Five Tons of Flax (Every Religion Needs Its Discordians)

[kiya]

A while back I was chatting about various and sundry things with oldsma and happened to make a side reference to my slightly erratic but yet devoted Discordianism; she nodded and said, "Every religion needs its Discordians."

Which is a very interesting concept to prod at a bit.


There is the child's voice, speaking of the emperor: "Hey, that man's a cabbage or something!"

I think the role of the questioner, sometimes the trickster, sometimes the challenger, is an important one to have in any organisation -- whether officially placed or not. (And I am reminded, tangentially, of the Werewolf: the Apocalypse game structure that formalises this role as well.) Is this rule sound? Perhaps it was sound when written, but is it sound now? Is this structure adequate? Has it withered over time or not met the needs of now in some way? Are the people sound? Are they doing the jobs they're supposed to be doing?

Someone has to be able to ask those questions.

I have an odd notion of Discordian sainthood. I will write about that another time. But one of the things that strikes me as a reasonable quality is the tendency to go to the people who have the information -- not the people who are supposed to be in front, not the people who are supposed to be in charge, but the people who know what's going on. This is an interesting sort of subversive; a healthy structure will facilitate this process, an unhealthy one will inhibit it. (A handy illustration of positive and negative aneristic energy, that.)

But back to the cabbages. Or something. "Some say he is a holy man. Others say he is a shithead." And I turn to the Contendings of Heru and Set, and the interpretation I place on that particular myth: Heru-sa-Aset was not, in fact, fit for the throne at the beginning of the Contendings. Set called Him a child stinking of His mother's milk -- suggesting that He was a whining brat too much under the control of Aset to be king in His own right. Through meeting Set's challenges, Heru-sa-Aset grew up, came to the point where He was acknowledged and acknowledgeable as king. He had to face being called a cabbage or something and prove he was a person.

Some would call Set destruction, but I think that that is not entirely accurate; He is of transformation. The weak spots are challenged and revealed to be false or defective, and thus destroyed and able to be replaced with something strong. I would expect that He is much opposed to the Curse of Greyface, as destructive order would be anathema to His nature -- stagnation, constriction, preservation of the outmoded solely because it is there. (And now I'm pondering Calvin and the transmogrifier. . . I get somewhat surreal when I'm on cold meds.)

Religions contain reality grids, ways of looking at the world and setting it up as an order/disorder matrix. I tend towards the opinion that those grids that are the most functional contain a mechanism for correcting and updating them so they don't drift away from the underlying reality -- to keep them relevant and living. And here is Set, shaking things up, questioning, challenging, fulfilling that place, demanding to know whether the throne is inhabited by a cabbage or something, storming around and being pushy. "Why is this here?" "Who are you?" "What's going on, huh?" "This wall doesn't look like I could lean on it, it'll tip right over and take the outhouse down with it -- *WHAM* -- see? I fuckin' told you."

Set and Heru, the balanced brothers: order depends upon chaos, chaos depends upon order. Without Set's challenges, Heru would stagnate, the life in his order would become rote rather than living, there would be neheh without djet. Without Heru's structure, there would be nowhere to stand; the sands of the desert shift with every storm.



The other major thing, the critical thing, is the sense of the ludicrous, for several reasons. First of all -- the ludicrous is a useful tool to wedge into the heart of defective order. It's looney; show how looney it is, and all of a sudden there's motivation to clear that stuff away and build something new.

But the other thing. From outside the right grid, all religion, all religious ritual, is nutty. It all looks insane. Like making stone boats -- back to the Contendings here, where Heru-sa-Aset made a wooden boat and covered it with false stone, and Set lopped off the top of a mountain to make His boat -- unless you're working with pumice (and sometimes you are, and that's a great gag if you can hack it) -- sometimes it just makes no damn sense.

A well-honed sense of the just plain wackiness of things strikes me as important. lysana says that one of Dagda's Old Irish epithets translates as "Shithead". Set hacked off the top of a mountain to make a boat to race against Heru. I could probably go on, but I don't wanna. I think it's a good idea to dig through the records of people over three thousand years dead to find religious rituals to do now; this is, I have to admit, a very funny concept. I'm floating stone boats here. Some of the damn things sink.

"I sunk it!"

Comments

On reality grids....

[brooksmoses]

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, -- objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery, and make them wait on his guests at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street, shopmen or barkeepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is threatenable and insultable in us. 'Tis the same with our idolatries. People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience.

There is also a Frost poem that I wanted to quote here, about following a bird in the woods and finding oneself lost, but I cannot seem to find it, although I have pages through the complete and unabridged poems of Robert Frost, and am perhaps forced to conclude that it is not a poem Frost wrote, for all that it is in my memory a Frostian poem.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I guess in Christianity (and perhaps in Judaism, but others will know better than I) the Discordian role is the role of the prophet, which is one we no longer do very well. The established churches mostly shoo anyone with any hint of a vocation in the priestly/pastoral direction, and the charismatic churches either have no quality control at all (no process of discernment, to use the technical term), or base the process on conformity to scripture, which only works so long as God isn't trying to do something new. I have read that in the current Anglican fracas about the consecration of gay bishops and blessing of gay marriages, the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA sees the US and Canadian churches in the prophetic role to the rest of the Communion, which is interesting, and makes some sense to me - but then I try to imagine Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel signing the communique that came out of the bishops' meeting in Northern Ireland a few weeks ago, and I despair.

