The 23 Apples of Eris

http://principiadiscordia.com/book/6.php

This page is presented as an interview to be published in a newspaper. It introduces some of the paradoxes and contradictions that will occur throughout the Principia.

The fictional newspaper is published in a place called “Yorba Linda”. This is a hilarious name, but it’s also a real place in Southern California (not too far from Greg and Kerry’s stomping grounds). It was the birth place of Richard Nixon, and is the site of the Richard Nixon museum and presidential library. At the time that the Principia was written, Yorba Linda was growing very quickly. It grew 30-fold between 1960 and 1980. Must have been quite a hot spot.

The final part of the interview contains a Discordian style zen koan:

GP: Is there an essential meaning behind POEE?
M2: There is a Zen Story about a student who asked a Master to explain the meaning of Buddhism. The Master’s reply was “Three pounds of flax.”
GP: Is that the answer to my question?
M2: No, of course not. That is just illustrative. The answer to your question is FIVE TONS OF FLAX!

This is a good example of the Discordian sense of humor. It amplifies traditional wisdom into absurdity. The “wisdom” often sounds like a punchline.  A good Discordian koan is like a joke – it takes you down a path, and then the ending surprises you.

As we’ll see later, the Principia owes a lot to the Rinzai school of Buddhism. Rinzai monks attempt to wake up their students through surprise. Their form of enlightenment is not acquired gradually during years and years of disciplined study. It’s something internal that clicks suddenly; a realization, an epiphany.

From the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

One of two major Zen Buddhist sects in Japan; [Rinzai] stresses the abrupt awakening of transcendental wisdom, or enlightenment. Among the methods it practices are shouts (katsu) or blows delivered by the master on the disciple, question-and-answer sessions (mondo), and meditation on paradoxical statements (koan), all intended to accelerate a breakthrough of the normal boundaries of consciousness and to awaken insight that transcends logical distinctions.

Here’s a description of Katsu from a book called Zen Speaks:

It follows that Discordians, who venerate someone traditionally seen as a Goddess of Strife, prefer a form of enlightenment based on interruption and surprise. Discordian wisdom is not about becoming the authority on a body of ancient texts, it’s about interrupting your own assumptions and mental processes. It’s about leading somebody down a path and then suddenly hijacking them.

It is in that moment of confusion that we are no longer distracted by the twin illusions of order and disorder.

We begin our journey of annotation right here.

http://principiadiscordia.com/book/5.php

The first thing we see on this page is “THE MAGNUM OPIATE OF MALACLYPSE THE YOUNGER”, apparently the author’s name. And this is a bit misleading – the Principia is the work of both Malaclypse the Younger (aka Greg Hill) and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (aka Kerry Thornley). Kerry doesn’t put his name right on the cover, but it’s there. He hides it within a poem, as we’ll see below.

Right next to the heading, there’s a stamp “NOT JUNK MAIL”. I like this stamp because it suggests that this is something you’d probably throw out if you weren’t paying attention. This juxtaposition between the sacred and the mundane is a recurring theme in the Principia.

The image on the left is the first appearance of the “Five Fingered Hand of Eris”. Some describe this orientation as “buttlike”.

The verse on the right is a variation on a stanza from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a thousand year old book of poetry. The Rubaiyat was written by Omar Khayyám, a Persian scholar with a reputation for mocking the devoutly religious.  Kerry Thornley borrows his nom de plum from the old mystic, but provides his own version of the stanza.  Here’s the complete stanza (stanza 12 in the 5th edition):

 ”A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness–
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

The Rubaiyat makes a good key note for the Principia. Its theme is that life is short, therefore we should spend what time we have enjoying simple pleasures like wine, music, poetry, and love.  Rather than dismissing the material world as a distraction from the true spiritual plane, as the gnostics and transcendentalists would have us do, Omar suggests that the physical world, the world we can experience, is the real deal. We have to open ourselves to the ecstatic joy already present in our world.

At the bottom of the page, there is a quote from the fictional “Book of Uterus” (a name which suggests birth and fertility). The quote reads “BE YE NOT LOST AMONG PRECEPTS OF ORDER”. This is another of the Principia’s main themes – warning us that the rules we choose to live by can be bewildering. The Principia dismisses these “precepts of order” as unreal, as a social construct we use to make sense of the world. Order isn’t some essential property of the universe, it’s just a way of looking at things. It is, therefore, only as real as we make it.

We’re kicking off a new project here at the 23 Apples of Eris cabal! We’re going to go though the Principia Discordia, section by section, and add notes, annotations, references, and other spaggy observations.

The Principia Discordia is an absurd, confusing, funny, surreal, obscure, and often mysterious book. I’d like to examine it really closely and distill as much as we can about what Mal and Omar were thinking when they put it together.

My hope is that we can facilitate a heightened appreciation for the text, but we do run the risk of “killing the joke by explaining it”. As such, my observations should be taken with a grain of salt. The Principia is, after all, highly subjective. I welcome you to chime in with your own notes and thoughts.

Come back every Thursday for another section of the Principia.