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.
Chasing Eris by Brenton ClutterbuckThe 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.
We’ve reached part two of the Chasing Eris adventure. I’ve taken my accommodation in Bristol, a city full of artistic energy, close to my intended interviewees. On one of my first days in the city, I jump on a train to London.
There are two great stories of Discordia waiting to be told here. One is of The KLF, the superstar band that took the world by storm, before quitting the music business and burning a million pounds of cash. The starting point of that first story grows out of the fertile, imaginative ground of our second story—the Illuminatus! Play of November 23, 1976.
Robert Anton Wilson first discovered Discordianism through his mail correspondence with Kerry Thornley in 1967. In a 1992 interview with Reverend Wyrdsli, Thornley discussed Wilson’s interest in Discordia:
He said, very early in our relationship that one of the things we needed were God models that were appropriate to anarchism. And he had written some stuff about Taoism and the spirit of the Valley Lady: the eternal female, and about Shang Dynasty matrism and so on and so forth. So I suggested to him Eris Discordia and told him about the Discordian Society, and he was just very enthused about it, plunged into it, got very active in it, and was responsible for a lot of our creeds and dogmas and so on and so forth.
Robert Anton Wilson would become involved in Operation Mindfuck that next year, participating in various Discordian shenanigans, including the development of a large mythos built-up around the Bavarian Illuminati. This mythos would appear to have gone on to influence the modern pop-cultural idea of the Illuminati, from books such as Umberto Eco’s conspiracy classic Foucault’s Pendulum (Amazon) to the pop-culture runaway successes of Dan Brown’s novels The Da Vinci Code (Amazon) and Angels and Demons (Amazon), and the film adaptation of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Amazon Instant Video), though Wilson’s influence is seldom credited.
Robert Shea, the editor of anarchist zine No Governor was Wilson’s partner in crime. The pair were working together editing the Playboy Forum letters section. A number of the letters they received were from paranoids (or most likely letters Shea & Wilson planted), alleging that they were the target of various conspiracies. Using the concept that perhaps every single one of the alleged conspiracies was true, they began work on the Illuminatus! Trilogy (Amazon).
One of the plot devices of Illuminatus! was that it featured a long-running feud between the Discordians and the Illuminati. This was a theme that had previously been carried through a number of Discordian writings in the zine scene, and was invoked in the Illuminatus! Trilogy at Shea’s suggestion.
The first volume of Illuminatus! was released in 1975, and did a great deal to popularize Discordianism. Readers mistakenly assumed the mysterious Principia Discordia mentioned in Illuminatus! was one of the many fabrications of Shea and Wilson, and were later often stunned to learn the Principia Discordia was, in fact, real.
* * *
Brenton Clutterbuck and Ken Campbell's daughter, Daisy Eris Campbell. Check out her production of RAW's Cosmic Trigger. Courtesy of Brenton Cluttberuck.In 1976 Ken Campbell went into Compendium, a bookshop in Camden town. He was looking for a work to perform at the Liverpool Theatre of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, the site founded by poet Peter O’Halligan, who based the location of the theatre on a dream recounted by Carl Jung. In this store he spotted a copy of Illuminatus!, a yellow submarine on the cover. This was a possible synchronicity to the Liverpool music scene that spawned The Beatles who once sang about such a submarine. He opened it to a random page to see what he’d find, and the line he read was all about Jung. Synchronicities were plentiful.
As a result, Illuminatus! became the first project to be performed in Liverpool Theatre of Language, Music, Dream and Pun.
Anyone who has seen a copy of Illuminatus! has had the sheer size of the work impressed upon them. Completing it is no mean feat. Adapting it down to the size of a typical play would be an even more daunting feat. However Campbell took it a step further; instead of cutting out huge chunks of the text he kept the work at largely its original size, and developed eight-and-a-half hours of performance. In Liverpool he presented five plays over five nights, with the fifth being a presentation of all five; one after the other in a mammoth all day performance.
The creative team behind the play included Chris Langham—who helped produce the play alongside Campbell—as lead role George Dorn, Jim Broadbent in a number of minor roles including biological weapon designer Dr. Charles Moncenigo and the sadistic Sheriff Jim Cartwright, Bill Nighy as magazine editor Joe Malik, David Rappaport as Markoff Chainey, and the work of Bill Drummond, later of The KLF fame, as a set designer.
