The Folklore of Discworld Page 3

  There is argument among scholars as to what he looked like, and what it was he was god of. The older generation thought his name came from a word for ‘fish’ and that he must have been the god of fishes, shaped like a merman, human above the waist and fishy below. Most poets and occultists agree. More recent scholars say no, the name comes from a word for ‘corn’, and he was a god of farming (no fish tail required). The matter could easily be settled if one could find an old temple of his and set up a bakery in one corner and a fish-and-chip shop in the other, and see what happened.

  One writer who had no doubts at all on the matter was the American H. P. Lovecraft, whose eerily receptive mind picked up many strange influences from the worlds of gods and demons, and indeed from the dreaded Dungeon Dimensions. In 1917 he published a story, ‘Dagon’, in which a shipwrecked man reaches an unknown land of mud and rocks, newly risen from the ocean floor. There are weird buildings there, with repulsive carvings. Then he sees, emerging from a deep abyss, a vast and loathsome monster with scaly arms, webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, and bulging, glassy eyes. Though he escapes, he remains haunted by the thought of huge nameless things crawling and floundering at the bottom of the ocean until the day when they will come to destroy mankind:

  Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon the Fish-god; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my enquiries.

  This may well be significant, since it is strongly suspected on the Discworld that Dagon had some connection with the sunken land of Leshp, which occasionally rises to the surface of the Circle Sea, as described in Jingo. On Leshp, there are fragments of buildings with an uncomfortably non-human look about them, a bodeful atmosphere, and plenty of pretty mosaics showing squid and octopuses. All in all, it seems probable that Dagon is actually one of the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions still lurking on the Disc, like Bel-Shamharoth (see below).

  Fate

  This, possibly, is the god most feared and hated by men. He is proverbially stern and implacable. Some Earthbound poets have claimed that he is blind, but this is far from true; anyone who looks into his dark and bottomless eyes will see that they are holes opening on to the blackness of infinite night. He enjoys gambling and chess, largely because when he plays, the roll of the dice is always fixed and there are always two queens on his side of the board – unless, of course, his eternal rival the Lady has a hand in the game, in which case there is a million-to-one chance that somebody might cheat Fate.

  In the mythologies of the Earth, Fate is sometimes personified as three old women, the Fates – three because triplicity symbolizes power. More often, however, he remains an abstract figure.

  The gods of Djelibeybi

  In the river kingdom of Djelibeybi, the national religion has been accreting and fermenting and bubbling away for seven thousand years, during which time nobody ever threw away a god, in case he might come in useful one day. As a result, the gods are far too numerous to list. One might start by mentioning Scrab the Pusher of the Ball of the Sun, Thrrp the Charioteer of the Sun, Jeht the Boatman of the Solar Orb, Vut the Dog-Headed God of Evening, Bunu the Goat-Headed God of Goats, Ket the Ibis-Headed God of Justice, Hat the Vulture-Headed God of Unexpected Guests, Bast the Cat-Headed Goddess of Things Left on the Doorstep or under the Bed … From which, two things are already obvious: they just love fooling around with funny faces, and most of them reckon they can do the top job. They can also be quarrelsome:

  There was a monstrous splash out in the river. Tzut, the Snake-Headed God of the Upper Djel, surfaced and regarded the assembled priesthood solemnly. Then Fhez, the Crocodile-Headed God of the Lower Djel, erupted beside him and made a spirited attempt at biting his head off. The two submerged in a column of spray and a minor tidal wave. [Pyramids]

  There are remarkably close and no doubt wholly coincidental similarities here to the pantheon of Ancient Egypt, where many of the deities have the heads of animals or birds, and where it was perfectly possible for several of them to be credited with the same important function. Thus, Amun, Aten, Atum, Ptah, and Ra were each said to have been the creator of the world, and all except Ptah were also sun gods. This does not seem to have caused any quarrels, either among the gods themselves or among their priests. In Egypt, as in Djelibeybi, priests, very much in the way of advanced physicists, took for granted that mutually incompatible statements could still both be true, and that in any case the really important thing was to carry out rituals correctly.

