[CT] Temple of Eris, DKM and Discordia

[Daniel Moran]

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The Prophet Harry is a decent guy whose teachings were hijacked by the 
Temples of Eris. The first book about him, Devlin's Razor, may well be 
published next year by QuietVision. Jodi is revising it.

I think I've posted "The Prophet" and "The Fool" from DR before -- they're 
the opening and the bridge. I think you can find them both on kithrup.com.

~~~~~~
The Prophet

The Pacific Ocean vomits up Venice Beach, a time warp psycho ward from 
hell. At the edge of the sand, artists, merchants and fortune tellers ply 
their trades with threatening urgency. Golden skinned musclemen, wearing 
little more than leather belts, pump iron and sweat. Women, wearing even 
less, watch them. Wild-eyed dopers crouch in the sand and dealers loiter in 
whatever shade they can find. Small children build sand castles and blond 
surfers with razor blades taped to their boards kick the castles down. Heat 
waves shimmer up off the water and a thousand sun worshipers invite skin 
cancer into their lives. Tourists wander uncertainly, looking for a 
bargain, or maybe a cop.
The peculiar, the bizarre and the grotesque all saunter merrily along, 
hoping to catch the eye of a wealthy producer, just dying for their type, 
or a wealthier pervert, dying for practically anything.
A man wearing a turban and playing a guitar roller-skates to nirvana.

Harry Devlin killed his beer and dropped the empty bottle back into the ice 
chest. The sun reached down, dragging the moisture from his body; the dry 
air absorbed it almost immediately. People thought of Los Angeles as a 
tropical city, a paradise of beaches and palm trees. In fact it was a 
desert, an arid, wasted expanse of land made green by stolen water and 
imported gardeners.
Harry laid on a lounge chair at the edge of the sand, tanning, while Father 
Spike and Swami Dave tried to sell one of his paintings to a girl who was 
prettier than they were. He pulled a fresh bottle out of the chest and 
popped the cap off with a small bottle opener tethered to the plastic arm 
of the chair. One end of the opener was rounded; the other pointed. Harry's 
father, for some obscure reason, called the bottle openers church keys.
Harry leaned back in his chair. Approaching him from the south was a 
procession of Hare Krishnas, chanting soundlessly and rattling soundless 
tambourines. And drifting down from Malibu was a group of naked Go-Go Girls 
wearing green skin paint and scarlet wigs. Their bagpipes were anything but 
soundless. A collision was inevitable.
Harry glanced from the Krishnas to the Go-Go Girls. He thought the 
collision might take place right where he lay. He let his head fall back, 
closing his eyes. Perhaps they would miss him. He certainly hoped so. A 
Hare Krishna/Go-Go Girl brawl would really be a flaw in what had so far 
been a very nice day.
Mama Aghabaria was built like a warrior, or a mother, although she had been 
neither. She stood just a bit over six feet tall, long, lean and muscular. 
Her breasts were full and heavy, thrusting out, threatening, the nipples 
showing through the thin cotton of her dress. She had broad shoulders, a 
slender waist, rounded hips and endless legs. Her skin was the color of 
Hershey's Dark Chocolate, her hair long, wild and white, her eyes blacker 
and colder than Lucifer's heart. She claimed to know both the Devil and the 
Lord personally and no one who knew her doubted it.
She worked out of a rainbow colored tent. Most days she did a steady 
business:  a handful of the locals wanting a curse or a charm, then a 
couple dozen of the curious, getting their fortunes told so they could go 
back to Spokane or Des Moines and tell the ladies in the bridge club, or 
the boys at the lodge, about their trip to La La Land.
The witch business was slow the day Channel 2 Action News came to the beach.
Mama Aghabaria sat outside her tent, shuffling her tarot cards and waiting 
for Harry Devlin to wake up. He would do so any second. The priest and the 
swami who'd come to the beach with him were about to sell one of his 
paintings. It was a nice painting, a portrait of a woman walking along a 
deserted, wind-swept beach. The woman in the painting bore an uncanny 
resemblance to the blond girl who wanted to buy it.
