[Music]
Monster House Presents
It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
A giant airing creature, a body, a mask.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands of Scotland
gets a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
[Music]
Monster Talk
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith.
And I'm Karen Stolzner.
For at least a decade, I've been trying to understand how ideas transfer and mutate over time.
One reason for this is that like many who dive into the supernatural, the conspiratorial, or the parapsychological,
you start to notice unexpected connections everywhere.
Humans have an exceptional ability to find patterns in meaning.
Those science shows these abilities exist in other species. We stand out in our capacity for abstract thinking and planning.
But finding explanations doesn't always mean finding the truth.
When ancient people saw lightning, it was easy to attribute it to angry gods.
Eventually though, we began to direct our suspicions that others in our community
and conspiracies became a way to explain events.
While some conspiracies do exist, many are rooted in fantasies, often fueled by hate,
and a march contempt for evidence-based reality.
Karen and I believe in responding to conspiracies with critical thinking and evidence.
Not all conspiracies have equal merit or plausibility.
Some, like the idea of a second shooter on JFK, are not impossible, just unsupported.
Others, like reptilian shapeshifters drinking a dream of chrome,
fall apart with even the dullest application of Occam's razor,
if anyone takes the time to wield it.
This stuff used to be fun for me.
I would read through French zines and weird publications and indie bookstores
and marvel at the insane, hyper-connected ideas that bubbled up in the minds of readers across the country.
In college, friends turned me on to the Illuminatus trilogy,
but none of them ever made such a compelling case for its contents
that I bothered at the time to try and read it.
Also, if I had read it, I would have been shocked at the detached quasi-pornographic bits
and probably would have been embarrassed at a finishing it.
But I've changed.
In the mid-1990s, I encountered Steve Jackson's card game,
Illuminati New World Order, or Inemwo,
a strategic game of secret overlords vying for world control.
It was fun, occasionally disturbingly plausible,
but still just a game, and the trilogy was just some books.
But then, recently, I saw the Adam Curtis documentary series,
I can't get you out of my head.
In the UK, you can stream it on the BBC's iPlayer,
and I'll put a link to a YouTube channel that has all six episodes.
But those type of channels tend to evaporate in a puff of copyright smoke
when too many people notice them.
The documentary postulates many things about how a world more connected than ever before
has degraded into clusters of ideological factions,
often guided by dark conspiratorial thinking.
It's a very trippy and depressing journey, but full of very, very thought-provoking ideas.
Now here's the thing.
When you look at some of these conspiracies, like the Bloodlabel,
the Freemasons, or the Illuminati, you can get overwhelmed.
It's so much.
If you start to question each idea,
any of them can take a lot of reading and a lot of work to figure out
if it's plausible or is it just nonsense.
Our sincere hope for Monster Talk is that we introduce enough critical thinking tools along the way
that you become armed in figuring this stuff out on your own,
that you become inoculated against nonsense and default to doubt
before falling down these rabbit holes.
There was a famous creationist named Dwayne Gish,
who would lay out so many wild ideas at once
that it was impossible for anyone to respond to all of his claims during a debate.
We get overwhelmed when too many ideas are thrown at us
and we don't have time to think them through.
That's one thing.
And another thing is that these conspiracy ideas don't always get transferred
from one person to another intact, conceptual bits break off and glom onto another idea.
The In-Wall game played in this space beautifully.
In his 2013 book, A Culture of Conspiracy,
researcher Michael Barcun warned about improvisational conspiracy theory.
But by 2016, we were seeing QAnon turn this same stuff into a horror show with real world implications.
What began as a playful, intellectual romp through these theories in the 60s and 70s
somehow became enmeshed in dark and serious takes that ended up with situations like pizza gate.
People want to understand the world and conspiracy sit out there as an easy explanation for why bad things happen.
Maybe it's an angry god, maybe it's a curse, or maybe they have everything stacked against you
if you could just figure out who they are.
I don't want to overstate the significance of Operation Mindfuck.