  The kings of Djelibeybi, also called pharaohs, are regarded as gods even while still alive; the divine part of their souls comes from the sun in the form of a bird – in the case of Teppicymon XXVII, a seagull. Kings have the power (and duty) to make the sun rise every morning, and to make the river Djel flood the land in due season; they do this by carrying out daily rituals as tradition requires. There may be minor supernatural manifestations too – rivers flowing more strongly as a pharaoh passes by, grass and corn springing up in his footsteps, and so on. On the Earth, the pharaohs of Egypt had similar powers and responsibilities.

  It has to be said that the Egyptian pantheon fits snugly into the Discworld way of thinking with barely more than a few changes of name. At one point the author of Pyramids declared: ‘I bought half a shelf of books on Ancient Egypt, and after a while I decided to make things up, because when you got down to details the real thing was just too weird.’

  Herne the Hunted

  Wherever humans go in for hunting, because they need the meat, or just because it’s such good fun, they tend to create a god (or goddess) of the hunt. They pray, and make offerings. They believe the god (or goddess) will provide a good fat deer or buffalo or wild boar for them, and ensure that they don’t break their necks as they gallop after the deer, or shoot one another by accident, or get gored by the boar. But it never occurs to them that the prey could be praying too, though probably not to the same deity.

  On the Discworld, where divinities are called into existence by the very fact that someone hopes and believes that they exist, this often urgent prayer is catered for. There, in the mountains and forests of Lancre, lives Herne the Hunted, who is a god of the chase, though not in the usual sense:

  Herne was the god of the chased and the hunted and all small animals whose ultimate destiny is to be an abrupt damp squeak. He was about three feet high, with rabbit ears and very small horns. But he did have an extremely good turn of speed. [Lords and Ladies]

  His role as a deity is to hear the occult voice of the prey. He is a good listener, but his success rate at answering prayers is not high. His worshippers, unfortunately, tend to die shortly after calling upon his name.

  How he got his name is an interesting example of interaction between one universe and another. At any one time there are millions of particles of inspiration and information pulsating through the multiverse, pouring out from the minds of various sentient species. One of the most powerful sources was on Earth, in the creative mind of a human being named William Shakespeare. In the world of Shakespeare’s imagination – to be precise, in his play The Merry Wives of Windsor, written in 1597 – there is a Herne the Hunter. The two heroines of the play decide to make a fool of a man who is pestering them by persuading him to disguise himself as a ghost and meet them at midnight under an oak tree in Windsor Park. Describing this ghost, one says:

  There is an old tale goes, that Herne the hunter,

  Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,

  Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,

  Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;

  And there he blasts the trees, bewitches cattle,

  And makes the cows yield blood, and shakes a chain

  In a most hideous and dreadful manner.

  According to another version of the play, some mothers used Herne as a bogeyman to frighten children:

  Oft have you heard since Hern
e the hunter dyed,

  That women, to affright their little children,

  Say that he walkes in shape of a great stagge.

  Shakespeare tells us nothing more about Herne’s life or death, but about two hundred years later, in 1792, a writer called Samuel Ireland says he had heard say that Herne was a gamekeeper who had turned to crime, and who hanged himself on the oak, fearing he was about to lose his job. This fits the traditional belief that suicides haunt the scene of their death. The rattling chain is also standard equipment for a ghost, but the stag’s antlers are not. Perhaps Shakespeare felt they matched the forest setting. Or perhaps he just wanted to get a laugh; Elizabethan audiences thought horns side-splittingly funny, even better than custard pies, and this is a comedy after all.

  To Shakespeare, Herne was simply an earthbound ghost, for ever walking round and round one particular tree, in the same way as the ghostly kings of Lancre must never move far from the stone walls of their castle. But the job-description ‘hunter’ caught the eye of Jacob Grimm, a German expert on mythology in the early nineteenth century, and started up a whole new train of thought. It reminded him of the Wild Hunt – a horde of phantom riders who, according to European folklore, gallop across the night sky during midwinter storms. Their leader is sometimes said to be a lost soul who is doomed to hunt for ever, sometimes the Devil pursuing the souls of sinners, occasionally a god hunting forest elves. Maybe, said Grimm, Herne had once been a Wild Huntsman, not a common-or-garden gamekeeper’s ghost.