Harry slept directly across from Mama Aghabaria, on the other side of the 
strip of asphalt that passed in Venice for a boardwalk. Dark blond hair 
reached almost to his shoulders; the stubble coming up on his cheeks and 
chin was brown. His nose was crooked, broken when he'd tumbled face first 
out of a tree at the age of eight; a scar bisected his right eyebrow, a 
souvenir of yet another trip out of the same tree.
Asleep, Harry looked younger and nicer than he was.
The girl who wanted to buy his painting had exactly a hundred and three 
dollars. The priest wanted the whole hundred and three, the swami wanted to 
leave the girl a few dollars.
Harry's eyes opened, the color of chlorinated water, surprisingly pale 
against his tanned skin. He said to the girl, "You can have it."
Mama Aghabaria smiled.
The girl said, "What?"
"The painting. You can have it. You can have it for free. I don't want your 
hundred and three dollars."
The priest said quite clearly, "Shit."
 From the corner of her eye, Mama Aghabaria saw Joey Pak, a sunglasses and 
earring dealer from down the beach, point her out to a suit. The suit had 
removed his jacket and tie and rolled up the sleeves of his fine white 
shirt, but the camouflage wasn't working. He still looked like a suit. She 
frowned slightly, mentally reviewing her business permits, then noticed 
that the suit was being tailed by a tall young man carrying a minicam. They 
crossed over to her, momentarily eclipsing her view of Harry.
They were exactly on time.
"Mrs. Aghabaria?" The suit spoke in a deep, professionally trained voice. 
"I'm Bob Kinly from Channel 2 Action News. We're doing a color piece on 
Venice Beach and were wondering if we could interview you."
The conga player who had been crouched in the shadow of Mama Aghabaria's 
tent began beating a sleepy tattoo on his drum. The suit shot him a look of 
annoyance.
"Mrs. Aghabaria?" he prompted.
Across from them, the girl hurried off with her painting. The priest and 
the swami fell to arguing over whether leaving the Canadian bacon off a 
pizza was a morally superior act. Mama Aghabaria supposed the morality of 
it all depended on whether or not they left off the sausage and the 
pepperoni, too.
The swami called the priest a fucking Papist and the priest said, "Oh, yeah?"
Mama Aghabaria made a vague gesture with one arm. "Interview them. I don't 
talk to anyone for free." She spoke in the flat, almost accentless voice of 
a native Californian. The conga player beat a little faster on his drum.
The suit looked across the boardwalk with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm. 
The priest announced loudly that Canadian bacon was inherently immoral 
anyway, so what difference did it make?
"I'll pay you," the suit said. The Krishnas and green Go-Go girls met. Only 
the suit and the swami glanced over at the ensuing melee, the suit 
uneasily, the swami fondly.
"No thanks. I don't want to be on the news. It'd scare away my regulars."
The man eyed Harry and his friends again. "Are they anyone?"
The guy with the camera touched a button, turning to pan across Harry and 
his friends. He sighted in on a painting of a blood spattered room, 
shifting in for a close up.
Mama Aghabaria smiled. "The tall one with the red ponytail is Swami Dave. 
He's a Hare Krishna. Watch out for him, he'll try to save you. The boy 
standing next to him is Father Spike. He's a Catholic priest. He doesn't 
care if you're saved or not."
"Don't tell me," the suit interrupted, "the guy on the lounge is a rabbi."
"Nope." Mama Aghabaria owned one of Harry's paintings. The witch hadn't 
paid for it, Harry had simply given it to her one day. The painting was of 
a girl with long, wild white hair, floating cross-legged in mid-air. The 
girl in the painting was the image of the child Mama Aghabaria had once been.
The conga player, while not a very good drummer, was extremely sensitive to 
atmospheric changes and recognized a momentous event when he saw one. His 
hands pounded rapidly against the leather skin, giving the witch an 
introductory drum roll. Harry flipped a beer across the boardwalk. The 
conga player caught it, terminating the drum roll. He didn't have a church 
key and couldn't get the cap off.
"He's not a rabbi," Mama Aghabaria said. "He's a prophet." She smiled, 
rather smugly. She loved it when things worked out the way she planned 
them. "That's the Prophet Harry."

