A Joke and a Religion, Held Open

Hill declined for the rest of his life to say whether Discordianism was a joke or a real religion, and the refusal was not evasion. The book itself makes the point repeatedly: it insists that everything it says is a lie, that it should not be believed, and that the reader should nonetheless carry on. A movement whose founding text undercuts itself cannot be assessed by asking whether its adherents believe its propositions, because the propositions are constructed so that belief is the wrong response to them.

Scholars of new religions have taken the case seriously on those grounds. Carole Cusack groups it with other movements that began in fiction or in humour and argues that a religion which starts as an invention can become a real one, because what makes a tradition is practice, community and transmission rather than the sincerity of its origin, and that the modern examples merely make visible a process that is harder to see in older cases. This atlas covers new and old religion on the same terms and holds the entry for that reason. The material also travelled far beyond its origin. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea worked Discordian ideas into a widely read novel sequence in the 1970s, and from there a set of jokes about conspiracies entered the culture that now takes conspiracies seriously.