Trickster Archetype

New Orleans—home to the Mistick Krewe of Comus of the Mardis Gras revels and the ritual “Killing of the King”—was the seat of the cabal behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, to which belonged Kerry Thornley, who was responsible, along with Esalen celebrity Robert Anton Wilson, for developing a parody religion known as Discordianism, an occult-based prankster cult which exercised an important influence in the development of chaos magic, as well as computer culture, to ultimately give rise to transhumanism and the subversive online community of the alt-right which helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency. Discordianism is founded on the notion of the trickster, first proposed by renowned psychologist Carl Jung, to explain the recurring archetype of the Devil and its variations. It represents the attempt to revive what has been interpreted to be the “dying-god” cults of ancient times, but often colored by modern interpretation.  In other words, the same tradition of the “wise fool” that eventually inspired the Mistick Krewe of Comus.

Wiccan priestess Margot Adler, in Drawing Down the Moon, which provided the first comprehensive look at modern pagan religions in the US, features a chapter on Discordianism. Adler was the granddaughter of Alfred Adler, who collaborated with Freud and founded the Adler’s Society with Dimitrije Mitrinovic. Sigmund Freud wrote about the possible survival of satanic cults:

I have an idea shaping in my mind that in the perversions, of which hysteria is the negative, we may have before us a residue of a primaeval sexual cult which, in the Semitic East (Moloch, Astarte), was once, perhaps still is, a religion… I dream, therefore, of a primaeval Devil religion whose rites are carried on secretly, and I understand the severe therapy of the witches’ judges.[1]

Margot’s aunt was Alexandra Adler, who worked as a neurology instructor at the Harvard Medical School, and wrote the foreword to the Encyclopedia of Aberrations, a reputable professional publication authored by a prestigious group of psychiatric experts, which includes an entry, “Devil Worship,” according to which:

In the twentieth century in England black magic is practiced and taught in secret schools both at Oxford and at Cambridge. The Black Mass is still celebrated in the drawing rooms of Mayfair and in Chelsea studios under conditions of almost absolute secrecy. There are at least seven active chapters of Satanists, each with an initiated membership of nearly fifty men and women, who meet at stated intervals and have their hidden chapels devoted to the worship of the demon.[2]

As suggested by G.P. Hansen in The Trickster and the Paranormal, the term “Trickster” was probably first used in this context by Daniel G. Brinton in 1885.[3] Brinton, an American archaeologist and ethnologist, graduated from Yale in 1858, where he had been a member of the Scroll and Key secret society.[4] In mythology, and in the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story (god, goddess, spirit, man, woman, or anthropomorphization), which exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge, and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and conventional behavior. Tricksters are archetypal characters who appear in the myths of many different cultures. Lewis Hyde describes the Trickster as a “boundary-crosser.” The Trickster crosses both physical boundaries and often breaks societal rules. Tricksters “…violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis.”[5] According to Lewis Hyde in the Trickster Makes this World:

I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on.[6]

The first to recognize the recurring archetype of the dying and rising gods was James Frazer in The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, which has had a substantial influence on European anthropology and thought.[7] Frazer’s thesis of the dying-god and the sacred king had an immense influence on a large number of authors inspired by the occult, such as Robert Graves, William Butler Yeats, H.P. Lovecraft, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound and Julius Evola. T.S. Eliot acknowledged indebtedness to Frazer in his first note to his poem The Waste Land. Also influential was Margaret Murray, the principal theorist of witchcraft as a “pagan survival”’ in The Witch-Cult in Europe. Although modern pagans would deny it, claiming the worship their “horned-god” was ignorantly disparaged by the bigotry of the Church, the dying-god was universally viewed as a god of evil.[8] Borrowing from Frazer’s thesis of the dying-god, the “horned god” of modern pagans is the lord of the underworld, and the Sun while the goddess is the Moon.

In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959), Jung lists the Feast of Fools as a European adaptation of the trickster archetype.[9] Archetypes, according to Jung, are fundamental human themes found throughout world mythology, and are the product of what he calls the collective unconsciousness. Included motifs are the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood among others. Reinvented from culture to culture in mythology and folklore, the Trickster is presented as god, spirit, man, woman, anthropomorphic animal, supernatural being or the occasional mischievous fairy who disobeys rules and conventional behavior, causing chaos while also inspiring some kind of change to occur. The Trickster is a shape-shifter and so has the possibility of transformation. The Fool or the court jester survives in modern playing cards as the Joker.

But for all its tomfoolery, Discordianism also has a dangerous side. Margot Adler, in Drawing Down the Moon, begins her chapter on Discordianism by mentioning the work of Harvey Cox, who in Feast of Fools “develops a theory of play, asserting, like others before him, that our society has lost or mutilated the gift of true festivity, playful fantasy, and celebration.”[10] Margot also cites the classic study on play written in 1944 by Johan Huizinga, who wrote that play and ritual are interrelated, and that all sacred rites are performed in the spirit of play, noting that “The outlaw, the revolutionary, the cabalist or member of a secret society, indeed heretics of all kinds are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, and a certain element of play is prominent in all their doings.”[11]

