Historia Discordia meet Kerry Thornley, the second Oswald.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Critical Essay

Kerry Thornley lived and died in obscurity. But while few people noticed, he invented one of the 20th century's more influential religions, helped launch '60s-style sex-and-nature neopaganism, and was a major force behind the first modern libertarian 'zine.

He was also, to hear him tell it, part of the conspiracy to murder JFK, and thus escalate the Vietnam War--a conspiracy so secret even Thornley didn't know about it at the time.

Thornley was one of America's most fascinating unknowns. It is fitting, given the underground nature of his claims to fame, that his first biography, The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, by Adam Gorightly, is published in the quasi-clandestine form of a print-on-demand book from Paraview Press.

Thornley helped his high school buddy Greg Hill invent the comedic religion of Discordianism in dull suburban Southern California in the late 1950s. It was dedicated to the worship of Eris, the Greek goddess of Chaos. Its flavor can be gleaned from this bit of powerful magick, the Turkey Curse, from its holy book, the Principia Discordia: "Face ... towards the direction of the negative aneristic vibration that you wish to neutralize. Begin waving your arms in any elaborate manner and make motions with your hands as though you were Mandrake feeling up a sexy giantess. Chant, loudly and clearly: GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE! The results will be instantly apparent."

Thornley joined the Marines in 1959, where one of his buddies at the El Toro Marine Base was Lee Harvey Oswald, an openly communist "outfit eight ball" known to his fellow grunts as "Oswaldskovitch."

Thornley began writing a novel based on his disillusioning experience in the Marines. After hearing that of' Oswaldskovitch really meant it with that commie stuff when he defected to the Soviet Union, Thornley transformed the book, called The Idle Warriors, into a roman a clef about Oswald--making Thornley the only person to write a book about Lee Oswald before that fall day in Dallas.

Thornley was living in New Orleans when John F. Kennedy was killed, hanging out, according to his own recollections (which some friends suspect Thornley invented) with a curious cast of characters. Among them were some unfortunates caught in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's feckless investigation into the JFK assassination.

What is definitely not Thornley's imagination, though, is that...