I walked up to the National Theatre. After the Liverpool shows the play moved on to performances in Amsterdam, before finally coming to London. I had come here just to stand in front of the theatre and do a small video talking about the play, but thought I’d try my luck wandering on in and asking at the theatre shop if they knew anything about the Trilogy. They referred me to the National Theatre Archive which, in my ignorance, I had not known about.
Brenton Clutterbuck and the Illuminatus! play manuscript. Courtesy of Brenton Clutterbuck. The next day I went to the archive and was given a large case full of documentation from the play. The most voluminous (and for reasons of copyright, the most off-limits, with no photocopying permitted) was the play itself, an enormous pile of A4 paper resembling more a Joycean manuscript than any play I’d ever seen. Sketches of Eye-in-the-Pyramid and designs of sets or advertising were scrawled across the backs of several of the pages.
I pulled out several newspaper articles. Most were reviews, but a small number stood out in particular as bizarre oddities that contributed an additional layer of weirdness to the already larger than life Illuminatus! saga.
One article was titled “Horror Mission of an Actor Obsessed with the Occult” from the Daily Mail, dated September 7, 1982 about Illuminatus! cast member Chris Taynton whose roles included the pimp Carmel and Robert Putney Drake, the head of the American Crime Syndicate. The article told of how Taynton, believing he had been overcome by alien forces, attacked Adrena Smith, a 57-year-old lady, by stabbing her multiple times. He blinded her in one eye, and killed her pets, including cutting the ears off her dog. Taynton’s involvement in the Illuminatus! play was raised in court by his defense lawyer, Patricia May, specifically in regard to the play’s supernatural and occult themes.
“Having taken an extremely exciting part in a somewhat bizarre play he became more and more involved in the principles that were propounded in that play,” said May.
It seems a number of the cast went on to have troubled futures. David Rappaport, a dwarf actor, who also played a main role in Terry Gilliam’s movie Time Bandits (Amazon Instant Video), struggled with depression in his later life and ended up shooting himself fatally in the chest in 1990, in Laurel Canyon Park, California.
Chris Langham too was jailed for 10 months in 2007 for possessing Level Five child pornography, which he claimed was both part of researching a character and helping himself deal with his own abuse as an eight year old child.
Before we enter into The Curse of Tutankhamen territory, it’s worth noting not all actors in Illuminatus! had such tragic futures waiting for them. Jim Broadbent and Bill Nighy continue to enjoy prosperous acting careers, and Ken Campbell left a legacy of genius (as well as a record for longest play ever—not in fact for Illuminatus!—but for his 22-hour long The Warp). He was remembered by Liverpool Everyman Theatre and Playhouse Artistic Director Gemma Bodinetz as “The door through which many hundreds of kindred souls entered a madder, braver, brighter, funnier and more complex universe.”
Another, less ghoulish article I read was titled “Raising School Fees for Gorilla,” and was published in The Guardian on April 19, 1977.
Brenton Clutterbuck on the Illuminatus! play. Clutterbuck: 'I mix-up facts and say LSD where I should say MDMA. I mix two stories from Gorightly and Higgs together.' Hail Eris!
In Illuminatus!, our intrepid heroes encounter a group of gorillas. Hagbard Celine, played by Neil Cunningham, has a conversation with them in Swahili (the gorillas all speak English, but are much more comfortable with Swahili). When Malik (Bill Nighy) asks if Celine taught the gorillas to speak, he responds that the gorillas have always been able to speak, but have largely kept their abilities secret:
“…the gorillas themselves are too shrewd to talk to anybody but another anarchist. They’re all anarchists themselves, you know, and they have a very healthy wariness about people in general and government people in particular. As one of them told me once, ‘If it got out that we can talk, the conservatives would exterminate most of us and make the rest pay rent to live on our own land; and the liberals would try to train us to be engine-lathe operators. Who the fuck wants to operate an engine lathe?’ They prefer their own pastoral and Eristic ways, and I, for one, would never interfere with them.”