It was a particularly uneventful day.
Harry made the five o'clock, six o'clock and eleven o'clock news.

~~~~~

Midway through the book, you get "The Fool."

~~~~~
The Fool

As twilight fell, the merchants on the beach began packing up. Those who 
worked out of tents packed their merchandise into trucks and vans, then 
pulled the tents down, shaping the tarpaulin into long thin rolls they 
threw into the vehicles alongside boxes of earrings, sunglasses and 
T-shirts. Vendors of a more suspicious nature, certain that thieves would 
take anything, pried the metal poles that supported the tents apart and 
took them along as well. Illegal, transient head shops, anticipating a new 
locale the next morning, boxed up posters and pipes and silver nose spoons 
with an eye toward artistic display.
The few who worked out of buildings locked up, pulling retractable iron 
gratings across the doors and windows, setting alarms that would scream for 
the police at the first indication of a break-in. Unfortunately, the 
burglars would be long gone by the time the police finally arrived and 
flipped the switch that quieted the alarms.
Mama Aghabaria did not close up shop. She didn't have a customer to keep 
her there, hadn't had one in over an hour, although her rainbow colored 
tent claimed one of the better spots on Venice Beach. Just north of Venice 
Boulevard, it was in the thick of things. Everybody passed by Mama 
Aghabaria's tent.
The floor of the tent was the same blacktop that had been used to create 
the beach's promenade, but Mama Aghabaria had covered it with brightly 
colored rugs. The space had no color scheme, yet the discordant shades 
somehow managed to appear harmonious. There were two tables in the room. 
One, back against the far tent wall, was small and square. It was covered 
with a cloth, brilliantly embroidered with Christian symbols. Mama 
Aghabaria's nephew had stolen it from a Catholic church; he'd wrapped it in 
ancient Smurf wrapping paper and given it to his aunt on a day that wasn't 
her birthday. She'd been hesitant to use the cloth, afraid it might negate 
some of her powers, but it had proven to be as dead as the crucified 
Savior, which was dead enough for Mama Aghabaria and she'd kept it. The 
other table was darkly polished wood, four feet by six, large enough to lay 
out all eighty-eight Tarot cards at once. There was a richly padded chair 
on the witch's side of the table. On the other side, a piano stool covered 
with bile green velvet sat like an orphan.
The witch sat at the table where she told fortunes to believers and curious 
alike, laying out the cards in formation after formation. The cards were 
old; Mama Aghabaria had painstakingly cut, drawn and painted them when she 
was still only a teenager. Her father hand carved a mahogany box for their 
safekeeping. Some of the Major Arcana had taken her months to do. But the 
result had been worth the investment; there was a brightness about the 
cards, an intensity other decks lacked. With these cards Mama Aghabaria 
could see the future.
It was unlucky for a seer to look at her own future and Mama Aghabaria had 
never attempted to lay a hand for herself. The patterns she set out were 
for the prophet. She laid them compulsively, knowing it was a useless 
endeavor. The subject of the readings had never touched the cards and with 
every new formation they offered a new future. Mama Aghabaria had told his 
fortune almost a year earlier, but she'd used the cheap store bought cards 
she used for most readings and they had been handled so many times since, 
none of the prophet's aura remained.
The tent flaps were pulled back and Mama Aghabaria watched the sunset 
through the opening. The sun changed as it approached the horizon, becoming 
bloody and swollen. The smog caught the dying orb in its deadly grip and 
squeezed. Scarlet tendrils reached across the sky, intertwined with orange 
and pink and blue, all held buoyantly aloft by particles of dirt and grit, 
carbon monoxide and chemical waste.
The witch thought that if they ever got the air cleaned up, the sunsets 
weren't going to be worth the time it took to watch them.
As Mama Aghabaria watched the day die, a young man passed by her tent. One 
arm was wrapped loosely around the shoulders of a dark haired girl, his 
fingers playing in the ebony strands of her hair. The other hand hung at 
his side. As they passed the open tent flap, the boy's free hand formed the 
sign against the evil eye. Mama Aghabaria smiled; smart boy.