Yet, I don't want you to be ignorant of it.
The players were tricksters in the mythic sense
and the people who opened the can with the spring-loaded snake are all the rest of us.
Only somewhere down the road, somebody replaced the silly fake snakes with deadly real ones.
In religious studies, there's a concept called syncretism,
wherein two or more concepts get merged into one cohesive doctrine or idea.
It happens often.
Consider the West African religion of Vudon, which became secretized into Vudu in Haiti,
incorporating elements of Catholicism with elements of Vudun.
But any long-lasting religion will pick up ideas and incorporate them over time.
The Illuminatus trilogy, while a work of fiction is what I would call "kitchen syncretism."
It throws in everything with trickster whimsy.
It's a novel, it's fiction, but somewhere along the way, for many people, these beliefs became true.
This is part one of our two-part interview with Adam Gorightly, on how the creators of Discordianism
and the authors of the Illuminatus trilogy created a whimsical, improvisational, trickster, counter-culture, web of ideas
that turned into something darker decades later.
Maybe it was inevitable, but like the aforementioned documentary, I can't get it out of my head.
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Monster Talk
Adam Gorightly is an author who's written extensively on topics that will be of interest to all our listeners.
And these include topics like the Manson family, the history of 60s counter-culture, UFOs, Neo-Paganism, and many other cultural weirdness topics.
And today, we're going to be talking about some stuff that has both, well, to be honest, delighted and appalled me over the course of my life,
and I expect you'll find it to be a wild ride.
So, welcome to Monster Talk. Adam Gorightly.
Thanks for having me.
So, this is kind of a sprawling story we're going to be talking about.
And I'll just go ahead and say, part of our topic here is a thing called Operation Mind Fuck.
I'm going to do my best to bleep that for the free listeners, but we're probably going to say F-bombs all over the place as this goes along.
Just if I miss one in my apologies, but here we go.
So, you can use shorthand, call it O-M.
Yeah, do you think that was intentional to sound like "OM?"
I don't know. It'll save you some editing, though.
That's true. Okay, so we could try that. We'll try it. Although I do love saying Operation Mind Fuck, sorry.
He does, yeah.
So, because I guess as Karen and I were kind of discussing before we started the interview, there are all kinds of countercultures,
but I think of a big capital C, capital C counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s.
But what is that counterculture and what was it reacting against?
Are we talking about the Discordian movement?
Well, we will, but yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And it seems like that fits in there, right?
The Discordians were part of the counterculture movement for sure, and they kind of, it's odd.
I guess we should talk about the origins of the Discordian society and how they fit into the counterculture.
Well, it really started in 1959 after these teenage kids, Greg Hill and Carrie Thornley.
And they were both very inquisitive, or they visited the understanding the UFO group, you know, so they were interested in those type of things, UFOs and paranormal,
but also a lot of the emerging politics that started in the late 50s.
Thornley had an interest in Iran, an objectivism, which kind of turned into libertarianism.
So early on, he was interested in libertarianism and anarchism.
And he said libertarianism, you know, what that kind of represented back in the late 50s.
I don't even think they were called it then into the 60s was quite different than what we think of as libertarianism today.
Anyway, Hill and Thornley and another guy, a kid named Bob Newport, they used to meet in Bowling, Ali in Whittier, California, around 1959 actually found this bowling alley.
Today it's been turned into a Bev Moe, but they've kept some of the original googly architecture.
And so what the reason they met in Bowling, Ali's was basically it was a, believe it was Greg Hill, at least what Bob Newport told me, Greg Hill looked old enough to order alcohol, so they could drink.
They could have these philosophical discussions about everything under the sun and one of those discussions evolved into why there's so much chaos in the world.
And eventually they make the long story short, they decided, you know, since you've had all these patriarchal religions over time that haven't worked out so well, maybe they should use a matriarch and in specific the Greek goddess of chaos in the score, the iris or in the Greek known as dyschordia.