Meanwhile in the “real” world at Stanford University, apparently unaware of the gorillas’ long term bluff, Miss Penny Patterson was busy trying to teach English to Koko the Gorilla.
Koko, according to the book Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Amazon), knew 2000 spoken English words and 1000 words in American Sign Language as of 2003. However, in 1977, the project was in very real danger of running out of money, the result to be that Koko would find herself returned to the San Francisco Zoo.
Perhaps because of the plot connection, or perhaps for other more incomprehensible and possibly synchronistic reasons, the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool (the organization run by Campbell and Langham specifically to produce the play) decided to support the project, even going as far as to consider adding an optional 50p levy to the audience in addition to setting up a stall to raise money.
“It was exactly the sort of research we think should be continued,” said Nighy.
“You never know what might be found out,” Campbell was quoted as saying.
* * *
The complete version of this article will appear in my forthcoming book Chasing Eris.
Early Discordian Roger Lovin, photo from his classic book The Complete Motorcycle Nomad. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.During Saul Goodman’s visit to the Playboy Club in Illuminatus! (Page 173, Week 18)—where he was apparently drugged, abducted and subjected to all sorts of MK-ULTRA-style perversions straight out of A Clockwork Orange—Saul (or Barney Muldoon, or whoever he actually is now) finds himself in a hospital room (Page 189, Week 19) attended to by a doctor who informs him that he’s really Barney and that ‘Saul Goodman’ was actually a dual identity that Barney created to compensate for never being promoted to detective.
The doctor further informs Saul/Barney about certain details of his life, one of which is that his children are named Roger, Kerry and Greg, which is a certain nod to not only the founders of Discordianism—Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley—but also to Roger Lovin, who could be considered the third member of the Holy Trinity of Discordianism that haunted the New Orleans French Quarter during the early 1960s. The Discordian business card below illustrates that Lovin (aka Fang the Unwashed) had a major role in spreading the Discordian Gospel during this period and oversaw the French Quarter Cabal after Thornley and Hill returned to Cali in late 1965.
Discordian Card of Thornley, Lovin, and Hill, 1965. Not a law firm. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
In many ways, Illuminatus! authors Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea seemed to be describing what happened to Kerry Thornley in the following passage:
…A few years ago, you started a game with your wife; she thought it was harmless at first and learned to her sorrow that it wasn’t. The game was, that you pretended to be a detective and, late at night, you would tell her about the important cases you were working on. Gradually, you built up to the most important case of all—the solution to all the assassinations in America during the past decade. They were all the work of a group called the Illuminati, who were surviving top level Nazis that had never been captured… —Illuminatus!, Page 189
This description of Saul/Barney’s apparent mental deterioration certainly relates to Kerry Thornley. During the late-60s, Kerry—in his writings—often parodied what he considered “paranoid” conspiracy theories, including the various Illuminati conspiracies at which he and RAW had such a high time poking fun. But after going through the Garrison meat grinder, Kerry came out on the other end with his head spun, at first thinking Garrison was totally off his rocker for believing that he (Kerry) was part of an insidious CIA funded homosexual thrill-kill plot (or something of that sort.)
However—as time passed—and Kerry began to reflect on his past (while enhancing those reflections with an occasional dose of LSD!), he started toying around with different theories to explain what had gone down with the JFK assassination, and how this related to his association with Oswald and the other disturbing string of synchronicities that occurred during his time in New Orleans—until eventually certain far-flung theories about Nazis and the Illuminati began to make more and more sense to him. And while he didn’t turn into Barney Muldoon per se, Kerry did develop a more paranoically inclined personality, as opposed to younger years when he was prone to be dismissive of “paranoids.”
Kerry’s growing paranoia (starting in the early-70s) was an outgrowth of his belief that he’d discovered the true assassins of JFK—or at least certain individuals that were involved in a plot to kill JFK, namely Gary Kirstein (aka Brother-in-Law) and Roderick “Slim” Brooks, a couple of shadowy characters Kerry met during the New Orleans period. According to a letter from Greg Hill to RAW dated September 1975, Slim Brooks was also an early member of the Discordian Society and was one of The Chosen Five who received the rare 1st edition of The Principia Discordia of which only five copies were produced (in accordance to the Law of Fives!).
