Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger)

Greg Hill, writing as Malaclypse the Younger, compiled the Principia Discordia out of collage: typed pages, clip art, rubber stamps, handwriting, jokes, diagrams and borrowed illustrations, assembled at a print shop and run off in tiny numbers through the 1960s. The book presents a religion of Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, and sets out an apparatus that parodies the form of a scripture while doing the work of one. There is a creation myth in which a figure called Greyface persuades humanity that life is serious and order is real, and that persuasion is named as the source of human misery. There is a symbol, the Sacred Chao, in which a pentagon and a golden apple stand for order and disorder as two aspects that need each other. There is a five day week, a five season year and a fivefold law of interpretation, offered with the observation that the law of fives is never wrong once you decide to look for it.

Two structural decisions are worth noting. Every reader is ordained a pope, so there is no clergy to be admitted to and nothing to be excluded from. And the text was released with copyright renounced, so it could be copied freely, which is why an object printed in a few dozen copies is now everywhere.

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.