The Principia Discordia is Discordianism's central text, assembled by Gregory Hill and Kerry Thornley from 1963 and first circulated in a small hand assembled edition in 1965 before later being reprinted by several small presses. It sets out the veneration of Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, and the teaching that order and disorder are equally illusions the mind imposes on an underlying chaos, delivered throughout in a deliberately comic, aphoristic and self parodying style rather than as a solemn treatise. The book explicitly declines to claim copyright over itself, a stance consistent with its own anti authoritarian ethos, and has been freely reprinted and adapted since. Scholars of new religions treat it as the founding document of the deliberately invented religion as a genre.
Facts
Structure
StructureHand-assembled between 1963 and 1965, mixing invented myth about the goddess Eris with mock legal and organisational structure for a fictional priesthood and philosophical argument for the Aneristic and Eristic Principles; released under an explicit anti-copyright notice, so dozens of variant editions with genuinely different content circulate under the one title. 1 Text
Literary FormText collection / anthology 1 Sources
Textual NoteReleased with an explicit anti-copyright notice inviting reproduction and alteration, so dozens of variant editions with genuinely different contents circulate under the one title. There is no single authoritative text, and that is by design rather than by accident of transmission. 1 Origins
Era of Composition Attributed Author / CompilerGregory Hill and Kerry Thornley 1 Status
Canonical StatusCanonical 1Tradition: Discordianism Canonical Status DetailCentral 1Tradition: Discordianism Learn More
Five Mimeographed Copies to a Cult Classic
Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley began developing Discordian ideas as teenagers in Whittier, California, in the late 1950s, reportedly after a bowling alley conversation that led them to conclude disorder was as fundamental to reality as order. Hill compiled their jokes, essays and invented liturgy into the Principia Discordia at his print shop job, producing an original run so small that only a handful of copies existed before it began circulating hand to hand and then through underground and countercultural presses in the later 1960s and 1970s.
Unlike almost every other scripture this atlas records, its authors deliberately released it without copyright, marking it Kallisti and inviting readers to copy, alter and republish it, which is why no single authoritative edition exists and later printings vary in content, page order and included material while sharing a recognisable core.
Scripture Written to Distrust Scripture
The Principia Discordia borrows the outward furniture of scripture, a founding goddess, a creation myth, a priesthood with mock titles, moral maxims, even a claimed organisational structure called the Discordian Society, while using every one of those forms to argue against taking any fixed structure, including its own, too seriously. Its central philosophical claim, that order and disorder are the Aneristic and Eristic Principles, equally artificial impositions of a pattern-seeking mind onto a reality that is neither, is presented with the same mock solemnity as its jokes, so that a reader is left uncertain where satire ends and sincere philosophy begins, a state the authors treated as the intended reading experience rather than a flaw.
Carole Cusack's scholarship on invented religions places the Principia Discordia at the origin of a recognisable modern category, deliberately founded, self-consciously playful traditions that nonetheless generate real communities, real practice and, for some adherents, real belief, a lineage she traces forward through the Church of the SubGenius and other later movements that borrowed Discordianism's founding gesture of scripture as joke and joke as scripture at once.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Eris, Deities This source names Eris directly: "It sets out the veneration of Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, and the teaching that order and disorder are equally illusions the mind imposes on an underlying chaos, delivered throughout in a..."
Authored By
Belongs to Tradition
Discordianism's founding and central text.
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