The Folklore of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  Those who study the effects of cosmic resonance in the space-time continuum of the multiverse often cite the Treacle Mine Phenomenon with amazement and awe, for it has been shown without doubt that these mines, which are a plain fact of geography on the Disc, have insinuated themselves into the folklore of a world where they do not actually exist, and never have done. In England, there are at least thirty villages reputed to have a secret treacle mine tucked away somewhere on their territory. Even more astonishing, there is one place, the village of Patcham in East Sussex, where people have a fairly accurate idea of how the treacle was formed (allowing for the fact that this world sadly lacks any cosmic elephants). A Mrs Austen told the West Sussex Gazette in 1973 the tale she knew, and had passed on to her children:

  Millions of years ago, when England was a tropical country, before the Ice Age, sugar cane grew here. Year after year it grew, ripened and rotted unharvested, the molasses draining away down into the folds of the hills, where it accumulated above an impermeable layer of clay. The centuries passed, the colder weather came, and sugar cane no longer grew on the Downs, but the underground layer of treacle lay patiently waiting until in 1871 Peter Jones, a scientist who had long suspected its existence, sank the first shaft. The ensuing treacle gusher spouted for three days, covering the countryside for several miles around with a fine rain of treacle, until it was at last brought under control.

  Elsewhere, other explanations are offered. At Chobham in Surrey, military incompetence is alleged to be the cause. It is said that soldiers who encamped on Chobham Common before setting out to the Crimean War (others say, American troops stationed nearby during the First World War) buried vast stockpiles of supplies, including drums of treacle and molasses, and forgot to remove them when they left. The drums corroded, and a subterranean reservoir of treacle was formed.

  Other places do not attempt to account for the origin of the precious substance, but tell ingenious tales about its discovery and use. The mine at Jarvis Brook near Crowborough (Sussex) was supposedly begun by the Romans, who carved the solid treacle rock into jewellery, but never found out how sweet it was; this was discovered accidentally when a medieval baby prince was visibly soothed by sucking his mother’s necklace. At Sabden (Lancashire) it is claimed that boggarts (a species of goblin) are employed in the mine to lick up any spilt treacle; cards and souvenirs about the mine are sold to tourists.

  Yet, sad to say, the people who tell these tales do not take them seriously. It is all a poker-faced joke, a hoax, a leg-pull, used by the locals to hoax gullible outsiders, by parents to entertain their children, by older children to make fools of young ones. While all the time, did they but know it, the remains of a real treacle mine lie below the streets of Ankh-Morpork.

  WIZARDRY AND CEREMONIAL MAGIC

  Any comment upon wizardry in a book with ‘Folklore’ in the title will have to be made very quietly, since there is nothing that infuriates a scholar more than to be mistaken for a member of the folk, after he has spent all his waking hours for the past fifty years with his nose in a book (mealtimes partially excepted). Naturally, he may have come across the odd scrap of folklore in the course of his reading, but he will make it very plain that he does not believe it. Arch-chancellor Ridcully, for example, has heard of the kind of monster called a Sciopod by Ancient Greeks and a Uniped in Latin: a humanoid with only a single leg and foot, this being so huge that if it lies on its back and sticks its leg in the air, the foot makes an excellent sunshade. But he thinks it’s just something travel writers invented.

  ‘They always make up that sort of thing. Otherwise it’s too boring. It’s no good coming home and just saying you were shipwrecked for two years and ate winkles, is it? You have to put in a lot of daft stuff about men who go around on one big foot and the Land of Giant Plum Puddings and nursery rubbish like that.’ [The Last Continent]

  Magic as actually practised by wizards generally consists of transformation spells, the skilled hurling of fireballs, the creation of illusions, and the occasional summoning of demons or, in extreme cases, of Death himself. These things are done as rarely as possible. But the theory underpinning these few simple acts is immense, and subdivided into innumerable branches – divination, theurgy, runes ancient and modern, cabbalistic rites, gramarye, knowledge of amulets and talismans, magianism, thaumatology, astrology, morbid spellbinding, sortilege, invisible writing – and so on and so forth. Not necromancy, however; this is frowned upon, and has been replaced by a far more acceptable Department of Post-Mortem Communications. The very heart and soul of Unseen University is its Library. With over 90,000 volumes of grimoires and magical texts, it is by far the largest concentration of magical scholarship anywhere in the multiverse, and so dangerous that most of the books have to be chained up.

