Erisian Ritual Magic II -- The Paper Clip Sacrifice
Erisian Ritual Magic II -- The Paper Clip Sacrifice

Sometimes, you just feel the need to introduce a gout of confusion into an aneristic situation (say, just about any office on a grey Tuesday afternoon, around 2PM). One good way to do this is the Paper Clip Sacrifice.

You will need (those marked with a `*' are optional):

  1. Five paper clips, preferably virgin (which, for unknown reasons, seems to make all ritual sacrifices more effective; maybe the universe doesn't have any use for self-righteous prudes, either).
  2. One uptight coworker, the more straight-laced the better.
  3. * Five bendy-straws
  4. * One Golden Delicious apple
  5. * One copy of the Principia Discordia

If you've decided to go with the more complex ritual, first construct a ritual pentagon out of the bendy-straws, as follows:

  1. Connect the straws together into one long straw by crimping the long end (that is, the end which is longer in terms of where the accordioning is) of one straw and inserting it into the short end of the next, and so on. It is vitally unimportant that you crimp the long end of the straw.
  2. Now, bend all the bendy bits of the straws so that you can crimp the last remaining long end and insert it into the initial small end.
  3. Fiddle with the finished product until it looks sufficiently like a pentagon.
  4. Hang the finished product over a thumbtack on your corkboard; you never know when you might need a bendy-straw. Also, coworkers will be confused about why you have it there, but probably never confused enough to actually ask you about it. This produces something of an eristic space for this and all future workings.
The Ritual:
  1. Unbend the five paper clips and place them, without a word of explanation, on the desk of the uptight coworker. Walk away.
  2. If you have a Golden Delicious apple handy, eat it -- people tend not to get enough fiber in their diets. And, once you have a high-fiber diet, the Principia makes good bathroom reading.

The ritual has, symbolically and in actuality, transformed the relatively small amount of bureaucratic order in the paper clips (the symbol of red-tape paperwork everywhere) into a much larger amount of confusion, thereby shifting (at least temporarily) the balance in your office. Constructing the ritual pentagon, clearly, has a similar effect but converts the utilitarian order of the bendy-straws into a more persistent and low-grade field of confusion, while also drawing on the power of the pentagon in its transmutative capacity as part of the Hodge-Podge Transformer.
      It is important to bear in mind that the goal of this ritual is creative -- it's meant to use some chaos to blunt the uncomfortable and therefore destructive restrictures of office boredom and to introduce into the uptight coworker's day a bit of adaptive confusion (or at least some much-needed variety in their uptightness). If you're doing this with the intent of harming your coworker's probably-fragile psyche for a few cheap laughs, you should really consider getting your Three of Stooges in an upright position before fiddling with potentially harmful occult forces.


For information on a classic Erisian warding ritual, please consult the Turkey Curse. If you're of the Neopagan persuasion (or are willing to be so persuaded), check out the invocations/banishings on the Wiccan Waccos page. Some general information on Discordian magic can be found in the document on occultism.