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book discordianism greg hill illuminati illuminatus! kerry thornley letters principia discordia robert anton wilson robert shea stickers timothy leary writings

We’re Fno-o-o-o-ord: Week 30 Illuminatus! Group Reading

Page 00010 of the Sacred PUD with fnords. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
And Historia Discordia is back! Dearest Eris decided to give us an unexpected end-of-summer week off due to some Markoff Chaney-style technical website hijinxery, Hail Eris!, but nothing lasts forever, so it’s time to get back on the horse…

First up, a post meant for last week’s Illuminatus! Group Reading. Usually, we post an Eris of the Month entry every 23rd, but we’ll post that tomorrow on the 24th, just to give a little slap back to Our Lady of Confusion for her testiness.


I’m a little late to the fnord party, as this weird word was apparently first introduced into the Illuminatus! (Amazon) lexicon way back on page 280 and shows up here again in Week 30—just the same I thought I’d play a little catch up, although I really have no great fnord insights to share other than to point out the first known appearance of this weirdo word was in the 4th ed. of Principia Discordia.

Fnord sticker by Greg Hill. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
The only other fnords I’ve seen—other than those that allegedly appear in Illuminatus!—are a bunch of fnord stickers that Greg Hill produced to help promote the book. In this regard, Hill was an exuberant cheerleader for this truly Discordian effort, and as previously posted here at Historia Discordia helped RAW concoct an Illuminatus! review by a certain Mordecai Zwack.

To further illustrate Hill’s involvement—with RAW, Robert Shea and Illuminatus!—I post a letter here for your probable reading enjoyment from Hill to RAW in the year of our Goddess, 3141. This was during the period that Hill was living in NYC. Hill mentions a poster-collage he was contemplating / working on at this time that had “fizzled out,” although he later shared a rough version of it with RAW.

Letter from Greg Hill to RAW, dated September 9, 1975, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Letter from Greg Hill to RAW, dated September 9, 1975, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

Letter from Greg Hill to RAW, dated September 9, 1975, Page 00003. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Poster by Greg Hill for Illuminatus!, circa 1975.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.

Jerry Milton Brooks
Hill talks about being unproductive, as this was a depressive period for him; he’d recently separated from his wife Jeanetta and had taken a dismal bank clerk job in NYC. Hill also mentions a recent visit with Kerry Thornley in Atlanta, and shares Kerry’s theory about the JFK assassination and how one of the supposed conspirators, Slim Brooks (who Kerry believed was actually Jerry Milton Brooks) was one of the chosen five to receive a 1st ed. copy of Principia Discordia, which is available at long last in Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society (Amazon).

On page 2 of Hill’s letter, he recounts a synchronistic moment between he, Thornley and the spirit of RAW, which probably cemented even more in poor Kerry’s mind that RAW was an evil agent of the Illuminati who possessed paranormal powers and could deliver thunder bolts on request!

On page 3, Hill mentions another can of worms in Thornley’s head concerning a party in a Atlanta that is discussed in more depth in my latest book about all of this craziness, Caught in the Crossfire: Kerry Thornley, Lee Oswald and the Garrison Investigation (Amazon).

Towards the end, Hill inquires if there’s any news about Sirius, which of course was referring to RAW’s famous July 23rd encounter. The Secret Chiefs, I assume, also refers to the July 23rd Dog Days experience. Who “Nichols at Voice” was, I have no idea, unless it’s a reference to The Village Voice. As for Leary, he was still in prison at this point, but it was not long after—in April of ‘76—that California Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown granted Leary’s release.

Hill finishes with a philosophical point—which is a bit over my head—although I think it’s referring to that quote by Alfred Korzybski of which RAW was so fond: “The map is not the territory.”

“Zap ‘em at Gnostica” refers—I believe—to a series of esoteric workshops that RAW was part of in San Francisco at this time sponsored by Gnostica magazine called Gnosticon. Here are some scans from the Gnosticon newsletter that includes RAW’s bio and a description of the workshops he presented, which consisted of his early explorations into Leary’s Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness.

Gnostica newsletter on RAW's talk, Page 00001. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Gnostica newsletter on RAW's talk, Page 00002. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Gnostica newsletter on RAW's talk, Page 00003. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
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book brenton clutterbuck discordianism greg hill interview letters principia discordia stickers

Chasing Eris: An Interlude on Copyleft

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.

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book discordianism greg hill illuminati illuminatus! kerry thornley principia discordia robert anton wilson stickers writings

Week 9 of the Illuminatus! Group Reading

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!

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art discordianism pope cards robert anton wilson stickers

While on the topic of Pope Cards…

Pope Card by St. Mae for the RAW Meme-Orial, front, 2007.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Pope Card by St. Mae for the RAW Meme-Orial, back, 2007.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Sticker: Lysergide by St. Mae.
Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
While on the topic of Pope Cards, a fine addition to the theme was created a few years back by my friend St. Mae over at Discordian.com, a card made specifically for The Robert Anton Wilson Cosmic Meme-Orial back in 2007.

Mae passed on a bundle of these beauties to me during a visit last year to Emperor Norton’s groovy grave site which she orchestrated.

In addition, Mae gave me a few Lysergide stickers that she and her crew created a while ago, which in short order I stuck on the back of my keyboard synthesizer, just because it looked cool there.

Lysergide, for those not in the know, was the trademarked name for LSD back when a group of someones were trying to market the drug before it became illegal.