It was long-held and universally believed that most—if not all—of those original sacred Five Copies were lost with the passage of time to mankind; that is until your humble author discovered the only surviving copy—Greg Hill’s personal copy—tucked away in the Discordian Archives for all these years and which now has been re-published, at long last, in the companion volume to this website, Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society (Amazon). So get your copy now before it disappears again!
Hill and Thornley—as Discordian history instructs—moved to New Orleans in 1961, and at some point became friends with Roger Lovin, who Kerry later remembered as “…a dashing, talented and handsome con artist who was too shallow to settle into any one thing. But for years and years after he read the Principia, under his Discordian name of Fang the Unwashed, he consistently and with unswerving devotion to the task excommunicated every new person any of the rest of us initiated into the Discordian Society.”
On his first sojourn in New Orleans, Greg Hill only lived there a few months before moving back to Southern California, but Kerry lived in NOLA (for the most part) over the next three-and-a-half years before relocating to Arlington, Virginia in late 1964.
Sometime in ’64, Hill moved back to The French Quarter, which led to one of the most intense and productive periods in the early evolution of the Discordian Society—1964 and 1965—as documented in several dozens of letters in the Discordian Archives exchanged between Hill and Thornley.
The Early Discordians become famous for their humorous letters, and one of the funniest I’ve come across is this missive dictated by Roger Lovin (aka Fang The Unwashed) dated December 17, 1964, addressed to Greg Hill (aka Malaclypse The Younger), who appears to have been staying with Bob Newport in Chicago at the time.
Letter: From Roger Levin to Greg Hill, December 17, 1964, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Letter: From Roger Levin to Greg Hill, December 17, 1964, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
While I’ve shared quite a bit in my books—and on this website—about Hill and Thornley, I’ve been reluctant to tackle Roger Lovin’s Discordian legacy just because it’s a pretty tangled web to attempt to unravel some of the more sordid aspects of his life.
Like Thornley, Lovin became ensnared by the Garrison investigation—although briefly and to a much lesser degree than Thornley. Garrison’s interest in Lovin was partly due to his association with the Discordian Society, which the New Orleans D.A. came to suspect was some sort of CIA front organization that had a hand in orchestrating Kennedy’s assassination. Hail Eris!
Lovin—from the stories I’ve heard—was a man of many talents: a writer, poet, musician—a silver-tongued devil and con man—who operated a French Quarter art gallery during the early-60s. From 1968/69, Lovin published a weekly New Orleans newspaper, The Ungarbled Word, that from time to time ran Discordian recruitment advertisements, in addition to articles by Hill and Thornley, and in particular, an ongoing series by Greg Hill entitled Etcetera Pacifica that gave a monthly run-down of what was happening with the West Coast counterculture scene.
The Ungarbled Word, Revelation of Eris, August 1968. Courtesy of Tim Cridland.The Ungarbled Word, Zenarchy, August 21, 1968. Courtesy of Tim Cridland.
The Ungarbled Word, Ecetera Pacifica, September 12, 1968. Courtesy of the Tim Cridland.
Lovin later moved out West and worked as the environmental editor for the Los Angeles Free Press from 1969-73, as documented in this article from 1971.
During that same period, Lovin wrote and published pornography, maintaining contact with Greg Hill throughout. I found one letter in the Archives where Lovin offered his services to help Greg publish a mass market edition of Principia Discordia, although nothing ever came of this.
Letter: Roger Lovin to Greg Hill, June 6, 1970. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
For the most part, though, Lovin was pretty much a Mystery Man to me, and the correspondences between he and Hill over the years—while colorful—were few and far between. When I asked some of the Early Discordians about him, they only vaguely remembered the name. At some point, I came across the following clipping which appeared in a 1979 edition of the Science Fiction fanzine Locus and hinted at certain darker aspects associated with Lovin.
Locus zine: Roger Lovin. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
While scouring the web, I came across other information which suggested that Lovin had gone to prison for these activities, although there was conflicting information, which of course can always be expected when the sources are various people posting different accounts to web forums.
