Kerry Thornley (Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst)

Kerry Thornley wrote as Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, and the Principia Discordia is a two hand production in which his voice is distinguishable from Hill. He supplied a body of material framed as epistles and sermons, the register of a preacher addressing a congregation, and the parody works because the form is handled accurately: the cadences, the exhortations and the appeals to authority are those of real religious writing turned to absurd ends. The two men had been friends since high school in Southern California and worked on the material from the late 1950s, and the collaboration continued by post for years afterwards while they lived in different places.

The calendar is a good example of what this kind of invention actually involves. The Discordian year has five seasons of seventy three days each, named for the five basic principles, with a set of holy days at fixed points in each and a leap day inserted outside the ordinary count. Building that requires arithmetic, consistency and a decision about every edge case, which is the same labour a real liturgical calendar demands. A parody of a religion, done properly, turns out to be indistinguishable in effort from the thing it parodies, and that is much of the point being made.

Thornley served in the Marine Corps alongside Lee Harvey Oswald and afterwards wrote a novel with a character based on him, completed before the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. That accident of timing shaped the rest of his life. He testified to the Warren Commission. Years later, when the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison pursued his own investigation into the assassination, Thornley was drawn into it, was treated as a suspect, and was charged with perjury in 1968 over his account of his contacts with Oswald. The charge did not result in a conviction. He wrote about the experience afterwards and, over time, came to entertain conspiratorial explanations of his own about what had happened to him.

The atlas records this because the two halves of his life became entangled in public accounts and because the entanglement is itself instructive. Discordianism had made a practice out of blurring the line between a joke and a belief, and had circulated the phrase operation mindfuck for the deliberate spreading of destabilising material. When one of its authors was then caught up in a real investigation and a real conspiracy literature, the technique and the situation became difficult to separate, and later retellings of his life frequently do not separate them at all.