From the final report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the “Warren Commission”
The Idle Warriors by Kerry W. Thornley, published by IllumiNet Press, 1991The testimony of Kerry Wendell Thornley was taken at 9:40 a.m., on May 18, 1964, at 200 Maryland Avenue NE., Washington, D.C., by Messrs. John Ely and Albert E. Jenner, Jr., assistant counsel of the President’s Commission.
Mr. JENNER. Mr. Thornley, in the deposition you are about to give, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Mr. THORNLEY. I do.
Mr. JENNER. You are Kerry Wendell Thornley, spelled K-e-r-r-y W-e-n-d-e-l-l T-h-o-r-n-l-e-y?
Mr. THORNLEY. That is correct, sir.
Mr. JENNER. Mr. Thornley, where do you reside now?
Mr. THORNLEY. At 4201 South 31st Street in Arlington, Va.
Mr. JENNER. Did you at one time reside at 1824 Dauphine Street in New Orleans?
Mr. THORNLEY. Yes, sir.
Mr. JENNER. What is your present occupation?
Mr. THORNLEY. I am a doorman at the building where I reside, Shirlington House.
New York Press cover feature box on Kerry Thornley, June 19-25, 1991 edition. Clipping courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Jonathan Vankin’s chapter on Kerry Thornley in Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes was one of the main motivating factors that launched me on this strange voyage of chronicling Kerry’s life.
At the time, Vankin noted that he was considering writing Thornley’s biography, a notion that excited me immensely, as Vankin’s portrayal of Kerry in Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes only whet my appetite for further revelations of one of the most curious characters to inhabit the counterculture and JFK assassination research scene of the 60s and 70s.
Of course, Vankin never got around to writing Thornley’s biography, so by the early 2000s I took it upon myself to dive down that particular rabbit hole, a journey which amazingly enough is still ongoing. I eventually pulled my research together in my biography of Thornley, The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, currently still available in all those various formats we read now. Hail Eris!
Here’s a fascinating article discussing Vankin’s coverage of Thornley from 1991 by John Strausbaugh, then-contributor and editor of The New York Press, then later host of the The New York Times’s “Weekend Explorer” podcast. This was a turning-point in Kerry’s life as IllumiNet Press was starting to publish Kerry’s works in a serious format, and subsequent coverage of Thornley, his works, and his story was being picked-up by earnest media types.
New York Press feature on Kerry Thornley, June 19-25, 1991 edition, Page 00001. Clipping courtesy of the Discordian Archives.New York Press feature on Kerry Thornley, June 19-25, 1991 edition, Page 00002. Clipping courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
The Filibuster Demon from the Goetia Discordia, Page 00022. Book PDF File Here. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.In the mid-1980s, Kerry Thornley began collaborating with a Canadian graphic artist and musician, Roldo Odlor, an association that culminated in an illustrated version of Thornley’s Book of the Demons of the Region of Thud aka Goetia Discordia, which we share with you now in its chaotic entirety as a PDF file.
Our forthcoming book, Historia Discordia, will feature more Roldo-created Discordian treasures, not to mention one of the most mind-blowing book covers you’ll ever see!
Roldo has a presence on Facebook and his music is available on Bandcamp.
A John Dillinger Died For You Society Membership Card. Click image for 300dpi printable JPG (1.4MB). Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.In the Discordian Society’s early days, not only was it SOP to adopt your own unique Discordian Pope handle—such as Mordecai The Foul or Fang The Unwashed—but it was also assumed that you’d start your own Discordian cabal, which included such notables as Greg Hill’s Joshua Norton Cabal or Rev. Dr. Makuska’s Society for Moral Understanding & Training (SMUT) Cabal.
Another of the more infamous Discordian cabals was The John Dillinger Died For You Society (JDDFYS), which appears to have been primarily the brain-child of RAW—when he was working as an editor at Playboy—along with another editor there named William Helmer, who himself adopted the Discordian non de plume of Horace Naismith when engaged in JDDFYS operations. For all I know, Bob Shea (aka Josh The Dill) might have also played a part in this conspiratorial caper promoting the Dillinger legend, which further manifested itself in Illuminatus! along with more Discordian in-jokes than you could shake a magick stick at.