However, according to David Carlyon, the romantic notion of the “daring political jester,” which has been popularized over the last few decades, especially since the protests of the 1960s, is “apocryphal.” Carlyon concludes that “popular culture embraces a sentimental image of the clown; writers reproduce that sentimentality in the jester, and academics in the Trickster,” though it “falters as analysis.”[12] As Carlyon points out, the trickster cliché is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s conception of the jester, and examples of truth-telling fools in the Twelfth Night, As You Like It and King Lear. Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1819) and Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) are two literary examples of the enduring fashion. As Carlyon notes, “The jester, comic sidekick in that era’s medieval mania, was imagined saying to the king what no one else dared say.”[13]

According to Carlyon, another obvious influence is theory of the ‘‘carnivalesque,’’ developed by Soviet philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895 – 1975), to playfully invert social conventions through humor and chaos, whos origins he traces to the Feast of Fools.[14] Bakhtin has influenced such Western schools of theory as Neo-Marxism, Structuralism, Social constructionism, and Semiotics. He was the leader of the Bakhtun circle, which included Valentin Voloshinov (1895 – 1936), who contributed to the emergene of Freudo-Marxism with his 1925 article “Beyond the Social.” which he developed more substantially in his 1927 book Freudianism: A Marxist Critique. The idea of the carnivalesque originated in Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) and was further developed in Rabelais and His World (1940). To Bakhtin, it was Francois Rabelais, author of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, that he considered the primary exemplars of carnivalization in literature. Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, featured an “Abbey of Thélème,” where the only rule was Fais ce que tu voudras (“Do what thou wilt”), which inspired both the eighteenth-century Hellfire Club as well as Aleister Crowley.[15]

It was one of the leading Situationists, Raoul Vaneigem, in his book The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), who inspired the May 1968 student movement with what could be called Carnival liberation theory. Vaneigem observed that “a strike for higher wages or a rowdy demonstration can awaken the carnival spirit,” and “revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society.”[16]

Discordianism began with Greg Hill (a.k.a. Malaclypse the Younger or Mal-2) and Kerry Thornley (a.k.a. Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst or Lord Omar), who were drawn together by their common interest in the occult and their own deranged sense of humor. While in a bowling alley in 1957, Thornley and Hill debated about chaos. Thornley believed that from chaos would come order, much like the Masonic dictate Ordo ab Chao (“order from chaos”). Greg instead believed that order was merely an idea that humans projected onto reality, where only chaos prevails. They identified this chaos with Discordia, the Roman equivalent of Eris, the Greek goddess of discord.

Aside from its connection to the JFK assassination, Discordianism betrays disturbing associations with Satanism and Nazism, and with libertarianism through its association with the Freedom School of former I AM member Robert LeFevre, which had numerous ties to the John Birch Society. Discodianism’s founder Kerry Thornley was raised Mormon, but in adulthood he shifted his ideology frequently, and after being a Marxist, Thornley read a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and converted to “Objectivism.” For her doctrine of radical selfishness and individualism, Ayn Rand is one of the principal authors cited in the Satanic Bible of Anton LaVey, who explains that his religion is “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added.”[17]

Joseph Maurone in “The Trickster Icon and Objectivism,” suggests that Rand served as a Trickster archetype. Rand sought to challenge two thousand years of Christianity. Her goal was partly to counter altruism, and she held as virtues that which the Church called vices. E. Merrill points out in Ayn Rand Explained: From Tyranny to Tea Party that a desire to épater les bourgeois is at work, in which “Rand takes an almost childish delight in defying the conventions and shocking the reader.”[18] Merrill roots Rand’s “predilection for paradox and her pleasure in surprising and shocking the reader…[in] the influence of O. Henry and Oscar Wilde.”[19] On Rand’s use of paradox, Stephen Cox observed that she “loved the artist’s ability to make life look interesting by changing the point of view from which it is seen. She loved antithesis, irony, paradox, parody, reversal. She loved the freedom that a spiritual outsider has to explore what happens when normal perspectives are inverted.”[20]

The Discordian Society was founded after the 1965 publication of its first holy book, the Principia Discordia. In 1964, Thornley had won a scholarship for a two-week course of the Freedom School in Colorado Springs, Colorado.[21] The chief promoter of Discordianism was Esalen celebrity Robert Anton Wilson (1932 – 2007), a longtime collaborator with CIA agent Timothy Leary, and a spokesman for the psychedelic culture, who fascinated with mysticism, conspiracy theories, and Aleister Crowley. In 1962, Wilson, became editor of the School for Living’s magazine Balanced Living, whose fellow contributors included Murray Rothbard, Timothy Leary, Robert LeFevre, Frank Chodorov, and Paul Goodman.[22]

Thornley ultimately came to believe that Robert Anton Wilson was his MK-Ultra handler. Wilson was a friend of Richard Bandler, who in the 1970s with John Grinder would develop an evolution of hypnotherapy called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a product of the Human Potential Movement (HPM), which started in Esalen, which became popular in the psychoanalytic, occult and New Age movements in the 1980s, and advertising, self-help and politics in the 1990s and 2000s. As Wilson recalled: “[Kerry] had the impression that I came to Atlanta more than once and that I had given him LSD and had removed the programming the Navy had put into him when he was in the Marines—and that I was one of his CIA handlers.”[23] Famed JFK assassination researcher Mae Brussell also asserted that Robert Anton Wilson was a CIA agent. When asked about the claim, Wilson retorted, “Ahh, if I were, I would deny it.”[24]

