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Assembling the Principia

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Assembling the Principia

Greg Hill, writing as Malaclypse the Younger, compiled the Principia Discordia out of collage: typed pages, clip art, rubber stamps, handwriting, jokes, diagrams and borrowed illustrations, assembled at a print shop and run off in tiny numbers through the 1960s. The book presents a religion of Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, and sets out an apparatus that parodies the form of a scripture while doing the work of one. There is a creation myth in which a figure called Greyface persuades humanity that life is serious and order is real, and that persuasion is named as the source of human misery. There is a symbol, the Sacred Chao, in which a pentagon and a golden apple stand for order and disorder as two aspects that need each other. There is a five day week, a five season year and a fivefold law of interpretation, offered with the observation that the law of fives is never wrong once you decide to look for it.

Two structural decisions are worth noting. Every reader is ordained a pope, so there is no clergy to be admitted to and nothing to be excluded from. And the text was released with copyright renounced, so it could be copied freely, which is why an object printed in a few dozen copies is now everywhere.

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