Letter sent to Dr. Ignotum Ignotius (aka Greg Hill) from Dr. Horace Naismith (aka William Helmer) of the John Dillinger Died For You Society, October 26th, 1970, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.Letter sent to Dr. Ignotum Ignotius (aka Greg Hill) from Dr. Horace Naismith (aka William Helmer) of the John Dillinger Died For You Society, October 26th, 1970, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Your humble author, in full Masonic regalia, delivering the signal of distress!One such in-joke appears on page 93 in a passage that recounts Dillinger’s first bank robbery and how the victim of the heist, a grocer named B. F. Morgan—when confronted during the robbery—summoned help by giving the Masonic signal of distress. The implication suggested in this scene is that Dillinger—from the very start of his so-called “criminal career”—was in reality a Discordian Robin Hood of sorts engaged in a covert war against the Freemasonic-Illuminati Conspiracy. The punch-line for this in-joke is that the Masonic signal of distress is given by holding both hands up in the air—although Wilson and Shea never informs the readers of this.
The Sacred Chao from Illuminatus!, page 00095.Page 95 features an illustration of that most significant of Discordian symbols, The Sacred Chao, a sort of twist on Taoism’s Yin and Yang, depicting the opposing forces of The Pentagon and The Golden Apple, also known in Discordianism as the Hodge and Podge. The Pentagon—according to the Discordian mythos—represents the Aneristic Principle (Apparent Disorder) in counterbalance to The Golden Apple, which represents The Eristic Principle (Apparent Order.) To find out more about this you will have to consult your pineal gland.
On page 96, the mystery of the Golden Apple is further revealed, which is at the center (core) of the whole Discordian mythos that runs through Illuminatus!
Elsewhere on page 96, ILLUMINATI PROJECT: MEMO #9 refers to a chart that the missing Joseph Malik identified as first appearing in an issue of The East Village Other, June 11, 1969 with the label “Current Structure of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy and the Law of Fives.”
'Current Structure of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy and the Law of Fives' chart shown on page 00097 of Illuminatus!
The chart in question was indeed published in a real underground newspaper, although once again Shea and Wilson were mixing fact with fiction into the Illuminatus! narrative, as the chart was an obvious put-on that—when it originally appeared in The East Village Other—did so without any type of editorial explanation, although in retrospect it was no doubt the handiwork of RAW and/or the usual Operation Mindfuck suspects.
The chart includes (in its diabolical Bavarian Illuminati organization) the likes of such Discordian illuminaries as Lord Omar (Kerry Thornley), Malaclypse the Younger (Greg Hill) and Mordecai the Foul (RAW)—not to mention a Discordian Society spin-off organization Greg Hill concocted called the Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric (POEE, pronounced “pooey”).
Curiously enough, Bank of America is also listed on the chart, a company where—as fickle fate would have it—Greg Hill was later employed from the late-70s until his death in July of 2000, having worked for BofA a total of 23 (synchronistic) years.
On page 100, the Legion of Dynamic Discord (LDD) is introduced and identified as a group aligned with Hagbard Celine. In reality, the LDD was the creation of Lord Omar during a period when he and Malaclypse the Younger had some sort of theological falling out and decided to form opposing (tongue-in-cheek) Discordian factions. Malaclypse named his faction the Erisian Liberation Front, more commonly known as ELF.
I Ching divination cast by Greg Hill for Kerry Thornley, dated April 26, 1970. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
A very-long forty-four years ago, this very day, during the rapidly loss-of-hippie-innocence known as that infernal year of 1970, Greg Hill cast an I Ching, or the Book of Changes, hexagram for Kerry Thornley (aka Lord Omar), based on Thornley’s inquiry:
“Lord Omar desires guidance for this coming year.”
As seen in the letter above, Hill cast Hexagram 38, K’uie (Opposites, or Opposition) moving into Hexagram 64, the I Ching’s last hexagram, Wei Chi (Before Completion, or Unfinished Business) for Thornley, where Hill tells Thornley based on I Ching interpretation tradition:
“Before the fox makes it across the ice, his tail gets wet.”
We Chi is an interesting casting for Thornley at this time. Thornley was ascending into High Weirdness after being targeted as a possible “Second Oswald” by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s JFK Assassination investigation. Thornley would soon, in the mid-70s and following years, order part of his life around the JFK Assassination based on his belief of recovered memories of involvement in the early-60s with the mysterious “Brother-in-Law” as he documents in his infamous The Dreadlock Recollections. As he tried to make sense of it all, Thornley could aptly be described as a “wet-tailed fox” during this time where his “transition from disorder to order is not yet complete,” although Thornley was trying his best to complete that transition with his increasingly conspiratorial speculations.
Not only did Hill cast hexagrams for fellow Discordians, but he also included exactly one reference to the I Ching in the Principia Discordia on the last proper canon page of the Fourth Edition of the book, Page 00074, entitled “Part Five: The Golden Secret.” This page is possibly the book’s most gung-ho positive message in the entire endeavor, giddily proclaiming:
And when men become free then mankind will be free.
