Academic literature on the topic 'Discordianism'

Discordianism, founded in 1957 and generally regarded as a “parody religion,” has only recently received scholarly consideration as a valid religious expression within modern Paganism (Cusack 2010). Yet ritual practice within Discordianism remains largely unexamined; Hugh Urban’s brief discussion of Discordian magical workings as a sub-category of Chaos Magic is the extent of academic discussion of the subject to date (Urban 2006). This article elaborates on Urban’s tantalising classification of Discordian magic. A brief history of Discordianism is sketched; then ritual and magic in the Discordian tradition is explored through an examination of key texts, including Malaclypse the Younger’s Principia Discordia (1965), and Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975). Similarities between Chaos Magic and Discordianism are noted, and an analysis of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), a magical order founded by British performance artist Genesis P-Orridge and others in 1981, elucidates the relationship between Chaos Magic and Discordian magic. It is argued that the essentially unorganised nature of Chaos Magic and Discordianism, and the trenchant resistance of both to any form of “orthodoxy,” justifies classifying Discordian magic as a form of Chaos Magic. Chaos magicians and Discordians both have a deconstructive and monistic worldview, in which binary oppositions collapse into undifferentiated oneness, and neither conformity of belief nor unity of practice is required to be an “authentic” Discordian or Chaote.

This chapter discusses the concept of invention and applies it to the study of New Religious Movements (NRMs). Invention plays a part in all religions and is linked to other conceptual lenses including syncretism and legitimation. Yet invention is more readily detected in contemporary phenomena (so-called “invented,” “hyper-real,” or “fiction-based” religions), which either eschew, or significantly modify, the appeals to authority, antiquity, and divine revelation that traditionally accompany the establishment of a new faith. The religions referred to in this chapter (including Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, and Jediism) are distinctively “new new” religions, appearing from the mid-twentieth century, and gaining momentum in the deregulated spiritual market of the twenty-first century West. Overt religious invention has mainstreamed in the Western society, as popular culture, individualism and consumerism combine to facilitate the cultivation of personal spiritualities, and the investment of ephemeral entertainments with ultimate significance and meaning.

Developing an open-source alternative to the UNIX operating system in the early 1980s, the master hacker Richard Stallman faced a dilemma: if he put his new GNU software in the public domain, people could copyright their improved versions, undermining the open-source cycle by taking away the freedoms he’d granted. So Stallman copyrighted GNU himself, and distributed it, at no cost, under a license that arguably was to have greater impact on the future of computing than even the software he was striving to protect. The GNU Emacs General Public License was the founding document of the copyleft. The word copyleft predated Stallman’s innovation by at least a couple of decades. It had been used jestingly, together with the phrase “All Rights Reversed,” in lieu of the standard copyright notice on the Principia Discordia, an absurdist countercultural religious doctrine published in the 1960s. And in the 1970s the People’s Computer Company provocatively designated Tiny BASIC, an early experiment in open-source software, “Copyleft—All Wrongs Reserved.” Either of these may have indirectly inspired Stallman’s phrasing. (He first encountered the word copyleft as a humorous slogan stamped on a letter from his fellow hacker Don Hopkins.) Stallman’s genius was to realize this vague countercultural ideal in a way that was legally enforceable. That Stallman was the one to do so, and the Discordians weren’t, makes sense when one considers his method. His license stipulated that GNU software was free to distribute, and that any aspect of it could be freely modified except the license, which would mandatorily carry over to any future version, ad infinitum, ensuring that GNU software would always be free to download and improve. “The license agreements of most software companies keep you at the mercy of those companies,” Stallman wrote in the didactic preamble to his contract. “By contrast, our general public license is intended to give everyone the right to share GNU Emacs. To make sure that you get the rights we want you to have, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.” Freedom was paradoxically made compulsory.