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Now Available! Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society

Historia Discordia:
The Origins of the
Discordian Society
.
Get Your Copy Now!
The most extensive collection in print documenting the Discordian Society’s wild and wooly legacy, Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society features the unique worldview and wit of such illuminated iconoclasts as Robert Anton Wilson and Discordian founders Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley.

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.”

See the fnords and buy the book at Amazon. Enjoy!

4 replies on “Now Available! Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society”

First Amazon Review:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, June 11, 2014
By Headless_View
Verified Purchase
This review is from: Historia Discordia (Paperback)

If you’re into Discordianism, you will not be disappointed. This book consists of largely primary sources, i.e. the actual and original previously unpublished documents of Discordianism. Of particular interest is what seems to be the entire “Honest Book of Truth” consisting of The Book of Uterus, The Book of Explanations, The Book of Predictions, The Book of Advice, The Book of Gooks, and The Gospel According to Fred. The Honest Book of Truth is quoted tantalizingly in the Principia Discordia and the Illuminatus Trilogy, but I didn’t know the whole thing even existed. While the above-mentioned Honest Book of Truth is “only” 13 pages of the text (out of 287 pages), the page size is larger than 8.5 inches by 11 inches (standard “American”-sized paper). As a POPE myself, I officially announce the inclusion of the Historia Discordia as part of the Discordian Canon.

Second Amazon Review:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, June 18, 2014
By Jake Shannon

FNORD: This aptly titled Golden Apple is a must buy for Discordians of all cabals…
By Jake Shannon on June 18, 2014

On the strength of Adam Gorightly’s biography of Kerry Thornley, I bought Historia Discordia as soon as it was available. I wasn’t disappointed, Hail Eris! Obviously a tremendous amount of work was done researching, compiling and cataloging this material and as such, my hat is off Gorightly. True to the title, Historia Discordia offers nerds for Discordian lore plenty of original, archival material from our Discordian forefathers with dashes of new material that ties it all together rather nicely. The book is a real value too as the Historia Discordia also contains the legendary first edition of the Principia Discordia, the complete Honest Book of Truth, and much much more. I give it 5 five-pointed stars, in accordance with the Law of Fives.

Third Amazon Review:

A delicious slice of madness
By D. Comstock on June 18, 2014
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

I just picked up the Historia Discordia. It’s cool! It’s basically a catalog of vintage Erisian stuff that was gathering dust in Bob Newport’s basement, including a ton of original Discordian correspondences and tracts. Tons of lost writings by Mal-2. Great coffee table book for the Discordian archivist or researcher.

I’ve enjoyed tracing the evolution of a lot of the concepts in the PD. For example, there’s that line in the PD about how Discordians don’t have dogma, they have catma. And it turns out there’s a whole little sermon about it that wasn’t included in the PD and to my knowledge isn’t on the net anywhere. There are a lot of 1st edition PD pages which were revised several times before the 5th edition we’re familiar with. A lot of the jokes and 1-liners from the PD are referencing other Discordian documents which have been lost, until now.

For those of us interested in the genealogy of this whackadoo contraption, this is really satisfying. It gives a sense about what the first Discordian communities were like, and who the key players were. (something I’ve always been curious about) It’s also pretty cool to see the early much rougher drafts of some of the texts we’re familiar with.

Definitely recommend this for the archivists, collectors, and insane hoarders that get stuck in Eris’ orbit.

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