My you be free of The Curse of Greyface.
May the Goddess put twinkles in your eyes.
May you have the knowledge of a sage,
and the wisdom of a child.
Hail Eris.
On the bottom-right of Page 00074 is pasted a black marker representation of Hexagram 11: T’ai (or Peace), shown below. This hexagram is also to be found in the July/August 1970 issue of Hill’s zine The Greater Poop #30 on Page 00004 discussing the Discordian Rev. Dr. Hypocrates Magoun, P.P., and his “antics” with LSD during his United States Air Force service. The Rev. Dr. Hypocrates Magoun is the Discordian name of Robert Newport, an Early Discordian and savior of Greg Hill’s Discordian archives.
As all these Greg Hill hexagrams occur around the same time in the late-60s/early-70s, shown above, below, and in previous posts, it’s clear Hill was at this time dabbling with the eternal mysticism of the I Ching and producing it in his literature and correspondences, as well as being called on by his fellow Discordians to cast their fates.
Now whether it did them any good? No Blame. Hail Eris!
Page 00074 of the Sacred PUD (the original Paste-Up Discordia): Part Five: The Golden Secret with I Ching Hexagram 11, T'ai or Peace. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
A Discordian bumper sticker promoting Illuminatus! Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
The most intriguing passage—at least for yours truly—in Week Nine of the Illuminatus! group reading (other than the introduction of The Golden Apple on page 85!) is the following quote on page 91:
The Purple Sage cursed and waxed sorely pissed and cried out in a loud voice: A pox upon the accursed Illuminati of Bavaria; may their seed take no root.
May their hands tremble, their eyes dim and their spines curl up, yea, verily, like unto the backs of snails; and may the vaginal orifices of their women be clogged with Brillo pads.
For they have sinned against God and Nature; they have made of life a prison; and they have stolen the green from the grass and the blue from the sky. And so saying, and grimacing and groaning, the Purple Sage left the world of men and women and retired to the desert in despair and heavy grumpiness.
But the High Chapperal laughed, and said to the Erisian faithful: Our brother torments himself with no cause, for even the malign Illuminati are unconscious pawns of the Divine Plane of Our Lady.
—Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S.,“The Book of Contradictions,” Liber 555
This passage seems quite similar to other excerpts in Illuminatus!—by Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (aka Kerry Thornley) and Malaclypse the Younger (aka Greg Hill)—that are taken from the Discordian Holy books, such as Lord Omar’s The Honest Book of Truth, and that were also previously quoted in the bible of Discordianism, Principia Discordia.
For years, many suspected that The Honest Book of Truth never actually existed, other than a few quotes that Kerry Thornley cooked up… but now, at last, the truth can be told! Lord Omar (Kerry) did indeed compose a work called The Honest Book of Truth, a 15 page irreligious tract that will be reproduced in its entirety in my forthcoming book, Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society.
As a sidebar, when I was talking to RAW once regarding his thoughts on Thornley as a writer, he told me that Kerry’s most significant work was The Honest Book of Truth—a comment I didn’t know what to make of at the time, because I, like most everyone else, believed that the book never actually existed.
Mordecai Malignatus, of course, was RAW’s Discordian alias, and in the above passage he speaks of The Purple Sage, a character Thornley first introduced in The Honest Book Of Truth. As for “The Book of Contradictions,” Liber 555, I’m guessing this was a made-up Discordian Holy book that RAW never actually composed, excerpt for the above passage which seems like a takeoff on The Honest Book of Truth.
It can indeed get quite confusing trying to make sense of all this, Hail Eris!
Letter from Camden Benares to Louise Lacey, September 8, 1976. Courtesy of Louise Lacey.In this 1976 letter to Louise Lacey, Camden Benares reflects on his life as a writer—of both Zen and porn—noting that Zen Without Zen Masters was scheduled for release in the spring of 1977. In addition, Camden mentions a science fiction collaboration in the works between he and his Discordian pal John F. Carr, a book that was finally published in the futuristic faraway year of 2013 and chronicled in my previous post “The Discordian Sci-Fi Series That Almost Never Was.”
Camden congratulates Louise on the recent publication of Lunaception, her landmark work on a natural method to conception, using the phases of the moon as a guide, a concept later explored by Tom Robbins in Still Life With Woodpecker.
Camden also floats the idea of putting together a list of Discordian books then in publication. With that theme in mind, here is just such a list, a snap shot in time of books in print by Discordian authors as of 1977.
