Another Sacred Ritual: Stirring The Pot

One thing I like about this sublime faith is that there actually are no rituals. At least they aren't built in. But you can certainly come up with your own. The 'Bavarian Fire Drill' described in Illuminatus! is a fine example. But again, I would hate to see anyone's imagination limited by what has gone before.

One I just heard about was The Bookstore Maneuver, currently in use in a town that prefers to be nameless, on the West Coast. My contact there is fond of taking books out of the "Atheism" section, the ones with noncommital titles, and sliding them into the "Christianity" section in hopes that someone will start reading it and have a bit of a start when they realize what they're looking at. Heh.

That's the Discordian equivalent of going to a restaurant seeking to take care of those hunger pangs, and asking for "mild spice" in your Pad Thai. Now, I'm wondering what would happen if you slipped in something like The Book Of Lies by Aleister Crowley. I can't remember whether it says anything obvious on the jacket like "Crowley was a prominent drug addict and Satanist." He might be too well-known for it to work, but you never know. I like to picture some exceptionally rigid type getting a ways into Crowley's poetry, and suddenly flinging the book into a corner so he can go home and scrub himself with Lava. That would be "extra spice," with a bonus side of Squid.

Man, I don't think there's a bookstore in my whole county that has an "Atheism" section! But I have many opportunities to engage in one of my personal rituals, 'Enjoying The Discrepancies,' when I'm in the town where I work. Here's a for-instance: there were only 2 bookstores there for years, until the trade-in-your-old-paperbacks place folded. The only bookstore left in that overwhelmingly Pentecostal town is, um, Wiccan.

Another discrepancy to enjoy is the way Wicca, an unseasoned potato pancake of a religion if there ever was one, gets fundies ALL UPSET. If they knew what they were fighting they might disperse in confusion. Either way, DISCORDIA WINS. I once sat and listened in horror as a guy I knew described how picketers closed the Wiccan bookstore down and rode the owners out of town on a rail. It seemed typical for a place that is so Klan-friendly. I went down much, much later to see who had taken over the storefront, and to ask whether they had the joint exorcised before opening for business.

Well, sir, the Wiccan bookstore was still right there. Hee hee! Sometimes the reality of the Discordian saying, NOTHING IS TRUE, is downright bracing. Now if only they would stock some more interesting books, I might actually buy something. All that mealy-mouthed New Age stuff about the Triple Goddess is pretty hard for me to stomach. Sure, it's as valid as any religion out there, but the books put me to sleep. At least the Bible has some good bloodshed in it.