A Religion Built as a Joke That Would Not Stay One

This entry records that Discordianism, founded in the early 1960s by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley under the pen names Malaclypse the Younger and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, centers veneration of Eris, the Greek goddess of discord and chaos, within a self-consciously satirical framework laid out in its core text, the Principia Discordia, that deliberately blurs the line between genuine religious practice and elaborate parody, a foundational ambiguity scholars of new religious movements treat as itself the movement's most distinctive and analytically interesting feature rather than a problem to be resolved one way or the other.

Discordian invocations and rituals accordingly exist within this same deliberately ambiguous register, and this entry does not reproduce specific Principia Discordia content here, both because the text remains under its own specific copyright and licensing terms and because presenting Discordian material without its essential satirical framing would likely misrepresent the movement's own self-understanding regardless of copyright considerations alone. The Principia Discordia presents itself partly as a compilation of found and invented material rather than as the singular original work of one author, a layered, collage-like composition method that further complicates any attempt to treat it as a conventional scripture with a single stable authoritative text.