  This is Grimm’s theory, not Will Shakespeare’s. But people liked the idea, and so on the Earth Herne the Hunter, the stag-headed god of hunting, was born. He has enjoyed a brilliant career, thanks to those fascinating antlers. In the 1930s, people started wondering if he could be connected with various old Celtic gods who had horns or antlers on their heads, especially a Gaulish one to whom sailors raised an altar in Paris early in the first century AD, calling him Cernunnos, ‘Horned One’ (or possibly ‘Old Horny’). Others thought he might even have as his remote ancestor a prehistoric man painted on the wall of a French cave, wearing a skin and antlers. By now, there are many, many people ready to swear that Herne is an age-old god, the lord of wild nature. But there is the truth and, then again, there is The Truth, in the face of which truth can only shrug and grin.

  According to a popular 1980s British TV series, Robin Hood used to meet a horned man in the forest, and this was none other than Herne. Well, maybe so – provided Robin had an efficient time machine to whisk him forward two or three centuries to Elizabethan times, or backwards to the first century AD to meet up with Cernunnos.

  And so, while Will Shakespeare lies giggling in his grave, the story goes drifting off across the dimensions, twisting itself into other shapes, and creating Herne the Hunted. Stories and folklore always tangle, and never more than on Discworld.

  Hoki the Jokester

  Hoki is a localized nature-god, only to be found in the deep forests of the Ramtops. Sometimes he manifests himself as an oak-tree, sometimes as half a man and half a goat, and pretty well always as a bloody nuisance. He plays the flute, very badly.

  Hoki has a typically mix-and-don’t-match approach to the business of filching attributes and character traits from the gods of another universe. He admired and copied the shaggy goat-legs and the pipes of Pan, a cheerful, sexy little nature-god living in Arcadia in Ancient Greece. His name, however, he took from that of the Norse Loki, a trickster and trouble-maker, whose most infamous deed was a murder-by-proxy: he caused the death of the popular and handsome young Baldur by getting a blind god to throw a twig of mistletoe at him, supposedly as a joke. Hoki must have got to hear about this, since it is said that he was thrown out of Dunmanifestin for playing ‘the old exploding mistletoe trick’ on Blind Io.

  The oak-tree manifestation is something Hoki picked up more recently. In some countries of the Earth over the past fifty or sixty years there has been a revival of paganism, and sexy male nature-gods are once again in fashion, including a Green Man who manifests himself as a face sprouting leaves, peering through leaves, or entirely made up of leaves. Sometimes, they are oak leaves. Observing this, Hoki decided to go one better and be the whole tree.

  The Lady

  Though everyone believes in her and longs to win her favour, nobody ever calls her by her true name, or tries to summon her, for this would make her vanish. Her eyes are pure green, from edge to edge, and green is her favourite colour. Her realm is that of the throw of the dice, of uncertainty and chance, especially the million-to-one chance. She thwarts the rigid rules of Fate.

  And on the Earth too, that’s exactly how things are. Except as regards the colour green. That information has not seeped through into our world, where many people regard green as unl— er, quite the opposite.

  Nuggan

  Nuggan, the god of Borogravia (and also of paperclips, desk stationery sets, and unnecessary paperwork), is small and podgy, and has the sourest face one could wish never to see, with a fussy little moustache. He has revealed himself unto his faithful people via the holy Book of Nuggan, which – unlike other holy writs – is published in a ring binder, since it is permanently incomplete, especially as regards the List of Abominations. Updates appear regularly as an appendix. At the last count, the things that are Abominations in the eyes of Nuggan included garlic, chocolate, certain mushrooms, dwarfs, cats, babies, shirts with six buttons, cross-dressing, jigsaws, and the colour blue.

