The front piece to the Paste-Up Discordia (The Sacred PUD). Courtesy the Discordian Archives.Here at Historia Discordia, we’ve be on a mission from Goddess to document the Origins, History & Chaos of the Discordian Society.
Hey, we even put this calling into the site’s masthead, so, you know, we’re like srsly Discordian zealots.
(DEATH TO ALL FANATICS!)
We enjoy this unique opportunity to have access to both Discordian Founders’ archives as well as other original materials. While Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley kept their stash of documents by very different methods, one Hodge and the other Podge, some clarity has been achieved regarding Discordian history.
Many New Old Truths have been discovered about the origination, growth, hilarity, and impact of Discordianism from this cache of source documents.
As such, we’ve tried to put a little sanity, Goddess forgive us!, on this library of madness:
As we glean new information and post articles about and from the Archives here, we include them into the Discordian Timeline, a linear year-by-year accounting of what was going on and when with the Early Discordians thru to current Modern Discordians.
The Discordian history is a murky maze and fraught with many Erisian contradictions, so we hope offering an understanding of its conception, history, and weirdness on a timeline will help every past, present, and future Discordian Pope better grasp these wonderful absurdities.
Kerry Thornley in the late-60s. Photo courtesy John F. Carr. Aside from Jim Garrison’s On The Trail of the Assassins (Amazon), the first book to address, in any depth, Kerry Thornley’s alleged role in the JFK assassination was Joe Biles’ In History’s Shadow: Lee Harvey Oswald, Kerry Thornley & the Garrison Investigation (Amazon).
Biles’ claimed that Thornley—on account to his supposed CIA affiliations—was well looked after by intelligence agency handlers as payment for his participation with a shadowy New Orleans cabal that conspired to assassinate JFK. According to Biles:
“Garrison investigator Jim Rose would later learn that Thornley had two homes in Florida, one in Miami and one in Tampa, as well as two cars. The Tampa residence, where Thornley lived, was a large white frame house on a one acre lot. Thornley was single and supposedly had only worked as a waiter and doorman at a few apartment houses.” 1
Yours truly has reviewed hundreds of letters in the Discordian Archives dating from the mid-60s until Thornley’s death in the late-90s, and in these letters one can trace his whereabouts and activities, in particular during the Garrison investigation period. Biles’ assertion that Thornley owned two homes in Tampa has no factual basis. Kerry lived on the edge of poverty most of his life (he never owned a house), and was homeless for extended periods. At one time he even made his home in a renovated chicken coop in Tujunga, California.
The only accurate statement—in the above passage from In History’s Shadow—is that Kerry lived in Tampa, and that his employment over the years included jobs as a waiter and doorman. Among other occupations, Kerry edited a Libertarian newsletter, The Innovator, during the mid-60s, in addition to working other odd jobs, including as a dishwasher, a job he performed at a variety of restaurants in Florida and later, Georgia.
Biles maintains that Kerry was single, another glaring goof-up. For the record, Kerry married Cara Leach in Palos Verdes, California in December 1965. They separated in the early 1970s.
Biles’ claim that Kerry owned two cars is also bunk. As was the hippie fashion of the day, he and Cara owned a VW van during the period they lived in Los Angeles, which they later sold to help fund their move to Florida in the autumn of 1967. From that point forward, Kerry never owned another vehicle.
After relocating to Florida, Kerry and Cara—with their infant son, Kreg—lived in an “inexpensive place” in the Palm River District on the outskirts of Tampa, settling there in late 1967 just as the Garrison investigation started heating up. Soon afterwards, they moved to a rented cottage on Marlin Street near the Yacht Club where Kerry worked as a dishwasher. Kerry’s mode of travel at this time was a used $8 bike he purchased from Goodwill. So much for the fantasy he was some sort of well paid CIA super spook. During this period, Greg Hill and Bud Simco visited Kerry in Tampa. According to Simco:
“The only real time we had to visit was while Kerry was at work. So Greg and I went with him and washed dishes at the Yacht Club for free—just to hang out in the kitchen to visit with Kerry… and it was a lot of fun—we did that for a day or two. And the management, they were really amazed that people would do that—these three guys back there washing dishes, two of them for free—all of them, by all appearances, over qualified to be washing dishes… And they couldn’t figure out why Kerry was back there washing dishes because he was obviously a very intelligent person, and they knew he was a writer—basically that’s what Kerry said: “I just want to write—I just want to cover the basic minimum daily requirements, and be left alone to write.” 2
Kerry Thornley and family circa late-60s or early-70s. Photo courtesy of John F. Carr.