By the time Illuminatus! was published in 1975, Kerry began suffering severe bouts of delusional paranoia along with his growing belief that the shadowy character he’d met in New Orleans in the early-60s (referred to as “Brother-In-Law”) was actually legendary CIA spook E. Howard Hunt, and that Hunt had manipulated Kerry to later set him up as an unwitting dupe in JFK’s assassination. During this period, Kerry began to suspect that he’d also been a victim of MK-ULTRA mind control, that Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) was involved in a plot to deprogram him, and that Illuminatus! was at the root of a lot of the high weirdness then going down in his life. As RAW told me in The Prankster and the Conspiracy:
“(Kerry) had the impression that I came to Atlanta more than once and that I had given him LSD and had removed the programming the Navy had put into him when he was in the Marines—and that I was one of his CIA handlers.”
When RAW informed Kerry that he didn’t remember any of this taking place, Kerry said that was because they had brainwashed him (RAW), too. Because of these suspicions, the two eventually ceased communication because as RAW later explained:
”It’s hard to communicate with somebody when he thinks you’re a diabolical mind-control agent and you’re convinced that he’s a little bit paranoid.”
On page 69, the character of Atlanta Hope is introduced, leader of God’s Lightning, a group who are opposed (at least on the surface) to all things fun and immoral. Atlanta Hope has always reminded me as a sort of Anita Bryant type: a seeming Miss All America goody two-shoes who, in reality, is willing to sleep her way to the top of the Illuminati pyramid while using the trappings of Christian fundamentalism to further her own duplicitous ambitions.
Kerry came to believe that the Atlanta Hope character was actually modeled after a woman he knew in Atlanta, Georgia named Mary Jo Padgett who belonged to a group of Quakers that provided ministry and group counseling sessions. At the time, Kerry sought counsel through this group and, in time, came to believe that they had been infiltrated by the intelligence community. Mary Jo Padgett, Kerry surmised, was:
“…an extremely high-level intelligence community dirty work organizer for elements of the Southern Rim (military-industrial complex) of the ruling class, including very probably the Dupont family. I believe these elements have been conducting a virtual reign of terror in this area for some years, not to mention corruption of the various levels of government, and that they must have been involved rather deeply in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr…. I’m rather strongly convinced that the Illuminatus! character, Atlanta Hope, is based substantially on Mary Jo Padgett…”
Letter: Kerry Thornley to Greg Hill, 1976. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Back in 1966, Kerry was editing the libertarian newsletter, The Innovator, which had published an article entitled “Postman Against the State” dealing with various non-governmental postal systems throughout history that had functioned more effectively than government operated systems. As the “Playboy Forum” was then receiving a slew of complaints from readers about snooping on the part of the U.S. Postal Service, Kerry persuaded The Innovator’s publisher to send a copy of the “Postman Against the State” issue to Playboy. RAW—then an associate editor at Playboy—received this issue of The Innovator and, in turn, responded to Kerry, which initiated a longstanding correspondence between the two.
Kerry and RAW discussed, among other things, the American Letter Mail Company operated in New England in the mid 1800s by the individualist anarchist, Lysander Spooner. The American Letter Mail Company, at the time, offered cheaper postage rates than the U.S. Postal Service, gave more deliveries per day, and earned a profit to boot. Spooner was finally put out of business when Congress made it illegal to deliver a first class letter for profit. Both Kerry and RAW agreed that the U.S. Postal Service was once again ripe for change, and the concept Spooner had spawned one hundred years earlier was the direction the current mail system should go.
Thornley later described his correspondence with RAW as “one of the longest, most intense, most stimulating, rewarding, enriching, enlightening—and certainly the most unusual—of my entire life.”
“We began writing long letters to each other… astonished at how totally our political philosophies agreed—we were both opposed to every form of violence or coercion against individuals, whether practiced by governments or by people who claimed to be revolutionaries. We were equally disenchanted with the organized Right and the organized Left while still remaining Utopians, without a visible Utopia to believe in.”
During this period, Kerry was promoting the idea of “floating ocean utopias” where Anarcho-Libertarians—such as he fancied himself—could live high and free on the sea. This is a concept that RAW and Shea entertain in Illuminatus! embodied by the character of Hagbard Celine and his golden submarine, the Lief Erickson, which first emerges on page 71.
Celine—like many other Illuminatus! characters—seems a composite of much of the idealism after which Kerry aspired during those heady days of the 60s: the dream of living on the high seas—like swashbuckling Captain Celine—free of governments and any limitations on the individual, devoted to pursuing true freedom and sensual pleasures while engaged in a battle to free men’s minds.