  Nuggan’s temper being notoriously tetchy, Borogravians mostly pray to their ruler, the Duchess Annagovia, whom they call Little Mother, and whose icon is displayed in every house. She herself is never seen, having shut herself away in a castle for years, in mourning for her husband who was gored by a wild boar when hunting, they say. (Another instance of trans-dimensional parallels, since on the Earth Adonis, a human lover of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, met his death in just the same way.) She may possibly be dead. She is (or was) human, of course, yet somehow rather more, as the Ankh-Morpork consul to Zlobenia explained to Commander Vimes:

  ‘The royal family in Borogravia have always had a quasi-religious status, you see. They’re the head of the church, and the peasants, at least, pray to them in the hope that they’ll put in a good word with Nuggan. They’re like … living saints. Celestial intermediaries. To be honest, that’s how these countries work in any case. If you want something done, you have to know the right people. And I suppose it’s easier to pray to someone in a picture than to a god you can’t see.’ [Monstrous Regiment]

  According to Commander Vimes, Nuggan has dwindled away to a mere voice, and it is time for the Borogravians to find themselves a new god. The Duchess herself agrees; speaking through her most fervent devotee, she declares:

  Fight Nuggan, for he is nothing now, nothing but the poisonous echo of your ignorance and pettiness and malicious stupidity. Find yourselves a worthier god. And let … me … go! All those prayers, all those entreaties … to me! Too many hands clasped, that could more gainfully answer your prayers by effort and resolve!

  A very unusual message for a divinity, or a semi-divinity, to give unto the faithful, in any universe, but it might bear repeating.

  Offler the Crocodile

  Offler is a very old god, who first arose from steamy swamps in the hot dark land of Klatch, and finds worshippers anywhere where there is a large river and a warm climate, including Djelibeybi and Ankh-Morpork. He is sometimes known as ‘Offler of the Bird-Haunted Mouth’, because of the flock of brave and holy birds which attend upon him, pecking out those little shreds of meat which are such a nuisance when they get stuck between your fangs. Apart from his crocodile head, he is of normal human shape, though he has occasionally manifested himself with six arms instead of two. He lisps, because of the fangs.

  His counterpart on the Earth is the Egyptian Sobek, son of the primeval waters, whose name means ‘the Raging One’ and who manifested himself either as an entire crocodile wearing a crown, or as a man with a crocodile hea
d. He lived in the marshes by the Nile, and was ardently worshipped by prudent river fishermen. Nile crocodiles are notoriously savage.

  Om

  The Great God Om is the sole god of the land of Omnia, his devotees having zealously exterminated everybody who worshipped any others. By nature he is very liable to outbursts of Wrath, expressed through cursing, trampling of infidels, and smiting with lightning. According to the Omnian priests, he spoke – indeed, he spake – to a series of chosen prophets, dictating to them a vast number of Laws, Precepts and Prohibitions which are enshrined in numerous sacred writings, not to mention some Codicils written on slabs of lead ten feet tall. Sometimes, it is said, Om did his spaking from out of a pillar of flame. Sometimes the chosen prophet sprouted glowing horns, for Holy Horns are Om’s symbol.

  The priests also claim that Om made the world, and revealed to them that it is not a disc carried by a turtle, but a perfectly smooth ball moving in a perfect circle round the sun, which is another perfectly smooth ball; this has become a vital dogma in the Omnian Church. Actually, Om now denies that he ever said this, or that he made the world – and if he had, he says, he wouldn’t have made it as a ball. Silly idea, a ball. People would fall off. Come to that, Om has only very vague memories of having met any prophets, and doesn’t recognize the things he is supposed to have said to them.

  Om’s views on these matters are known because he spent three years or so in the world in the form of a tortoise. This was an embarrassing accident. He had meant to manifest himself briefly in some suitably impressive avatar – most likely, a bull – but what he got was a tortoise. Not a vast mountain-bearing tortoise such as the Hindu god Vishnu once chose, but a mere common-or-garden tortoise. And he found he was quite unable to get back to his own shape. This humiliating failure of god-power was due to the fact that hardly any Omnians had real, true, deep-down belief in Om. Possibly, only one. The rest thought they believed in him, but what they really believed in was the terrifying authority of the Omnian Church and its Quisition. As the philosopher Abraxas wrote: