Jim Garrison and the Illuminati
Discordianism is in direct contradiction of the monotheory- mono theist foundations of Western religion, Western logic and Western law, all of which assume that there is one correct model that is true in all cases. People who are religious in the dogmatic Judaeo-Christian sense, logicians who haven't gotten to Godel's Proof yet, and lawyers of all sorts are the last persons on Earth to be able to appreciate the Discordian philosophy.
Nonetheless, in a totally Quixotic way, Kerry Thornley, dragging his Discordian history behind him, insisted on getting himself involved in the Kennedy Assassination Mania of the '60s, and went straight to a lawyer — New Orleans D.A. Jim "The Jolly Green Giant" Garrison. He might as well have gone to a Thomist theologian.
Kerry decided in 1967, after reading Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment and a few other of the Kennedy assassination books, that perhaps his old friend Lee Harvey Oswald hadn't killed the President after all; maybe there really was a conspiracy. Kerry naively went back to New Orleans and had several long talks with District Attorney Garrison, who had opened a new investigation which seemed to be uncovering such a conspiracy.
Thornley and Jim Garrison did not make a good team together, to put it mildly. In fact, at their last interview, each told the other to go to hell. Discordianism and law do not mix. Kerry left New Orleans and angrily informed all his friends and correspondents that Garrison was an unscrupulous demagogue who was organizing a witch-hunt to excite the gullible and advance his own political career. Garrison's aides struck back with a series of ridiculous charges against Thornley.
Naturally, I got drawn into the controversy.
That was when I really began to understand how arbitrary are the reality-constructs of the average human nervous system. The establishment press was 100% anti-Garrison and denied all of his charges. The underground press was 100% pro-Garrison and supported all of his charges. In Leary's language, all the signals that could be organized into a "good" Garrison Gestalt were transmitted freely and omnidirectionally in the underground press game, while all signals suggestive of a "bad" Garrison, or inconsistent with a "good" Garrison, were smoothly, efficiently reserved for the Establishment press game.
"My God," the Libertarian said to himself one day in early 1968, when this had become clear, "the left wing is as robotic as the right wing." (We apologize for our naivete in taking until 1968 to figure that out.)
It certainly illustrated the first law of Discordianism: "Convictions cause convicts." Whatever you believe imprisons you.
Thornley, as I had gotten to know him through the mails and then through visits, was a humorous, agnostic, libertarian person who was dogmatic about only two things: anarchism and pacifism. It was against his personal ethic to destroy life in any form. It was impossible for one to consider him seriously as a participant in a conspiracy to murder anybody.
And yet, in the underground press, Thornley and the other Garrison suspects were pictured as a weird gang of homosexual Satanic C.I.A. Nazi fanatics. It was the McCarthyism of the '50s all over again, coming from the left this time.
("There seem to be a lot of different realities going around these days," Abbie Hoffman said during the Democratic Convention horrors of 1968; that may well be the only intelligent thing he ever said.)
From that time to this the Skeptic has made it a point to read one or two periodicals every month put out by some political or religious group he despises, just to see what sort of signals are being screened out by his habitual reality-maps. It is most educational.
(Aleister Crowley and Bertrand Russell, respectively the outstanding mystic and the outstanding rationalist of the 20th Century, have also recommended this practice. It is one of the best ways to discover how Nasrudin's donkey—the self-metaprogrammer—works.)
Meanwhile, Thornley discovered that Allan Chapman, of Texas, one of Garrison's aides, believed the JFK assassination was the work of the Bavarian Illuminati. Of course, I had been an expert on that subject (I thought) for a number of years, and Garrison's involvement in it encouraged me to enter the belief system that Garrison was a paranoid or a demagogue or both. There simply were no real Illuminati; it was all a rightwing fantasy-a sanitized version of the tired old Elders-of- Zion mythology. Although the underground press was absolutely fundamentalist in its allegiance to the Garrison Revelations, it was also intensely gullible and eager to believe all manner of additional conspiracy theories, the weirder the better. Most Discord ians, at this time, were contributors to underground newspapers all over the country. We began surfacing the Discordian Society, issuing position papers offering non-violent anarchist techniques to mutate our robot-society. One was our "PURSE" plan (Permanent Universal Rent Strike Exchange) in which everybody simply stops paying rent forever. (Can they dispossess us all into the Atlantic and Pacific?) Another was our "PUTZ" plan (Permanent Universal Tax Zap), in which everybody stops paying taxes. Along with this we planted numerous stories about the Discordian Society's aeon-old war against the sinister Illuminati. We accused everybody of being in the Illuminati— Nixon, Johnson, William Buckley, Jr., ourselves, Martian invaders, all the conspiracy buffs, everybody. We did not regard this as a hoax or prank in the ordinary sense. We still considered it guerrilla ontology. My personal attitude was that if the New Left wanted to live in the particular tunnel-reality of the hard-core paranoid, they had an absolute right to that neurological choice. I saw Discordianism as the Cosmic Giggle Factor, introducing so many alternative paranoias that everybody could pick a favorite, if they were inclined that way. I also hoped that some less gullible souls, overwhelmed by this embarrassment of riches, might see through the whole paranoia game and decide to mutate to a wider, funnier, more hopeful reality-map. The distinguished poet Ed Sanders, author of Fuck God Up The Ass and other immortal works, once sent me an urgent message, warning, "There's nothing funny about the Illuminati. They're real!" I laughed immoderately, as the Fool always does before the doors of Chapel Perilous swing shut behind him. The Discordian revelations seem to have pressed a magick button. New exposes of the Illuminati began to appear everywhere, in journals ranging from the extreme Right to the ultra-Left. Some of this was definitely not coming from us Discordians. In fact, one article in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1969 consisted of a taped interview with a black phone-caller who claimed to represent the "Black Mass," an Afro-Discordian conspiracy we had never heard of. He took credit, on behalf of the Black Mass and the Discordians, for all the bombings elsewhere attributed to the Weather Underground.
