The Folklore of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  The new Death raised his cowl.

  There was no face there. There was not even a skull. Smoke curled formlessly between the robe and a golden crown.

  Bill Door raised himself on his elbows.

  A CROWN? His voice shook with rage. I NEVER WORE A CROWN!

  You never wanted to rule. [Reaper Man]

  And so Death went looking for another image from our world. He decided he liked the look of Old Father Time, an old man carrying a scythe and an hourglass. This figure had evolved out of a god called Cronus in Ancient Greece and Saturn in Rome, who carried a sickle or a scythe because he was a god of agriculture, and an hourglass because he had also become the god of Time (this happened because ‘Cronus’ sounds almost exactly like chronos, meaning ‘time’ in Greek). Now, harvesting and death are two faces of the same thing, depending on the point of view. If you are the farmer reaping corn or grass, you’re looking ahead to the bread, the beer, the hay for the cattle, and you go home for a cheery Harvest Supper with plenty of drink and a hey-nonny-no, and maybe a barn dance. But if you are the plant being reaped, what you’re going through is death. Seeing the sense in this, Death copied the scythe and hourglass of Cronus, and adopted the title of the Grim Reaper. It was, after all, his job to separate the wheat-germ of the soul from the chaff of the mortal body.

  Both the Rider and the Reaper were thought of, at first, as having the normal body of a living man. However, the European Middle Ages had a rather morbid interest in physical decay, so for a while Death adopted the appearance of a rotting corpse, with split belly, peeling skin, and crawling worms, wearing (if anything) a shroud. Many medieval painters and sculptors showed him in this form. Then, little by little, he changed over to something more hygienic – just clean, gleaming bones. His new idea of himself as a Skeleton Reaper seeped into the minds of Italian artists during the fourteenth century. He can be seen in this guise, for example, on early packs of Tarot cards (he is Number 13 among the Greater Trumps, which accounts for a lot). Then, soon after 1400, painters in the Netherlands who had to do the illustrations for manuscripts of the Apocalypse got the message, and started drawing the Rider on the Pale Horse as a skeleton too. At first they kept the sword (after all, that’s what the Book said), but by the end of the century woodcuts in German Bibles were giving him the scythe instead. And that, give or take a black cloak and hood, is how Death still usually chooses to be seen: a skeleton on a white horse, with a scythe and an hourglass. He allows himself one touch of luxury – the robe is fastened with a silver brooch engraved with an omega, which is the last letter of the Greek alphabet and so very definitely signals The End. Also, it’s a pretty shape.

  It was also towards the end of the European Middle Ages that Death learned how to dance. He is famed for it. Any dance, every dance – square dances, round dances, reels, the polka, the mazurka, the waltz, the tango, the Quirmish bull-dance (oh-lay!):

  A high-speed fusillade of hollow snapping noises suddenly kept time with the music.

  ‘Who’s playing the maracas?’

  Death grinned.

  ‘MARACAS? I DON’T NEED … MARACAS.’ [Reaper Man]

  That was on the Disc. He can be just as energetic on Earth too, judging by old prints of skeletons wildly leaping about, and by a story told in Sussex in the 1860s, as recorded by Charlotte Latham:

  There stood upon the Downs close to Broadwater an old oak tree, and people said that always on Midsummer Eve, just at midnight, a number of skeletons started up from its roots and, joining hands, danced round it till cock-crow, then as suddenly sank down again. They said several persons had actually seen this dance of death; one young man in particular, having been detained by business at Findon till very late, and forgetting that it was Midsummer Eve, had been frightened out of his very senses by seeing the dead men caper to the rattling of their own bones.

  On other occasions, his dancing is sedate and courtly. In Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Dance of Death was often painted on the walls of cemeteries and churches; it showed a line of men and skeletons, hand in hand, pacing along in a slow and stately chain-dance. In England there was a famous mural in the cloister of London’s Old St Paul’s Cathedral (the one that burned down in the Great Fire of 1666), and there is still a set of carvings on the ceiling of Roslyn Chapel near Edinburgh. The Dance was also painted in the margins of prayer books, and acted out in religious pageants. Nowadays, it is best remembered as the closing shot of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal.