Jim Rose’s entrée into the Garrison investigation came courtesy of former FBI guy William “Bill” Turner, who during this period was freelancing for Ramparts magazine and dabbling in JFK assassination research. At some point, Garrison passed on leads in the case to Ramparts editor Warren Hinkle, which Hinkle passed along to Turner. (Hinkle and Turner would later co-author The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro (Amazon). Soon after, Turner inserted himself into Garrison’s investigation and brought with him Jim Rose, who had also freelanced at Ramparts.
Jim Rose aka Carl. E. McNab.
Although Rose used a number of aliases (Jim Rhodes, Vince Rose, Carl Davis and Steve Wilson) his real name was E. Carl McNabb (as far as I’ve been able to ascertain), but for clarity’s sake we’ll just call him “Jim Rose” because that’s how he’s most often identified in memos, letters and articles from the period. According to Warren Hinkle:
“We called him Jim Rose. At least that was the name by which he was known to everyone on the magazine, including one of the secretaries with whom he took up housekeeping between derrings-do. But he had a name for every day of the week. He was Jack Carter when he worked in Miami, until later he became too hot and decided to ‘kill off’ Carter by simulating a plane crash at sea, thus discouraging the spoilsports in the F.A.A. from inquiring further into the checkered history of Carter’s flight plans. He had several newspaper clippings reporting his own death, which he would exhibit with the eager shyness of someone showing you an appendix scar or bottled gallstone. He was also known as Dawes, also as McLeish, also as several other people, among which I was always partial to Rose, because of Gertrude Stein and all. But by any name he was, as Damon Runyan said about those types who stand out among other types of their type, the ‘genuine item.’ He loved adventure, and second only to that he loved talking about adventure.” 3
Ramparts editor Warren Hinkle.
Although Hinkle considered Rose a real deal soldier of fortune with intelligence agency connections up the wazoo, others connected to the Garrison investigation were less enthralled with the seemingly self created legends swirling around the enigmatic Mr. Rose. Rose claimed he’d worked as a CIA contract pilot, and had flown missions—at one time or another—with one of Garrison’s key suspects, the notorious David Ferrie of red wig fame. However, Rose said many things to many people that more often than not never really panned out. Just the same, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Rose was involved in paramilitary activities linked to the CIA.
Jim Rose with P-51 Mustang, Santa Barbara, 1967
Strange bedfellows such as Jim Rose suggest that Garrison showed little hesitation about recruiting into his investigation former intelligence agents or assets from the very same agencies that he theorized were behind JFK’s assassination—such “former” agents or assets that could potentially serve as moles and undermine his own investigation. And that’s exactly what Garrison later claimed: that his investigation had been infiltrated by former CIA spies and ultimately sabotaged. In particular, a character named Bill Boxley (aka William Wood), a former CIA spook who—prior to hooking up with Garrison—had apparently been booted from the agency due to frequent bouts with the bottle. Boxley and Garrison eventually had a falling out and Boxley jumped ship and ended up working on Clay Shaw’s defense team.
Bill Boxley aka William Wood.
Even though Garrison was knee deep in his belief that the FBI and/or CIA were attempting to sabotaged his case, he nonetheless possessed an almost fan boy fascination with former spooks. The first time Rose met with Garrison at the D.A.’s office, he was frisked by staffer Lou Ivon, who apparently overlooked a deadly ballpoint pen Rose was carrying. “It’s napalm,” Rose explained. “If I shot you, your face would go up in flames.” 4 Garrison endearingly dubbed Rose, “Winston Smith,” then later “Winnie the Pooh,” and “Rosalie.”
Too sexy for his shirt? Jim Rose on assignment.
Although Rose wasn’t officially on Garrison’s payroll, he was compensated through a slush fund called “Truth or Consequences” that set up by a group of wealthy right wing Garrison supporters. Among his many activities, Rose was paid a thousand dollars upfront to travel to Tacoma, Washington, to investigate Fred Crisman, another among the many colorful alleged JFK assassination conspirators targeted by Garrison.
