The Law of Fives touches on two things: the mystical significance of the number five, and  Confirmation Bias.

Many Discordians go through a questing phase where they make a note whenever they encounter the numbers 5 or 23. Those numbers are interpreted as a sign of Eris’ presence. On a long enough timeline, this will pretty much drive you insane. One constantly asks oneself: Is that just a coincidence, or is the universe trying to communicate something to me at this moment? Meditation on this question can lead to Robert Anton Wilson’s Chapel Perilous, or the Thelemic Abyss, where one faces the demon Chornonzon. The Law of 5s meditation is also sometimes compared with a moment of Kabbalistic enlightenment, where one experiences God by overwhelming oneself with life’s synchronicities and coincidences.

Confirmation Bias is our tendency to focus on data which confirms or supports our existing beliefs, and discount data which doesn’t fit.

Robert Anton Wilson posits that our brain contains a “thinker” and a “prover”, which do different jobs. The Thinker comes up with a conclusion, and then the Prover comes up with evidence and reasoning to support that conclusion. So we don’t come to a conclusion based on sound reasoning, it actually happens the other way around — the reasoning is a post-hoc justification for what we really want to say. In short, “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.”

The Illuminatus Trilogy elaborates on the Law of Fives in Appendix Beth:

“Here’s your latest revelation from the A:.A:..” He reached into his pocket and took out a photo of a female infant with six fingers on each hand. “Got this from a doctor friend at Johns Hopkins.”

Joe looked at it and said, “So?”

“If we all looked like her, there’d be a Law of Sixes.”

Joe stared at him. “You mean, after all the evidence I collected, the Law of Fives is an Illuminati put-on? You’ve been letting me delude myself?”

“Not at all.” Hagbard was most earnest. “The Law of Fives is perfectly true. Everybody from the JAMs to the Dealy Lama agrees on that. But you have to understand it more deeply now, Joe. Correctly formulated, the Law is: All phenomena are directly or indirectly related to the number five, and this relationship can always be demonstrated, given enough ingenuity on the part of the demonstrator.” The evil grin flashed. “That’s the very model of what a true scientific law must always be: a statement about how the human mind relates to the cosmos. We can never make a statement about the cosmos itself— but only about how our senses (or our instruments) detect it, and about how our codes and languages symbolize it. That’s the key to the Einstein-Heisenberg revolution in physics, and to the Buddha’s revolution in psychology much earlier.”

“But,” Joe protested, “everything fits the Law. The harder I looked, the more things there were that fit.”

“Exactly,” said Hagbard. “Think about that. If you need quick transportation to Panama,” he added, heading for the door, “call Gold and Appel Transfers and leave a message.”

This page addresses the discord between the Classical Greek depiction of Eris (as a snarling Goddess of strife) and the modern Discordian depiction of Eris (as a mischievous bitch).

The Classical Greeks Were Not Influenced By the Classical Greeks

The Ancient Greeks were sharp. They laid down the original course of this ongoing civilization experiment we’re all riding.

But were they right? Is that the best that humanity can do? Where did they get these ideas we’ve been chattering about for thousands of years? Can we come up with ideas that are just as good?

And when the Greeks were laying down these tracks, they lived in a time that struggled to overcome Disorder. At that point in history, we’d spent millions of years living in Primal Chaos, living in tribal units and not writing down anything. Then we figured out the city thing, and entered the age of Discord. The Greeks discovered that with a little order, we could keep pull ourselves up into better forms of civilization. Their order was a triumph over millions of years of screaming and throwing rocks. They built something from the primal chaos. That’s why they saw Strife as a horrible old woman that you shouldn’t invite to your party.

But fast forward to 2012… Disorder doesn’t play the same role anymore. We’ve silenced the beasts outside the city walls, we’re all citizens and scholars now. And in this light, the danger is in our Order, our Bureaucracy. Now we need the Strife that used to be the wolf at our throats.

In this iteration of civilization, Eris wears a new dress. It’s not important that the Ancient Greeks feared her, we’re telling the New Story of Chaos now. The Ancient Greeks lived in a world where Order protected you from bad scary Disorder. And they protected that baby Order and fed it and cared for it, and now it’s out of control. Eris is back now, she’s looking hot, and it’s time to get to work.

Do Not Circulate

The juxtaposition of the Do Not Circulate stamp and the Classical Greek quote suggests the two are related. Perhaps Mal and Omar are suggesting we shouldn’t keep riding the Classic Greek merry-go-round, perpetually reliving their desperate battle against Disorder.

 The Horace Quote

DIRUIT AEDIFICAT MUTAT QUADRATA ROTUNDUS     -Horace

This line appears at the foot of page 15. It’s from Horace’s Epistles I. It roughly translates to “Razing, re-building, and altering round to square.”

Here’s one translation of the full passage it appears in:

If, when we meet, I’m cropped in awkward style
By some uneven barber, then you smile;
You smile, if, as it haps, my gown’s askew,
If my shirt’s ragged while my tunic’s new:
How, if my mind’s inconsequent, rejects
What late it longed for, what it loathed affects,
Shifts every moment, with itself at strife,
And makes a chaos of an ordered life,
Builds castles up, then pulls them to the ground,
Keeps changing round for square and square for round?
You smile not; ’tis an every-day affair;
I need no doctor’s, no, nor keeper’s care:
Yet you’re my patron, and would blush to fail
In taking notice of an ill-pared nail.

So, to sum up: the sage is half divine,
Rich, free, great, handsome, king of kings, in fine;
A miracle of health from toe to crown,
Mind, heart, and head, save when his nose runs down.

Another translation is “What [do you do], when my judgment contradicts itself? it despises what it before desired; seeks for that which lately it neglected; is all in a ferment, and is inconsistent in the whole tenor of life; pulls down, builds up, changes square to round. ”