Here’s the complete 1992 Kerry Thornley interview conducted by Rev. Wyrdsli, clips from which we’ve been sharing here at Historia Discordia over the last several months.
With the recent release of Historia Discordia, the first book of several from the Erisian materials preserved in the Discordian Archives, multi-instances of unauthorized Discordian activity have been observed. Each and every fnord has been inappropriately cataloged for future chaos repercussions. Hail Eris!
The following is a semi-listicle of Authorized Discordian Society Activity for your re-education and amusement:
For semi-daily shameless promotion of Historia Discordia, a dreaded (but fun and foul!) Facebook page has been manifested by Goddess: https://www.facebook.com/historiadiscordia
Like it, then once “Liked,” be sure to also “Get Notifications” to keep the fnords-a-fnording in your Fnordbook feed!
Binall of America Historia Discordia Interview: Esoterica’s crackpot historian and longtime friend of BoA:Audio, Adam Gorightly returns to the program to discuss his new book Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society. Adam shares the amazing tale of how the book all came together and then provides listeners with a tremendously detailed history of how the Discordian Society started and subsequently evolved. He takes us through Operation Mindfuck as well as explains the Principia Discordia and how it changed over the years.
Expanding Mind Interview On Historia Discordia: Anarchism, synchronicity, and the joke religion spawned by the vision of a Goddess in a bowling alley: a talk with “crackpot historian” Adam Gorightly about his new book Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society.
John Higgs Review of Historia Discordia:
“Adam Gorightly’s new book is hardcore. The most battle-hardened historian would blanch at writing a history of Discordian Society.”
In the interview I mentioned Arlen Wilson—who I’ve heard was as brilliant as RAW, and was a large influence on his thinking—and lo and synchro-mystically behold, an interview with Bob and Arlen popped up on my radar this morning, which is certainly a joy, as I had never heard Arlen talk before.
AP photo of Kerry Thornley during the Jim Garrison investigation.Slated soon for publication from Feral House is my long awaited epic, Caught In The Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Oswald and the Garrison Investigation, a topic I first broached ten years ago or so in The Prankster and the Conspiracy (Amazon).
Several years after the release of The Prankster, your humble reporter stumbled upon a wealth of new information related to Kerry Thornley and the Jim Garrison case which, in turn, led to an ever-deeper examination of this seemingly never-ending rabbit hole that encompassed such a large and troubling part of Kerry Thornley’s life. (And mine, as well!)
Caught in the Crossfire, Pre-Order from Amazon Today!You can order an advanced copy of Caught In The Crossfire at Amazon and be the first one on your block to know the complete, mind-blowing story!
On a related note, I share with you now a Historia Discordia Exclusive snipped from Rev. Wyrdsli’s seminal 1992 video interview with Thornley at A Cappella Books, wherein Kerry discusses many of the strange and intimate details that will further emerge, and be expanded upon, in Caught In The Crossfire.
Anarchism, synchronicity, and the joke religion spawned by the vision of a Goddess in a bowling alley: a talk with “crackpot historian” Adam Gorightly about his new book Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society.
The above interview of RAW on Aleister Crowley was a real eye opener for me when I initially heard it back in the 90s, as RAW was the first observer (that I recall) who drew a comparison between Crowley’s portrait of Lam and the alien gray illustration on the cover of Whitley Strieber’s Communion (Amazon), which of course suggested that maybe dear old Uncle Al had once upon a time summoned certain entities (of the gray skin Zeta Reticuli variety) onto the earth plane that over the last few decades have been abducting and probing and doing such things that alien grays are wont to do.
Crowley's Lam vs. Strieber's Gray Alien.
The obvious difference between Lam, and Strieber’s alien gray, is the eyes. However, Fortean researcher Regan Lee made a keen observation recently pointing out that if you look above Lam’s eyes you will see alien gray eyes on his forehead, and that once you notice this, it’s impossible NOT to see them.
Lam—as the story goes—was the apparent product of a magick ritual called the Amalantrah Working that Crowley performed way back in 1917. There are even those who suspect that Crowley intentionally opened a Stargate by the practice of such ritual workings which allowed the likes of Lam and other otherworldly entities a passageway onto the earth-plane. It was through a similar Crowleyean ritual that RAW made contact with what he perceived as entities from the star system Sirius—but that’s a rabbit hole we won’t go any further with at the moment.
RAW's article on Aleister Crowley in The Realist, September-October 1971 issue. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.As noted in the Youtube interview, RAW’s interest in Crowley dated back many years, and he in fact first wrote about the Great Beast in 1971 for Paul Krassner’s The Realist.
A noted protégé of Crowley’s was Jack Parsons, a renowned rocket scientist and co-founder of Jet Propulsions Laboratory. In 1946—with the aid of the future founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard—the two men contacted beings not unlike Crowley’s Lam while performing a series of rituals called the Babalon Working in California’s Mojave Desert, a hotbed of UFO activity throughout the early days of UFO sightings.
Around the time that Hubbard and Parsons began the Babalon Working, a lady named Marjorie Cameron showed up at Parsons’ house (also known as The Parsonage), which served as the OTO Agape Lodge headquarters for Southern California, as well as a notorious bohemian hangout and purported drug den. A couple weeks after arriving at The Parsonage, Cameron claimed that she witnessed a silver cigar shaped UFO. To Parsons this incident was a sign that Cameron was the chosen one with whom to conduct the Babalon Working, the intent of which was to create a “child” in the spiritual realms who would be “called down” and directed it into the womb of a female volunteer. When born, this child would incarnate the forces of Babalon and become the Scarlet Woman of Revelations, symbolizing the dawning of the Age of Horus, the coming new age.
Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron.The Babalon Working ended just before the ‘Great Flying Saucer Flap’ of 1947 when the modern age of UFO sightings began. In this regard, some have suggested that Parsons, Hubbard and Cameron opened a door and something flew in. (Insert creepy organ music here.)
As with Crowley, RAW was also an admirer of Jack Parsons, as can be seen in the following Youtube interview, which is broken up into four parts.
The following is another 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
Ⓚ ALL RIGHTS REVERSED: Page 00075 of the Sacred PUD. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Often, in detailing (and perhaps attempting to inflate) the influence of Discordia on the world, I have described Discordia’s concept of Copyleft as the spiritual predecessor to Creative Commons. But how strong is the actual link?
Creative Commons, founded by Lawrence Lessig in 2001 and run by the Creative Commons Foundation is a form of copyright that offers greater flexibility than All Rights Reserved. The loosest form of Creative Commons is Attribution, where one can use the creative work of the author provided attribution is provided as specified. Other more restrictive licenses are No-Derivs (no works may be made by remixing this work), Share-Alike (you can remix, but you must release remixed work under the same license as the source material), and Non-Commercial. Chasing Eris itself is planned to be released under one of these less restrictive licenses, by way of a tribute to the unorthodox copyright methodology of the Principia Discordia.
An unrelated, but well advertised similar license preceding Creative Commons was the GNU General Public License, developed by Richard Stallman in 1989. The contents of Wikipedia for instance, are licensed under this license. The term here evidently comes from a letter Don Hopkins sent to Stallman in 1984/5. Hopkins didn’t write the term himself, instead sticking a sticker onto the letter which read COPYLEFT, and then added his own special terms to the letter:
The material contained in this envelope is Copyleft (L) 1984 by an amoeba named “Tom”. Any violation of this stringent pact with person or persons who are to remain un-named will void the warrantee of every small appliance in your kitchen, and furthermore, you will grow a pimple underneath your fingernail. Breaking the seal shows that you agree to abide by Judith Martin’s guidelines concerning the choosing of fresh flowers to be put on the dining room table.
And so on it went.
I emailed Hopkins to ask him about the origin of the sticker and he replied, “I got the sticker in the dealer’s room of some random east coast science fiction convention (which RMS [Richard Stallman—BC] also frequents).”
That line runs dry, but we can go back further again, to an even earlier manifestation of Copyleft.
