Cruz, so on the way I picked her up and gave her a lift to the event, which was located right off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk where I’d spent so many days of my youth and teenage years. So it was nostalgic in that sense, conjuring up memories of days gone by, and also a sense of fond nostalgia about RAW’s influence on all of us Discordians attending the event. In many ways this day signaled the end of an era, although those in the crowd did not dwell on the maudlin, but to the contrary came and celebrated and laughed and lifted a glass (or two) to RAW’s passing into the land of We Know Not What.
RAW’s box of ashes, topped by the Golden Apple, February 18, 2007. Courtesy of Tim Cridland.As we entered the ballroom, RAW’s ashes were on display in a wooden box that was appropriately topped off with a Golden Apple. Louise stopped in her tracks and did a double take, recognizing it as the very same Golden Apple she’d given RAW a few years earlier at the premiere of the Maybe Logic documentary at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz back on July 23 of 2003. (July 23rd being a holy Discordian date that celebrates the rising of the star Sirius and RAW’s encounter with otherworldly entities. Maybe.) Outside during intermission, RAW had stepped out to have a cig when Louise presented him with said Golden Apple and recalled that he was completely enchanted with the gift, and couldn’t take his eyes off it as he cradled it in his hands. This was the last time that Louise saw him.
During the Meme-Orial, many took to the stage with their RAW remembrances, including his daughter, Christina, who shared his last message:
“I no longer claim to know anything, but I still have some persistent suspicions. My greatest suspicion holds that all my suspicions may prove wrong. Intelligence recognizes that nothing now seems impossible. Have a good, hearty laugh and do not dare to mourn me.”
The zine movement, in all its nostalgic glory. Left to right: Adam Gorightly, Tim Cridland, Kenn Thomas and Greg Bishop at the RAW Meme-Orial, February 18, 2007. Courtesy of Tim Cridland.The event was attended by my good friends Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press fame, The Excluded Middle’s Greg Bishop and Tim Cridland (aka Zamora The Torture King), who all, in one way or another, were touched by RAW’s work. Coming of age during the late-80s zine movement, it seemed RAW was a unifying force binding us all together, not only because he had penned such mind bending classics as Illuminatus! and Cosmic Trigger, but due as well to his optimistic and open minded outlook which seemed an inspiring path to follow.
To this end, Greg recalled how his life was literally saved when—during a period of deep depression—he fortunately discovered RAW’s writings about the loser and winner scripts, and immediately took them to head and heart, turning his world around.
Synchronicities were often abundant during personal interactions with RAW, as Kenn Thomas recalled:
“The twenty-three coincidences came up twice when RAW visited me in St. Louis way back in 1978. We were talking about it at lunch one day when the number we were given at the pizza place to wait for our order was 2323. Later, I took him to a radio interview in the nearby burb of Clayton, MO—near where George Noory does his show these days—and I pointed out that the name of the building where the radio station was located must have some mystical significance. It was called the Sevens Building. “Maybe,” he said, “and maybe so does that” and he pointed the top of the tall building across the street which had a large “23” marking its street address. RAW tells some version of this story on one of his videos, saying that the incident reflected a koan ‘Who is the Master who makes the grass green?’”
Poster for the RAW Meme-Orial.Any decent memorial—as all good Irishmen and Discordians know—has a well stocked bar to which I soon made passage. After securing an ice cold Anchor Steam—and taking a long cool drawl thereof—I worked my way back through the crowd, in the process bumping into R.U. Sirius of Mondo 2000 fame. Though no meaningful words were exchanged between us during the course of our passage, we shared that knowing nod that only RAW initiates know, clinking our bottle necks together, a toast in cosmic unison, as each of us then continued moving through the crowd.
The next RAW initiate I encountered was his long time friend, Scott Apel, who spent a lot of time with Bob during his final days. Scott mentioned that, at one point, RAW had handed him a copy of The Prankster and The Conspiracy and said, “If you want to know what really happened with the early Discordian scene, read this book!”—which was a wonderful anecdote to hear.
There are some very cool clips from the RAW Meme-Orial at this YouTube playlist:
RAW’s ashes being tossed to the sea, and to Eris, February 18, 2007. Courtesy of Tim Cridland.Included is a stirring rendition of Auld Lasagna, as well as the procession where we were all given kazoos and such to blow upon and make mad music as we marched out to the beach to watch RAW’s ashes scattered to the sea, and to Eris.
In a previous post, DS Documents A-Plenty!, I chronicled Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill’s creative collaborative period of ’64, which is further documented in this postcard that Kerry (aka Omar) then living in Arlington, Virginia, sent to Greg.
