An awesome Eris as seen on The Eriskopalian Kirk’s Twitter.
Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page.
An awesome Eris as seen on The Eriskopalian Kirk’s Twitter.
Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page.
Here’s a great pen and ink with watercolor Eris by artist Thalia Took found in the A-Musing-ing Grace Gallery.
You can find prints at deviantArt and greeting cards through Zazzle.
Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page.
Scattered throughout the Discordian Archives are flyers and invites to such chaotically-inspired soirées. In a recent post, we featured correspondence from Greg Hill about one such meet-up that occurred in Chicago during the early-70s that included Hill, Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), Robert Shea and Tim and Mary Wheeler.
In this vein, I thought I’d share further examples of Discordian parties starting with a shindig thrown by Tim Wheeler (aka Harold Lord Randomfactor) at his farm in Shelbyville, Indiana, billed as the “Grand National Founding Convention of Young Americans For Real Freedom.” The intent of this gathering was to draft “The Shelbyville Statement,” which would be the guiding document of the Young Americans for Real Freedom (YARF). Of course, all of this was merely an elaborate joke-parody riffing on a real organization called the Young Americans for Freedom that was prominent in conservative political circles during this period.
For further info on YARF, click here.
Moving on to other Discordian parties, here’s a note from Greg Hill (aka Mal 2) to Louise Lacey (aka Lady L., F.A.B. – Fucking Anarchist Bitch) composed on genuine Illuminati stationary created by the aforementioned Harold Randomfactor.
Next in chronological (dis)order is a party described in RAW’s Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati that occurred on Crowleymas – October 12, 1974 . According to RAW, this gathering was
“…celebrated at our apartment house with weird and eldritch festivities. Arlen and I, representing the Discordian Society, together with Stephen upstairs (Reformed Druids of North America), Claire and Carol in another apartment (witches, connected with the New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn), and the Great Wild Beast Furtherment Society (which is really Stephen and me and another neighbor named Charles), opened all our rooms to a Crowleymas Party and invited nearly 100 local wizards and mystics…”
In attendance were such illuminaries as ufological visionary Jacques Vallee, along with a flock of other furry freaks from a hodge-podge of mystical and religious (dis)orders, including Grady McMurtry, then head of the Ordo Templi Orientis in the USA.
Apparently, such Discordian frivolities carried on well into the early 1980s as demonstrated in a letter below to Greg Hill from Camden Benares (aka The Count of Fives aka Felix Pendragon) announcing a duel sponsored event orchestrated in cahoots with renowned pornographer, and sometime Discordian, Ron Matthies under the banner of “Fort Chaotic.” In said letter, Camden mentions a Discordian novel he was working on at the time called Another Howling Eighties Conspiracy that unfortunately never saw the light of day, although we know he finished at least five chapters, Hail Eris.
As revealed in my Thornley bio The Prankster and the Conspiracy, Camden and his wife June often attended parties dressed as a priest and nun. After one such party, Camden and June—still bedecked in their holy garbed—visited a Denny’s in West Los Angeles where they spent considerable time making out in their booth. As would be expected, people began freaking out upon witnessing this ungodly spectacle, as in between sacrilegious smooches Camden gave blessings and benedictions to the stunned Denny’s patrons.
This month’s Eris was ripped (literally) from the pages of a Kerry Thornley zine published sometime in the 80s, I believe, called Spare Change.
To add to the chaotic beauty of the composition, in the lower left hand corner, is a Sacred Chao of sorts illustrated by our old friend Roldo, the magnificent Discordian artist who created the wonderful cover art for Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society.
Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page.
The JFK-never-died school of assassinationology is among my all time favs, right up there with the-secret-service-driver-shot-JFK-with-a-poison-dart-filled-with-deadly-shell-fish-toxin. There have been variations on this JFK never died theme throughout years, such as the rumor that he was still alive though withering away in a secret room at the Mayo Clinic. Let’s look at a couple more variations of this theory now, because apparently I have nothing better to do with my time…
My first whiff of this JFK-never-actually-died doo-dah came courtesy of a Southern California swimming pool engineer named George C. Thomson. The gist of Thomson’s theory was that Kennedy narrowly escaped with his life from Dealey Plaza and inserted in his place (in the Presidential limousine) was J.D. Tippit, the Dallas Police officer who had been allegedly shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald in the aftermath of the assassination (in front of Oswald’s apartment in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas). Some suggest that Tippit strongly resembled JFK; photos of the two men do reveal some similarities, although Tippit wasn’t a “dead ringer” by any stretch of the imagination.
