Discordianism, Chaos Magick, SubGenius, and the Satanic Temple

13 min read

From: The Hidden Fire

From the Principia Discordia to chaos magick to the Satanic Temple. Joke religions that turned out to be real, and the real religions that turned out to be jokes.
Contents 40 sections

Discordianism, Chaos Magick, SubGenius, and the Satanic Temple – Research Compilation

Status: COMPLETE (compiled 2026-02-20)

NOTE ON COVERAGE

The opening section on early Discordianism (the bowling alley origin story, the writing of the Principia Discordia) was partially truncated during compilation. Key details on Greg Hill and early Discordian history should be expanded in a follow-up pass.

TOPIC 1: DISCORDIANISM

The Principia Discordia

Written by Greg Hill (as “Malaclypse the Younger”) and Kerry Thornley (as “Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst”), first distributed circa 1963. (Wikipedia) A satirical religious text worshipping Eris, the Greek goddess of discord and chaos. The text declares: “All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5.” (Principia Discordia) This is the “Law of Fives” – and the joke is that once you start looking for fives, you find them everywhere, which is the point: confirmation bias is the engine of all conspiracy thinking.

The Principia established Discordianism’s core paradox: “Is Discordianism a joke disguised as a religion, or a religion disguised as a joke?” The answer: BOTH. And the refusal to resolve the ambiguity is itself the teaching.

Key doctrines:

  • The Sacred Chao: A yin-yang symbol with a golden apple (marked “kallisti” – “to the prettiest”) on one side and a pentagon on the other
  • The Law of Fives: Everything relates to five (if you look hard enough)
  • Catma vs. Dogma: A catma is a relative metaphysical proposition, as opposed to a dogma (absolute). “It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs”
  • Every man, woman, and child is a genuine and authorized Pope: This democratization of authority is the opposite of hierarchical religion

Operation Mindfuck

A “practice of causing social disruption by spreading disinformation” and guerrilla ontology (Robert Anton Wilson’s term). The original Operation Mindfuck involved sending contradictory letters to the same organization from different personas, creating confusion about what was real. It was formalized in the Principia as a Discordian practice.

The Dark Legacy: John Higgs noted that “the ideas behind Operation Mindfuck have since become a tool for those with a lust for political power, most blatantly Putin’s advisor Vladislav Surkov.” (John Higgs) This is the shadow side: techniques designed to expose how easily people believe nonsense were adopted by people who wanted to CREATE nonsense for political gain.

Kerry Thornley and the JFK Connection

Kerry Thornley served in the Marines with Lee Harvey Oswald and wrote a novel based on him (The Idle Warriors, 1962) BEFORE the assassination. (Wikipedia) After the assassination, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison subpoenaed Thornley, suspecting him of being part of the conspiracy. (Spartacus Educational) Thornley – co-founder of a religion based on creative paranoia – found himself the target of actual paranoid conspiracy investigation.

The tragic arc: Thornley eventually developed schizophrenia and came to believe he had been a CIA asset who had been used in the conspiracy without his knowledge. “The man who wanted people to question reality found that reality had become unquestionable – in the worst possible way.” He died in 1998.

Robert Anton Wilson and the Illuminatus! Trilogy

Wilson (1932-2007) co-authored The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) with Robert Shea. (Wikipedia) The novels weave every conspiracy theory into a single absurdist narrative involving the Illuminati, JFK, Atlantis, and the Principia Discordia.

Wilson developed “guerrilla ontology” – the practice of deliberately undermining certainty about what is real. He also coined “maybe logic” – an approach that refuses binary true/false categorizations.

The “fnord” concept: In the Illuminatus! Trilogy, “fnords” are words hidden in news text that generate unconscious anxiety. Once you learn to see fnords, the news loses its power over you. The metaphor: all media operates through invisible anxiety triggers, and awareness of the mechanism is the only defense.

The 1990 Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games – which was publishing a card game called Illuminati – led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). (EFF) A Discordian in-joke literally created one of the most important digital rights organizations in history.