Idle Warriors

Thornley betrayed all the signs of being another mind-control victim. In his book The Prankster and the Conspiracy, Adam Gorightly explains that perhaps Oswald’s doppelganger was none other than Kerry Thornley, who was born two years earlier than Oswald. In 1957, Oswald was stationed as a radar technician at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, the CIA’s headquarters in the Far East, where the CIA conducted extensive LSD testing.[25] In early 1959, before he himself would also be stationed at Atsugi, also as a radar technician, Thornley served for a short time in the same radar operator unit as Oswald at MCAS El Toro in Santa Ana, California. In 1962, Thornley completed The Idle Warriors about their time together, describing the state of completely chaotic insubordination that prevailed at the base, which can only be attributed to the soldiers being under the influence of LSD. The novel was about a soldier who defects to the Soviet Union. As Thornley described it, he wrote the novel as a way of exploring Oswald’s possible reasons for doing the same, by projecting his personality into Oswald’s.[26] After the assassination, Thornley wrote the non-fiction Oswald, which largely corroborated the “lone nut assassin” theory peddled by the Warren Commission, the official investigation of the JFK assassination, headed by former CIA director Allen Dulles.

In 1961, Greg Hill and Thornley moved to New Orleans, where they joined the cabal of Kennedy assassination conspirators. Suspiciously, the city is the base of the Mardi Gras revelries, operated by the Mistick Krewe of Comus, performers of the ritual of the “Killing of the King.” Oswald was recruited by CIA agent David Ferrie at a two-week summer camp of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol in 1957.[27] After he had moved to New Orleans in 1961, Thornley also met Ferrie at one of his “parties,” as well as Clay Shaw and Guy Banister. These men formed the hotbed of the anti-Kennedy conspiracy uncovered by Jim Garrison—when he reopened the Kennedy investigation in 1966—which involved the Mafia, anti-Castro activists, writers, artists, bohemians, Nazis and a homosexual subculture. Ferrie was reportedly a practitioner of black magic rituals, which involved animal sacrifices, blood drying and homosexual rites. Ferrie was also a high priest in the Apostolic Old Catholic Church of North America, which researcher Jim Keith speculated was in reality the Gnostic Catholic Church of the OTO.[28] Garrison suspected that the Church was a CIA front.[29]

In 1968, Garrison subpoenaed Thornley to appear before a grand jury, believing that Thornley and Oswald were involved together in covert CIA operations. Garrison’s theory was that the assassination was “a homosexual thrill-killing, plus the excitement of getting away with a perfect crime.”[30] Reverend Raymond Broshears, an active member of the New Orleans homosexual community and a former roommate of David Ferrie, placed Thornley in the company of Oswald, Clay Shaw, and David in New Orleans in the fall of 1963. According to Broshears, Oswald was a homosexual, and said that Thornley, “maintains he is not a homosexual. But I say he is and I say to the whole world if he is not a homosexual why was he in homosexual bars, why if he is not?”[31]

Broshears also noted that Thornley’s resemblance to Oswald was “rather frightening.”[32] Garrison argued that Thornley had impersonated Oswald between the years 1961 and 1963. Thornley lived only a few blocks away from Oswald, in New Orleans, and they were seen together on repeated occasions according to several witnesses. One of these was Barbara Reid, a voodoo priestess who was a member of Thornley’s Discordian Society, and “up to her ass” in the Process Church.[33] A number of people who lived in that neighborhood saw Thornley at the Oswalds’ apartment a number of times, and in fact reported that they saw him there so often that they did not know which was the husband, Oswald or Thornley.[34]

Garrison also began to speculate that the infamous photos of Oswald with a rifle in one hand and a copy of the communist newspaper The Daily Worker in the other, had likely been fabricated by Thornley and other accomplices. Oswald himself denied the authenticity of the photo, claiming his face had been superimposed on the body of someone else. Garrison also believed The Idle Warriors was written by Thornley to portray Oswald as a communist sympathizer, a tactic known in the intelligence community as “sheepdipping.”[35]

Garrison later suspected that the Discordian Society itself was a CIA front. What especially incriminated Thornley was his public celebration on the announcement of JFK’s murder, and the fact that he would introduce himself as follows: “I’m Kerry Thornley. I masterminded the assassination—how do you do?”[36] And then less than two weeks after the assassination, Thornley moved to Alexandria, Virginia, right near CIA headquarters. Garrison finally charged Thornley with perjury after Thornley denied that he had been in contact with Oswald since 1959. The perjury charge was eventually dropped by Garrison’s successor Harry Connick, Sr., father of the successful singer and movie actor Harry Connick, Jr.

An early prototype of the Principia Discordia was copied using a mimeograph machine in Garrison’s office, by Greg Hill and his friend Lane Caplinger, who worked as a typist in the office. Lane Caplinger’s sister was Grace (Caplinger) Zabriskie, who became one of Thornley’s lovers. Thornley wrote a book on her, named Can Grace Come Out to Play. There were rumors that Grace was the subject of Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, and the lines “You used to be so amused/ At Napoleon in rags” and the language that he used were in reference to Thornley. [37] Grace’s father owned the famous French Quarter gay bar, Café Lafitte in Exile. Growing up in New Orleans, Grace has said that her family was visited by Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote.[38] She later became a successful Hollywood actress, appearing in many popular films, including Norma Rae, Fried Green Tomatoes, Twin Peaks (as the eerily psychic mother of the doomed Laura Palmer), Seinfeld, Big Love and Charmed, which follows three sisters, known as “The Charmed Ones,” and the most powerful good witches of all time.

