St. John's Bread Wednesday Messenger: Volume I, Number I. November 19, 1969

Quarterly Journal of St. John's Bread Wednesday Messenger and Paranoid Flash Illuminator: [ca. 1970]

TWO ISSUES, published by St. John's Bread Church, Topanga, California, 1969, [1970], first and only printings. Edited by Paul Encimer. Zine, mimeograph, various paper colors, side staple bound, 8.5" x 11", 22 and 38 unnumbered pages. VERY GOOD CONDITION: with a fitting association to City Lights - both issues were originally mailed to City Lights bookstore in San Francisco with stamps, postmarks, address and penned printed matter on the rear covers, otherwise just some light edgewear, age toning, and the rear cover of one is pulling from the staples, overall tight, bright, clean and unmarked. Scarce.

Saint John's Bread Wednesday Messenger and Paranoid Flash Illuminator was one of the most curious counterculture publications of the late 1960s. A scarce primary source illuminating Discordia's hippie origins. An exploration of real and imagined spirituality, cabals, psychedelic drug fueled enlightenment, surrealistic discordia, poetry, fiction, esoteric confusion, comic paradoxical conspiracies, revealing secret knowledge of Discordianism for your perverse entertainment. Issued on multi hued paper printed on mimeograph machines, its ethos inspired the dawning of the zine age.

St. John's Bread publisher Paul Encimer (1938-2021) Discordian name, Dr. Confusion was an early ordained minister of the Universal Life Church. His friend and contributor Kerry Wendell Thornley, Discordian name, Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst was the co-founder of Discordianism and author of Principia Discordia. The first 10 pages of Thornley's poem Illuminati Lady, which Robert Anton Wilson described in Illuminatus! as "an endless epic poem which you really ought to read," is printed herein.

HAIL ERIS! ALL HAIL DISCORDIA!