Fred Crisman
On a trip in the Northwest in 1968, Fred Newcomb (a JFK assassination researcher and graphic artist commissioned by Harold Weisberg to touch up Kerry Thornley’s photo), spent a couple of days in Tacoma, following up leads on Crisman. While there, Newcomb learned that Rose had been snooping around town earlier that year and making claims that “Chrisman [sic] had been known to transport large sums of money to several cities in the country and that he had no visible means of support.” Rose later claimed that he had been shot at while in Tacoma and barely got out of town alive. 5
As for Crisman’s alleged role in Garrison investigation bingo, he was accused of being one of the three mystery tramps (presumably up to no good in Dealey Plaza) that had been picked up by Dallas cops in the aftermath of the assassination. This was a theory originally promoted by Garrison’s “photographic expert,” Richard Sprague, based on information developed by Jim Rose’s mentor, Bill Turner, and then subsequently “investigated” by Rose.
These allegations against Crisman were later debunked in 1977 by the House Select Committee on Assassinations who determined that—on November 22nd, 1963—Crisman had been filling in as a substitute teacher at Rainer Union High School in Rainer, Oregon, his whereabouts corroborated in affidavits provided by three teachers in attendance that day: Marva Harris, Norma Chase, and Stanley Peerloom. 6
In On the Trail of the Assassins, Garrison spoke glowingly of Rose:
“…an urbane, very bright young man who had grown up in Latin America and spoke Spanish like a native; he was useful in interviews with Cuban exiles… [Rose] was accepted after a strong recommendation from Boxley, who had known him back in his agency days. Rose had a number of photographs showing himself instructing anti-Castro guerrilla trainees at the no name key training camp in Florida back in the early-60s.”
Garrison’s puffery aside, there’s no evidence that Rose actually served with the CIA. According to Big Jim’s glowing prose, Rose had been involved with training anti-Castro exiles, something that Fred Newcomb discovered after coming across a series of photos taken of these training exercises. Newcomb passed the photos along to his circle of assassination researchers that included Penn Jones, Jr., who was able to verify that Rose was indeed the mystery man in the photos identified as “Steve Wilson.” These associations cast a cloud of suspicion over Rose that he had infiltrated the Garrison investigation for dubious reasons.
Arrest photo of Jim Rose (red circle around his head) with Cuban exiles involved in paramilitary training exercises in Florida, 1963.
1) Biles, Joe G. 2002 In History’s Shadow: Lee Harvey Oswald, Kerry Thornley & the Garrison Investigation. Writers Club Press. (Pages 66-67).
2) Author’s interview with Bud Simco, Feb 17, 2003.
3) Hinkle, Warren, April 1973, Esquire Magazine, “The Mystery of the Black Books”.
4) Mellen, Joan. 2005. A Farewell To Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, And The Case that Should Have Changed History. Potomoc Books.
5) “Memo on Jim Rose/Jim Rhodes/Vince/E. Carl McNabb with sidelights on Turner/Jaffee/Crissman/Sprague” by Fred Newcomb (Harold Weisberg archives).
6) Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives. 1979. (Page 607).
Please spread the word on this Indiegogo launch for The Hill and the Hole, a film featuring yours truly as a wise-cracking sociopathic Freemasonic fry dough truck operator and cult leader!
If everything goes as planned, you may even get to see me kill a person or two.
Check out the teaser trailer below and if you are so moved, help any way you can at the film’s Indiegogo page:
@thehillandthehole on Instagram & Facebook
A teaser for the supernatural independent feature film, The Hill and the Hole, adapted from a Fritz Leiber short story, retold by directors Chris Ernst & Bill Darmon. A weird tale from the southwest. Who would you sacrifice?
Film Score: Drew O'Doherty
Featuring: Liam Kelly, Kristen Brody, Brandt Adams, Adam Gorightly, Chris Dunlop, Matthew O'Donnell, Ricardo Burgos, Xochi, William McLane
Just released! Chasing Eris by Brenton Clutterbuck. Grab your copy!As we recently celebrated this past March, it has been FIVE years since Historia Discordia contributor Brenton Clutterbuck visited the Discordian Archives (both West and East Archive locations!) on his world-wide quest to document Modern Day Manifestations of Discordianism and meet the Discordian Popes around the world who keep Eris fnording.
