Historia Discordia

He was a major contributor to, and briefly in charge of, one of the first 'zines of the modern libertarian movement, The Liberal Innovator (later just The Innovator). (It was published from 1964-69.) He helped found the Only True Religion of Discordianism and thus inspired one of the greatest libertarian novels of all time, Illuminatus! He's the only man to write a roman a clef, The Idle Warriors, inspired by Lee Harvey Oswald before that fateful day in Dallas. And, to hear him tell it, he was a possible government mind-control stooge and patsy implicated in some way in the Kennedy assassination–possibly as a second Oswald, whom he was Marine buddies with and some say resembled closely enough. (I don't see it myself.)

He is, of course, the late Kerry Thornley, and his fascinatingly bizarre life story is told with verve in a new book, The Prankster and The Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, by Adam Gorightly, which I highly recommend to those intrigued by this blog entry, whether old Erisites or those new to the strange wonders of Thornley.