Other articles claimed the Illuminati definitely were a Jesuit conspiracy, a Zionist conspiracy, a bankers' conspiracy, etc., and accused such worthies as FDR, J. Edgar Hoover, Lenin, Aleister Crowley, Jefferson and even Charlemagne of being members of it, whatever it was. All this inspired Bob Shea and me to start work on the gigantic novel which finally emerged as the Illuminatus trilogy. We made The Discordians The Good Guys and The Illuminati The Bad Guys in an epic of convoluted treachery that satirized all conspiracy theories of Left and Right.
A good omen early in the writing cheered us vastly. A search through the Discordian Archives revealed that the earliest of Discordian holy books—How the West Was Lost, by Maladypse the Younger (Greg Hill)—was originally printed, after office hours, on the Xerox machine of D.A. Jim Garrison, in summer 1963. (Greg's girlfriend was Garrison's secretary.) That would be about the time when Oswald was ordering the Carcano rifle and I was having my experience with the green man in the cornfield, and by this time we were all too sophisticated to dismiss such a pattern as "mere coincidence." Synchronicity, by Goddess, was afoot. . . and the weirdness was increasing. For instance, we Discordians had a mystic sign, like the Masons and everybody else. Ours was blandly lifted from good old Tory warmonger Winston Churchill; it was the V-for-Victory Winnie had used all through World War II. Of course, to us, it had special Discordian meanings: theV, being the Roman numeral for 5, illustrated the Law of Fives. The way the sign is made, with 2 fingers up and 3 bent down, exemplifies the hidden 23 within the Law of Fives. The fact that this sign is also used by Catholic priests in blessing and by Satanists in invoking the devil illustrates the essential ambiguity of all symbolism, or the Cosmic Giggle Factor. Between the first edition of the Principia Discordia, run off on Jim Garrison's Xerox machine in 1963, and the fourth edition, published by Rip-Off Press in Berkeley in 1969, only 3,125 copies of that basic Discordian text were ever distributed. Nonetheless, the V sign, somehow, got accepted by the whole counter-culture, especially circa 1966-70. One saw hundreds of thousands of protesters using it at the Pentagon demonstration in October 1967 and again at the Democratic convention of 1968. The odd part was that virtually nobody using it was aware that we Discordians had revived i t . . . The Pentagon itself, of course, is a sacred Discordian shrine, both because it is five-sided* and because the Byzantine bureaucracy there enshrined illustrates so wonderfully the basic Discordian sociological law enunciated by Kerry Thornley in The Gospel According to Fred: "Imposition of Order = Escalation of Chaos." I attended the Pentagon protest in October 1967—where the Yippies attempted to expel the Demon, Yog-Sothoth, by chanting, "Out, demon, out!" -and all of it, especially the V signs, seemed as if the Discordian version of surrealism was becoming a new political reality. The next year the Yippies ran a pig for President. A psychologist named Richard Ryan, in New Jersey, read some of the Discordian literature and wrote to tell me another 23 mindfuck. Ryan had overheard a psychiatrist, in a mental hospital where they both worked, giving a royal asschewing to a nurse who'd made a mistake. "When I say 23 c c , " the psychiatrist had shouted, "I want 23 cc.-not 24 cc." Ryan heard this on his way to visit a ward with chronic schizophrenics. When he entered the ward, one of the schizzies said to him, in a tone of anxiety, "Yes, yes, 23 cc."