So they basically started a spoof religion and their own society called the dyschordian society in 1959. It was just kind of an in joke between these guys, kind of just a platform for them to riff on spoofing, you know, major religions, etc.
themselves and this goof that they were members of this religious set called the dyschordians.
So this was just an in joke between two or three, you know, those three guys back in 1959. So we move into the 60s. God, I don't even want to get into the Thornley Oswald connection yet.
Sure, sure, although it is interesting. Yeah, we can put a pin in it that, yeah, Thornley, Thornley, new Oswald in the Marine, that later really plays into the story.
But jumping ahead to like the early 60s after Thornley got out of the Marines, he was the first person to edit.
Well, it wasn't the first person, but he was the editor of the first libertarian newsletter. I think there was an editor before him, but it had only been existence in a couple years for a couple years.
And so he was interested in those things libertarianism and archism.
He identified himself one time or another is an anarchy libertarian, they call them in there was a lot of that in that mid 60s period, a lot of these folks that were identifying themselves as libertarians also became part of the hippie movement back to the land counter culture that, you know, started experimenting with
psychedelics and different types of art forms and kind of trying to break free of the status quo, you know, so that that was all part of they seem, you know, how Thornley fit into all this and you'd be surprised how many of these folks during that period, you know, were into libertarianism as well, which was back then more of like
telling the government to stay out of our business, you know, our sex lives, what we can do to our own consciousness, whether it was through meditation or psychedelic drugs, you know, those type of things.
So that's where it kind of fit into all that and around that time, Thornley, and this is like 65, 66 is when he made contact with Robert Anton Wilson.
Wilson at that time was the editor of the playboy advisor, which was a letter column to the playboy, there were there was two letters to the editor's columns.
And the fourth one, which dealt with kind of the sex stuff and then there was the advisor that dealt more with civil rights issues, political stuff, even getting into the realm of conspiracy theories and these type of things.
And he started interacting during this period, you know, because Thornley was editing that libertarian newsletter, they were sharing their thoughts about different anarchists and different systems, you know, discussing things that are topics nowadays, like alternate forms of money,
private postal systems that people started, you know, that was part of this, the anarchy libertarian things they were interested at that time.
And he was also in Wilson was introduced by Thornley to discordianism around that time. They had started like in 64 after Thornley got back from the Marines.
He and Greg Hill wrote the so called Bible of discordian, Principia, discordia and started sharing that among friends in the counter culture and this evolved over time that there's different additions of the Principia, discordian it became kind of a group art project, pranks, spoof thing they would have these what they called groovy packs, which they would send to one another somebody.
Get an envelope and maybe you would stick a joint of marijuana in there, but also something funny they found in a newspaper some artwork, some collage stuff and they send it to the next person on the list.
And they to add their own jokes or whatever to it smoke the joint maybe put another joint in there and a lot of this material contributed to different additions of the Principia, discordia.
Hey, if you know how was this distributed like when the Principia was it like, memographed or like how did they or was it just yeah, how did that work?
I inherited the discordian archives when was that back in 2009.
And the original I say that because what I found in there was the original addition of the Principia, discordia, the holy grill.
Originally there was five copies made of the Principia, discordia and all of those were lost apparently until I got to what were great hills, discordian archives and in there was the first addition of the Principia, discordian.
It was just there's a bizarre story about that too that they, thoughtfully in hill basically created that, put it all together during a period there were living in New Orleans in the early 60s, 61s, 62 and they had a friend who worked in Jim Garrison's office who used their copy and machines after hours or memograph machine, whatever it was.
Create those five additions oddly enough another one of those bizarre synchronicity so over time, yeah, it was like the second addition it started to change quite a bit it got more of the there is is in jokes and
drugs jokes and different people like Robert Anton Wilson some of his material ended up in it like Camden Beneris is another name they were exchanging all the different ideas and thoughts about and so
changed over time to more of this kind of free form collage kind of 60s counter culture type jokes and hill made like the second addition was a maybe a hundred copies that he produced and the third addition was like 300 copies but it was
basically just a handful of people you know a few hundred people across the country found this for whatever reason whatever networks they were dialed into until in 1975 the illuminati was published and the
illuminati mentioned this book called the principia discordia and you know the illuminati was in a fiction fictional work so a lot of people read this assume that the principia discordia was the something made up that they were
talking about in the illuminati trilogy before we get into the the mate of this that seems like there are somebody players in this story and you really
And answering a lot of the questions before we've even had to ask them.