Tiny Basic was a dialect of the BASIC programming language designed to function on minimal disc space. The first lines of the source code as released in 1976 by Li-Chen Wang stated ‘@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED’. This appears to be the first use of Copyleft that I can find published, other than the Principia.
So was Li-Chen Wang influenced by the Principia? It seems possible. The project to create Tiny BASIC was proposed in Dr. Dobbs Journal, a journal of the Homebrew Computer Club, a small group of computer hobbyists who began meeting in 1975 around Silicon Valley. This puts him in Northern California around the period that the Principia Discordia was spreading through certain circles in California, and certainly the time that Discordian content was circulating through the zine scene.
The geek/tech crowd have always appeared to be a popular breeding ground for Discordian ideas. This is emphasized in Neophilic Religions; Richard Lloyd Smith III’s 1996 research on early-Internet prevalence of irreligion, where he points to Metacrawler data indicating that Catholic sites outnumbered the Discordians by only 33, a dramatically low number considering the real world prevalence of both (and the Unification Church had LESS results than Discordianism, by the count of both Metacrawler and Hotbot).
* * *
Greg Hill as Mad Malik, Copywrong Rip Off Write On!, July 1970, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.In Atlanta I had the privilege of sitting down with some of The MGT., surrounded by a good amount of the Discordian archives. In front of me was a copy of the Loompanics “fourth edition.”
A lot of Greg Hill’s content was included in the files as well. Of particular interest were a number of particular files that bore some relation to copyright.
While there were a number of different newsletters in the mix, one I didn’t get to view directly was The Greater Poop. Fortunately, Gorightly and Gandhi later uploaded a copy for the enjoyment of the world.
The Greater Poop #30, July/August 1970 elaborated, not just on how the Principia was copylefted, but made the point on expressing some of Greg’s ideology behind the choice.
Greg Hill as Mad Malik, Copywrong Rip Off Write On!, July 1970, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Commercial publishers are not likely to be interested in the Principia due, at least, to the counter copyright on it–for, if they had a good seller, then other publishers could print it out from under them. Consequently publication and distribution will have to occur spontaneously, thru the “underground”, as alternative cultures learn to meet their own needs and provide their own services. This non-commercial limitation of the Principia is to provide less limitations is other respects, and it is not an accident. The Principia is not simply a handbook, it is a demonstration.
For the most part rummaging piece by piece through the treasures on the table, it was a case of grabbing, glancing and putting back paper after paper after paper. However sometimes when I’d grab a piece of paper it would look me in the eye and grab me back.
“Oh my gosh,” I said, picking up one handwritten sheet.
“A contract,” said Groucho.
“He drew up a contract. Literally.”
The contract related to the 4th editions afterward. When Mike Hoy of Loompanics decided to publish this edition, he threw in an introduction by Robert Anton Wilson (whose popular Illuminatus! Trilogy brought Discordia to the attention of the counterculture and had made the venture of taking on publication worthwhile) and an afterward by Hill. Hill wrote his afterward in the style of an interview between interviewer ‘Gypsie Skripto’ and several of his alter egos sitting in a post office box together. It was wacky, loony and did a great job of explaining a number of Hill’s creative choices.
The contract, drawn up in October 1978, and I suspect may well be the first legal example of Creative Commons style alternatives to Copyright. The contract states unambiguously that:
[W]henever the Afterword is published by Loompanics it will be accompanied by the following line:
ALL RITES REVERSED (K) Reprint What You Like
This statement being understood that the Afterward is placed in the Public Domain.
The afterward itself is also very revealing in terms of lifting the curtain on the creative process. Mal reveals the sources of many of the bits and pieces used; clips cut from magazines, pieces made by multiple Discordians, so on.
