Kerry Wendell Thornley (April 17, 1938 – November 28, 1998) was an American author. He is known as the co-founder (along with childhood friend Greg Hill) of Discordianism, in which context he is usually known as Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst or simply Lord Omar. He and Hill authored the religion's text Principia Discordia, Or, How I Found Goddess, and What I Did to Her When I Found Her. Thornley also was known for his 1962 manuscript The Idle Warriors, which was inspired by the activities of his acquaintance Lee Harvey Oswald before the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Thornley was highly active in the countercultural publishing scene, writing for a number of underground magazines and newspapers, and self-publishing many one-page (or broadsheet) newsletters of his own. One such newsletter called Zenarchy was published in the 1960s 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. Among the subjects he closely scrutinized throughout his life were atheism, anarchism, Objectivism, autarchism (he attended Robert LeFevre's Freedom School), neo-paganism, Kerista, Buddhism, and the memetic inheritor of Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius.
Personal life
Kerry Wendell Thornley was born on April 17, 1938, in Los Angeles to Kenneth and Helen Thornley. He had two younger brothers, Dick and Tom.
Thornley attended California High School in Whittier, California.
On Saturday, December 11, 1965, Kerry married Cara Leach at Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, California. They had one son, Kreg Thornley, born in 1969. They later divorced. Kreg was a photographer, painter, musician and film maker.
Military life
Having already been a reservist in the U.S. Marine Corps 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. According to Principia Discordia, it was 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.
In early 1959, Thornley served for a short time in the same radar operator unit as Lee Harvey Oswald 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.
While aboard a troopship returning to the United States from duty in Japan (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 U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes.
1960s
In February 1962, Thornley completed The Idle Warriors, which has the historical distinction of being 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, D.C., on May 18, 1964. The Commission subpoenaed a copy of the manuscript and stored it in the National Archives, and the book remained unpublished until 1991. In 1965, Thornley published another book titled Oswald, generally defending the "Oswald-as-lone-assassin" conclusion of the Warren Commission.
In January 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, questioning him about his relationship with Oswald and his knowledge of other figures Garrison believed to be connected to the assassination. Thornley sought a cancellation of this subpoena on which he had to appear before the Circuit Court. 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.