At one point, Kerry had even toyed with the idea of taking out a post office box at the Pentagon (if that’s even possible) and making it the official address of the Discordian Society headquarters. Grace Caplinger (Zabriskie) is also mentioned on the postcard.
Hail Eris!
Front of a postcard of the Pentagon from Kerry Thornley to Greg Hill, 1964. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Back of a postcard of the Pentagon from Kerry Thornley to Greg Hill, 1964. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Loyd Blankenship, troublemaker. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
The following is a draft excerpt from my forthcoming book Chasing Eris. The book documents my worldwide adventure to experience modern Discordian culture, meet its personalities, and discover elusive Erisian mysteries. —Brenton Clutterbuck
Discordia has long been immersed deeply in copyright liberation and geek culture. What you may not know though is the surprising role it played in the birth of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose history begins in Austin, Texas.
Robert Anton Wilson, who I’m sure you will recall as one of the Early Discordians, released his popular The Illuminatus! Trilogy in 1975. In 1981, Steve Jackson, who published the “black cover” Principia Discordia, held discussions with freelance artist Dave Martin about adapting Illuminatus! into a game. Instead of taking on the book, due to the complexity (and, one might speculate, perhaps payment for creative rights), his company, Steve Jackson Games, began to make a game built instead on the concept of the Illuminati generally, throwing in a couple of explicit Discordian references. To play with their interest in conspiracies and Discordianism, Steve Jackson Games had on their BBS the tongue-in-cheek announcement:
Greetings, Mortal! You have entered the secret computer system of the Illuminati, the on-line home of the world’s oldest and largest secret conspiracy. 5124474449300/1200/2400BAUD fronted by Steve Jackson Games, Incorporated. Fnord.
In 1990, Steve Jackson Games was also working on another project, GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System), a system allowing players to develop role-playing scenarios of their choice. The company was developing materials for a GURPS Cyberpunk role-playing game, written predominantly by recent hire Loyd Blankenship.
In other circles, Blankenship was known as +++The Mentor+++, an experienced computer hacker. He’d moved to Austin in 1976, in grade five or six. Without knowing anyone, he began to get into computers, mostly just for the gaming. At his mother’s workplace he met a number of the system operators who maintained the PDP Mainframe, who showed him a text-based game called Star Trek, which he then convinced the operators to printout the BASIC code for him. It was through porting the game over to a CompuColor computer in the college library where he used to hang out that he first began to teach himself BASIC.
He began to break into computers when his guest password expired on the university computers he’d been using.
By 1988, Blankenship was fairly established as a hacker and attended Summercon, the longest running hacking convention in the U.S., where he spent time with The Leftist, Doom Prophet, Phantom Phreaker, Control C and Urvile/Necron 99 amongst others. Together, they became the second incarnation of a group known as the Legion of Doom.
Summercon was arranged by a hacking magazine called Phrack, established in 1985.
We jump to 1989: As well as writing the GURPS manual, Blankenship was running a Bulletin Board System called The Phoenix Project which helped to distribute Phrack, as well as participating in the Steve Jackson Games completely unrelated Bulletin Board, Illuminati.
Computers were a big thing; a new forefront for industry and crime. The government was busy with Operation Sundevil, an operation to crack down on hackers. The U.S. Secret Service also had another target in mind for an operation, technically unrelated, but still after those wascally hackers: Phrack magazine.
In 1989, the 24th edition of Phrack published the contents of a text file giving information on the E911 system. E911 is an enhanced service for handling emergency calls. These calls take place ordinarily on the public phone lines, but are managed so as to take priority over all other calls. According to a Secret Service affidavit, the file had been stolen from Atlanta telecommunications giant BellSouth by Robet J. Riggs, and was edited into a hacker tutorial by one of the Phrack founders, Craig Neidorf (Knight Lightning).
March 1, 1990: Steve Jackson Games is unexpectedly raided by members of the United States Secret Service, accompanied by Austin police and at least one civilian expert from “the phone company.” The Steve Jackson Games webpage says agents cut locks, tore open boxes, and forced open footlockers. They confiscated four computers containing GURPS Cyberpunk files, two printers, and other hardware and files.
Steve Jackson Games was told they would get their computers back “tomorrow.” In later statements, a judge said that the Secret Service could have duplicated the material they needed in between a couple of hours and eight days. Rather than the next day as promised, or eight days, the majority of confiscated material wasn’t returned for a whole four months. The majority of the GURPS Cyberpunk manual had to be reconstructed from snippets, planning and memory. Steve Jackson Games was impacted by the raid, and had to lay off nearly half their staff. Later, Judge Sam Sparks would seek to dispute the assertion that Steve Jackson Games had been nearly bankrupted by the raid.
