The Other Author, and What He Contributed

Kerry Thornley wrote as Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, and the Principia Discordia is a two hand production in which his voice is distinguishable from Hill. He supplied a body of material framed as epistles and sermons, the register of a preacher addressing a congregation, and the parody works because the form is handled accurately: the cadences, the exhortations and the appeals to authority are those of real religious writing turned to absurd ends. The two men had been friends since high school in Southern California and worked on the material from the late 1950s, and the collaboration continued by post for years afterwards while they lived in different places.

The calendar is a good example of what this kind of invention actually involves. The Discordian year has five seasons of seventy three days each, named for the five basic principles, with a set of holy days at fixed points in each and a leap day inserted outside the ordinary count. Building that requires arithmetic, consistency and a decision about every edge case, which is the same labour a real liturgical calendar demands. A parody of a religion, done properly, turns out to be indistinguishable in effort from the thing it parodies, and that is much of the point being made.