  Folklore? Oral tradition? Old wives’ tales? Tchah! It is an insult to the grand intellectual achievements of wizardry to think their work has anything in common with the foolish ways of the peasantry.

  No doubt the famous and learned occultists of medieval and Renaissance Europe – such men as Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century, or Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, and Dr John Dee in the sixteenth – would have been just as dismissive. They wrote books which straddled the ill-defined boundaries between magic, science and philosophy – massive, expensive tomes in Latin, the international language of the wise. Albertus, for instance, wrote a treatise on the practical procedures of alchemy, and was also reputed to be the author of a much simpler Book of Secrets which described the magical properties of stones, herbs, and beasts. For example:

  If thou wilt know whether thy wife be chaste or no. Take the stone which is called Magnet, in Englishe the Loadstone. It is of a sadde blew colour, and it is found in the sea of Inde, and sometime in part of Almaine. Lay this stone under the head of a wife. And if she be chaste, she will embrace her husband. If she be not chaste, she will fall forth of her bed …

  If thou wilt Overcome thine Enemies. Take the stone which is called Draconites, from the dragon’s head. And if the stone bee drawne out from him alive it is good against all poisons, and he that beareth it on his left arme shall overcome all his enemies …

  The Marygold. The vertue of this herbe is marvellous for if it be gathered, the Sunne being in the Signe Leo in August, and wrapped in the leafe of a Lawrell, or May tree, and a wolf’s tooth added thereto, no man shall be able to speake one word against the bearer thereof, but only words of peace. If anything bee stolen, and the bearer of the things before named shall lay them under his head in the night, he shall see the theefe in a vision.

  And so on. It must remain one of the mysteries of trans-dimensional correspondence whether this Albertus Magnus of medieval Europe has any connection with Alberto Malich, the exceptionally powerful wizard who founded Unseen University some two thousand years ago, and disappeared while performing the Rite of AshkEnte backwards. He had intended to achieve immortality, and so he did, in a way. He now exists (one can’t quite say ‘lives’) as cook, valet and gardener in the House of Death, which suits him nicely.

  On Earth, grimoires were often attributed to prestigious figures from legendary times, such as King Solomon the Wise and Hermes Trismegistus. As time went on, the practice of magic slid down the social scale; by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cheap, simple books of spells and conjurations were selling in thousands to village cunning men and wise women, and to ordinary households. In Germany, there was The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses; in France, Le grand Albert and Le petit Albert, Le dragon rouge, La poule noire, and the splendidly named Abracadabra monumentissima diabolica. Intellectual wizardry was being drawn into the vast melting-pot of folk tradition.

  This has not happened in Ankh-Morpork, nor is it likely to, so long as the Librarian has an ook to say in the matter. Nevertheless, far outside the hallowed walls of Unseen University, lurking in shadowy and insalubrious back-alleys and keeping out of sight of qualified wizards, are magical practitioners of a lower sort. Their ambitions are
great; their skills are not. They know far less than they suppose. They band together in secret societies with imposing titles, and attach vast importance to ritual, ceremony, and magical tools. They are led by pompous, bullying men, calling themselves Supreme Grand Masters. Such are, for instance, the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, guardians of the sacred knowledge since a time no man may wot of.

  Such groups would be just as indignant as the academic wizards at the notion that what they were doing had anything in common with folk magic. No, their Grand Master had been taught profound secrets from the Heart of Being while undergoing tuition from Hidden Venerable Sages on a distant mountain. Furthermore, the Sages had given him a book of ancient wisdom … actually, he had arranged for it to be stolen from the Unseen University Library, but no matter, it was a Book. And it was ancient.