Brenton Clutterbuck visiting the Discordian Archives East for his Chasing Eris book project. Here he's holding the front-piece to the original Paste-Up Discordia known as the Sacred PUD. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.And now his crazy idea has come to perfect Golden Apple fermentation on the auspicious Erisian date of May 5, 2018 (on the Kalendae Discordium date known as Setting Orange Discord 52nd, YOLD 3184), also coincidancing on Early Discordian Camden Benares‘ Discordian Holiday known as St. Gulik’s Day, with the publication of his years-long efforts now known as his newly released book Chasing Eris!
Go grab your very own copy via Lulu.com immediately.
I asked Clutterbuck for a few of his thoughts on the occasion of the release of Chasing Eris:
After years of horrifying experiments and strongly-worded letters from the Ethics Committee, my secret laboratory has finally produced the most significant marvel of International Chaos Science—my book Chasing Eris.
A note that I am totally wiped-out, weirded-out, and bedazzled by how willing people have been to get excited about this release—it’s very sweet and overwhelming to have my excitement and joy shared by so many of you weirdos, and I hope you know how simply humbled and delighted I am.
I have an e-book and some other tasty treats on the way, and if you’d like notification of when they arrive, you can sign up to my mailing list.
Keep the Lasagna Flying!
Congratulations, Clutterbuck! Eris abides on Chaos well done.
Check out a recent interview with Clutterbuck about writing Chasing Eris, some great deep-mind RAW stuff here:
They can be lump free, chunky, or smooth textured. Many of us perform Discordian Rituals without even knowing. Case in point: as a hirsute, dope smoking teen—long before my Discordian Pope-hood—I oft times visited Fresno’s Fashion Fair Mall, and above the urinal in a restroom there (a urinal can double as an irreligious altar) there was a chalk board with chalk on a string that allowed the user to scrawl lewd crudities as opposed to the walls of the stalls, such as “for a good time call…”
Anyway, with said chalk—and without premeditated thought—I wrote “Jesus is pregnant!”
This was Discordian Ritual #1.
Fashion Fair Mall postcard, circa 1970s. The restroom was to the left of the fountain, next to See's Candies.
Discordian Ritual #2
My second Discordian Ritual occurred once again in magical Fresno when a colleague and I ingested LSD and went out trippin’ into the streets of our fair city. At some point in our adventure, one of us said: “What if we saw a UFO right now, no one would believe us,” which made us laugh somewhat uncontrollably.
After uttering those immortal words, Eris called down a surreal squadron of psychedelic saucers which blew our minds.
This was Discordian Ritual #2—although I didn’t know I was a Discordian Society member at the time.
Hail Eris!
Discordian Ritual #3
Discordian Ritual #3 was also initiated by psychoactive substances, this time those crazy little mushrooms Eris transported to Earth.
The set-and-setting was out on the beach at Half Moon Bay when the spirit of The Monster Tamer entered my body and gave a blow by blow account of every monster he’d battled and destroyed—from Frankenstein to the Wolfman—to name just a few.
This was Discordian Ritual #3. (You really had to be there.)
Discordian Ritual #4
Discordian Ritual #4 occurred when I lived in an apartment in Clovis, CA, and sculpted a strange bust of a tormented little green creature with pointed ears named GLIB.
When I moved out, I left GLIB in an empty closet alongside a copy of The Book of Mormon, which though I didn’t know it at the time, was a very Discordian thing to do, and may well have lit up the pineal gland of who ever discovered GLIB sharing a closet shelf with Joseph Smith’s holy book.
Discordian Ritual #5
Discordian Ritual #5 actually occurred after I became a Discordian Pope when myself and some friends who didn’t realize they were Discordian Popes—but now understand that they may or may not be—conducted “The Fifth Degree Discordian Initiation Rite” in the parking lot of the fabled Brunswick Shrine bowling alley where Mal and Omar experienced the Revelation of Eris.
The performance of 'The Fifth Degree Discordian Initiation Rite' at the Brunswick Shrine.