Why did Secret Service agents target Steve Jackson Games?
The key was Loyd Blankenship. Agent Timothy Golden had based the raid of Steve Jackson Games on the fact that Loyd Blankenship was working there, ran a bulletin board system popular with hackers from his home, and also ran a completely separate BBS at Steve Jackson Games.
In response to the Steve Jackson Games case and other similar cases, John Gilmour, John Perry Barlow, and Mitch Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990. They would later, in 1993, support Steve Jackson Games in a legal battle seeking damages from the Secret Service.
When Steve Jackson Games sued the Secret Service, the judge’s comments concluded, amongst other things, that Foley had seen the “Greetings, Mortal!” message on a printout of the Illuminati BBS, and concluded, without further investigation, that this was evidence that the Illuminati BBS was a hacking space. Judge Sam Sparks added in his comments that it would have taken only hours to determine that Steve Jackson Games was a legitimate publisher, who would have been willing to cooperate with Foley’s investigation. The judge was critical of Foley, who despite being an attorney, was led to violate the Privacy Protection Act, simply by not being aware of it. Fellow Agent Golden was also unaware of this act, and when informed in the process of the seizure, that Steve Jackson Games was a gaming publishing company, did not place importance on the fact, or realize this meant his actions were illegal.
Judge Sam Sparks was scathing of the Secret Service, whose warrant, he said, did not even meet the standards set by the Secret Service itself. He criticized Foley for not creating copies of the computer content to be made available to the company, and for the impact of the case on Steve Jackson’s personal reputation.
He asked a direct question of Foley: had he considered that his actions could harm Steve Jackson economically?
Foley replied with “No, sir.”
“You actually did, you just had no idea anybody would actually go out and hire a lawyer and sue you,” replied Sparks.
Steve Jackson Games was awarded over $50,000 for damages sustained by the raid and the retention of property belonging to the company.
Riggs was sentenced to 21 months in prison for his part in stealing the E911 code.
Craig Neidorf, aka Knight Lightning, was charged, though these charges were dismissed after only 4 days with no conviction, incurring $100,000 in legal costs. This dismissal was in part due to the revelation that the stolen document which was estimated by BellSouth at a value of over $70,000, was in fact available from BellSouth unedited at a cost of $13.
Loyd Blankenship, for his part, was never charged.
[Edit 02/19/14: Jackson didn’t state himself that the choice to adapt the concept of the Illuminati mythos rather than adapting the Wilson and Shea book Illuminatus! was related to royalty costs. I’ve adapted the article to reflect this. —Clutterbuck]
Camden playing the role of 'Trinidad John' sometime in the 1950s in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of John F. Carr.In the 1950s, John Albert Overton attended Georgia State University, where he earned an engineering degree, and—according to one source—“chased more black tail than anybody I ever heard of.” (This in a state where at the time black/white sexual relations were punishable by imprisonment.)
During the Korean War, Overton served in the Navy and somehow finagled a tour of duty in Jamaica, spending most of his time, during the conflict, romancing beautiful black women. Due to these pursuits, Overton developed such an excellent Jamaican accent that when he returned to the states he hosted a local African-American sponsored radio show in Los Angeles, appearing as “Trinidad John.”
According to Discordian mythology—or at least Kerry Thornley’s version—it was following Overton’s first acid trip in the mid-60s that he decided to change his name to Camden Benares, the idea of which was to bring the teachings of the East into the West: “Camden” for Camden, New Jersey, and Benares after Benares, India, paying allegorical homage to the city where the Buddha delivered his first sermon.
In Europe, Camden is still considered a leading authority on Zen, and his books have been published in German, Dutch, and several other languages. He wrote a total of three books in his Zen series which included Zen Without Zen Masters, A Handful of Zen and his final—and as yet unpublished memoir—Riding Buddha’s Bicycle, finished shortly before his death in 1999.
Camden in the role of his Discordian persona, The Count of Fives. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.As Camden explains in Riding Buddha’s Bicycle, his name change was prompted not so much to escape his past, but to re-invent himself into the type of person he envisioned becoming, and which to some extent he ultimately became; an enlightened being tuned to the emotions of others; a teacher without a strict formula to follow on a path of Zen Without Zen Masters. As Discordianism was a disorganized religious practice where each Discordian became pope and overseer of their own self-styled church, likewise was Camden’s Zen Buddhist approach.