Er, that turned into a thoroughly Anglican little rant. Don't mind me.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

The way I see it, too many modern pagan trads are trying too hard to land in the realm of orthodoxy. blackfyr and I sought some feedback from other CRs on the Feast of Age ritual, and one person ripped our heads off for daring to use the five provinces motif because it was too close to Wicca. Nevermind the fact we were evoking something that happened there. Oh, no. Too Wiccan. Bad Celts, no pork.

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Five provinces motif? I've never heard that particular phrase before. What does it mean?

[blackfyr.livejournal.com]

There is some evidence that the Irish Celts, at least, saw the everyday world as having five cardinal directions, west, north, east, south and center. The kingdoms of Ireland echoed this with Meath, the kingdom that contained the high-king's seat at Tara, being in the middle.

In the ritual we did, as a means of invoking the sacred space, we called on the five kingdoms, their directions and their symbolic properties. The idea was to symbolically place Ireland on the ritual space as an overlay, since the ritual we were doing was commemorating the feast by which the gods gain/maintain their immortality.

The person doing this critique felt that calling the directions, even though we were not casting a circle and cutting of the space, was too Wiccan in format.

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's interesting. Thank you for the information! I hadn't heard of this particular concept attached to the Real World, although now that I know about it, I think White Wolf lifted it for their Exalted setting.

I know very little about Celtic mythology, sadly. (My calling seems to be to one pesky Norse creative genius/utter annoyance.) I'd be interested in learning more about the feast you mentioned. What is it called? That way I can go look it up. (:

[blackfyr.livejournal.com]

It's called the Feast of Age (note that it is not the Feast of AgeS as that brings up some kind of computer game reference). And the only references we can find to it online are to two stories where it's mentioned, almost in passing. We do know it involved Mannannan's pigs and Goibhniu's ale (and I'm sure I just mangled the spelling on the second name).

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Hmm. OK. Thanks much! I will poke around and see what I can find out. Sounds interesting! (:

[keshwyn]

Dear Set,

If I go back to Utah and find that the beavers have felled the outhouse again, I will know whose fault it is. I cannot build the thing strong enough to survive a felled tree, and it is meant to be tippable so that we can move it when the hold fills up with fertilizer.

-- Keshwyn

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

ROTFLOL! *falls over*

[blackfyr.livejournal.com]

Some would call Set destruction, ...

Ironically "set destruction" is a psychological appellation that almost exactly describes what you were talking about. It involves tearing down the model of reality that a person has built up so that they can deal with things and forcing them to see the world as it actually is, since many times the models that get built up don't reflect reality and the changes that have come along.

[kiya]

I would not be surprised if He found that completely hilarious.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

But the other thing. From outside the right grid, all religion, all religious ritual, is nutty. It all looks insane. Like making stone boats -- back to the Contendings here, where Heru-sa-Aset made a wooden boat and covered it with false stone, and Set lopped off the top of a mountain to make His boat -- unless you're working with pumice (and sometimes you are, and that's a great gag if you can hack it) -- sometimes it just makes no damn sense.

The more you say about this kind of stuff the more I'm convinced I live in a nation of Discordians.

Concrete yachts are reasonably common here. And so are fibreglass ones. Anything made the right shape will float.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Very thought-provoking.

My spirituality isn't particularly highly-developed, so I tend to think of these things in terms of mundane examples (and I also think this might be an example of what you're talking about...)

There is definitely a need for someone to say "this isn't working (well enough)". And in many subcultures, anyone who takes on that role becomes a scapegoat, as though the reason things aren't working well enough is that someone has pointed it out.

I think part of the unpopularity of the questioner, the trickster, is that the most blatant cases (at least that I've encountered) aren't actually asking enough relevant questions, pointing out enough true flaws; they're just asking "why?" "why?" "why?" and over-analysing everything until people get annoyed, or worse.

There's an expression about continually pulling up the carrots to check on how they're growing...

So just as the system doesn't work if no-one ever asks why, the system also doesn't work if someone is asking why all the time to everything. Good questioning is a complex skill to learn.

my slightly erratic but yet devoted Discordianism

Sounds like it's on the right track, to me.

[kiya]

I think part of the unpopularity of the questioner, the trickster, is that the most blatant cases (at least that I've encountered) aren't actually asking enough relevant questions, pointing out enough true flaws; they're just asking "why?" "why?" "why?" and over-analysing everything until people get annoyed, or worse.

This is one of the reasons I tend to say that the most common failure state of Discordianism is incredibly annoying.