So there you have my Five Discordian Rituals.
I could probably name another 23, but not right now fnord.
Brenton Clutterbuck and the Illuminatus! play manuscript.
Discordianism is the most influential parody religion you’ve never heard of. However, the half-century old “joke disguised as a religion” is experiencing something of a resurgence, with events such as Daisy Eris Campbell’s Cosmic Trigger play and the ‘Find the Others Festival’ organized by a team of chaotic pranksters including Ben Graham.
Now that chaos is returning to the UK (in style!), I talk to Ben Graham to look back on the long strange journey it’s taken to get here. From the pop sensation that burned a million pounds, to the reclaim the streets movement, Graham tracks chaos from comics to the Cosmic Trigger play.
Chaos culture is coming to you;
here’s where it’s coming from.
In 2015 trend forecaster K-Hole made a bold prediction; the next big thing would be Chaos Magic. To their credit, they seemed to have their finger firmly on the pulse of the zeitgeist—bit by bit, Chaos seemed to start waking up. A sudden resurgence of interest in Discordianism—a chaos worshipping ‘joke religion’—saw multiple book releases from names such as Adam Gorightly and John Higgs. John Higgs also began to do a tour to promote the legacy of famous Discordian author Robert Anton Wilson. Robert Anton Wilson’s family regained copyright to his works and began publishing under the name Hilaritas press. Meanwhile his book Cosmic Trigger (Amazon) was adapted into a play by Daisy Eris Campbell, and a Discordian festival was announced in ‘a south Yorkshire woodland’.
Suddenly, Chaos seemed to be creeping out from nowhere. But of course it hasn’t come from nowhere—in fact, while Anarchy may get all the attention, Chaos in the UK has a long and appropriately complicated history.
Ben Graham in 2016. Courtesy of Ben Graham.
On a cold evening in London, I spoke to writer Ben Graham, an organizer of Festival 23 and author of A Gathering of Promises: The Battle for Texas’s Psychedelic Music From the 13th Floor Elevators to the Black Angels and Beyond (Amazon), who agreed to guide me through the strange trajectory of British Chaos.
I meet him at a pub up the top of Paddington Station. He has a kind of geeky manner to him, and that delightful British politeness that we see in Hugh Grant movies, shaggy sandy hair framing a friendly face well speckled with rough stubble.
From Magic Manual to Comic Book
Ben starts his tour of the chaotic in his childhood; his first forays into these concepts of chaos came as a child reading comic books. Specifically, a hugely popular series called 2000AD—the series that spawned the character Judge Dredd.
First issue of 2000AD, February 26, 1977.
“Basically 2000AD was a British kids comic starting 1977,” he says. “It’s still going today. It started as a fairly kind of violent high-end kids comic with science-fiction themes off the back of Star Wars… it was also a primer in Chaos Magic for a few years there because the guys who were writing it were slipping all this stuff in. Alan Moore, you had Grant Morrison very into it. You also had people who never really got out—like Pat Mills did a comic strip called Slaine which had a lot of Celtic mythology—very into magic ideas. I would have been reading it as a kind of 15/16 year old.”
Grant Morrison, would go on in the late-80s to publish a strip named Zenith, notable for its themes of Chaos Magic. Here, he took influence from Chaos Magician Peter Carroll, the founder of the Chaos Magic organization Illuminates of Thanateros. The inspiration was quite overt—too overt perhaps—at one point Carroll threatened legal action against Morrison.
“You had a kind of a mainstream kids comic where three out of five strips in it would be kind of Chaos Magic primers for kids,” Ben tells me. This early transferal of Chaos Magic ideas from Carrol’s somewhat obscure special interest publications, into mainstream youth popular culture was perhaps one of the first big steps that Chaos took into the mainstream of the British public’s imagination.
Chaos Magic has another notable influence; the ostensibly jocular religion of Discordianism. In his work Oven-Ready Chaos Phil Hine describes this influence:
An important influence on the development of Chaos magic was the writing of Robert Anton Wilson & co, particularly the Discordian Society who revered Eris, the Greek goddess of Chaos. The Discordians pointed out that humor, clowning about and general light-heartedness was conspicuously absent from magic, which had a tendency to become very ‘serious and self-important’. There was (and to a certain extent remains) a tendency for occultists to think of themselves as an initiated ‘elite’ as opposed to the rest of humanity.
