Terry Pratchett - The Globe

'Looks a bit religious to me,' said the Dean. 'Rincewind? This sort of thing is right up your street, isn't it?'

Rincewind looked at the word. Really, when you came to think of it, his whole life was a crossword puzzle ...

'The clacks people charge by the word, don't they?' he said.

'Yes, it's scandalous,' said Ridcully. 'Five pence a word, on the longdistance trunk!'

'And this was sent back by an old woman in Lancre, where as far as I recall the chicken is the basic unit of currency?' said Rincewind. 'Not much money for fancy messages, then. It looks to me like a simple anagram of ... THE STORY

'I think it means "change the story",' said Ponder, without looking up. At a saving of five pence.'

'We tried changing it!' said the Dean.

'Change it in a different way, perhaps? At a different time?' said Ponder. 'We've got L-space. We ought to be able to get some guidance from books written in different futures—'

'Ook!'

'I'm sorry, sir, but the library rules don't apply here!' said Ponder.

'Look at it this way, old chap,' said Ridcully, to the angry Librarian. 'The rules do of course apply here, everyone can see that, and we wouldn't dream of asking you to interfere with the nature of causality in the normal way of things. It's just that the nature of causality on this world is such that, if any libraries survive the next thousand years without being used for lighting fires or uncomfortable toilet paper, they're due to be destroyed in a fireball and/or entombed in ice. Dr Dee's wonderful books which you like so much, with their many delicate illustrations of completely useless magical circles and rather interesting mathematical cyphers, will go the way of the, the ...' He snapped his fingers. 'Someone give me the name of something that'll be going completely extinct,' he demanded.

'People,' said Rincewind.

There was silence.

Then the Librarian said: 'Ook ook.'

'He says he's just finding the books, okay?' said Rincewind. 'And he'll leave them in a pile and go out of the room and no one is to look at them while he's gone, because if they do he won't know about it, and if he coughs loudly before he comes back in that will only be because he's got a cough and not for any other reason, okay?'

'Religious,' said the Dean. 'Oh dear,' said Ridcully.

Discworld's wizardry is not terribly keen on religion. Given the history of the Discworld, this is not surprising. One big problem is that on Discworld, gods are known to be real. We list a few later on, but we can set the scene with reference to the god of mayflies. In Reaper Man, an old mayfly is telling some youngsters about this god, as they hover just above the surface of a stream:

'... you were telling us about the Great Trout.'

'Ah. Yes. Right. The Trout. Well, you see, if you've been a good mayfly, zigzagging up and down properly—'

'—taking heed of your elders and betters—'

'— yes, and taking heed of your elders and betters, then eventually the Great Trout—'

Clop.

Clop.

'Yes?' said one of the younger mayflies.

There was no reply.

'The Great Trout what?' said another mayfly, nervously.

They looked down at a series of expanding concentric rings on the water.

'The holy sign!' said a mayfly. 'I remember being told about that! A Great Circle in the water!

Thus shall be the sign of the Great Trout!'

Roundworld religions avoid the difficulty of gods that you can actually see, or meet or be eaten by: most of the world's current religions find it best to go the whole hog and locate their gods in a place that is not just outside Roundworld the planet, but outside Roundworld the universe. This demonstrates admirable foresight, for regions impenetrable today may be a forest of tourist hotels tomorrow. When the sky was an unexplored and unfathomable realm, it was fashionable to locate gods in the sky, or on top of unscalable Mount Olympus, or in the halls of Valhalla, which amounts to much the same thing. But now all significant mountains have been climbed, people routinely fly across the Atlantic, five miles up, and reports of encounters with gods are few.

However, it turns out that when gods don't manifest themselves in physical form on an everyday basis, they acquire an impressive degree of ineffability. On Discworld, on the other hand, it is possible to run into gods in the street or even in the gutter. They also lounge around in Discworld's equivalent of Valhalla, known as Dunmanifestin, which is situated on top of Cori Celesti, a ten mile high spire of green ice and grey stone at the Disc's hub.

Because of the everyday presence of tangible gods, on Discworld there's no problem about belief in gods; it's more a matter of how much you disapprove of their lifestyle. On Roundworld, deities do not infest the highways and byways -or, if they do, they do so in such a subtle guise that the unbeliever does not notice them. It then becomes possible to have a serious debate about belief, because that's what most people's concept of God rests on.

We've already said that on Discworld everything is reified, and that's pretty much the case there with belief. Now B-space, the space of beliefs, is huge, because people have vivid and varied imaginations and can believe almost anything. Therefore G-space, the space of gods, is also huge. And on Discworld, phase spaces are reified. So the Discworld not only has gods: it is infested with them. There are at least 3,000 major gods on the Disc, and scarcely a week passes without the research theologians discovering more. Some use props like false noses to appear in religious chronicles under hundreds of different names, which makes it difficult to keep count accurately. Among them are Cephut, the god of cutlery (Pyramids), Flatulus, god of the winds

(Small Gods), Grune, the god of unseasonal fruit (ReaperMan), Hat, the vulture-headed god of unexpected guests (Pyramids), Offler, the crocodile god (Mort and Sourcery), Petulia, the goddess of negotiable affection (Small Gods), and Steikheigel, the god of isolated cow byres

(Mort).

Then there are the minor gods. According to The Discworld Companion, 'There are billions of them, tiny bundles containing nothing more than a pinch of pure ego and some hunger'. What they hunger for, at least to start with, is human belief, because on Discworld the size and power of a god is proportional to how many people believe in him, her, or it. Things are much the same on Roundworld, in fact, because the influence and power of a religion are proportional to the number of its adherents. So the parallel is much closer than you might expect -which is what you should always expect with Discworld, because it has an uncanny ability to reflect and illuminate the human condition in Roundworld. Actually, it's not always human (or mayfly)

belief that matters. According to Lords and Ladies-.

There were a number of gods in the mountains and forests of Lancre. One of them was known as Herne the Hunted. He was a god of the chase and the hunt. More or less.

Most gods are created and sustained by belief and hope. Hunters danced in animal skins and created gods of the chase, who tended to be hearty and boisterous with the tact of a tidal wave.

But they are not the only gods of hunting. The prey has an occult voice too, as the blood pounds and the hounds bay. Herne was the god of the chased and the hunted and all small animals whose ultimate destiny is to be an abrupt damp squeak.

When discussing religious beliefs, there is always the danger of upsetting people. The same goes when discussing football, of course, but people take their religion nearly as seriously. So let us begin by acknowledging, as we did towards the end of The Science of Discworld, that 'all religions are true, for a given value of true'. We have no wish to damage your beliefs, if you have them, or to damage your lack of beliefs if you don't. We don't mind if we cause you to modify your beliefs, though. That's your responsibility and your choice: don't blame us. But we're shortly going to have a go at science, and then we're going to have a go at art, so we don't think it's fair that religion should get away scot-free. Anyway, whatever your beliefs, religion is an essential feature of the human condition, and it's one of the things that made us what we are. We have to examine it, and ask whether Discworld puts it in a new light.