Most of the writing credited to a name is a true person and almost always a different name means a different person. Most of the non-credited, you know, Malaclypse, text is mine although some things credited to either Mal2 or Omar were actually co-written and passed back and forth and rewritten by each of us. The marginalia, dingbats, and pasted in titles and heads and things came from wherever I found them–some of which is original but uncredited Discordian output, like the page head on 12 and other pages which is from a series of satiric memo pads from Our Peoples Underworld Cabal. All page layout is mine and some whole graphics like the Sacred Chao and the Hodge Podge Transformer are mine but mostly I just found stuff and integrated it. Mostly I did concept, say 50% of the writing, 10% of the graphics, all of the layout.
In a further comment (Remember Greg Hill is ALL of the characters in the interview) Greg said the following in regards to the motivation for producing under Copyleft.
Occupant: Eris told Mal2 what to use and where to find it.
Hill: Yeah, in a way that is right. That is why my name does not appear anywhere on the PRINCIPIA and why it was published with a broken copyright — Reprint What You Like. I knew I was taking liberties and didn’t want my intentions to be misunderstood. It was an experiment and was intended to be an underground work and that involves a different set of ethics than commercial work.
Hill wrote other works expanding on his views on Copyright. One such, called “Copywrong Rip Off Write On!”, encourages people to photocopy material regardless of copyright status, and publish under the anonymous banner of the People’s Pirate Press.
If you find in a magazine, book, newspaper, or whatever, a page or so of information that you feel will contribute to the Betterment of Anything, then take it to an offset printer, or Xerox, or whatever, he suggests, and distribute it to whoever you think would dig it.
One gets the impression Hill would have been a fan of the Creative Commons movement—the least restrictive available CC license still requires the provision of attribution, which is something Hill promotes in the article, describing reproduction without attribution as akin to “psychological rape.”
It’s interesting to note that this connection between Discordia and Copyleft is one that developed over time; the first edition Principia Discordia, and in fact a good deal of early Discordian stuff is in fact explicitly copyrighted, both from Hill and from Kerry Thornley.
* * *
It was here that for the longest time the trail went cold, until I met with academic Christian Greer in Amsterdam, asked him about the term Copyleft, and told him how I was looking into the origins of the term (and if the Principia Discordia itself was in fact the mothership!).
When I first met Greer, he wasn’t your everyday academic. He had a rough unshaven face and liberal use of ‘dude,’ ‘man,’ and the occasional ‘dudeman.’ Greer is a trip of deep knowledge and excited speech, and there’s little to do in his presence but grab hold onto a thread of conversation and hold on for dear life.
Lubricated by the sweet nectar of Amsterdam’s pubs, we talked about his research. Greer’s research is mainly built around the study of Discordianism through the examination of primary sources—namely the zines floating around from the glory days of the zine scene. He told me that he had seen the term in various zines. The zine scene then, it seems relatively safe to assume, was one of the big places the term may have found itself reproducing.
“What’s the oldest use of the term you’ve seen,” I asked.
“It was in a Discordian zine,” he tells me. However, for someone who works predominantly with Discordian zines, that’s not surprising, and the mention he saw, like every other mention I’ve seen since the Principia is spelt with C, not the iconic Discordian K.
Still, it opens new grounds for wild speculation and dramatic hyperbole amongst our Discordian brethren, which is always a plus.
A hand-made postcard from Pope Christopher Wilhoite to Kerry Thornley (Grand Ballyhoo of Egypt), stamped 25 APR 1994. Courtesy of Christopher Wilhoite.In The Prankster and the Conspiracy (Amazon), Chris Wilhoite—a wandering minstrel who made his way to Little Five Points (L5P), Atlanta in the early-90s—remembered how he first became acquainted with Kerry Thornley:
“I had just read the Illuminatus! Trilogy and was pondering what was what when I noticed the pages of a xeroxed novel about Oswald and JFK on the telephone poles in L5P. The last page had the name Kerry Thornley on it. Synchronicity #1. Around the same time, I noticed an unusual/ enigmatic/ groovy looking fellow in tie-died cotton who occasionally strolled through the park with the smile of a Buddha, and somehow I knew there was something special about him. One night, I was playing one of my songs on acoustic guitar in the park and this Buddhaesque being stopped and listened and paid me a compliment. I still didn’t catch his name. A friend had told me more about the mysterious author of the JFK sheets and said he’d written a book called Zenarchy, a name that appealed deeply to me, but I still didn’t match the person with the name.