Unlike the variety of magical systems which are all based in some mythical or historically-derived past (such as Atlantis, Lemuria, Albion, etc), Chaos magic borrowed freely from Science Fiction, Quantum Physics, and anything else its practitioners chose to. Rather than trying to recover and maintain a tradition that links back to the past (and former glories), Chaos magic is an approach that enables the individual to use anything that s/he thinks is suitable as a temporary belief or symbol system. What matters is the results you get, not the ‘authenticity’ of the system used. So Chaos magic then, is not a system—it utilizes systems and encourages adherents to devise their own, giving magic a truly Postmodernist flavor.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy, 'candy apple red' edition from Dell Trade Paperback, January 1984. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.
Robert Anton Wilson was himself one of the original Discordians, and is probably single-handedly the person most responsible for the spread of Discordian ideas through the series of books he wrote with his friend Robert Shea—The Illuminatus! Trilogy (Amazon). This strange trilogy featured Discordians fighting against the evil plans of the Illuminati, and proposed that nearly every conspiracy theory popular at the time of writing was simultaneously true.
Epic Productions: Illuminatus! on Stage and the KLF
The event that bought Wilson’s ideas across the pond from the USA was the adaption of his Illuminatus! Trilogy into a play in 1977. Such a feat seemed impossible to do; luckily the discovery of the trilogy came to Ken Campbell; a man who regarded nothing as worth doing unless it was impossible. He was also the father Daisy Eris Campbell, who recently produced the play of Wilson’s book Cosmic Trigger.
Campbell was a theatre legend. His production of Illuminatus! into a play was a testament to his drive and creativity—the final presentation was performed as five acts across five nights, followed by an epic 10 hour presentation of all acts together. The opening date—November 23, 1976—took advantage of the Discordian obsession with the number 23.
As part of Ben’s writing career, he had the opportunity to interview one of the participants in this epic scale caper—Bill Drummond, who had developed the visionary set design of the play, creating surreal sequences with sets out of proportion to the actors, and using innovative techniques to position audiences in surprising ways, such as presenting actors horizontally to allow for a birds eye view of a tarot reading.
“So when I interviewed him, it wasn’t long after Ken Campbell had died,” Ben tells me. “So I wanted to ask him about that. And he was very effusive about the influence Ken Campbell had had on him when he worked on the 1977 production of Illuminatus! at the Liverpool Theatre and how he introduced him to those book and those ideas. Also I didn’t realize that Ken Campbell had been a lifelong friend. He would go to his house, keep in touch, for dinner, stayed like a friend with his family, more or less up to the point where he died. He said he was like a friend, not just a mentor from way back. He’d lost somebody who was an important guiding light.”
“He was always working in the now, he wasn’t thinking in terms of making films, writing books; it was always like, the event, what’s actually happening in the room,” Graham’s 2010 Quietus interview quotes Drummond as saying. “That was one of the big things I learnt from Ken Campbell. And taking risks, and just making things happen. That continued to inspire me about what he does, what he did do, right up until he died. And so I always got a lot out of getting together with Ken Campbell, or going to see a Ken Campbell production.”
The KLF: Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty
Drummond is actually more famous for his role in music than for his role in the Illuminatus! play. He, together with Jimmy Cauty, founded The KLF, a sample based pop outfit. Their original name was The JAMS, a name alluding explicitly to a group in Wilson and Shea’s Illuminatus! Trilogy.
By the time Ben had had his interview, the band had been long broken up. They ended their career in an extraordinary way—by announcing their retirement, shutting down their record catalogue and traveling out to a small island on Jura to burn the money they made—an entire million pounds. (For those interested, aforementioned author John Higgs has brought this strange tale back into the spotlight with his book, The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned a million pounds (Amazon.)
When the band first burned the money, they followed up with a tour where they invited audiences to ‘tell them’ why they burned the money. Ben was in attendance at one of these nights in 1995, and detailed it for his fanzine News From Nowhere.
