A Snub Turned Into a Philosophy

Discordianism's founding grievance is deliberately petty in scale and enormous in consequence, which is the joke and the argument at once. Eris, goddess of discord, was left off the guest list for the wedding of the sea nymph Thetis to the mortal king Peleus, an oversight the other gods evidently thought would pass without incident. Her response, tossing a golden apple marked for the fairest into the banquet, set Hera, Athena and Aphrodite against one another, led to the Judgment of Paris, and, in the chain the ancient sources trace from it, contributed to the Trojan War.

Discordianism reads the Original Snub not as a myth about divine pettiness but as a parable about the cost of excluding disorder from a picture of the world, arguing that any system built entirely around the Aneristic Principle, apparent order, will eventually be forced to reckon with the Eristic Principle it tried to leave uninvited.