At one point in the thread someone claiming to be Lovin’s sister said that the charges against her brother were true, and then posted a photo of herself with Lovin in his later years—after he had been released from prison—and stated that he had died of a heart attack in 1991. The photo indeed looked to be Roger Lovin, however these posts from his alleged sister (which I think legit) were later removed from the thread.
Letter: Greg Hill to Pat, May 13, 1970, front. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.I really didn’t have much planned for this week’s Illuminatus! group reading until I happened upon a note by Greg Hill in the Archives which caught my attention because it’s addressed to someone named Pat. Having gone through a lot of Hill’s correspondence, I’m usually able to figure out (in most cases) to whom he was corresponding—but in this instance I haven’t a clue.
Letter: Greg Hill to Pat, May 13, 1970, back. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.When I saw the name Pat, I immediately flashed on an enigmatic character by the same name who appears in Illuminatus! in relation to a series of Illuminati memos exchanged between she (or at least I think Pat is a she) and Joseph Malik, editor of Confrontation magazine, a character that is based—to some degree—on both Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley. In fact, you can see an upside down Mad Malik stamp on the note, which was Hill’s Bavarian Illuminati persona, further linking this curious little note to Illuminatus!
In Greg’s note to Pat, he encourages him/her to pass it on to BofA, and one can only assume he is referring to Bank of America, who—as synchronicity would have it—later employed Greg for 23 years (Hail Eris!), which we’ll no doubt discuss in more depth at some later date here at Historia Discordia.
Oddly enough, a web search for Joseph Malik, editor of Confrontation magazine, led me to this publication at bookfinder.com which appears to be something RAW and Shea probably cooked up prior to the publication of Illuminatus! as a promotional stunt. Here is the magazine’s description:
Published by Confrontation Magazine, New York, 1975. , 15 pages, includes interviews with ‘illuminatus’ authors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, plus poems by Joe Malik, black & white illustrations, appears to have been the only issue of the magazine ever published First Edition , light spots to covers, pages slightly yellowed at edges otherwise clean, in good+ condition , printed wraps 30 x 22 cm Paperback ISBN: Bookseller Inventory # 53469
An additional Joseph Malik web search left me even more perplexed.
Chronicling Discordianism’s halcyon days, Historia Discordia presents a fun and freewheeling romp through rare photos, holy tracts, art collages, and fnords, many of which appear for the first time in print.
Included among the contents are such chaotic wonders as the 1st edition of Principia Discordia: How The West Was Lost, which no one has really seen for a long, long time—besides a handful of Early Discordians back in the day. Also featured is Kerry Thornley’s The Honest Book of Truth, another rare and hardly seen holy tract that many thought never actually existed.
Here’s what Alan Moore has to say about Historia Discordia:
“Like communication-god Thoth with his yammering ape, like the all-important noise that Count Korzybski assures us must accompany our every signal, no harmony is possible without an acknowledgement and understanding of discord. Born from the bowling-alley epiphanies of Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, its disruptive teachings disseminated through the incendiary writings of Robert Anton Wilson and other Eristic luminaries, the Discordian Society has unexpectedly become a landmark of gleefully aggressive sanity in a chaotic and incoherent world. Through this book, we can all involve ourselves in their gloriously constructive quarrel.”
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!”
Through my remarkable remote viewing powers I’ve had the opportunity to sneak a peek at Daisy’s play, and I must say she’s done a marvelous job of weaving all of RAW’s Chapel Perilous craziness together in a freewheeling romp that includes appearances by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, to boot.
In other important business, 5/23 was also the day the presses starting churning out my latest book Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society (RVP Press), although it will be about a week before you start seeing it pop up for purchase, so hang in there and as soon as we have a purchase link, you’ll be the first to fnord know!
According to my publisher for Historia Discordia, part of the delay stemmed from the fact that when he reviewed a test copy of the book, he discovered page 123 had been printed twice.
A card dated April 1970 with some Erisian information about the LBJ Cabal. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.I’ve been on the road of late and so finally getting around to commenting on the most recent Illuminatus! group reading (after a couple weeks MIA) reporting from an undisclosed location somewhere in Spook Central, VA where I’m using my ipad mini to read from a kindle version of the book—and it seems that the page numbers don’t always correspond with the paperized version, hail eris!, so bear with!