“They came to Bradford where I was staying and did a showing, a Q&A. I took part in the Q&A, so I had some interaction with the guys but it wasn’t an interview. I did write up the piece. I kind of tied it in with a lot of Discordian Illuminati type thing to sort of put my spin on why they’d done that. It did kind of get back to the KLF chaps, and I gathered that they thought that that was kind of the best piece on it at the time.”
Ben later sends me a copy of it. It is a good piece. The mood of the gathering is palpable, an audience frustrated at being asked questions rather than being given answers, in parts angry, congratulatory and indifferent.
“It was at the One in Twelve Club, Bradford, which was the kind of Anarchist underground club there, so the quotes from the people watching it were that these were kind of rich pop-stars that were burning money that could have gone to a good cause—that it was kind of an indulgent, decadent act. The guys, when they were talking, they weren’t really trying to defend themselves. Their approach was that they were trying to say, ‘we’re trying to find out why we did it, you tell us why we did it, we want to hear your stories,’ so they were being a bit of a kind of blank canvas.”
At one point Graham describes some of the outbursts of the crowd, describing the reaction of a group of punks unhappy that no explanation would be forthcoming.
“How do you get rid of piles,” they demand, amidst assorted jeers and heckles.
“Grab ‘em in your hand, right, and shove ‘em back up yer arse and hold ‘em there,” demonstrates Bill.
“It was a hostile night for them I think at the One in Twelve. My take on it; I suppose I kind of thought that one thing—it was their money. People have wasted that amount of money, music people have made that amount of money and wasted it on far more frivolous things, not many people give it to a charitable cause—they spend it on cars, houses, drugs, whatever with that money. They chose to make an art project by burning it. And I think it was quite a good reaction, they did make people think about the notion of money, money is the relationship between the paper and whatever it is you value in the world.”
His article also quotes the following passage from The Illuminatus! Trilogy:
“And you know what they do with Federal Reserve notes. Every time they get one, they burn it. Instant demurrage, they call it.”
“I doubt that it’s literal that they kind of saw this reference in the book and either it gave them the idea or said that it justifies that. You know, it’s not like the Bible where you’re looking for quotes to justify or base your actions on. But I think the action of doing that was sort of in line with the ideas that came from Discordia and the Illuminatus!…”
“And the burning of the money—it is a random act in the sense that they—they sort of knew why they were doing it I think, but you don’t really know what the consequences are going to be. You know you’re taking this money and you’re burning it and it’s a big—it’s sort of a magical ritual. In that way I think it’s very much a Discordian thing to do. And they deleted their back catalogue. Seemed sort of very much, let’s destroy the idea of the KLF but also you’re sort of creating more of a myth you know, beyond the sort of money making, the actuality of the music business, actuality of the KLF—you’re actually furthering its mythical life.”
At one point in the article Graham quotes one of the pair saying they weren’t trying to make a big statement like “chopping off our hands or something.” The joke would have been lost on the audience—Bill publicly admitted seriously considering that mad idea in his book 45, released in 2000.
One interesting point made towards the end of the article is Graham quoting Bill talking about a gender divide; men were more likely than women to support the burning.
Temporary Autonomous Zones and Radical Rave Culture
“After the KLF, some of the Illuminati stuff did spread into more general rave culture for a few years when it was in its peak,” Graham tells me. He pronounces it Illumin-ar-tai. “Kind of in the early-90s people kind of talked on—sort of around ’87, ’88 but then it went more widespread. It was also in that period when you had in the UK, the kind of club, the rave sort of techno clubs crossed over with the older traveling free festival scene that sort of came with the guy in the 60s and 70s, Hawkwind, that had been traveling hippy dreadlocked guys, because of the ravers that had been having free festivals out in fields, they ended up teaming up with guys who’d been having hippy rock festivals in fields forever. Those guys ended up getting into a lot of techno music, but they would have been guys who were reading the Illuminatus! books in the early 70s. It had the whole kind of esoteric hippy knowledge and stuff behind it, and guys who’d been living outside society for like a decade or so, going around in buses and all sorts of stuff.”
Ben Graham, an illuminated fountain on British Chaos. Courtesy of Ben Graham.