'The Gypsies of the Sulu Sea,' Kerry Thornley’s short article on 'aqua-libertarians' from Ocean Living magazine, 1968. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy, 'candy apple red' edition from Dell Trade Paperback, January 1984. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.And now yet more revelations of certain Erisian Mysteries in Week 6 of the Illuminatus! group reading…
On page 54, 00005 (Of Her Majesty’s Secret Service) is introduced, otherwise known elsewhere in Illuminatus! as the character Fission Chips.
00005 is the first reference in Illuminatus! to the Discordian Law of Fives, which states that all things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly related to five.
Page 00005 of the Sacred PUD (the original Paste-Up Discordia): A Zen Story by Camden Benares from the Principia Discordia. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.00005 is also an example of the same five digit numbering system Greg Hill devised for the Principia Discordia. Illuminatus! is permeated with such Discordian allusions, which very few people at the time of its publication in 1975 would have been able to pick up on—or had even heard of Discordianism, for that matter. During this period there were only a few hundred copies of Principia Discordia in circulation, and so these Illuminatus!-Discordian allusions (such as this obscure reference to The Law of Fives) were initially inserted into the narrative as nothing more, it would seem, than inside jokes to the few who would understand them: a small cabal of Early Discordians numbering no fewer than five and probably not more than 23. The ultimate design of including all these Discordian winks and nods in Illuminatus! was part of a well thought out (albeit semi-covert) Discordian campaign to bring the Principia Discordia and Discordianism to a larger audience. The subsequent success of Illuminatus!, as a result, led many in turn to seek out the Principia Discordia, which was no easy task to track down at the time given its limited availability.
This limited availability of the Principia Discordia—coupled with its repeated referencing in Illuminatus!—no doubt intrigued and motivated the likes of Michael Hoy at Loompanics, and later Steven Jackson Games, to come out with new editions in the years to follow, thus unleashing an insidious plague that would soon envelop the planet, and usher in modern day Discordianism as we now know it.
On page 58 is a direct quote from Malaclypse the Younger, aka Greg Hill:
Hang on for some metaphysics. The Aneristic Principle is that of ORDER, the Eristic Principle is that of DISORDER. On the surface, the Universe seems (to the ignorant) to be ordered; this is the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Actually, what order is “there” is imposed on primal chaos in the same sense that a person’s name is draped over his actual self. It is the job of the scientist, for example, to implement this principle in a practical manner and some are quite brilliant at it. But on closer examination, order dissolves into disorder, which is the ERISTIC ILLUSION. —Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., Principia Discordia
From this passage one can see the philosophical inspiration Greg Hill provided to RAW and Bob Shea, which once again attests to the overarching role that Hill, Kerry Thornley and Discordianism played in the creation The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
As for the “K.S.C.” tagged on to the end of Malaclypse the Younger, this appellation is an acronym for Keeper of the Sacred Chao, which we will of course learn more about as we progress further down the Illuminatus! rabbit hole.
A John Dillinger Died For You Society Membership Card, Courtesy of the Discordian Archives. On page 59, the legend of John Dillinger is first introduced, a mythology that’d been evolving in certain Discordian circles since at least 1970 in the form of the John Dillinger Died For You Society (JDDFYS), a legend largely inserted into the Discordian mythos by RAW.
Camden Benares sent Greg Hill this article on Mad Dog, Texas from the November 1970 Playboy, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives. An early mention of JDDFYS appeared in one of the more obscure articles found in Playboy magazine, no doubt penned by RAW and/or Shea or both when they were editors there. As I’ve mentioned in previous reading group posts, many of the conspiracy theories in Illuminatus! contain equal amounts of fact mixed with fiction, although it’s hard sometimes to figure out where one ends and the other begins. Included in this Playboy “After Hours” article from November 1970 is an early reference to the JDDFYS, which was a real society created in a large part by RAW and based on fanciful legends mixed with an equal measure of historical fact. So once again we have a real article in a real magazine, about a group of writers, artists and radicals launching their own “independent republic” in Mad Dog, Texas—that was probably totally made-up although the article included some elements of truth mixed with fiction, as well as real people (such as Warren Hinckle and George Plimpton) co-existing with some imaginary people mentioned in the article. Reality tunnels within reality tunnels…
Camden Benares sent Greg Hill this article on Mad Dog, Texas from the November 1970 Playboy, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives. Mad Dog, Texas—as the reader shall soon discover—later plays a key role in the Illuminatus! narrative, although it really seems to have next to nothing to do with the Mad Dog, Texas group discussed in the Playboy “After Hours” article.
