Discordianism celebrated its first heyday in the sixties and seventies in the period in which the postmodernist ideology was still new. It celebrated its second heyday in the late nineties, that is the time when the post-modern ideology had reached a new peak in about five years after the collapse of Eastern European totalitarianism. The Discordianism of these two episodes was therefore imbued with similar mindsets. Very often, the Discordian action was largely understood as a symbolic act, and it was hoped that through interventions of ultimately purely symbolic nature, ie within the symbolic order itself, which did not really touch the substance of this order, but rather represented small oddities, one could expand people's thinking. In its second phase this belief was additionally fed by the new „deviant“ cultures of hackers and programmers who actually believed to cause substantive changes with pure symbolism in their daily work. Many of these folks are today well-paid, productive and integrated members of the symbolic order of capitalist society, for which the word Discordianism means mostly a sin of youth, similar to other people's ouija sessions or telling urban legends around the campfire. At best, they see him as a pseudo-spiritual New Age parody to which they laugh off at lunch as they do to funpics and lolcats without really being affected. Of Hagbard Celine's saying „Nothing is true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't really understand it until it makes you cry“, they only want to know the first part: Discordianism without substance, spiritual diet cola, comparable with books like „Zen for managers.“ All this shows the fundamental failure of their approach.

The Discordianism of this past is in a coma from which it will not wake up. Its own timidity and lack of substance in combination with the suction effect of the post-modern ideology has brought it down. We should be so gracious as to shut down the life support and to reinvent ourselves. We, the Discordians of today, can not be the cute, funny and transparent ELFes of the past. We have become dark elves who wander in the dark places of the world to bring their repressed truths and fundamental fantasies to light again. We walk in the shadows where no one else travels. We also make use of symbolism and ideology of the ruling order where we consider it appropriate. But we use it to show people their repressed and concealed dark shadows. Our will to create shock and confusion and arouse are unbroken. We have only corrected our ideas of how it was reached. By nice speeches stating facts which are already clear to everybody anyway, you reach no one. A leaflet that just whines about existing conditions, the ones about which everybody else already complains, will not be distributed by us! A leaflet, a sticker, a word, however, that tells us that repressed truths and what fundamental ideologies are associated with these conditions, we will carry in all directions with the unbroken, indestructable enthusiasm of those who have no hope.

In this situation, it is time to emphasize the darker side of Chaos and the Goddess more. Eris is not a New Age goddess, no gender-normed post-modern career woman, She is not Gaia or a mother goddess, who would pretend equal validity and diversity while letting any distinction drown in the fog of indifference at the same time. Eris is rather militant, pugnacious, almost stubborn, and insists to the mere sake of insistence on Her positions and ideals, even if no one understands it any more. The other Greek goddesses are no incarnations of various aspects of Her, and to say something like that is bordering on blasphemy. If you want to compare or associate Her with other gods by all means, then you should compare Her to the ancient creatures and elder gods from the sick fantasies of H.P. Lovecraft which are lying and lurking in the shadows of the World: Ancient, inscrutable, unfathomable and incomprehensibly terrible. To look Her straight in the eye is not a good idea if one values his own physical, mental and emotional health, and when the Discordian does so anyway, he does it so as to find new ways to deal with it. So today, he stands as „vanishing mediator“ between the pure, psychotic madness and a late capitalist normality which is less and less distinguishable from madness.

In a way, the Discordian of today is the only one who is still sane.

This illumination was brought to you by
Saint Angrémonn the Hasty, KSC, Indirector of the Old Illusionated Seers of Bonn.