“I don’t know how much you know about this stuff; the whole peace bus in the UK, the battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge where police smashed up, destroyed buses and a whole community, then you had the Castlemorton Festival which led to the Criminal Justice Bill which is a law in the UK outlawing repetitive beats in public places which basically killed the outdoor bass scene. But when you had that whole scene going in the 90s, you had the club rave kids meeting the hippy travelers, one side being electronic techno music and ecstasy, and the other bringing this kind of like hippy philosophy and ethos and knowledge and it all kind of crossing over. And certainly I think a lot of the kind of Illuminati ideas. Suddenly it became cliché to be referencing the number 23 and something, for one thing.”
I mention to Ben the prevalence of the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, in the rave scene. This idea came from Hakim Bey, a philosopher, who described this concept of a space in which the usual laws did not apply in his 1991 book of the same name.
“Yeah,” says Ben. “And in practical terms that sort of crossed over into the reclaim the streets movement doesn’t it. What they were doing certainly kind of early on, there was a lot of theory behind it and the notion of Temporary Autonomous Zone was very much to do with what they were doing, going into the business area of London and having a big party and stopping the traffic. It wasn’t really a protest. Maybe a protest against business or car culture or whatever but at the same time it was the notion of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. It’s like the Situationist idea of beneath the pavements, the beach and in the heart of the city we can have a party, we can bring flowers, we can have a fete in the middle of the road, and that came out of that sort of politicized and radicalized rave culture. You know, they became the reclaim the streets movement and the anti-road protesters, it’s really the same people who’ve moved on from music just into protesting. They’re outdoors and they’re reclaiming their environment, on a kind of Utopian Situationist principle.”
He describes the recent Occupy as a natural outgrowth of reclaim the streets movement.
“It’s like William Burroughs says,” he tells me. “Artists legislate the world, they’re more powerful than politicians because artists create ideas and politicians just put things into action; good artists come up with something new and put it into the world and that kind of changes things.”
Ben Graham has joined forces with a number of other co-conspirators to be part of a contemporary Discordian celebration—Festival 23—that in part formed itself through the energies of the motley crew that came together for the ‘Conferestival’ that marked Daisy Eris Campbell’s opening of Cosmic Trigger. Festival 23 hosted a giant artwork by Jimmy Cauty—an industrial container filled with an epic post-riot miniature landscape. Ben Graham provided the writing on a leaflet that accompanied the artwork:
Both festivals and riots aspire towards freedom; both ultimately are only temporary negations of a stultifying status quo, but may lead to more long-term solutions catalysed by their unfettered expression of energy, anger, love and/or ecstasy. There is freedom in the heart of a riot; a wild abandon and a sense that suddenly anything is possible. Do what thou wilt is quite literally the whole of the law, for the law as defined by policemen, judges and politicians is shown to have no empirical natural authority. It is an assumed condition imposed by those temporarily in power, and can be overthrown both within and without by the will of the people, if only for a limited time and space. But if it can be done once, even for a few seconds, can such glorious lawlessness not be achieved again?
Festival 23 flyer. Courtesy of Ben Graham.
* * *
So did chaos jump from magic manual to comic book, find itself in fiction, transferred to stage before implanting itself in the minds of future pop superstars, whose rave hits implanted it into the culture of rave, and ultimately protest and party culture?
Well, of course not—such a story is far too clean for the messy madness that is chaos. But if there’s a lesson here, it’s that every strange step of history sets off another twenty-three steps in all sorts of directions. With so many chaotic steps bouncing off each other, how long do you think it will be before you too have the pleasure of being plunged into chaos?
Chasing Eris by Brenton Clutterbuck
My forthcoming book Chasing Eris will be released next month. The book documents my worldwide adventure to experience modern Discordian culture, meet its personalities, and the discovery of many elusive Erisian mysteries. —Brenton Clutterbuck
March Eris of the of the Month 2018: Dwarf Planet Eris and her moon Dysnomia.
This month’s entry for Eris of the Month is the solar system’s largest Dwarf Planet, Eris, “holding” its moon Dysnomia (daughter of Eris) as the Apple of Discord.
Also, check out this previous post about Dwarf Planet Eris wherein Early Discordian Louise Lacy writes a letter to Eris’ discoverer, astronomer Michael E. Brown, in an attempt to lure him into Discordianism and most likely the Region of Thud.
