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Sunday, August 19, 2012

Origin of Principia Discordia manuscript

Keen-eyed John Merritt looks carefully at the Principia Discordia noted by Jesse Walker (see Friday's post) and notices something interesting:

"Reference copy, JFK Collection HSCA (RG 233)" along right edge of each page. Thornley served w/ Lee Harvey Oswald in USMC.

This apparently refers to the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, from the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records in the National Archives.

Doesn't this sound like something from the pages of ILLUMINATUS?


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"In 2006, a copy of the first edition of the Principia Discordia was claimed to have been discovered in the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection in the National Archives, proving Malaclypse the Younger to be Gregory Hill."

I think i read mention of an amusing considering the cirumstances building it was originally xeroxed in. Can't seem to find the mention now.

Jesse said...

While an early Discordian text was run off in Garrison's office, there are competing claims as to whether this was the one. I'm inclined to believe it wasn't, since Thornley and Hill's addresses appear in the manuscript & neither apparently lived in New Orleans at the time.

michael said...

Good point, Mr. Walker.

To shed light and/or muddle things a tad, Alex Gorightly has How The West Was Lost being mimeographed on Garrison's machine after-hours.

"As synchronicity would have it, an early Discordian manuscript titled _How The West Was Lost_ was actually reproduced, after hours, on a mimeograph machine in Garrison's office. This clandestine copying operation occurred a couple of years before the Kennedy assassination, and was the work of Greg Hill and his friend Lane Caplinger, who worked as a typist in Garrison's office. Later, Garrison theorized that the Discordian Society was a CIA front, and idea that Kerry - ever the surrealist prankster - heartily encouraged." -p.135, _The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Coutnerculture_. (With a foreword by RAW)

michael said...

Oops: the book is by ADAM Gorightly, not Alex. Not a bad writer in the so-called marginals milieu.

Jesse said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jesse said...

Hill has elsewhere said that it was Thornley's girlfriend who worked for Garrison. Thornley says she was a friend but not a girlfriend. It gets confusing.

"How the West Was Lost," you'll note, is the subtitle of this version of Principia Discordia, which was run off in 1965, i.e., not before the JFK assassination. Then again, they may have used the same title on another text.