But there's just one other player that we've heard about.
If you could tell us a little bit about them, Robert Shay, who was he?
- Shay was also an editor at Playboy and he and Bob Wilson became friends.
And it had to do with Operation Mine Buck partly.
And Shay became a player in this discordian network.
And they all used different, they all had their discordian, different discordian names
and they started their own discordian caballs and they were all doing different pranks
and stuff.
So Shay was Josh the deal.
And Wilson was, Mordeky the foul was his discordian name.
And then, Shay Kyl was, Mel Eclipse the younger.
Kerry Thornley was Omar Kiam Ravenhurst.
And so they all started, they all used these different names for a lot of times when they
were writing these prank letters to each other and sending to other people.
And they started their own different caballs, discordian caballs.
And where I was going with this was so Shay and Wilson got involved in that.
And that kind of played into what Wilson was doing at Playboy.
This was around the time that Thornley was started getting harassed by Jim Garrison and
his investigation.
Garrison was claiming, I'm jumping around here but all.
- No, you have to.
It's a crazy story.
- I'll make sure.
- Yeah, I'll try to make this make sense.
- Well, I should say Jim Garrison is a key figure in the JFK, like a secondary JFK investigation
and the heart of that JFK movie, right?
So people will know him, yeah, from that, I imagine.
And so you don't really don't see Kerry Thornley in the movie but he was one of the key people
that Garrison went after and he claimed that Thornley, who knew Oswald and the Marines for
a brief period of time, was basically the second Oswald who was going around pretending
to be Oswald prior to the assassination.
Thornley wrote a really the first book on Oswald after the assassination was this kind of
this quicky tabloid book called Oswald that Garrison claimed it was designed to set up Oswald
after the fact to paint him as a Russian, etc.
So that was some of the charges that Garrison had Garrison claim Kerry was a CIA agent.
And one of the things that came out of that, they had a bunch of, Garrison had a bunch of
bald people, uh, feeding him information and one of them was a guy named Alan Chapman
who's described to the theory that the Illuminati was involved in the JFK assassination.
Now, when Thornley heard this, he thought it was pretty hilarious and he shared that with
the other discordians.
And that started one aspect of Operation Mindfuck.
They decided to, uh, prank Garrison and some of the other people promoting some of these,
wild stories about Thornley.
And so, they, and I, she has some of these letters in my book, the, the, the story of
the story of the origins of the discordian society.
They were writing these letters, Wilson, for instance, pretending to be a member of the
Illuminati contacting Garrison's different Garrison people claiming he'd heard the stories
that had, uh, about the Illuminati connected to the assassination and Wilson under his
guys and Maliklips, the, or, um, uh, more to kind of the foul claim this was false that the
Illuminati were actually the good guys here and they were, uh, here to enlighten mankind,
you know, he's just, just to basically blow people's minds and maybe just to, uh, get back
at Garrison for, uh, out of the shenanigans he was involved in.
But they were contacting other people to, uh, during this period, the John Birch society
or different people aligned with the John Birch society were promoting these stories about
the Illuminati that were, they were basically, um, the hidden hand behind communism and the
racial unrest of the, uh, 1960s and that they had been involved in the, uh, JFK, MLK, RFK
assassination.
A lot of, a lot of these things were flowing around at the time too and what Wilson did is
part of the operation mindfuck.
He, uh, dictated it kind of a fake letter.
He, uh, sent it to, uh, Playboy, which he then answered is the, the, the, basically the
theme was it the person writing the letter and was really Wilson was asking the editor,
the, he had heard these rumors about this ancient, uh, group that was connected to the, uh,
Hachishan, you know, the, uh, the old man on the mountain, the old man of the mountain,
yeah.