The Genealogy of Discordian Influence

Discordianism influenced:

  • The Church of the SubGenius (direct descendant)
  • Chaos magick (philosophical foundation)
  • Internet troll culture (Operation Mindfuck as template)
  • The Satanic Temple (legal trolling as Discordian practice)
  • Culture jamming (Adbusters, etc.)
  • The “post-truth” media environment (the dark mirror)

TOPIC 2: CHAOS MAGICK

Peter Carroll and the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT)

Peter J. Carroll (b. 1953) co-founded the IOT with Ray Sherwin in 1978. (Wikipedia) Key texts: Liber Null (1978) and Psychonaut (1982), later combined as Liber Null & Psychonaut. (Open Library) Carroll studied science at the University of London and approached magic as an experimental discipline.

The IOT was organized with a “Pact” structure (degrees) but was deliberately anti-hierarchical and schism-prone. The “Ice Magic War” of the mid-1990s saw internal conflicts and splinter groups – fitting for an organization that valued chaos.

The Core Innovation: Belief as Tool

Carroll’s key insight: the specific content of a belief system is irrelevant to its magical effectiveness. What matters is the intensity and focus of belief. A chaos magician can work with Norse gods on Monday, Buddhist mantras on Tuesday, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos on Wednesday, discarding each paradigm after use.

This is the logical endpoint of the esoteric tradition’s four-thousand-year arc: if the Hermeticists showed that fake ancient texts have real effects, and the Gnostics showed that the establishment’s “truth” is a prison, then chaos magick shows that ALL belief systems are tools rather than truths. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

Austin Osman Spare and Sigil Magick

Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) developed sigil magick: condense a desire into a symbolic glyph, charge it through ecstatic states (sex, exhaustion, meditation), then forget it – allowing the sigil to work through the subconscious. Spare was a gifted artist who exhibited at the Royal Academy at age 17, then abandoned the art world for increasingly obscure magical practice. (Wikipedia)

Carroll systematized Spare’s approach, making it the practical backbone of chaos magick.

Phil Hine and “Condensed Chaos”

Phil Hine’s Condensed Chaos (1995) made chaos magick accessible to a wider audience. William S. Burroughs called it “the most concise statement of the logic of modern magic.” (Wikipedia)

Grant Morrison’s “The Invisibles” as Hypersigil

Grant Morrison (b. 1960) used their comic book series The Invisibles (1994-2000) as a “hypersigil” – a large-scale magical working embedded in a narrative artwork. (Wikipedia) Morrison claims events in the comic manifested in their life, including a near-fatal illness that mirrored the torture of the comic’s protagonist. At the Disinfo.com conference in 2000, Morrison declared: “We’re dealing with some kind of operating system that can be hacked, using words.” (Disinfo Con 2000 transcript)

Alan Moore as Chaos Magick Practitioner

Alan Moore (b. 1953), creator of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, declared himself a ceremonial magician in 1993 and began worshipping the snake god Glycon (a known hoax god from the 2nd century CE – the oracle at Abonoteichus was exposed as a fraud by Lucian of Samosata). (Wikipedia; Glycon) Moore deliberately chose to worship a god he KNOWS is fake, which is the purest expression of chaos magick’s central insight: the realness of the god is irrelevant; what matters is what the practice does to the practitioner.

“Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted”

This phrase is attributed to Hassan-i Sabbah (leader of the Nizari Isma’ili Assassins, d. 1124), though the attribution is probably fictional – it comes from Vladimir Bartol’s 1938 novel Alamut, which was itself inspired by European legends about the Assassins. (Wikipedia) William S. Burroughs popularized it; Peter Carroll adopted it as a chaos magick motto.

The genealogy: a possibly-real statement by an 11th-century Shi’ite leader → a 1938 Slovenian novel → a 1960s Beat writer → a 1970s British magician → a 21st-century video game (Assassin’s Creed). The phrase travels through so many layers of fiction and reinterpretation that its “truth” is irrelevant – which is itself the point.

TOPIC 3: THE CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS

Key Historical Details

Founded by Ivan Stang (Douglass St. Clair Smith) and Philo Drummond (Steve Wilcox). First publication: Sub Genius Pamphlet #1, Dallas, Texas, 1979. Announced the impending end of the world and offered “Eternal salvation or triple your money back!” for $1. (Wikipedia)

J.R. “Bob” Dobbs: The prophet figure – a 1950s clip-art man with a pipe. Always in quotation marks. No one explains why. The prophet of a satirical religion is literally generic stock art.