As noted, part of Thomson’s theory included this body swap switcheroo of Tippit for JFK—and get this: the assassin, according to Thomson, was none other than soon to be President Lyndon Baines Johnson who used “a drum-fed, fully automatic weapon, two of them…” Approximately 22 bullets were fired (although 23 would have been ideal) and in the crossfire five (Hail Eris!) people were killed, all of which is documented in Thomson’s “Dallas Murder Map,” a fold-out included as part of his magnum opus, The Quest for Truth.
Thomson never really explained why JFK’s assassination was faked, and specifically what became of our supposedly dead President. However, Thomson alleged that JFK had been seen (wearing a mask) at the famous Truman Capote “black and white ball” that occurred in November of 1966.
Even farther out on a conspiratorial limb was a fellow named Bernard Bane, who authored such obscure JFK assassination classics as The Bane in Kennedy’s Existence (1967) and Is President John F, Kennedy Alive… And Well? (1973).
By and large, The Bane in Kennedy’s Existence is a ponderously inscrutable read, but the basic gist is that in October 1963, Bane was taken into custody and committed to a mental health facility where MK-Ultra like “spychiatrists”—or those he refers to as the “Social Engineers”—injected him with massive doses of LSD, all part of an insidious plot to drive Bane bananas.
Why Mr. Bane was treated in such an unseemly manner is never made entirely clear, although part of the reason, apparently, was due to a book he authored in 1962 entitled The Grand Model of the Mind that presented a psychological theory that appears to have made even less sense than his JFK assassination theory, which is saying quite a lot. I’ll let Bane tell the story in his own words:
“So, I got out [of the psych ward] October 15. And according to expectations, something was going to happen on my birthday. My birthday’s on November 21st. President Kennedy was supposed to be assassinated as a birthday present to me. So, on November 22, he was assassinated. So that’s how I got involved. I figured, there’s something going on here. There was a definite connection. So then, when I read an article in the Boston Globe that said, ‘HOAX IN DALLAS’ — somebody did something that had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination—but to me, it meant something: “HOAX IN DALLAS” —it means the assassination’s a hoax. And I always felt there was something bizarre about the whole thing. So I concluded, OK. He never got killed. And I realize after concluding that, a lot of people around me knew that all along… but they didn’t admit it. So slowly I leaked out my belief that he wasn’t even killed…”
(Donny Kossy’s 1991 interview with Bernard Bane, Kooks Magazine)
This was today in Discordian history.
Our March Eris of the Month was literally ripped from the pages of The Green Egg, Vol IX, No. 70 to be exact, an illustration accompanying a Robert Anton Wilson article entitled “Racism, Sexism and Evolution,” which you can view and download a PDF copy of the article here.
Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page.
Eris comes to us in many guises (“my father’s house has many mansions”), sometimes even in the form of St. Valentine’s Day cards, such as the one we see here sent to the founding father of the Discordianism, none other than Malaclypse the Younger aka Greg Hill in February 1977, apparently alerting him to a Discordian soiree of sorts. It’s not clear who the sender of said Erisian Valentine was, although the card says “Gnostic” on it, so I guess it’s possible it was sent from Thomas the Gnostic aka Tom McNamara.
Hail Eris and pass the candy hearts!
Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page.
It was about Eris and President Trump. So be it, Goddess often uses lesser vessels for her OM mission’s goals. We will not judge her choice of conduit for stoking chaos.
Read what the dimwit wrote here:
Found Eris at artist Elaneith’s Renderosity account.
Send us your Eris of the Month Club submissions (more info here) by using the form at the bottom of The MGT. page.