Throughout Riding Buddha’s Bicycle, Benares stressed that his method of peddling might work for some in some instances, but most likely not for everyone in all instances and that it’s incumbent upon each and every prospective Zen peddler—who mounts Buddha’s bicycle—to chart their own course of discovery as they move along at different speeds and vectors. Camden simply encouraged his readers to consider his methods and to either use them or discard them, as they saw fit. There are many paths up the mountain…
At the outset of his studies, Camden deeply contemplated the two schools of Zen thought, and which would be the most appropriate for him to pursue: 1) The School of Gradual Enlightenment, as opposed to: 2) The School of Sudden Enlightenment, accompanied by that blinding flash of satori that leads to illumination.
Camden decided the former—Gradual School of Enlightenment—was a more practical and attainable approach for him personally, and “would consist of gaining knowledge by seeing into one’s own nature and having a series of insights that would produce an enlightened state equivalent to the experience of sudden enlightenment…”
While Benares’ aforementioned LSD trip may have certainly been a catalyst to his mounting of Buddha’s bike, other episodes in his life were of equal or greater importance, such as a pivotal life-after-death experience, followed not long after by an ill-fated love affair. Each of these episodes set Camden forth on a quest of self-examination and personal exploration, to ultimately cultivate his own self-styled Samadhi, and to make himself a more tuned-in soul.
For Camden, it was more about the journey than arriving at any ultimate destination, for who really knows, among us, if there truly comes an end to consciousness, human or otherwise? It was what he discovered along the way, and living life to its fullest, that was forefront in Camden’s consciousness, as such seemingly trite maxims as “being in the now” and “living for the moment” truly came into focus for him—due to a health crisis he experienced in his early 20s—when given just mere months to live. My guess is that, at least in the back of his mind, Camden must have felt he was living on borrowed time, and that it was critical he make the most of each precious moment at his disposal, however fleeting they may have been, while riding Buddha’s bicycle.
Official Discordian Business. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.The times they were a changin’ back in ‘64. JFK had just been takin’ out and shortly after The Beatles emerged on the landscape to breathe a little positive vibe into the National Downer that’d just gone down the rabbit hole. Against this backdrop, Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley entered into perhaps their most productive collaborative period, sowing the seeds of what would become the 1st edition of Principia Discordia: Or How The West Was Lost.
Back in ‘61, Thornley and Hill moved to New Orleans where they engaged in a number of early Discordian activities, some of which were covertly copied on New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison’s mimeograph machine by a friend who worked in the D.A.’s office, Lane Caplinger, who just happened to be the sister of Grace Caplinger, later to become known to the world as actress Grace Zabriskie, none other than Laura Palmer’s mother among other notable roles. Garrison, of course, would play a larger and much weirder role in Thornley’s consciousness in the years to come, to be covered in greater depth in my forthcoming book, Caught In The Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Oswald and Garrison’s JFK Investigation, coming later this year from Feral House.
In ’63 — after JFK’s assassination — Kerry moved from New Orleans to Arlington, Virginia for a number of reasons, one of which included being in closer proximity to D.C. where the Warren Commission had recently convened, and Kerry — looking for an angle to promote his novel in the works, The Idle Warriors (the main character of which was modeled on Oswald before the Kennedy assassination) — was hoping to wrangle an appearance before the Commission. The rest, as we know, is a weird slice of history.
The documents I’ve posted here would — in the following year, 1965 — greatly influence the 1st edition of the PD, which will soon appear in its entirely for the first time in 50 “odd” years in our forthcoming book project Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society, coming soon from RVP Publishers.
In these early years, Hill and Thornley spent an inordinate amount of time developing a Discordian Society hierarchical structure that would eventually dissolve into nothingness when Greg Hill later decided to forgo any type of formal Discordian structure and turn the whole thing into an art collage project without rules and regulations, which led to a more free form approach to later editions of the Principia Discordia.
Some items to note include Kerry’s (Omar’s) mention that he sent a copy of “Why We Think The DS Is A Hot Item” to Grace Caplinger (Zabriskie), as well as what is perhaps the first formal mention of the fabled Law Of Fives, a document lovingly adorned with a slew of Greg Hill stamps, as he was wont to do.
In 1976, pioneering underground newspaper the Berkeley Barb published the below article on a then 44-year-old Robert Anton Wilson written by Ray Ramsay. The article posted below contains some interesting history on the writing and publication of The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
Greg Hill was thoughtful enough to stash a copy into the Discordian Archives.
Hail Eris!
Berkeley Barb article on Robert Anton Wilson, March 12-18, 1976 edition. Click to Embiggen. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
