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Who are these people and what do they believe in?
The impressively and self-named Malaclypse the Younger (or Mal-2) is really Greg Hill and the equally impressively and also self-named Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst is really Kerry Thornley.
Both had little better to do around 1958 than to have a good old whinge and gripe at any and all established establishments and they were both in agreement that everything, and they meant everything, was a just an unhappy mixture of controlled chaos and falsely imposed order.
One day they were pondering this very paradox at a bowling ally in Whittier, California when things got seriously weird. In one of those blinding-light-moments Greg and Kerry stopped chatting long enough to discover that everyone else in the bowling hall appeared to be frozen in time. Which led our two heroes to the unavoidable conclusion that they had been chosen to tell the world all about, well… a whole new world!
God, they said, is actually a crazy woman by the name of Eris. Eris, you remember, was the-god-not-invited-to-the-wedding-feast. Turning up anyway she threw in the apple of confusion that started an ungodly spat between Aphrodite, Athena and Hera that gave rise, ultimately, to the first war between men; The Trojan War.
And quite appropriately Eris' Law states that chaos is increased when order is imposed [See The Law of Eristic Escalation above] and Chaos, says the Discordians in the Great Scheme Of Things, is every bit as important as Order.
For Discordians the world around them is governed by chance, opportunity, and indiscriminate accidents, in short, chaos and any 'order' imposed is merely an exercise in containment and in all likelihood, doomed to failure.
The Principia Discordia is the Bible of Discordianism and having got into the twenty first century and evolved through five editions there is no indication of its early demise.
Five is a good number for the Discordians and the Pentabarf gives five laws for all good Discordians to follow or ignore as they see fit. These cover the good news that Hot Dogs Are Good On Fridays and that all good Discordians are Actually Prohibited From Believing Anything They Read.
The symbol adopted by the Discordians is based on the older Yin-Yang shapes-within-a-circle but instead of the teardrop and eye shape they have a pentagram (that five sided figure again) and Eris's famous apple representing the continuing relationship between chaos and order.
The non-Discordians who still insist on poking fun at the Discordian cause (and that is just about everybody) put forward the argument that 'reality' is, well, real and to say that there are different kinds of reality is simply crazy.
But as just about everyone had different ideas of ërealityí the boys needed no more proof. It was all the other people who were crazy.
The word and concept of 'reality' was (and still is) the main talking point of Discordian philosophy. If reality comes from the culture that surrounds us then it follows that given any particular subject, different cultures would have a totally different view of it.