While Thornley feebly claimed not to have had a part in the assassination plot, in the mid-seventies he developed the persona of a paranoid schizophrenic, or “mind-control” subject, claiming to have started to remember the details of his involvement. In 1992, in an interview with the tabloid magazine show A Current Affair, Thornley confessed that prior to the assassination, “I wanted to shoot him. I wanted to assassinate him very much… I wanted him dead I would have shot him myself. I would have stood there with a rifle and pulled the trigger if I would have had the chance.”

The interview was arranged with the assistance of Thornley’s friend Sondra London, known as the “Serial Killer Groupie.” London developed an affair with the incarcerated serial killer G.J. Schaefer, and the two collaborated on works of fiction together. London also collaborated with serial killer Danny Rolling, with whom she also fell in love. Rolling’s killing spree inspired screenwriter Kevin Williamson to pen the script of the popular 1996 slasher film Scream. Together London and Rolling wrote The Making of a Serial Killer: The Real Story of the Gainesville Murders. Published by Feral House, who also published London’s study of vampirism True Vampires in 2004, which was illustrated by French cannibalistic killer Nicolas Claux, the “Vampire of Paris.”

London declared at Thornley’s memorial service in 1998 that she was his true love and the one chosen to carry on this legacy.[39] Between 1992 and 1998, Thornley had participated in a series of interviews with London about what he would recollect of his knowledge of the JFK assassination, which are now available on YouTube.[40] London and Thornley collaborated on writing Confessions of a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK. However, as in his Garrison depositions, Thornley’s confessions rarely provided direct responses, and most often were clumsy and convoluted. Rather, it would seem that Thornley’s confession was another Discordian ploy by mixing the truth with nonsense so it appears as a joke.

Thornley also finally became convinced that he and Oswald were products of MK-Ultra, to create an “Manchurian candidate,” and that one of his handlers two mysterious middle-aged men named “Gary Kirstein” and “Slim Brooks.” Thornley later came to believe that Kirstein had in reality been senior CIA officer and future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. According to Hunt’s autobiography, he was stationed at the Atsugi Air Base at the same time as Thornley. Thornley also determined Brooks to have been Jerry Milton Brooks, a member of the 1960s right-wing activist group “The Minutemen,” which Garrison also connected to the assassination.[41] Brooks, who became known to his comrades as “the rabbi,” served as Robert DePugh’s intelligence and security officer. Brooks, who had done some file work for Banister in 1962, had identified his deputy, Hugh F. Ward, as also belonging to the Minutemen as well as an outfit called the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean, which was headed by Banister after he came to New Orleans in 1955. Brooks credited the ACLC with helping the CIA overthrow the leftist Arbenz government in Guatemala.[42]

Kerry even came to suspect his own parents were Nazis spies who had made a deal with occult Nazis to conduct these eugenics experiments, the ultimate purpose of which was to create a Manchurian candidate. Thornley further believed that he was the child of a Nazi breeding experiment that used both him and Oswald—whom he suspected might have been his brother—as guinea pigs.[43] Thornley alleged that while on active duty he was subjected to electronic mind control transmissions, maintaining that a device planted without his knowledge in the base of his neck picked up the “voices” of a “Nazi” covert operations unit attempting to manipulate his head.[44] In fact, Thornley viewed the whole psychoanalytical establishment as a product of Nazism and an outgrowth of the eugenics movement.[45] Thornley was apparently told that his father was Admiral Karl Dönitz.[46] Dönitz’s representative in the United States, H. Keith Thompson, was also in touch with Oswald’s mother Marguerite.[47]

Discordianism

There is some question as to whether Discordianism should be regarded merely as a parody of religion. According to Robert Anton Wilson: “Much of the Pagan movement started out as jokes, and gradually, as people found out they were getting something out of it, they became serious. Discordianism has a built-in check against getting too serious.”[48] Wilson explained, “Many people consider Discordianism a complicated joke disguised as a new religion. I prefer to consider it a new religion disguised as a complicated joke.”[49] As Wilson clarifies, however, “It will be understood by the Cabalistic reader that Discordianism is a system of transcendental Atheism, agnostic Gnosticism, skeptical Monotheism, and unified Dualism. In short, the Erisian revelation is not a complicated put-on disguised as a new religion, but a new religion disguised as a complicated put-on.”[50]

Discodianism is linked with Satanism in its rejection of the existence of a higher God, and a kind of Nietzschean “positive nihilism.” But instead of becoming intoxicated with the “Triumph of the Will,” Discordians look at the absence of meaning in the world and instead laugh, and mock anyone who takes any of it seriously. They follow the foolish chastised in the Bible for saying, “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Through their pranksterism they become missionaries to their nihilism, poking fun at everything and everyone in an attempt to jostle them out of their supposed stodginess and unwillingness to accept the frightening truth that there is no truth, and that all is permitted. As such, the model of the Discordians is the Wise Fool, possessed with Divine Madness, who, like Nietzsche, peered into the abyss and cracked.

Discordians believe everybody should live like a Jewish eccentric named Joshua Abraham Norton (1818 – 1880), known as Emperor Norton, a citizen of San Francisco, who proclaimed himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States” in 1859. He later assumed the secondary title of “Protector of Mexico.”[51] Though Norton had no formal political power, he was treated deferentially in San Francisco, and currency issued in his name was honored in the establishments that he frequented. Norton roamed the city in a European-style military uniform with a plumed top hat and a sword at his side. Norton was recognized as an Illuminated Being by the Freemasons, who granted him a 33º. When Norton died, ten thousand San Franciscans attended his funeral, and he was buried in the Masonic cemetery, courtesy of the Freemasons.[52] Mark Twain resided in San Francisco during part of Emperor Norton’s public life, and he modeled the character of the King in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on him.

