by Terry McCombs
Terry McCombs maintained the "God/dess of the Month Club" on soc.religion.paganism for several years, producing monthly profiles of deities drawn from across the world's traditions. His approach was comparative and eclectic, treating each deity as a window into a shared human experience rather than the exclusive property of any one culture.
His April 2008 entry profiles Eris — originally a minor Greek goddess of strife, she tossed a golden apple at a wedding and started the Trojan War. In 1958 or 1959, Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley brought her back in the Principia Discordia, which led to the Illuminatus Trilogy, which led to thousands of self-declared Discordians acting accordingly. McCombs notes the moral is the same both times: sometimes practical jokes just go too damn far.
Preserved here from the Usenet archive as a document of early internet-era comparative paganism.
Name: Eris, "the Lady of Sorrow," "defender of the people" (Homer). Known by the Romans as Discordia.
Symbols: A golden apple of immortality with Kallisti ("to the fairest" or "to the prettiest") written on it.
Usual Image: Usually depicted as a beautiful young woman who, on looking closer, is shown to have corpse-pale skin, hair bedecked with thorns, and a garland that from a distance seems floral but is really a poisonous snake. She was also said to grow larger while close to battles.
Area of Influence: Originally strife; lately chaos — but in a good way.
Holy Books: The Theogony of Hesiod, the Iliad, the Principia Discordia.
Holy Days: None.
Relatives: Chaos (grandparent), Nyx (mother), no father. Gaia (aunt), Erebus "Darkness" (uncle). Apate goddess of deceit, Geras goddess of old age, Philotes goddess of affection, Nemesis goddess of vengeance, the Keres, the Fates (sisters). Thanatos god of death, Hypnos god of sleep, Momus god of writers, critics, sarcasm, and — one would assume these days — bloggers (brothers). Horkos god of oaths (son, with Ares?). Morpheus (nephew). Ares (consort). It has to be said that Saturnalia supper over at "the gloomy house of Nyx" had to have been one interesting affair. Later accounts give her mother and father as Hera and Zeus; McCombs considered this a much later addition.
Synodeities: Discordia (Roman — though later said to be one and the same as Eris, she was at first another goddess altogether), the Morrigan (Celtic), Loki (Norse), Kali (Hindu), Seth (Egyptian), Lucifer (Christian).
The Greek goddess Eris was originally a very minor goddess about whom little is known.
Most of our knowledge about her comes from Hesiod, where we learn there were two Erises — one bad and one not so bad — and from Homer's Iliad, where we are told that Eris, the goddess of strife, was one of the few deities not invited to come to Boeotia ("Cow-Land") to witness the marriage of the human Cadmus to the goddess Harmony. (Cadmus had formerly been a slave on Olympus for eight years, as a penalty for having killed one of the giant serpents of Gaia — apparently as a reward for being a really good sycophant to Zeus.)
All the gods and goddesses were at this wedding, save for Eris, who they thought an inauspicious personage to invite — though a bit unfair, as they did invite Ares, hardly the best houseguest.
Hearing of it anyway, Eris crashed the party and rolled one of the golden apples of immortality into the middle of it, marked with the word Kallisti meaning either "for the fairest" or "for the prettiest." This led to a dispute between the goddesses Aphrodite, Athene, and Hera about who should have it (you would think Athene would have better sense), which led to the human Paris — who apparently had never been introduced to the concept of cutting an apple into sections — being called in as the sucker to settle the dispute, which led to the Trojan War. The whole moral of which seems to have been: sometimes practical jokes just go too damn far.
There is not much else heard from Eris, though we are told that, like the Celtic goddess the Morrigan, she does not take part in battles herself but does revel in them, and during some may grow larger in size as she becomes more excited.
However, McCombs suspected there may have been more to Eris than this. For one thing, while Homer goes to a great deal of trouble to paint her in the harshest colors, Homer also at one point refers to Eris as "the defender of the people." This may be a slip of an earlier tradition — perhaps she was originally a triple goddess, with her "sisters" Philotes (goddess of affection) and Nemesis (shapeshifting goddess of vengeance). As so much of the shifting beliefs of that time is lost, it can probably never be proven. So we are left with the golden apple story.
Until the year 1958 or 1959, when Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley brought her into the 20th century with the Principia Discordia — which led to The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, which led to many thousands of people starting to call themselves either Discordians or Erisians and acting accordingly. Restating, it would seem, the same moral we got from the Iliad.
And Eris, having been brought back, refuses to go away — still showing up as a cute goth on the television series Xena: Warrior Princess (where they insisted on just calling her Discord), as the foe of Sinbad in a cartoon where she is voiced by Michelle Pfeiffer, as a villainess in the Wonder Woman comic in the 1980s and 90s, and now depicted as a British-accented blonde with a David Letterman gap in her teeth and a midriff-revealing toga on The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy on the Cartoon Network (based, according to Wikipedia, on Madonna). Showing that you might as well send her an invitation — because she is coming anyway.
As Greg Hill is reported to have said: "If I had known it was all going to come true, I would have picked Venus."
— Terry McCombs
Colophon
Written and posted by Terry McCombs to soc.religion.paganism on April 30, 2008, as part of his monthly "God/dess of the Month Club" series, which profiled deities from across the world's traditions. Original Message-ID: [email protected].
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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