Key texts: The Book of the SubGenius (McGraw-Hill, 1983), Revelation X: The “Bob” Apocryphon, The SubGenius Psychlopaedia of Slack. (Wikipedia)

Core Concepts

  • Slack: The central goal. Never concisely defined. Members seek a free, comfortable life without hard work or responsibility. Simultaneously a parody of spiritual salvation and a genuine critique of work-obsessed culture.
  • The Conspiracy of Normals: Everything keeping you from Slack. Conformity, wage slavery, suppression of individual weirdness.
  • “Eternal Salvation or Triple Your Money Back!”: The Church explicitly frames itself as a con – and that honesty about being a con is what distinguishes it from other religions.

X-Day (July 5, 1998)

The prophesied end of the world. “Xists” from Planet X would arrive; paying members would be transported onto spaceships. When the aliens didn’t arrive, Stang suggested “the date had been read upside-down and it might be 5 July 8661.” (Wikipedia) This is not even mathematically consistent, which is the point. Annual X-Day celebrations became festivals lasting 3-5 days.

The Bevilacqua Custody Case (2006)

Rachel Bevilacqua (Reverend Magdalen) lost custody of her son after Judge James P. Punch saw pictures of her at an X-Day festival wearing a papier-mache goat head. The child was NOT present at any X-Day event. Her defense: “I just thought the word ‘goat’ was funny.” (Wikinews) The ACLU examined the case as religious discrimination. After nearly four years, she regained custody.

Celebrity Affiliations

Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo), Paul Reubens (Pee-wee Herman), David Byrne (Talking Heads), R. Crumb, Mojo Nixon. (Texas Monthly)

Key Quotes

  • “Eternal Salvation or Triple Your Money Back!”
  • “Pull the wool over your OWN eyes.”
  • “Act like a dumb shit and they’ll treat you as an equal.” – attributed to “Bob”
  • “You’ll PAY to know what you REALLY think.”

TOPIC 4: THE SATANIC TEMPLE (TST)

Key Historical Details

Co-founded by Lucien Greaves (Douglas Mesner) and Malcolm Jarry (Cevin Soling) in 2012-2013. Headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts. IRS-recognized as tax-exempt church in 2019. (Wikipedia; Religion News Service)

Origin: Jarry organized a rally of hired actors playing Satanists to praise Florida Governor Rick Scott’s bill allowing “inspirational messages” in public schools – Satanic students could now “share their love of Satan.” Originally created with hired actors; then became a real religion. (Wikipedia)

Distinction from Church of Satan: TST is activist; Church of Satan is “deliberately apolitical.” TST venerates “the allegorical Satan described in Paradise Lost – the defender of personal sovereignty against the dictates of religious authority.” Neither worships Satan literally.

The Seven Tenets

  1. Strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason
  2. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit
  3. One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone
  4. The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend
  5. Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world
  6. People are fallible; if one makes a mistake, rectify it
  7. Every tenet is a guiding principle; the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail

The trolling: These tenets are more ethical and humanistic than most traditional religious codes. The cognitive dissonance – that the “Satanists” have better values than the “Christians” who oppose them – IS the point.

Oklahoma Capitol (2014-2015): Crowdfunded an 8.5-foot, 3,000-pound bronze Baphomet statue for placement next to the Ten Commandments monument. Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled the Commandments monument must be removed. (Wikipedia)

Arkansas Capitol (2018): Baphomet statue displayed on a flatbed truck protesting another Ten Commandments monument. (NPR)

After School Satan Clubs: Created as response to Child Evangelism Fellowship’s Good News Clubs, using the 2001 Good News Club v. Milford Central School precedent. (Wikipedia; Justia) The Child Evangelism Fellowship officially supports ASSC’s RIGHT to equal access – trapped by their own legal precedent. Some school districts banned ALL outside groups rather than allow a Satan club – which is also a TST victory.