“Then, one day a friend told me that Kerry Thornley had, in the course of one day, been called by Oliver Stone to be a consultant for the JFK film, (shortly afterward) had dual kidney failure and his landlady flipped a mental cog and kicked everybody out of the boarding house where he lived. So, Kerry needed a place to stay. I immediately volunteered space in my duplex. My friend told me to talk to Kerry, he was in front of A Capella Books, signing and selling his work. Who did I see in front of the store, but the groovy Buddha I had noticed before! I invited him to crash at my pad, and this became the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship.”
Chris bore witness to any number of Kerry’s surrealist pranks, such as one that occurred on Halloween morning of 1993:
I was living in a VW campervan behind a restaurant in L5P. I had just had breakfast and was standing at the corner across from the park, when Kerry comes walking from the far end of the square, wearing a white cloak with a hood and carrying a sign reading “World Will End SOON. Get your tickets NOW!” As he passed down the street, snowflakes (unseasonal for Oct 31 in Atlanta) began to fall right behind Kerry, and as he passed across my field of vision, the snow came in like a curtain drawn by Kerry. My friend Wolf, standing directly behind me said: “Yep, hell just froze over!”
One day, Kerry and Chris were hanging out in front of the Tête-à-Tête Café in L5P with a wooden box full of copies of The Principia Discordia and Zenarchy, which Kerry was selling/giving away. (Buyer: “How much?” Kerry: “How much do you have?” Buyer: “A quarter.” Kerry: “That’s plenty!”) On Kerry’s wooden box was a sign that said: Principia Discordia—much funnier than the bible!
At one point, a Christian zealot happened by, noticed Kerry’s sign and started shouting, “Much funnier than the Bible!? The Bible’s not funny!” In response, a local zealous Marxist—seated behind Kerry and Chris—jumped up and started shouting down the Christian. Kerry, smiling, closed his box and walked away, with Chris following after, exclaiming: ”Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!”
Drawing Down The Moon by Margot Adler. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Probably the first semi-academic study of Discordianism in popular form appeared in Margot Adler’s Drawing Down The Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans In America Today (Amazon), published in 1979 by Beacon Press.
This book—along with RAW’s Cosmic Trigger Volume I, Final Secret of the Illuminati (Amazon)—helped me greatly in understanding the early days of Discordianism from the perspective of RAW and Greg Hill, both interviewed by Adler.
On page 309, RAW drops some vital Discordian knowledge, which stands as probably the most succinct and to the point summary of Eris worship ever writ (maybe):
“Much of the Pagan Movement started out as jokes, and gradually, as people found out they were getting something out of it, they became serious. Discordianism has a built-in check against getting too serious. The sacred scriptures are so absurd—as soon as you consult the scriptures again, you start laughing. Discordian theology is similar to Crowleyanity. You take any of these ideas far enough and they reveal the absurdity of all ideas. They show that ideas are only tools and that no idea should be sacrosanct. Thus, Discordianism is a necessary balance. It’s a fail-safe system. It remains a joke and provides perspective. It’s a satire on human intelligence and is based on the idea that whatever your map of reality, it’s ninety percent your own creation. People should accept this and be proud of their own artistry. Discordianism can’t get dogmatic. The whole language would have to change for people to lose track that it was all a joke to begin with. It would take a thousand years.”
Later in the book, when Adler asked Malaclypse (Greg Hill): “What’s Omar Ravenhurst (Kerry Thornley) doing these days?” He replied, “Ravenhurst has recently been in a state of extreme discord. We were talking about Eris and confusion and he said, ‘You know, if I had realized that all of this was going to come true, I would have chosen Venus’” (Page 312). This, of course, during a period when Kerry went off the deep end believing that he was at the center of a grand conspiracy that made Illuminatus! look like a Sunday stroll in the park with grandma.