They were connected with the Illuminati and now there's rumors that they are behind these,
uh, major assassinations and so Wilson went ahead and answered this letter and he actually
got some, by this time, Thornley had kind of become an expert on the Illuminati too, they,
so they kind of shared notes and this became a kind of a famous letter in Playboy over
the years that helped revive the Smithology of the Illuminati and let me talk briefly.
Well, Adam, if I can interject, um, we were just wanting to, uh, you've talked about, uh,
operation mindfuck or, or, um, several times now, could you tell us a little bit about
what it is and how it came to be and, and when?
So we talked about how they, you know, started forming this network, they had collaborations
with, uh, kind of sending stuff to the mill, art projects, uh, etc and sharing different
ideas and one of these things initially is what they called a Jake, J-A-K-E and I don't
know where that came from specifically, but what the deal was, uh, for instance, if there
was like some newspaper columnist that they liked something he did that they got to kick
out of the, uh, Grey Hill, for instance, would send out a letter to the Discordian list
and tell them on such a, such date, we all need to write a letter during, uh, under our Discordian
personas and bam, bomb, bombard whoever this is and so the individual would get, you
know, a dozen different letters over the course of the week from across the country by people
with names like Mordeky the, uh, Fowl attached to some strange Discordian cabal riffing on
whatever they came up with, you know, and they did, they did this as well and see the letters
in my book, uh, Discordia or Historia Discordia reprinted a lot of these original letters where
they were, would also send letters to Robert Welch with the John Birch Society, and some
of the extreme Christian anti-communist, uh, people during that period, just a tweak with
them, you know, and create this, uh, weird feedback loop.
So that was part of what Operation Mindfuck was just to, uh, kind of prank, uh, to, uh,
maybe raise the consciousness or get people to see a different, uh, way to, uh, kind of,
tweak, tweak with their own realities to get them maybe to see another aspect or a
nor humorous angle of, uh, something or just to confound them with all the chaos, Hell,
or, er, er, um, very 60s. Yeah. And so that was Operation Mindfuck became, you know, those
were, they called those shakes, but that became Operation Mindfuck and they kind of geared
that towards, uh, Garrison as well. Now over the years, this is kind of weirdly evolved
into people still invoke Operation Mindfuck and Discordianism and it started manifesting
people were using these terms like in 2015, 2016 when you had all this stuff like, uh,
Peppy the Frog and this chaos magic type stuff that was tied to, uh, kind of white supremacist
alt-right, those type of things. And a lot of people who were traditionally identify as
Discordian, as Discordians were kind of taken a back that had been appropriated. Now,
it's not to say a Discordian can be whatever they want to be, you know, and that was the
famous Discordian mantra, we Discordians must stick apart. There was really no rules
to it all either, you know, monster tall. You've been listening to Monster Talk, the
science show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith. And I'm Karen Stolzner.
You just listened to part one of our two part interview with Adam Gorightly. I'll put
links to Adam's books in this week's and next week's episode notes and I'll also link
to some of the books and writings of the characters in this crazy story. Obviously, the Discordians
and the Illuminatus trilogy are not the only vectors these ideas had into the counterculture.
The John Birch Society, the Theosophists, and any number of other fringe and radical groups
were tapping into anti-Musonic and anti-illuminati ideas that stretched back to the founding of the
United States. But the playful tricksters were helping to mainstream the fringe. And one
of the phrases you'll hear throughout the Illuminatus trilogy is the idea that these
conspiracy groups want to "imminitize the Eskitan." That's fancy words that mean they believe
the end of the world is coming, so why not hurry at the hell up? In the book, it's amusing.
It's played for laugh. In the present, they're called accelerationists and they are very,
very real. So we will continue our conspiracy romp next week. Stay tuned!
We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk. Each episode we strive to bring you
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Monster Talk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
I'm Benoord.
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