> I was just interested as to how serious you were as to your beliefs
> in Discordianism...
Well, it's the way I view the world... I don't know if that counts as serious.
> I, myself, would be a Discordian if I could sincearly believe in any
> religion and I was wondering, among other things, what drew you to
> Eris and why.
It sort of just happened. Back in the gymnasium (roughly the equivalent of your high school, I think) I and a friend started our own religion (mooseism), based on our own thoughts and fevered imaginations. It started out as a joke, but for some obscure reason it refused to die. After a year or two, my friend moved and I remained as sole head of the Mooseist religion. Yet another year later, mooseism had mutated quite a bit and was more or less just a statement of my personal view of the world. People still refused to ignore it and let it die, even when I asked them to. More time passed, and I started reading books on the occult and such.
(
There's a bit of a story there, actually. I'd read Philip Dick's "The
Man in the High Castle" and wanted a copy of the I Ching. I was
totally unable to find one. Not a single bookstore in all of Stockholm
had a copy of it. That summer I went to London for a week. I had
completely forgotten about the I Ching. Until I found a copy, inserted
between two copies of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons "Dungeon
Master's Guide" at the Virgin Megastore. How it had gotten there I'll
never know, but I bought it. The blasted things actually works,
too. After a few accurate predictions I decided I don't *want* to know
what's going to happen in the future and stopped using it.
The same summer, after I'd returned from London, I was on one of my
usual visits to a favourite occult/unusual bookstore (which suddenly
had plenty of copies of the I Ching, I might add) when I spotted the
name "Necronomicon" on a shelf near the floor. "What?!", I thought,
and bent down to give it a closer examination. As I bent down, I
clumsily banged into another shelf, and a rather large book fell a
millimeter or two from my head. *smack* it said, and landed face up
just in fron of my face. "Magick In Theory and Practice", the cover
said. "Gotta be an omen," I thought and bought it. The Necronomicon
I'd seen proved to be the boring and worthless Simon version, BTW.
)
Someone recommended the Illuminatus! trilogy, which I read. Discordianism sounded like a cool thing. "Too bad it's not real", I thought. Shortly thereafter I found Wilson's "Cosmic Trigger" and a copy of the PD. "Cosmic Trigger" I found among the works of Tanith Lee in an SF bookstore (Tanith Lee was and is one of my favourite writers, so her books is one of the places I always check when in a bookstore), the PD in a small second-hand store located in a murky cellar (I did find it again, but it closed for good less than a week after I first found it).
I read them, and found to my *immense* surprise that not only did Discordianism exist, but its beliefs were almost *exactly* the same as those I had created for Mooseism. I decided that Mooseism was a discordian sect, but didn't tell anyone.
Shortly after that, all of those who had stubbornly refused to ignore Mooseism for years seemed to forget all about it.
That's how I came to be a discordian. A few more years of life has only deepened my conviction that too much order and too much disorder are booth Bad Things, and that our society is far too orderly.
Hm, this got long. Maybe I'll make a web page of it :-)
> That is, if you don't mind tell a complete stranger.
I don't. I think. If you're going to publish my answer and make BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars from it, I want a cut, though.
> (And trust me, you won't find many stranger then me! *grin*)
Can you prove that? ;-)
> BTW, nice home page.
Thank you.
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calle@lysator.liu.seLast updated: Setting Orange, the 13 day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3163, 11:38:56.