Principia Discordia is a sacred text ofDiscordianism written by Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger) andKerry Thornley (Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst). It was originally published under the title "Principia Discordia or How The West Was Lost With Explanations to Yellow Pages Use" in a limited edition of 5 copies in 1965; for years distributed as a humorous "underground classic" ofabsurdism, it became far more famous after being quoted extensively inThe Illuminatus! Trilogy byRobert Shea andRobert Anton Wilson.
THE PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA
or, How I Found the Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her
THE MAGNUM OPIATE OF MALACLYPSE THE YOUNGER
Wherein Is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything
GREATER POOP: Are you really serious or what?
MAL-2:Sometimes I takehumor seriously. Sometimes I take seriousness humorously. Either way it is irrelevant.
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GP: Is Eris true?
M2: Everything is true.
GP: Even false things?
M2: Even false things are true.
GP: How can that be?
M2:I don't know man, I didn't do it.
GP: Why do you deal with so many negatives?
M2: To dissolve them.
GP: Will you develop that point?
M2: No.
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The PENTABARF was discovered by the hermit Apostle Zarathud in the Fifth Year of The Caterpillar. He found them carved in gilded stone, while building a sun deck for his cave, but their import was lost for they were written in a mysterious cypher. However, after 10 weeks & 11 hours of intensive scrutiny he discerned that the message could be read by standing on his head and viewing it upside down.
KNOW YE THIS O MAN OF FAITH!
IT IS SO WRITTEN! SO BE IT. HAIL DISCORDIA! PROSECUTORS WILL BE TRANSGRESSICUTED.
In the year 1166 B.C., a malcontented hunchbrain by the name of Greyface, got it into his head that theuniverse was as humorless as he, and he began to teach that play wassinful because it contradicted the ways of Serious Order. "Look at all that order about you," he said. And from that, he deludedhonest men tobelieve thatreality was a straightjacket affair and not thehappyromance as men had known it.
It is not presentlyunderstood why men were so gullible at that particular time, for absolutely no one thought to observe all the DISORDER around them and conclude just the opposite. But anyway,Greyface and his followers took thegame of playing atlife more seriously than they took life itself and were not unknown even to destroy other living beings whose ways of life differed from their own.
The unfortunate result of this is that mankind has since been suffering from apsychological andspiritual imbalance. Imbalance causes frustration, and frustration causesfear. And fear makes a bad trip.Man has been on a bad trip for a long time now.
It is called THE CURSE OF GREYFACE.
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The human race will begin solving its problems on the day that it ceases taking itself so seriously.
To that end, POEE proposes the countergame of NONSENSE AS SALVATION.Salvation from an ugly and barbarous existence that is the result of taking order so seriously and so seriously fearing contrary orders and disorder, that GAMES are taken as more important than LIFE; rather than taking LIFE AS THE ART OF PLAYING GAMES.
To this end, we propose that man develop his innate love for disorder, and play with The Goddess Eris. And know that it is a joyful play, and that thereby CAN BE REVOKED THE CURSE OF GREYFACE.
Genuine and authorized by The House of Apostles of ERIS
Everyman,woman andchild on thisEarth is a genuine and authorized Pope
-Reproduce and distribute these cards freely-
POEE Head Temple, San Francisco
A =POPE= is someone who is not under theauthority ofthe authorities.
With our concept making apparatus called "mind" we look atreality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about-reality are mistakenly labeled "reality" and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see "reality" differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level deeper than is the level of concept.
We look through the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts).Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it.The ORDER is in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle.
Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.
DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea aboutsex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.
The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.
