History & overview · every faith gets one
A joke disguised as a religion, disguised as a joke.
Discordianism honours Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, and holds that order and disorder are both patterns human beings lay over a world that is neither. Its scripture, the Principia Discordia, was typed, drawn, scissored and photocopied by two friends in southern California and released with the notice ALL RITES REVERSED — REPRINT WHAT YOU LIKE. There is no church, no membership and no clergy above the rank of Pope, a rank it confers on everyone alive. Its own standard self-description is that it is a joke disguised as a religion disguised as a joke, and Discordians disagree in good faith about which layer is outermost. Most English-language parody religions founded since owe it something, although as this sweep found, almost none of them say so.
Why it is filed this way
Filed as parody because that is how it presents itself, and because its own scripture forbids taking it at its word. It is also true that people have lived by it for sixty years, that its account of order and disorder is discussed seriously in the study of new religious movements, and that its texts are held in academic religion collections. The Discordian answer is that both readings are correct and that choosing between them is the mistake.
The founding
Hill and Thornley dated their first Eristic vision to a late-night bowling alley in Whittier at the end of the 1950s, where they concluded that the goddess of discord had been badly used by history and set up the Discordian Society to correct it. The first Principia Discordia was run off in 1963; Discordians record that it was printed on the photocopier in the New Orleans office of District Attorney Jim Garrison. A second edition of five copies followed in 1965 under the title Principia Discordia or How The West Was Lost. Thornley had served in the Marine Corps with Lee Harvey Oswald in 1959 and later became a subject of Garrison's own Kennedy assassination investigation — the strangest fact attached to any parody religion, and one Discordians have never tried to tidy away.
Its founding is bound to Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger) and Kerry Wendell Thornley (Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst) — 1963 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Order and disorder are equally real and equally invented — two ways of cutting up an undivided world. The Sacred Chao holds both and prefers neither..
The divine. Eris is the only goddess named, and the Pentabarf makes the point in deliberate parody of monotheism: there is no Goddess but Goddess and She is your Goddess. Whether anyone believes in her is left open, and the fifth commandment forbids believing what you read, which includes that sentence..
Death and after. None taught. The Principia says nothing about what follows death and Discordians have not filled the gap..