  But it would be a mistake to think that everyone in Ankh-Morpork has such a highbrow approach to magic. There are people who need no books, no apparatus, no complex rituals – people with a natural inborn talent for the occult, like the redoubtable medium Mrs Evadne Cake, noted for her precognition and her numerous spirit contacts. In some ways she is very like a witch, and every community needs its witch.

  Even in Unseen University itself the housekeeper, Mrs Whitlow, dabbles in the occult. She loves trying to peer into the future, and owns a crystal ball which she keeps under a sort of pink frilly tea cosy, several sets of divinatory cards, a pink velvet bag of rune stones, an ouija board, and special dried monkey turds which can be thrown in such a way as to reveal all the secrets of the universe. Granny Weatherwax, for purposes of her own, offered Mrs Whitlow her services as a reader of tealeaves. No doubt she had her own opinion of such amateurish goings-on, but she kept it to herself.

  SATOR SQUARE

  Most of those who walk through the streets of Ankh-Morpork never pause to wonder why the square in front of Unseen University is named Sator Square. There is indeed a reason, though you have to search the annals of a different universe to discover it: on Earth, Sator Square is the most famous of all magic squares. But it’s no use looking for it on the street map of any city, for it is not that sort of square. It is a palindromic word square.

  These are talismans, difficult to invent, but very powerful. You have to choose a group of words which can be laid out as a square of letters and which (this is the hard bit) will remain the same whether you read it downwards, upwards, from the left or from the right. Most of them are mere gibberish, but the Sator formula does make sense, of a sort. It goes:

  S

  A

  T

  O

  R

  A

  R

  E

  P

  O

  T

  E

  N

  E

  T

  O

  P

  E

  R

  A

  R

  O

  T

  A

  S

  Four out of the five are normal Latin words, meaning ‘the sower holds the works [and] the wheels’, but arepo is either pure nonsense or the mysterious, mystical name of the mysterious, mystical Sower who controls the Wheels (of Fate? Of the heavenly spheres?). The earliest known example of the square is in one of the houses of Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79; another early one was found scratched on wall plaster in a Roman villa at Cirencester in Gloucestershire. At these dates, both homes could have belonged to Christian families, and the square could have served as a coded signal of their faith. It can hardly be a coincidence that its letters can be unpacked to reveal the first words of the Our Father (Pater noster) twice over, plus A and O twice. The latter could mean Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, which is a title of Christ in the Apocalypse, the Bible’s Book of Revelation. What’s more, the whole thing can be laid out as a cross, thus:

  The Sator-Arepo Square was known all over medieval Europe, and in some countries (Russia, America and Germany, for example) was still being used in folk magic right up to modern times, almost two thousand years after it was invented. People said it would put out a fire, if you wrote it on a piece of wood and threw the wood into the flames; if you cut it into dough, baked it, and swallowed it, it would cure the bite of a mad dog; in the United States in the nineteenth century, a cheap book of spells recommended it as a fire precaution, a detector of witches, a protection against disease, and good for the cows.

  Some echo of all this must surely have filtered through to the wizards of Unseen University, but whether they actually use word squares themselves remains unknown.

  THE BLACK SCHOOL

  For centuries, Earth has known rumours of a Black School where magic was taught, though none quite matches the venerable antiquity of the Disc’s Unseen University, now some two thousand years old. The only possible contenders would be certain secret academies where (if we can believe the rather unreliable Roman author Pomponius Mela in the first century AD) druids trained pupils for twenty years on end ‘in sequestered and remote places, whether in a cave or in secluded groves’.

  Once real universities became established in the Middle Ages, there soon grew up the legend of their secret counterpart, a college called the Black School where one could learn all the occult arts. It was deep underground, windowless, and pitch dark. Nobody ever saw the Teacher, for that was the Devil himself. Students never went outside. Every evening, they would say aloud what they wanted to learn, and by next morning the right books would have appeared magically on their desks, written in fiery letters that glowed in the dark; or the information would be written in fire upon the walls. And when the course of studies ended, the students would rush to escape through the single door, for it was known that the Devil would take the hindmost – unless he was cunning enough to trick him into seizing his cloak, or his shadow, instead.

