Discordian Society

Eris is the Greek goddess of strife and discord. Not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, she tossed a golden apple inscribed kallisti— “for the fairest” — among the guests. The resulting argument among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite led, by way of the Judgement of Paris, to the Trojan War.

Discordians regard this as her finest work, and a reasonable template for Tuesday.

Robert Anton Wilson, riffing on Timothy Leary, argued that each of us perceives reality through a tunnel built from language, conditioning, biology, and habit. The map is not the territory; the tunnel is not the world. Different tunnels yield different “realities,” all of them partial.

The Discordian use of this idea is practical: if your reality tunnel is making you miserable, you are permitted — even encouraged — to redecorate.

From the Principia Discordia: All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5.

The Law of Fives is never wrong. Look hard enough at anything and you will find a five; this is taken either as evidence for the law, or evidence for the human talent for finding patterns, or both. The Discordian answer is “yes.”

In the Illuminatus! Trilogy, children are conditioned to see the word fnord in newspapers without consciously registering it. The fnord triggers low-grade anxiety; the anxiety keeps the populace too unsettled to think clearly.

To see the fnords is to stop being controlled by them. Most adults cannot. A few learn. The first step is to suspect they are there.

The Sacred Chao is the central Discordian symbol: a circle divided like a taijitu, but with a golden apple of Kallisti on one side and a pentagon on the other. Order and Disorder are not opposites; they are the two faces of the same coin, both equally needed, neither to be trusted alone.

Pronounce it “cow.” This will matter later.

The Principia Discordia states the position clearly: every man, woman, and child on this Earth is a genuine and authorized Pope. No ordination is required; you have always been one, and so has everyone you have ever quietly disagreed with.

Pope cards — small wallet-sized certificates issued by Greg Hill, Kerry Thornley, and their successors — simply notify you of an office you already held. POEE (the Paratheo-Anametamystikhood of Eris Esoteric) is the loosely structured Discordian order founded by Hill. Membership requirements are notoriously relaxed.

William S. Burroughs noticed the number 23 turning up in his life with suspicious frequency. He told Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson started noticing it too. So did everyone who heard about it.

This is either evidence of synchronicity, or evidence of the Baader-Meinhof effect. The honest Discordian answer is that the distinction stops being interesting around enigma number 23.

Operation Mindfuck, devised by Hill and Thornley around 1968, is the practice of attributing absurd, contradictory, or impossible conspiracies to whatever institution most deserves it, and seeing what sticks. The point is not to convince anyone of any particular theory. The point is to demonstrate, kindly but firmly, that the consensus reality on offer is also a construction, and you are allowed to build a better one.