The Principia Discordia borrows the outward furniture of scripture, a founding goddess, a creation myth, a priesthood with mock titles, moral maxims, even a claimed organisational structure called the Discordian Society, while using every one of those forms to argue against taking any fixed structure, including its own, too seriously. Its central philosophical claim, that order and disorder are the Aneristic and Eristic Principles, equally artificial impositions of a pattern-seeking mind onto a reality that is neither, is presented with the same mock solemnity as its jokes, so that a reader is left uncertain where satire ends and sincere philosophy begins, a state the authors treated as the intended reading experience rather than a flaw.
Carole Cusack's scholarship on invented religions places the Principia Discordia at the origin of a recognisable modern category, deliberately founded, self-consciously playful traditions that nonetheless generate real communities, real practice and, for some adherents, real belief, a lineage she traces forward through the Church of the SubGenius and other later movements that borrowed Discordianism's founding gesture of scripture as joke and joke as scripture at once.