Laughing Buddha Jesus (short for LBJ) was a Discordian cabal Kerry Thornley cooked up back in the day, although I don’t know if Kerry ever referred to it with a “Phallus” added to the end—as the John Dillinger character does on page 127. For those versed in the alternate Dillinger legends, perhaps the addition of “Phallus” (to the end of LBJ) is associated with rumors that Dillinger was well equipped with a massive 23-inch you-know-what that was pickled for posterity and is now hidden away in the vaults of the Smithsonian.
To this end, Dillinger identifies himself as President of Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus, Inc. (LBJP), a distributer of rock music LPs that Johnny D.—in cahoots with the Justified Ancients of Mummu (JAMS)—started as a front organization to counterattack the Illuminati’s strangle-hold on the rock music industry. In conjunction with this anti-Illuminati operation, Dillinger mentions that the LBJP had disseminated Illuminati revelations through certain unexpected channels such as The Christian Crusade, which—in “real life”—is exactly what the Discordian Society perpetrated via Operation Mindfuck (OM), a topic previously discussed here at Historia Discordia—so if you are still confused by the term “OM” (Don’t Leave OM Without It!) do a search of this site—or if all else fails, a pineal gland consultation has been known to work wonders.
Late-60s Bavarian Illuminati Hoax Letter to Rev. David Noebel. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
The Beatles: A Study in Drugs, Sex, and Revolution by David Noebel. (Amazon)Above is one of the famous Bavarian Illuminati hoax letters that RAW, Greg Hill, Thornley, et al, cooked up in the late, great Sixties. This one in particular is addressed to Rev. David Noebel who wrote a handful of somewhat provocative books (many of which inhabit my arcane library at Gorightly Hindquarters) including such startling titles as Rhythm, Riot and Revolution (Amazon) (mentioned in the Bavarian letter hoax letter)—as well as The Beatles: A Study in Drugs, Sex and Revolution (Amazon) and Communism, Hypnotism, and The Beatles (Amazon)—each of which includes, on their respective covers, some caricatures that bear uncanny resemblances to the Fab Four… sort of. The hoax letter, in this instance, was most likely composed by RAW (in the guise of Rev. Charles Arthur Floyd II) given the Evanston, Illinois mailing address, this during the period when RAW was under the employ of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mag in Chicago.
Communism, Hypnotism, and The Beatles by David Noebel. (Amazon)Although Rev. Dr. Noebel wrote the above-mentioned titles way back in the 60s, he’s apparently still hard at it, penning additional classics along these lines and preaching from his pulpit situated somewhere deep in the heart of Texas. Noebel also has a presence on facebook but when I tried to friend him a couple years back he shined me on. 🙁
Below is a snippet from a lecture by Rev. Noebel on Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, which pretty much lays out his commies-infiltrating-rock-music thesis:
Emperor Norton Promissory Note, 50 Cents.On page 133, the “Norton Lodge in Frisco” is mentioned, which in the “real world” was Greg Hill’s pad in San Fran. A couple paragraphs later we see the first mention of flaxscript, an alternate form of currency that Dillinger and the JAMS are using to get over on the Illuminati’s Federal Reserve note scam, which is exactly what the real Discordians were up to when Greg Hill and his Discordian confederates—inspired by Emperor Joshua Norton (who had previously issued his own currency)—likewise followed the good Emperor’s lead with what became known as Flax Notes (or alternately, flaxscript.)
Flaxscript: Security Last Intergalactic, 30 tons of flax. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Included among those listed as taking part in this exchange of Discordian currency were Malaclypse The Younger (Greg Hill), Lord Omar (Kerry Thornley), Mungojerry (Bob McElroy), Mordecai Malignatus (RAW), Hypocrates Magoun (Robert Newport), Iona K. Fioderovna (Jeanetta Hill) and Harold Randomfactor (Tim Wheeler).
Flaxscript: Bank of Omar, 1 ton of flax. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Before Bitcoin: Security Last Intergalactic Bank Flaxscript. 2 Tons of Flax = 1 Principia Discordia. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
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.