Discordians use irreverent humor to promote their philosophy and to prevent their beliefs from becoming “dogmatic.” Their favored prank has been spreading false legends about the Illuminati, who are mentioned as the inheritors of the Assassins in the Principia Discordia. Discordianism represented a confluence of all the prankster traditions of occult secret societies, dating back to the Sons of Malta, the Shriners, through to the avant-garde and Situationism, adapted to the psychedelic counterculture. As described to Scott Oliver, in “Inside the Resurgence of Discordianism–the Chaotic, LSD-Fuelled Anti-Religion” for Vice magazine:

It’s perhaps hardly surprising that there’s cross-pollination between Discordianism and Situationism, the French artist-philosophers of the happening, while other influences and precursors include: the Dada movement; Beat novelist William S Burroughs, who first mooted “the 23 Enigma” after which F23 is named; psychologist and LSD guru Timothy Leary, dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by Richard Nixon; and Zen Buddhist thinker Alan Watts…[53]

The modern popularization of the terms “pagan” and “neopagan,” as they are currently understood, is largely traced to Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, co-founder of the Church of All Worlds (CAW), who was inspired to use the term from Thornley. As Adler indicates, some, like Robert Anton Wilson, have alleged that the entire pagan movement is a plot centered around Thornley’s worship of Discordia.[54] In California in 1966, Thornley, who was interested in “sex, drugs and treason,” joined Kerista, an early free love cult founded in Haight-Ashbury, which Thornley described as being “more akin to the religions of the East and, also, the so-called pagan religions of the pre-Christian West.”[55] Margo Adler credits Kerista as “the true beginnings of the neopagan movement in contemporary culture.”[56] Kerista was centered on the ideals of polyfidelity and the creation of intentional communities (communes). According to Carole Cusak, Kerista’s sexual practices were influenced, as was that of the Church of All Worlds, by OTO member Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land.[57] In the science-fiction novel, a Martian-raised human named Michael Valentine Smith founded The Church of All Worlds, preached sexual freedom and the truth of all religions, and is martyred by narrow-minded people who are not ready for his teachings. Cusack speculates that the person who invited Heinlein to speak at Kerista’s Los Angeles chapter may have been Thornley. Thornley was known to be a lifelong science-fiction fan. But, Heinlein turned down the invitation.[58]

Operation Mindfuck

Wilson, who was working as associate editor of Playboy magazine at the time, met Hill and Thornley in 1967, and helped develop many of the Discordian Society’s creeds and dogmas.[59] Wilson and Thornley had developed “Operation Mindfuck” (OM) in 1968, and Adam Gorightly argues that Thornley deliberately issued statements during the JFK investigation claiming he was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati, simply to “mindfuck” Garrison.[60] When a New Orleans jury refused to convict one of the men Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK assassination, Garrison’s aide Art Kunkin of the leftist Los Angeles Free Press received a letter from the “Order of the Phoenix Angel” revealing that the jurors were all members of the Illuminati. The tell-tale sign, explained the letter, was that none of the jurors had a left nipple. The Discordians planted stories about the secret society in various leftist, libertarian, and hippie publications, introducing the Illuminati to the counterculture. “We accused everybody of being in the Illuminati,” Wilson recalled, “Nixon, Johnson, William F. Buckley, Jr., ourselves, Martian invaders, all the conspiracy buffs, everybody.”[61] According to Wilson:

We did not regard this as a hoax or prank in the ordinary sense. We still considered it guerrilla ontology. My personal attitude was that if the New Left wanted to live in the particular tunnel-reality of the hard-core paranoid, they had an absolute right to that neurological choice. I saw Discordianism as the Cosmic Giggle Factor, introducing so many alternative paranoias that everybody could pick a favorite, if they were inclined that way. I also hoped that some less gullible souls, overwhelmed by this embarrassment of riches, might see through the whole paranoia game and decide to mutate to a wider, funnier, more hopeful reality-map.[62]

Wilson laid out the basic instructions for Operation Mindfuck in a memo sent to several friends, including fellow Esalen personality Paul Krassner, his editor at The Realist. Wilson and Thornley met only once during that period, when Wilson spent the night at Thornley’s place in Tampa in 1968. They smoked marijuana and started conversing about their project. “What if there really is an Illuminati?” Wilson asked. “Maybe they’ll find out about us and be pissed.” “I doubt if there is,” Thornley replied. “And if there by some chance is, they would probably be very happy to have wildass fools like us covering up for them by spreading bizarre theories.” [63]

In 1969, Wilson and another Playboy editor, Robert Shea, inspired by some of the letters the magazine often received, they decided to write a novel “perched midway between satire and melodrama, and also delicately balancing between ‘proving’ the case for multiple conspiracies and undermining the ‘proof.’”[64] The result was Illuminatus! which won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for science fiction in 1986. The trilogy comprises The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan, which were first published as three separate volumes starting in September 1975. The trilogy is a satirical, postmodern, science fiction-influenced adventure weaving drugs, sex, Lovecraftian gods, Kabbalah and conspiracy, related to the authors’ version of the Illuminati. It is revealed at the end of the trilogy that the Discordians, a group who despite their eternal battle against the Illuminati, had been infiltrated by an Illuminatus Primus, who had been playing both sides against each other in order to keep balance. He is a representative of the “true” Illuminati, whose aim is to spread the idea that everybody is free to do whatever they want at all times. According to Brian Doherty in Radicals for Capitalism, Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy is “the most influential libertarian novel since Atlas Shrugged, though its libertarianism is not always recognized by more economistic libertarian movement types.”[65] In 1986, The Illuminatus! trilogy won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, designed to honor classic libertarian fiction.

