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.
Greg Hill: Some Useful Information Regarding Simple Cyphers, undated. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives.POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY.
The Discordian Archives are filled with Greg Hill’s interests and hobbies. One such hobby of Hill’s was the use of simple ciphers.
Hill’s dabbling in cryptography and the promotion of secure communications is evident in this undated, but most-likely late 1960s, missive from the Joshua Norton Lodge entitled “Some Useful Information Regarding Simple Cyphers,” probably sent to his Usual Suspects zine mailing list.
In it, Hill lays out a simple algorithm that replaces the same number of characters for each letter to encrypt and decrypt a given message. So not a secure code, per se, but a simple substitution cipher, used through-out history going back to at least Julius Caesar’s reign of the Roman Empire and all the state secrets he had to secretly and securely communicate about across the World’s Most Successful Empire to keep that shit going right-as-rain on a daily basis. Julius did a pretty damn good job with his ciphers and kept things a-moving for the Empire until he got him all stabbed-up by his buddies in the Senate. Yet, his cipher lived on. Hail Caesar!
Page 00071 of the Sacred PUD (the original Paste-Up Discordia): Discordian Society Super Secret Cryptographic Cypher Code by Greg Hill from the Principia Discordia. Courtesy of the Discordian Archives. An interesting 21st Century Internet cypherdom tie-in to note is Hill’s usage of the term “cypher” vs. “cipher” in the late 1960s, a very prescient pre-cyberpunk name-styling considering the era of the original missive in the 60s and how such geek-spellings were later adopted by fringe computer users and hackers starting in the mid-to-late-80s. Whether this is a “style” choice or a simple misspelling by Hill is hard to determine. Yet, also of note, is that Hill includes a “cypher” in the Fourth Edition of the Principia Discordia on Page 00071 entitled “Discordian Society Super Secret Cryptographic Cypher Code,” a wonderful silly cryptic redundancy.
In the Principia Discordia, Hill encodes “HAIL ERIS” as the example and provides a step-by-step encryption methodolgy of the phrase that produces a nonsensical result once decrypted. In this Principia Discordia example, “HAIL ERIS” = “AEHILRS” as the decoded term. And then Hill declares, “This cryptographic cypher code is GUARANTEED TO BE 100% UNBREAKABLE.” Indeed, it is.
On a side-note, this “cypher” page of the Principia Discordia appears in the Rip-Off Press Fourth Edition with the Eye-in-the-Pyramid base pasted-on the lower-right facing outwards towards the book’s bleed, while the Loompanics Fourth Edition reproduction of the page has the Eye-in-the-Pyramid base facing inward towards that edition’s staple binding.
I’m sure this is an encoded message I have yet to decypher.
Greg Hill: Why I Am Not An Anarchist, cover mailing, June, 1975. Courtesy the Discordian Archives.
With the approaching release of Illuminatus! way back in 1975, Robert Shea was still producing underground zines, in particular Shea’s then-new endeavor NO GOVERNOR (issues of which can still be had as PDFs on bobshea.net thanks to Shea’s son, Mike).
During this pre-release era of Illuminatus!, Shea and Discordian co-founder Greg Hill were furiously exchanging letters and articles. Of course, “furious” being defined at this time, a decade before publicly available email, as maybe half-a-dozen letters over as many months. Crazy stuff.
“Why I am Not an Anarchist” will be a welcome addition to NO GOVERNOR #2. I like it. It says something that needs saying—at least once a year. Also, I am very grateful to you for sending me something I can publish.
For your pleasure and research purposes, here is the original article ‘Why I Am Not An Anarchist’ by Greg Hill, including the original proofing notes. Hail Eris!
Greg Hill: Why I Am Not An Anarchist for Robert Shea's No Governor, June 1975, Page 00001. Courtesy the Discordian Archives. About five years ago I considered myself an anarchist (anarchopacifist, in particular), because I believe that the highest authority available to any individual is one’s own honest experience and that any other authority provides only vicarious information at best.
I’ve not changed my opinion about this, but I have ceased referring to myself as an anarchist. The reason is basic and simple: TOO MANY DAMN RULES.
OK, it’s a joke. But it’s a TRUE JOKE. The incompatibility is not between my position and some anarchist theories, but between my position and the position of most of those who use the label “anarchist.”
It seems that Rule Number One of anarchy, as understood by authoritarians and by most who call themselves anarchists, is that a government is an enemy. Rule Number Two is that to gain freedom the individual is politically or morally or somehow obligated to fight this enemy.
Greg Hill: Why I Am Not An Anarchist for Robert Shea's No Governor, June 1975, Page 00002. Courtesy the Discordian Archives. In my opinion, these rules represent a position which would be better referred to as anti-archy. The prefix “a” means “without” and it need not imply “against.” There is an exact parallel with the word atheist—it is usually used and understood, by those for it and against it, as thought eh word was anti-theist.
I can respect the anti-archist position, but I don’t share it. The government is not my enemy because there is no government. OK, another joke, but still a TRUE joke. I know good and well that there are people with guns who restrict my free decisions, and I know about groups of people collecting taxes from me, and all of the rest of this government business. I perceive it in the same manner that I perceive (for example) a big rock in my path which necessitates stepping around and compromising myself. Frankly, I don’t believe in rocks either—I just step around and compromise (which is actually easier than is believing in them). I think that there is a big difference in degree between (a) existentially responding to a phenomenon and (b) conceptualizing it as an “enemy.” If everything in the universe that has ever thwarted my purpose is my enemy, then only nothing can be my friend—and that excludes even myself. But, still, I respect the anti-archist position. After all, if one does perceive a phenomenon to be an enemy then one would be a damn fool to do other than defend ones’ self.
Greg Hill: Why I Am Not An Anarchist for Robert Shea's No Governor, June 1975, Page 00003. Courtesy the Discordian Archives. Much of this essay is futzing around with labels. Still, I feel free to futz, and in any case what I’m trying to do is to avoid the assumption by others that I am at war with certain people just because those people think that they are a government and go out of their way to forcibly impose their notions on me.
I’m not at war with them or with them or rocks either. And insofar as anyone thinks that an anarchist is one who is supposed to believe something or another, or is obligated to do something or another, then there are too damn many rules for me and to hell with the whole business.
