The 23 Apples of Eris

I love the elegance of “A POEE cabal is exactly what you think it is.” There is no purpose or definition assigned. A cabal doesn’t have to be a group of mystics, or secret agents a la Illuminatus. If you and your friends get together to  play board games every week, and you have fun doing it, you could call it a cabal.

Malaclypse takes special care to divorce himself of any real authority. He encourages people to come up with alternate interpretations of Eris’ word. He gives out ordination certificates, but they’re basically meaningless.  He seems to enjoy wearing the leader costume, but is careful to hold that role at arm’s length.

From what I’ve read, Greg Hill (the guy who plays Malaclypse in this book) had a love/hate relationship with Discordia. When he wrote the Principia, he said he was possessed by the spirit of Malaclypse. This character helped him articulate the things he had been thinking about as he grew up in the suburbs of California in the 1950s and 60s. Many years later, when the work was done, Malaclypse left him. (note the concordance with Aliester Crowley’s Aiwass, the entity which Crowley claims wrote The Book Of The Law).

In anecdotes about Greg Hill, he sounds totally annoyed with the Discordian Society. Rev. Loveshade approached him in the 80s (?) and the man sounded like he was done with it. He didn’t want to be the guru anymore. Robert Anton Wilson’s alter ego, Hagbard Celine, voices the same thing when he steps down as head of the Lief Erikson cabal in the Illuminatus! trilogy.

Hagbard lowered his eyes for a second and gave a Sicilian shrug. “O oi che siete in picdoletta barca,” he said softly, and bowed. “I’m still in charge of nautical and technical matters,” he announced, “but Miss Portinari now succeeds me as episkopos of the Leif Erikson cabal. Anyone with lingering spiritual or psychological problems, take them to her.” He lunged across the room, hugged the girl, laughed with her happily for a moment and placed his golden apple ring on her finger. “Now I don’t have to meditate every day,” he shouted joyously, “and I’ll have more time for some thinking.”    -The Illuminatus! Trilogy

I love the phrase “World Council of Churches Boutique” It sounds like a store offers samples of various world religions.

The warning about money illustrates the main difference between Discordia and the Church of the Subgenius.

Here’s another page by Rev. Mungojerry Grindlebone, the author of the Erisian Hymn on page 00019. It’s an application to the Erisian movement, the counterpart to POEE. This is Kerry Thornley’s half of the classic Discordian society.

The page resembles a bureaucratic application form, but the questions themselves are absurd. This entry path to the Erisian movement shows  the relationship between bureaucracy and absurdity. If you’ve ever spent hours filling out forms that in all likelihood nobody will read, you already understand.

The Lick Here box in the bottom right corner has been an ongoing mystery to Discordians. Many of us have licked our monitors or print-outs of the Principia, hoping that we’re one of the lucky 25. Discordian folklore posits that Mal and Omar dropped a hit of LSD into 25 copies of the Principia.

I imagine some people must have been quite startled as they started to come up.

This is the main page describing POEE.

Most interesting to me is the five degrees of POEE. As a member of this POEE, you’d climb up the hierarchy as you learned about Eris. But the Polyfather is not the highest rank, the popes are. And most of the popes don’t know anything about Discordia. And anybody can be a pope, every man woman and child on this earth is a genuine and certified Pope. So you don’t have to go through the other four steps to be the head of POEE.

There’s a lesson here about no-mind. The Buddha says that everybody’s a Buddha, they just don’t realize it.  Students of Zen spend years training their minds to be childlike. The POEE hierarchy recognizes that there’s nothing really mystical or occult about enlightenment, it’s accessible to everybody.  There are people who walk around confident, aware, and unconflicted, doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and they didn’t need a single spiritual teaching to do that. A seeker could spend decades on a spiritual path, and then meet somebody who seems to have mastered the teaching, despite having never heard of it.

"Riel Monkey" by Riel Hilario, from the exhibit "if an apostle looks in no monkey can look out"

The hierarchy is also a reminder to be humble. We are not walking on the “true spiritual path”, and to entertain that idea is an ego game. Regular pedestrians “get” Discordianism a lot better than any of us, so give them a break. They are the highest members of POEE, they are totally free of Discordian orthodoxy and dogma. You could learn a thing or two from them!

The quote at the bottom of the page is from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a German scientist and satirist. This line is one of his most famous aphorisms. Originally, it’s not talking about the Principia, but all books. In another similar aphorism, Lichtenberg clarifies, “When a book and a head collide and it sounds hollow, then the book doesn’t need to be blamed for it.”  This is line shares a chord with a warning later in the book: If you think the Principia is just a joke, go back and read it again.