Moorish Orthodox Church

An important prophet of not only Discordianism, but of modern occultism as a whole, is Peter Lamborn Wilson, also known as Hakim Bey, who founded the Moorish Orthodox Church of America (MOCA).[66] Wilson is an American anarchist author, who spent time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary and later collaborated closely with both Kerry Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson.[67] Bey, who sees himself as continuing the tradition of Situationism and autonomist Marxism, is best known for his influential essay The Temporary Autonomous Zone.[68]

MOCA was founded by Bey and a group of Jewish beatniks who, through their interest in jazz, came into contact with a number of African-American musicians associated with the Moorish Science Temple, to which belonged Elijah Mohammed before he founded the Nation of Islam.[69] MOCA purports to be an outgrowth of the Moorish Science Temple of America, which was founded by Noble Drew Ali (1886 – 1929). According to Bey, in Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam, Ravanna Bey of the Moorish Academy of Chicago claimed that, in 1882-1883, Noble Drew Ali’s family had been initiated into Salafism by Jamal ud Din al Afghani, Grand Master of Freemasonry in Egypt, and purported member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, and according to K. Paul Johnson, one of H.P. Blavasty’s “Ascended Masters.”[70]

The Moorish Orthodox Church supposedly consists of an ostensibly Eastern Christian liturgical and devotional tradition, combined with a theology sampling from the Assassins, Bektashi Sufism, Tantra and Vedanta teachings.[71] The silsilah (Sufi lineage of authenticity) of the order is traced back to Rofelt Pasha, the reputed founder of the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (AEAONMS), an African-American version of the Shriners, that grew out of Prince Hall Freemasonry.

The Moorish Orthodox Church derived influences of the Bektashi Sufi order, as well as the Queer Spirit and Radical Faerie movements. The Radical Faeries were founded in 1979 by Harry Hay, who is considered the founder of the Gay Liberation Movement. Hay, who was a practitioner of Crowley’s sex magick, was a member of the Agape Lodge in Los Angeles under W.T. Smith.[72] Bey has also written on the alleged connections between Sufism and ancient Celtic culture, technology and Luddism, Amanita muscaria use in ancient Ireland, and sacred pederasty in the Sufi tradition.[73] Wilson’s first use of the pseudonym Hakim was in 1983, when he published Crowstone: The Chronicles of Qamar, a Sword and Sorcery Boy-love Tale.

Appalled with the social and political climate in America, Wilson left for Lebanon in 1968. He travelled to India with the intention of studying Sufism, but became fascinated by Tantra, tracking down Ganesh Baba. He spent a month in a Kathmandu were he was treated for hepatitis, and practiced meditation techniques in a cave above the east bank of the Ganges. Wilson then moved to Iran where he developed his scholarship. He translated classical Persian texts with French Traditionalist scholar Henry Corbin, and also worked as a journalist at the Tehran Journal. Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Wilson returned to New York where he lived with William S. Burroughs. Burroughs credited Wilson for providing material on Hassan-i Sabbah which he used for his novel The Western Lands.[74]

Hakim Bey has also received criticism for writing for the bulletin of North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), a pedophile advocacy organization in the US that works to abolish age of consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors.[75] Bey has also written on the alleged connections between Sufism and ancient Celtic culture, technology and Luddism, Amanita muscaria use in ancient Ireland, and sacred pederasty in the Sufi tradition.[76]

The Moorish Orthodox Church went through a slump during the 1970s and the 1980s. In 1991 a new current emerged through a group of artists, musicians, rocket scientists, cyberneticists, as well as spa-loving freaks, soon-to-be Master Masons and adherents of the Hot Tub Mystery Religion. Its adherents hold to no particular spiritual dogma, borrowing freely from such sources as Jewish mysticism, Roman paganism, Islamic heresy, and experimental art.[77] The Feast of Fools is their most important annual holiday. Their goal is to build a Xanadu, or Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, as described in the opium-induced poem of Samuel Coleridge, a friend of Lord Byron. They claim the task was foreshadowed by Jorge Luis Borges in one of his essay.[78] An engineer named Yehoodi (“Jew” in Arabic) El and a chaos magician named Mustafa al-Layla, along with a few others, created the Khalwat-i-Khidr (“Hermitage of the Green Prophet”) lodge, revamped the Moorish Science Monitor, started a Texas radio show, and social media, as well as word of mouth that spread rapidly, overflowing into different scenes such as Chaos Magic, Punk, Rave, Thelema, as well as others interested in a spiritual tradition with an anarchist ethos.[79]