Abortion as Religious Ritual: Claims abortion is a protected religious ritual under RFRA. After Dobbs, filed lawsuits in Texas, Indiana, Idaho, Missouri. (Newsweek)

“The Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic”: A telehealth abortion facility in New Mexico. Malcolm Jarry: “In 1950, Samuel Alito’s mother did not have options, and look what happened.” (Salon)

Grey Faction: Campaign to end the ongoing Satanic Panic in mental health, targeting therapists using pseudoscientific “recovered memory therapy.” (Grey Faction)

The Trolling Mechanism: Constitutional Jiu-Jitsu

TST operates as a “poison pill”: when a government entity passes a law favoring Christianity under “religious freedom,” TST demands equal treatment for Satanism. The government must either extend the same rights to Satanists (politically untenable) or admit “religious freedom” only applies to preferred religions (constitutionally untenable). Either outcome exposes hypocrisy.

Key Quotes

  • “The entire point of our effort was to offer a monument that would complement and contrast the Ten Commandments, reaffirming that we live in a nation that respects plurality.” – Lucien Greaves (Wikipedia)
  • “In 1950, Samuel Alito’s mother did not have options, and look what happened.” – Malcolm Jarry (Salon)

CROSS-CUTTING THEMES

The Genealogy of Trolling

  1. Discordianism (1957-1963): The philosophical foundation. Trolls the concept of truth.
  2. Chaos Magick (1976-1978): Takes Discordian philosophy, builds a practical system. Trolls the Western esoteric tradition.
  3. Church of the SubGenius (1979): Full parody religion with such commitment it becomes indistinguishable from real. Trolls religion by being one.
  4. The Satanic Temple (2012-2013): Legal/political weapon. Trolls the legal system using religious freedom laws against their intended beneficiaries.

The Sincerity Paradox

All four exist in radical ambiguity between sincerity and parody. The inability of outsiders to resolve this ambiguity IS the trolling mechanism.

The Thornley Trajectory (A Warning)

Kerry Thornley’s arc – from co-founding a religion of deliberate confusion to paranoid schizophrenia to confessing on television to being part of the conspiracy he mocked – represents the dark potential of trolling. Operation Mindfuck may have mindfucked its own creator. Wilson acknowledged the dark legacy when the ideas were adopted by the alt-right and Russian disinformation.

KEY ACADEMIC SOURCES

Discordianism

  • Hill, Greg (Malaclypse the Younger). Principia Discordia. 1963.
  • Wilson, Robert Anton, and Robert Shea. The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Dell, 1975.
  • Cusack, Carole M. Invented Religions. Ashgate, 2010.
  • “Serious Parody: Discordianism as Liquid Religion.” Culture and Religion, 2013.
  • “Chaos Magick, Discordianism and Internet Trolling.” Diva Portal, 2023.

Chaos Magick

  • Carroll, Peter J. Liber Null & Psychonaut. Weiser, 1987.
  • Hine, Phil. Condensed Chaos. New Falcon, 1995.
  • Spare, Austin Osman. The Book of Pleasure. 1913.
  • Duggan, Colin. “Perennialism and Iconoclasm: Chaos Magick and the Legitimacy of Innovation.” Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review, 2013.

Church of the SubGenius

  • Stang, Rev. Ivan. The Book of the SubGenius. McGraw-Hill, 1983.
  • Cusack, Carole M. Invented Religions. Ashgate, 2010.
  • Church of the SubGenius, WRSP (World Religions and Spirituality Project), 2024.

The Satanic Temple

  • Laycock, Joseph P. Speak of the Devil. Oxford University Press, 2020.
  • Good News Club v. Milford Central School, 533 U.S. 98 (2001).
  • Hail Satan? (2019), documentary by Penny Lane.
  • “Hail Satan (or not).” Journal of Contemporary Religion, Vol 40, No 1.

Key Quotes for Epigraphs

  • “Is Discordianism a joke disguised as a religion, or a religion disguised as a joke?” – common attribution
  • “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” – attributed to Hassan-i Sabbah
  • “We’re dealing with some kind of operating system that can be hacked, using words.” – Grant Morrison
  • “Eternal Salvation or Triple Your Money Back!” – SubGenius Foundation
  • “In 1950, Samuel Alito’s mother did not have options, and look what happened.” – Malcolm Jarry

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