Kerry Thornley

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Kerry Thornley
Kerry Thornley

Kerry Wendell Thornley (April 17, 1938 - November 28, 1998) is perhaps best-known as the co-founder (along with childhood friend Greg Hill) of Discordianism. In this context he is usually known as Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, a name he derived from Omar Khayyám, father of Determinism. He and Hill authored the religion's seminal text Principia Discordia, or, how I found Goddess, and what I did to her when I found her.

Less known is a series of Zenarchy articles, originally written in the late 1960s for Thornley's broadsheet newsletter of the same name, under the pen name Ho Chi Zen. "Zenarchy" is described in the introduction of the collected volume as "the social order which springs from meditation," and "A noncombative, nonparticipatory, no-politics approach to anarchy intended to get the serious student thinking."

Raised Mormon, in adulthood Kerry shifted his ideological focus frequently, in rivalry with any serious countercultural figure of the 1960s. Discordianism, atheism, anarchism, Objectivism, neo-paganism, Buddhism and the Church of the Subgenius have all been subjects of his close conceptual scrutiny throughout his life.

Contents

[edit] Military life

Having already been a US Marine Corps reservist for about two years, Thornley had been summoned to active duty in 1958 at age 20, soon after completing his freshman year at the University of Southern California. Incidentally, it was also around this time that he and Greg Hill—alias Malaclypse the Younger or Mal-2—shared their first Eristic vision in a bowling alley in their hometown of Whittier, California (a hometown shared, coincidentally, by Richard Nixon).

Thornley had served for a short time in the same radar operator unit as Lee Harvey Oswald in the spring of 1959 at MCAS El Toro in Santa Ana, California. Both men had shared a common interest in society, culture, literature and politics, and whenever duty placed them together, had discussed such topics as George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the philosophy of Marxism, particularly Oswald's interest in the latter.

Some time after the two men parted ways as a result of routine reassignment, Thornley read of Oswald's autumn 1959 defection to the Soviet Union in the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes while aboard a troopship returning to the United States from duty in Japan.

[edit] 1960s

Released from Marine Corps' active duty in September of 1960, Thornley relocated with Greg Hill to New Orleans in early 1961 and began to write about his experiences as a peacetime Marine both stateside and in Asia in a book titled The Idle Warriors, which used Lee Harvey Oswald as the template for its main character. The aspiring novelist viewed Oswald as the metaphorical embodiment of an intelligent peacetime GI: deeply dissatisfied with the monolithic, totalitarian structure of military life which stood in distressingly sharp contrast to the professed American ideals of individual liberty and free enterprise.

In late 1962, Thornley completed The Idle Warriors, the only book written about Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy's assassination in 1963. Due to the serendipitous nature of Thornley's choice of literary subject matter, he was called to testify before the Warren Commission in Washington DC on May 18, 1964. The Commission subpoenaed a copy of the book and stored it in the National Archives. In 1965, Thornley published another book titled Oswald, generally defending the "Oswald-as-lone-assassin" conclusion of the Warren Commission, which met with dismal sales. In his later years, Thornley became convinced that Oswald had in truth been a CIA asset whose purpose was to ferret out suspected Communist sympathizers serving in the Corps.

Epistle to the Paranoids
Epistle to the Paranoids

In January of 1968, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, certain there had been a New Orleans-based conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, subpoenaed Thornley to appear before a grand jury once again, questioning him about his relationship with Oswald and his knowledge of other figures Garrison believed to be connected to the assassination. Garrison charged Thornley with perjury after Thornley denied that he had been in contact with Oswald in any manner since 1959. The perjury charge was eventually dropped by Garrison's successor Harry Connick, Sr.

Thornley claimed that, during his initial two-year sojourn in New Orleans, he'd had numerous meetings with two mysterious middle-aged men named "Gary Kirstein" and "Slim Brooks". According to his account, they had detailed discussions on numerous subjects ranging from the mundane to the exotic, and bordering sometimes on bizarre. Among these was the subject of How one might assassinate President Kennedy, whose beliefs and policies the aspiring novelist deeply disliked at the time. Later, the former Marine came to believe that "Gary Kirstein" had in reality been senior CIA officer and future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, and "Slim Brooks" to have been Jerry Milton Brooks, a member of the 1960s right-wing activist group, "The Minutemen". Thornley also claimed that "Kirstein" and "Hunt" had accurately predicted Richard M. Nixon's accession to the presidency six years before it happened, as well as anticipating the rise of the 1960s counterculture and the subsequent emergence of Charles Manson and what became his cult following. This led Thornley to believe that the US government had somehow been involved, directly or indirectly, in creating and/or supporting these events, personages and phenomena.

In the wake of this period, Thornley came to believe (among many other things) that he had been a subject of the CIA's notorious LSD-soaked MK-ULTRA mind-control research program. While skeptics may dismiss as flimsy conspiracy theory some of his later notions—such as having been a product of occult-based Nazi Vril selective breeding programs—his claims regarding participation in such highly-classified US government mind-control programs and foreknowledge of the John F. Kennedy assassination are somewhat more plausible, as they are consistent with the time period, his residences, and the nature and locations of his military service.

[edit] Later life and death

For the next 30 years, Thornley traveled and lived all over the United States and was involved in a variety of activities, ranging from editing underground newspapers to attending graduate school. For a time Thornley wrote a regular column in the zine Factsheet Five, until editor Mike Gunderloy stopped publishing the magazine. Struggling with illness in his final days, Kerry Thornley died of a heart attack in Atlanta on November 28, 1998, a Saturday, at the age of 60. The following morning, 23 people attended a Buddhist memorial service in his honor. His body had been cremated and the ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean. Shortly before his death, Thornley reportedly said he'd felt "like a tired child home from a very wild circus," a reference to a passage by Greg Hill from the Principia Discordia:


“ And so it is that we, as men, do not exist until we do; and then it is that we play with our world of existent things, and order and disorder them, and so it shall be that Non-existence shall take us back from Existence, and that nameless Spirituality shall return to Void, like a tired child home from a very wild circus. ”


[edit] Bibliography and references

  • Malaclypse the Younger (Greg Hill); Principia Discordia, or, How I found Goddess and what I did to Her when I found Her, 5th Edition, September 1991, IllumiNet Press (Introduction by Kerry Thornley) ISBN 0-9626534-2-X
  • Thornley, Kerry; Oswald, New Classics House, 1965
  • Thornley, Kerry; Zenarchy, IllumiNet Press, June 1991 ISBN 0-9626534-1-1
  • Thornley, Kerry; The Idle Warriors, IllumiNet Press, June 1991 ISBN 0-9626534-0-3
  • Gorightly, Adam; The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, Paraview Press, November 2003 (foreword by Robert Anton Wilson) ISBN 978-1931044660
  • Biles, Joe G.; In History's Shadow: Lee Harvey Oswald, Kerry Thornley & the Garrison Investigation, Writers Club Press, April 2002 (foreword by Robert Buras) ISBN 978-0595224555

[edit] External links

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Persondata
NAME Thornley, Kerry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst; Ho Chi Zen
SHORT DESCRIPTION American author and religious figure
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Whittier, California
DATE OF DEATH November 28, 1998
PLACE OF DEATH Atlanta, Georgia
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