Church of the Subgenius

An offshoot of Discordianism is the parody religion, the Church of the Subgenius. According to Rev. Ivan Stang, the founder of the Church of the SubGenius, his father was a member of the Royal Order of Jesters.[80] In 2002, a Board of Directors meeting of the Jesters passed a resolution which directed the abolition of all Jester-related bulletin boards and internet sites. The reason was an anonymous email from “Sam Houston” which published details of the sordid activities Jesters were involved in, including gambling, prostitution and sexual hazing. According to Sam Houston, initiation practices involve prostitutes and often brothers would have sex in front of other brothers. Oral sex competitions between brothers were considered “fun” activities to build strong brotherly bonds between members. As Houston remarked, “Potentates and Chaplains, Attorneys and Judges, Past Masters and brothers all participating or watching with open eyes, but closed minds.”[81]

Similarly, the FBI and Human Trafficking Task Force investigated the Jesters after catching three members in a human trafficking sting in 2008. They confessed to taking prostitutes over state lines to their weekend stag parties and to a Jester national meeting in Canada, and nineteen other Jesters were called to testify in a federal libel/slander lawsuit about their knowledge of drugs and child sex tourism.[82] The former director of the Buffalo Jesters, Retired State Supreme Court Justice Ronald Tills; his former law clerk, Michael R. Stebick of Orchard Park; and retired Lockport Police Capt. John Trowbridge all pleaded guilty to transporting prostitutes across state lines. From his conversations with the government, it seems they believe a lot of the other Jesters chapters were doing the same things as the one in Buffalo, said Joel L. Daniels, Stebick’s attorney.[83]

In 1981, Steve Jackson Games released the Illuminati card game, based on Wilson and Shea’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Shea provided a four-paragraph introduction to the rulebook for the Illuminati Expansion Set 1 (1983), in which he wrote, “Maybe the Illuminati are behind this game. They must be—they are, by definition, behind everything.” The game is also mentioned in Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons. The world is represented by group cards such as Secret Masters of Fandom, the CIA, The International Communist Conspiracy, Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorro, and many more. It contains groups named similarly to real world organizations, such as the Society for Creative Anachronism and the Symbionese Liberation Army. The players take roles of Illuminati societies who aim for world control. The Pocket Box edition depicted six Illuminati groups: The Bavarian Illuminati, The Discordian Society, The UFOs, The Servants of Cthulhu, The Bermuda Triangle, and The Gnomes of Zürich and Up Against the Wall. The deluxe edition added the Society of Assassins and The Network, and the Illuminati Y2K expansion added Shangri-La and the Church of The SubGenius.

The Church of the SubGenius worships an idol named J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, a Ward Cleaver-like image derived from 1950s clip art. Robert Anton Wilson is venerated as “Pope.” In the Church’s mythology, God (Jehovah 1) had intended for Dobbs to lead a powerful conspiracy and brainwash people to make them work for a living. However, Dobbs refused to support the group, and instead infiltrated it and organized a counter-movement. Church leaders teach that Bob was a very intelligent child and, as he grew older, he travelled to Tibet and studied several religious traditions, including Sufism, Rosicrucianism, George Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way and Scientology.

[1] Sigmund Freud. Letter 57. In J. Strachey, A. Freud, A. Strachey, & A. Tyson (Eds.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966b); cited in James Randall Noblitt & Pamela Perskin. Cult and Ritual Abuse (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014).

[2] “Devil worship.” In E. Podolsky (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Aberrations (New York: Citadel Press, 1965), p. 186; cited in James Randall Noblitt & Pamela Perskin. Cult and Ritual Abuse (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014).

[3] G.P. Hansen. The Trickster and the Paranormal, (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2001).

[4] Yale University Class of 1858. Biographical Record. Nos. 2-5 (New Briton, Conn: The Record Press, 1908) p. 189.

[5] Paul Mattick. “Hotfoots of the Gods,” New York Times (February 15, 1998).

[6] Lewis Hyde. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) p. 9.

[7] K. Karbiener & G. Stade. Encyclopedia of British Writers, 1800 to the Present, Volume 2, (Infobase Publishing, 2009), pp. 188-190.

[8] H.D. Muller. “Mythologie der griech.” Stimme, II 39 f; K. O. Miiller, Aeschylos, Eumeniden, p. 146 f; Stengel, “Die griech,” Sakralalterthimer, S. 87; cited in Arthur Fairbanks, “The Chthonic Gods of Greek Religion.” The American Journal of Philology , Vol. 21, No. 3 (1900), pp. 241-259.

[9] Carl Gustav Jung. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (New York: Bolingen, 1959), p. 255.

[10] Margot Adler. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America (Penguin, 2006), p. 563.

[11] Cited in Adler. Drawing Down the Moon, p. 563.

[12] David Carlyon. “The Trickster as Academic Comfort Food.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures v. 25 n. 1-2 (March 2002), p. 14.

[13] Ibid., pp. 14-18.

[14] Ibid., p. 16.

[15] Gavin Grindon. “Carnival Against Capital: A Comparison of Bakhtin, Vaneigem and Bey.” Anarchist Studies 12:2, 2004. p. 151.

[16] Raoul Vaneigem. The Revolution of Everyday Life (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), p. 93.

[17] Bill Ellis. Raising the devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (University Press of Kentucky, 2000), p. 180.

[18] Ronald E. Merrill & Marsha Familaro Enright. Ayn Rand Explained: From Tyranny to Tea Party (Chicago: Open Court, 2013) p. 61.

[19] Ronald E. Merril. The Ideas of Ayn Rand (Lasalle, Illionois: Open Court, 1991) p. 28.