When the sun was only a faint pink line on the horizon, Mama Aghabaria took 
out a battery operated lamp. She set it on the polished wood of the table, 
but didn't turn it on. She began forming yet another pattern of cards. The 
Fool was the first of the Major Arcana to appear, the only card that had 
appeared consistently throughout all the readings. The Fool. Il matto; 
fate; luck; the end.
In this latest reading the Fool was followed by the Magician and Justice. 
The rest of the reading was hopeful, foretelling a probable success. The 
two previous readings had offered certain doom. Mama Aghabaria shuffled the 
cards together in frustration, slapping the deck down into its box.
She flipped the switch that activated the lamp and a cold white glow filled 
the room. A book lay on the rugs next to her chair. She picked it up, 
leaned back in the chair and began to read.
She had a long wait ahead of her.

Wednesday was well underway before the prophet arrived. She could hear him 
walking alone down the boardwalk, the gravel crunching slightly under his 
feet. She knew he hadn't come to see her, but the light had attracted him 
and he was headed toward her. She smiled; light had a way with mad young 
men and moths.
The prophet poked his head in through the tent opening and said, "Hey."
Mama Aghabaria said, "Hey what?"
The prophet smiled just a bit. "I meant good morning." He entered the tent, 
stopping just inside the doorway. It was cooler on the beach than it was 
inland. His hands were tucked into his pants pockets; a gun-shaped bulge 
disfigured his waistline. "What are you doing here in the middle of the night?"
"Waiting for you. And you certainly took your time getting here."
"Sorry." The prophet, who hadn't realized he was expected, looked abashed 
at discovering he was late.
"First things first," Mama Aghabaria said. "Go throw that gun in the ocean. 
Make sure to toss the bullets in separately."
The prophet didn't move. "It's not my gun. It's Rami's."
"Then lay it outside. I don't want it in here. Gives off a nasty odor."
He nodded, ducking back out of the tent.
Mama Aghabaria read twelve pages of her book while he was gone. When he 
finally returned, she asked him if he'd remembered to throw the bullets 
separately.
"I remembered." He sat across from her on the piano bench. "The gun won't 
come back on the tide?"
Mama Aghabaria shrugged. "Probably not. It's not exactly buoyant."
The prophet blinked. He didn't seem to like her answer. After a moment he 
said, "I threatened to kill a man tonight." He smiled. "And I almost shot 
myself in the foot."
"That's what people do with guns," Mama Aghabaria said. "Shoot themselves 
and anyone else who might be around." She took the hand drawn Tarots from 
her father's box and set the deck in front of Harry. He shuffled it without 
being asked, cut it and handed it back to her.
She fanned the deck, holding it out to him. "Pick a card, any card."
Harry plucked out a card and handed it back to Mama Aghabaria without 
looking at it.
She held the card for an instant before laying it down on the far right 
hand corner of the table. She'd intended on laying out the cross again, but 
abruptly opted for a more extensive reading. "The significator."
Harry stared at the card in dismay. "The Fool?"
"The Fool is the fundamental mystery of the Tarot Pack:  the only 
unnumbered card in the Major Arcana." In Mama Aghabaria's deck the Fool 
stood at the edge of a cliff with his back to the fall. He grinned, as if 
daring the elements to take him. At his feet, a small dog clenched his 
pants leg between its teeth, pulling him back from the cliff. In his lapel, 
a yellow flower drooped, dying. The same flower appeared as a bud at the 
feet of the Magician, opening near the Emperor and in full bloom in the 
Stars. "The card portrays a fool and in English it's come to be called the 
Fool." Mama Aghabaria flashed Harry a reassuring smile, laying cards on the 
table in a seemingly randomly fashion. "But its not such a bad card to have 
as your own. Originally, it was il matto, 'matador' or 'checkmate.' Il 
matto comes from a very old Persian word meaning 'to kill', or 'to put an 
end to'."
"So the Fool's a killer."
"No. The Fool isn't death, or even an agent of death. He's not a player in 
the game, he's the master of it. At every fateful moment, he's somewhere at 
hand, doing nothing himself, apparently only there to observe that whatever 
should be done is done. He's the end of things, the conclusion. He's Fate."
The prophet stared at her. "Is that good?"
The witch said, "It's not bad."
"It doesn't sound good."
Mama Aghabaria continued to lay out the prophet's future. "The Fool's a 
survivor. He's the only card of the Major Arcana to survive in the modern 
pack of playing cards; he's the Joker, the wild card. In the old courts, 
the king's jester, the fool, was punished for nothing he did. The Fool is 
freedom." Mama Aghabaria finished laying out the cards. She did not tell 
the prophet that the Fool, the joker in her deck of cards, was also the 
Fool of God, the shaman entranced with the wonders of the universe, the 
holy madman who lived a charmed life. He represented the best of luckbut it 
was luck and likely to turn at any moment.
"If this Fool doesn't get punished for anything he does," Harry asked, 
"does he get punished for things other people do?"
"Oh, probably," Mama Aghabaria said. "Life's not fair, you know." She read 
the cards from right to left, then took the first card and the twenty-sixth 
and read their combined meaning. She then combined the second and the 
twenty-fifth and continued until she came to the last pair, the thirteenth 
and the fourteenth. "You'd better watch out for relatives, Harry."
"My relatives, or somebody else's?"
"If I were you I'd keep an eye on everybody's relatives."
"But that's everyone," he protested.
"Yes, well." The first through eleventh and the thirty-fourth through the 
forty-fourth cards were the past and they showed the witch nothing she did 
not already know about Harry. The twenty-third through the thirty-third and 
the fifty-sixth through the sixty-sixth represented the present. She stared 
at the Woman Pope. Combined with the Ace of Swords and the Knight of Cups 
she was bad news. "You sleep with that lady pope?"
It took Harry a moment to realize she meant Gayle. "No."
"Don't lie to me." Mama Aghabaria was very fond of Iselma. "I know you did. 
And you better not do it again."
"I slept with her sister."
"Well, don't do that again either."
The twelfth through the twenty-second and the forty-fifth through the 
fifty-fifth cards showed the future. Mama Aghabaria scowled down at the 
cards. She wasn't terribly fond of the future. There was always too much 
opportunity for chance to play its nasty tricks.
"Is Jack Wilson going to call the cops?"
"He's the guy you were gonna shoot?"
"Yeah."
She examined the cards. "Nope. He wants to avoid the police even more than 
you do."
"Who's Peter Hegg? He keeps writing about me in the newspaper. He says he's 
doing it as a favor to you."
Mama Aghabaria was not averse to lying. "I've never heard of him." Harry 
looked skeptical and she said, "Honest."
He sighed. "Can you tell me who murdered Phil Sullivan?"
"No. I'm not reading his cards. Not that I'd want to read a dead man's 
cards anyway; it's bad luck. I could tell you who murders you, though."
Harry jerked forward, bumping the table, causing The Fool to slide a few 
inches closer to the witch. "What?"
"Don't get so upset. Everyone dies eventually. You just do it more 
dramatically than most." She began gathering the cards together. "Now, go 
home. You're bothering me."
"Who kills me?"
"None of your business."
He stared at her incredulously. "You're not going to tell me?"
"No, I only said I could tell you, not that I would. Go home." She put the 
cards in their box and fitted the lid, then turned off the battery operated 
lamp.
"Then tell me this:  am I going to jail?"
"Harry, I don't care if you go to jail. I'm only interested in your career 
as a prophet." In the darkness, she eyed him fondly. "And that's going very 
well. You don't need to worry about it at all. You're going to be a great 
prophet.
         "Now get out."



At 12:11 PM 1/9/2002 -0700, you wrote:

>AAARRRGHHH!!!
>I was hoping for a discussion of how The Temple of Eris _might_ have evolved
>from the current Discordian philosophy. What I've read of Discordia seems
>intentionally obscure and confusing. How did the Temple of Eris become a
>coherent religion? What thought processes did DKM have to change a
>obscure "cult" into a mainstream religion? Did the Prophet Harry have 
>anything
>to do with it?
>
>Speculate, damn it.
>
>--Ben
>
>benjamin.manthey@colorado.edu
>
>There were too many cell phones on that airplane and not enough pistols. -
>Payton Miller
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