The Principia Discordia went through five editions between 1963 and 1979 and no two are the same. It is a physical object as much as a text — typewritten, hand-lettered, rubber-stamped, illustrated with clip art and photostats, assembled with scissors and paste, and reproduced on whatever machine was to hand. The copyright notice reads ALL RITES REVERSED — REPRINT WHAT YOU LIKE, which put it in the public domain decades before anyone had a word for that, and which is the reason it survived without a publisher: it travelled by photocopier, then by Usenet, then by the web, gaining and losing material at every stop. No edition is authoritative and the tradition treats the instability as doctrine rather than damage. It is now held in academic religion collections and is one of the few new religious texts whose transmission history can be reconstructed in full.