[20] Stephen Cox. “Outsides and Insides: Reimagining American Capitalism.” The

Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 1, no. 1 (Fall, 1999) p. 32.

[21] Jane Mayer. “The Secrets of Charles Koch’s Political Ascent.” Politico (January 18, 2016).

[22] Jeff Riggenbach. “Robert Anton Wilson.” Mises.org (August 15, 2011).

[23] Adam Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley  and How he Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture  (New York: ParaView Press, 2003), p. 169.

[24] “Nardwuar vs Robert Anton Wilson,” Dedroidify (Saturday, August 1, 2009). Retrieved from  http://dedroidify.blogspot.ca/2009/08/nardwuar-vs-robert-anton-wilson.html

[25] Martin A. Lee, Robert Ranftel & Jeff Cohen “Did Lee Harvey Oswald Drop Acid?” Rolling Stone Magazine (March 1983).

[26] “Kerry Thornley Talks to Sondra London - 1 of 7” Interview with Sondra London. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky7O9COM13o

[27] Daniel Hopsicker. “Barry & ‘the Boys’: Goss Made His ‘Bones’ on CIA Hit Team.” Mad Cow Morning New (May 6 2006).

[28] Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.

[29] “Kerry Thornley Talks to Sondra London - 1 of 7” Interview with Sondra London. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky7O9COM13o

[30] James Phelan. Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels, pp. 150-151

[31] Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.

[32] Ibid. p. 136.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid., p. 82.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid.

[38] HBO: Big Love - Interviews - Grace Zabriskie

[39] Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.

[40] “Kerry Thornley Talks to Sondra London - 1 of 7.” Retrieved from https://youtu.be/ky7O9COM13o

[41] Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.

[42] William Turner. Rearview Mirror (2001)

[43] Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.

[44] Alex Constantine. Virtual Government, p. 89.

[45] Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.

[46] Interview with SteamShovel Press editor Kenn Thomas in a 1991. Cited in Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy, p. 195.

[47] Kerry Bolton. “H. Keith Thompson Jr.” Inconvenient History, 6(2), 2014.

[48] Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.

[49] Ibid., p. 136.

[50] Andrew W. Griffin. “BOOK REVIEW: ‘Historia Discordia’ by Adam Gorightly. Red Dirt Report (August 6, 2014).

[51] Ibid., p. 124.

[52] Ibid.

[53] (June 15 2016).

[54] Adler. Drawing Down the Moon.

[55] Ibid., p. 294

[56] Carole M Cusack. Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (Ashgate Publishing Limited, Farnham, 2010) p. 37; Doherty. Radicals for Capitalism, p. 329.

[57] Cusack. Invented Religions, p. 37.

[58] Ibid. p. 39.

[59] Carole M. Cusack, “Discordian Magic,” p. 130.

[60] Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy.

[61] Jesse Walker. “Robert Anton Wilson & Operation Mindfuck.” Disinfo (August 21, 2013).

[62] Jesse Walker. The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (Harper, 2013).

[63] Jesse Walker. “Robert Anton Wilson & Operation Mindfuck.”

[64] Walker. The United States of Paranoia.

[65] Doherty. Radicals for Capitalism.

[66] Michael Muhammad Knight. William S. Burroughs vs. The Qur’an, (Soft Skull Press, 2012) p. 96

[67] Ibid. p. 96; Joseph Christian Greer. “Occult Origins: Hakim Bey’s Ontological Post-Anarchism” Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies.

[68] Gavin Grindon. “Carnival Against Capital: A Comparison of Bakhtin, Vaneigem and Bey.” Anarchist Studies 12:2, 2004. p. 156.

[69] “Sultan Rafi Sharif Bey.” Wikipedia (accessed June 15, 2015).

[70] K. Paul Johnson. The Masters Revealed, p. 47.

[71] Imprimatur & Nihil Obstat Ustad Selim & Arif Hussesin al-Camaysar. History & Catechism of the Moorish Orthodox Church of America (Crescent Moon Press, 1986).

[72] Stuart Timmons. The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (New York: Alyson Publications, 1990), p. 75-76; George Pendle. Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006) p. 150.

[73] Peter Lamborn Wilson. “Contemplation of the Unbearded - The Rubaiyyat of Awhadoddin Kermani.” Paidika, Vol.3, No.4, (1995).

[74] Knight. William S. Burroughs vs. The Qur’an, pp. 11-78.

[75] Ibid., pp. 76–79.

[76] Wilson. “Contemplation of the Unbearded.”

[77] Jesse Walker. “Inside the Spiritual Jacuzzi.” Reason (May 2003).

[78] Steve Aydt. “THE PLEASURE DOME & ME: Visions from the Moorish Orthodox Church.” These New Old Traditions (September 29, 2010).

[79] “Moorish Orthodox Church of America.” Wikipedia (accessed, April 16, 2017); Steve Aydt. “The Pleasure Dome & Me.” Moorish Orthodox Information Kiosk (September 29, 2010); “A Brief Overview of the Eulessynian Hot Tub Mystery Religion.” The Laboratory of Love (July 7, 2010).

[80] Rev. Ivan Stang. “Creepy Satanist Jesters Engage in Interstate Sex Trafficking.” alt.freemasonry. Retrieved from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.freemasonry/FphJL2bMyYA/rWIBWxIcPu4J

[81] Ibid.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Dan Herbeck. “Probe of Jesters carousing goes national.” Buffalo News (April 5, 2009).

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio