The idea

If you take a ball of turd and polish it, you get a shiny sphere eventually; a spherical fecal mirror.

So too with any other object, in a figurative sense: if you keep fiddling with something and worrying its details it becomes a vessel of visions, though mostly those visions are mirror-images of you.

This, I think, is behind much mysticism and religion: if you just keep readin' that one holy book of yours, over and over again, all the details slough away and shine away, as you read and write and meditate, until the book has no words in it save those painted on the reader's forehead. With a book that needs polishing, one that is thorny with contradictions and unclear in its notions, such readings are almost inevitable.

Another way to appear profound is to take great big handfuls of feces and throw them around. Some are bound to stick to the walls in patterns that are aesthetically pleasing or pareidolic; and then you can point at those and crow.

Better still, you can let your audience do the choosing and the pointing; they themselves can discern the True Message as whatever pleases and arouses them. (This works the other way round, too; and then the writer wonders why the readers are so angry.)

The concept of “found theology” is founded on these two realizations: the idea of the polished mirror, and the idea of the Rorschach explosion. Anything can be theology, if one only concentrates on it, considers enough permutations of it.

A restaurant menu.

A wall of graffiti.

An airport novel.

Even the misogynist ramblings of millennia-dead goat herders.

Even the literal excretions of a random Discordian yahoo.

Which is where MAKHAI comes from: I have ideas, yes, and sophomoric whispers of esoteric and exoteric secrets, but I've written MAKHAI to be a deliberately vague and conflicting book — partly for this reason, and partly because I've a short attention span and I suck in writing — so that anything nice, useful or pretty you find in Makhai is not wholly of my own design.

No, the numinous thingy here is this imperfect telepathy between us, this Erisian communication — in short, this Discordian holy book.

Find your own revelations.

I started writing Makhai on the 16th of March, 2012, having written two holy books before that. (You get hooked on this! also, see the old site for them) I took some of the best bits of the previous ones and said to myself, “I think I'll make this a big one.”

I wrote when the inspiration took me: evenings, nights, during the day even. I wrote about what I felt like writing about. I wrote as much as I felt like writing.

When the thing then got to over 1000 pages, I grew a little scared, and paralyzed by the thought of the editing and rewriting I would need.

Thus, then, this: a way to throw Makhai at you in some form, while still signalling that work needs to be done.

See, now I can go have a glass of Coke and a lie-down, and still feel I've contributed something to the sum total of human delusions.

I suspect that I'm 80% done with MAKHAI being in the raw stage. I think I mostly need to get my pants up and decide which chapters to throw out and which to finish or majorly alter. That'll get me to rough stage, where the text is roughly ready, and getting from there to ready stage is polishing, prettification, spellchecking, looking at line and page breaks, having font anxiety, and deciding how and how extensively I want to illustrate this thing. (I am unable to match the eclectic scrapbooky style of Principia Discordia, but I have already a slim folder of strange public domain pictures, and a camera.)

Once I'm ready, I'll recompile the book into:

• one big PDF,
• EPUB and MOBI (Kindle) for ebook readers,
• a new mirrorsoferis.com website (parts of MAKHAI were drawn from the old website)
• a Lulu-or-something print copy thingie.(That's why the page size of the PDFs is A5 — it's a compromise of thickness and page size, and available in hardcover!)

All of these, then, except the print book, I can offer free to you.

MAKHAI is organized into five parts, because five is a nice number. The parts aren't of equal length; the first will be the longest, and the second will be the second-longest. This nice length formatting will not probably hold for the other three. The Appendices contain some stuff which will be sprinkled inside the other parts when they're done.

The parts are named after Eris's children. Because the names are from Greek mythology, “child” is a term whose truth value varies from telling to telling.

• ALALA — Discordian thealogy, openly and brazenly ecclesiastical notions, encyclicals, etc.
• PROIOXIS & PALIOXIS — stories, tales, parables, legends and fictions, etc.
• HOMADOS — games to play by yourself or with others; some have deep Discordian underpinnings and some don't.
• KYDOIMOS — numbers, lists, definitions and such.
• APPENDICES — things left over, such as the honestly true details of an evil conspiracy of mathematicians (no lies).

Well, strictly speaking “Appendices” isn't one of Eris's children. I may have to think about that. Maybe include portraits of these children, too — possibly including Apendikes, the Daughter of Epimetheus.

(Not to be confused with sweet Prefakéa, the daughter of Prometheus.)

(Or the other literary Titan-children — Typhographea, Prologuea and Epiloguea, Indice, Epigramma, Apogryphaea, Marginalus, Blurba, Manuscripta, comic Xans of Phont, and Arial.)

If you want to contact me, try webmaster at, um, wait, how do these anti-address-auto-harvester precautions work? at mirrorsoferis dot com, obviously.

If you want to send feedback about MAKHAI, write to feedback at mirrorsoferis dot com.