  And where was this wondrous Black School? Usually it was said to be in one of the great medieval universities, but not of course in one’s own country. The learned French scholar and scientist Gerbert d’Aurillac (946–1003), who became Pope Sylvester II, was rumoured to have studied magic at the Islamic university in Cordoba, Spain. The Icelander Sæmundur the Learned (1056–1133) was said to have attended a Black School somewhere in France. In Romania, folk tradition tells of an underground academy called Scholomance, near Sibiu in the mountains of Transylvania (Bram Stoker had heard of this). Others have talked of a Black School in Paris, Padua, Salamanca, Prague, or Wittenburg (Faust studied there). Probably students at Wittenburg and Prague whispered about the fearful occult activities at Oxford and Cambridge.

  An aside: It has been suggested by the learned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that the general western antipathy towards witches is at least partly to do with teeth and beards. The hypothesis runs like this: until the advent of modern dentistry, people who lived to a great age tended to lose their teeth – to get gummy, in fact. For the old widow, perhaps with no family to care for her, that added another problem. She looked like a crone, with the lower part of the face dished in and the nose appearing to hook. Of course, the same thing happened to the old men, but they could grow long white beards to hide the wrinkles behind, and looked as wise as an Old Testament prophet. Wise wizard, wicked witch … what a difference a razor makes.

  11 Tyrants insist on doing this, despite the fact that it never works.

  12 It’s the little details that charm.

  Chapter 14

  MORE CUSTOMS,

  NAUTICAL LORE and

  MILITARY MATTERS

  THERE IS A WIDESPREAD FEELING among folklorists that city-dwellers do not have customs. Maybe there had been some in the very old days, when the city was little more than a collection of villages, but they are long forgotten now. Of course there are various civic and academic occasions which require serious-minded men to process through the streets in outdated ceremonial robes and plumed helmets, but these aren’t proper folk customs. They are all too obv
iously well organized and official. They are not archaic and bloodthirsty, nor, on the other hand, do they involve jolly yokels and winsome maidens prancing around with many a merry fol-de-rol. Folklore collectors therefore feel free to ignore them.

  However, there comes a time in the history of most cities when somebody says, ‘We really ought to have a few customs. They could do wonders for the tourist trade.’ Books are consulted. Ideas from elsewhere are forcibly uprooted and shamelessly reworked to fit their new environment. And lo! Suddenly, there are Morris dancers everywhere, and age-old traditions spring up overnight like mushrooms.

  This is beginning to happen in Ankh-Morpork. There is a team of folk dancers who have revived the Morris – probably more than one, since Morris dancing is essentially a competitive pastime, sometimes quite dangerously so. Nobby Nobbs is known to be a participant. There are also enthusiastic and delightfully melodious wassailers, who put in weeks of practice before setting out to spread seasonal cheer through the streets of Ankh-Morpork at Hogswatch.

  The custom was referred to by Anaglypta Huggs, organizer of the best and most select group of the city’s singers, as an occasion for fellowship and good cheer …

  The singers were halfway down Park Lane now, and halfway through ‘The Red Rosy Hen greets the Dawn of the Day’ in marvellous harmony. Their collecting tins were already full of donations for the poor of the city, or at least those sections of the poor who in Mrs Huggs’ opinion were suitably picturesque and not too smelly and could be relied upon to say thank you …

  In fact the hen is not the bird traditionally associated with heralding a new sunrise, but Mrs Huggs, while collecting many old folk songs for posterity, had taken care to rewrite them where necessary to avoid, as she put it, ‘offending those of a refined disposition with unwarranted coarseness’. Much to her surprise, people often couldn’t spot the unwarranted coarseness until it had been pointed out to them.