Discordianism

The central text, the Principia Discordia, first circulated in 1963-65 as a handful of photocopied pages, and it grew by accretion across later editions rather than being written as a book. Its authors, Greg Hill ("Malaclypse the Younger") and Kerry Thornley ("Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst"), present the worship of Eris, goddess of discord, whom classical myth blamed for starting the Trojan War by rolling a golden apple marked 'to the fairest' among the goddesses.

The doctrine, so far as there is one, is that order and disorder are both illusions laid over reality by the human nervous system, and that the Discordian, by embracing chaos, sees through the imposition. It comes with a mythology held with visible irony: the Law of Fives (that everything is related to the number five, if you look hard enough), the Sacred Chao with its Hodge and Podge, the word fnord, and a calendar of five seasons. Its best-known line is the question of whether Discordianism is "a joke disguised as a religion, or a religion disguised as a joke", which it pointedly refuses to answer.

Two things keep it from being merely a prank. The first is its reach: through Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy of 1975, which drew heavily on it, Discordian ideas and jokes, fnord above all, passed into a much wider counterculture and, later, into internet culture. The second is that scholars of religion take it seriously as an object of study. Carole Cusack and others treat it as the earliest fully developed 'invented religion', one that knows it was made up and treats that knowledge as the point, and argue that the line between such a thing and a religion of the ordinary kind is harder to draw than it looks. Dated honestly, it is a 1963 American satire that became, for some of its participants, a working spiritual practice without ever ceasing to be a satire.

Discordianism's two best-known contributions are a joke about pattern recognition and a technique for spreading confusion, and both turn out to be making a serious epistemological point.

The Law of Fives

The Principia Discordia states that all things happen in fives, or are divisible by five, or are somehow directly or indirectly related to five. It then notes that the law is never wrong, and invites the reader to work out why. The answer is that a sufficiently motivated observer will find fives everywhere, and that the demonstration of the law is a demonstration of confirmation bias performed on the reader rather than explained to them. It is a better teaching device on the subject than most textbook treatments, because the reader supplies the evidence themselves.

Operation Mindfuck

Attributed to Kerry Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson, this was the practice of seeding contradictory material into the culture: letters to magazines under false names, planted rumours, absurd conspiracy claims issued alongside real ones. The stated purpose was to make people notice how much of what they accept arrives without provenance. The Illuminatus! trilogy is the largest artefact of it, and the modern circulation of the Illuminati as a conspiracy staple owes a great deal to a campaign whose point was that such stories should not be believed.

Where the joke stops being one

The material has been taken literally often enough to matter, and some of what it seeded is now repeated in earnest by people who have never heard of Discordianism. Whether a religion that cannot be distinguished from its own parody is a religion is a question the tradition asks about itself and declines to answer, which is consistent.