  On the Discworld, Death has often tried to act in human ways as a relief from his unremitting memory of both past and future, but he rarely gets much satisfaction from it. Fishing, gambling, getting drunk and joining the Klatchian Foreign Legion in order to forget have not really worked for him. His greatest success was his spell as a farm labourer (harvesting a speciality), as described in Reaper Man; he also on one occasion enjoyed riding a rather special motorbike:

  There were two small cart-wheels, one behind the other, with a saddle in between them. In front of the saddle was a pipe with a complicated double curve in it, so that someone sitting in the saddle would be able to get a grip.

  The rest was junk. Bones and tree branches and a jackdaw’s bouquet of gewgaws. A horse’s skull was strapped over the front wheel, and feathers and beads hung from every point. [Soul Music]

  Death is clearly the patron saint of album covers. And in some cultures a saint is just what he is – or rather she is: Santa Muerte, a (female) folk saint. Devotees say she is an offshoot of the Catholic Church; the Church dismisses them as a cult. The case continues, but one follower delivered a quote with a near Discworld pragmatism: ‘It’s better to make her your friend.’16

  Sainted or otherwise, Death is attracted to Mexico, where he takes part in all kinds of human activities, expertly and with great enjoyment. This is especially obvious around the time of the Day of the Dead (1 and 2 November). At this season, streets and shops are full of cheerful images of male and female Deaths not just dancing but playing all kinds of musical instruments, flirting, fighting, drinking, showing off their fine clothes, working at any and every trade. Nothing, in short, could be more alive than Death, in Mexico.

  And what of the dead themselves, on the Discworld? What happens when Death comes to them? Well, that usually seems to be up to them. The only group who had no say in the matter were the luckless pharaohs of Djelibeybi, mummified and immured in pyramids which were supposed to ensure a blissful afterlife but which simply imprisoned them inside a time-distortion. After centuries of excruciating boredom, they broke free and passed over into Death’s world (with great relief, and forming an orderly queue). It is not known whether the Ancient Egyptian pyramids had the same unwelcome side-effect on their pharaohs.

  On Earth, according to the myths of Ancient Greece, the gods would occasionally, as a mark of great favour, take someone newly dead and turn him or her into stars. The hero Perseus is a constellation now, as is Andromeda, the girl he rescued from a sea-monster, and indeed Cetus the monster too. So is Orion the hunter, lover of at least two goddesses; so is Amalthea the Goat, who became the constellation Capricorn. Some people on the Disc are aware of this possibility, though as far as is known the Disc gods have never actually done it – Cohen and his Horde rode for the stars because they wanted to, and gods had nothing to do with it. In any case, becoming a constellation is not a permanent solution:

  Mrs McGarry looked up at the stars.

  ‘In the olden days,’ she said, ‘when a hero had been really heroic, the gods would put them up in the stars.’

  THE HEAVENS CHANGE, said Death. WHAT TODAY LOOKS LIKE A MIGHTY HUNTER MAY LOOK LIKE A TEACUP IN A HUNDRED YEARS’ TIME. [The Last Hero]

  There are a few who, when Death comes to them, refuse to move on, preferring to become ghosts – certain kings of Lancre who haunt their ancestral castle, for example, and dwarfs who may choose to walk the earth in torment if they have not been buried with their finest weapons. According to
the myths and folklore of our world, such situations are pretty common here; people linger as ghosts because they have not been properly buried, or have been particularly wicked, or have died by violence, or are looking for money they buried, or simply can’t bear to leave home. But nobody, in any universe, can match the obstinacy of the political activist Reg Shoe, who insists on remaining a zombie in order to campaign for the rights of the dead and the undead.

  The normal course of events is that Death escorts those who die to the edge of a vast desert of black sand under a brilliant starry sky, where he informs them that what they do next, or what happens to them next, is not his responsibility – for in the universe of the Discworld Death is never the supreme reality. It appears that no two people have the same experience, since it will accurately reflect the beliefs and personality of each one.

  In Small Gods, for instance, five deaths are described. One, a sea-captain who believes that the souls of sailors become friendly porpoises (in British lore, it would be seagulls), sails away in search of paradise in a ghostly ship (for ships too have a soul), with a ghostly crew, and ghostly rats, and an escort of ghostly porpoises. The second and third are soldiers – Fri’it, an Omnian general who secretly disbelieves the hell-fire doctrines of that church, and Ichlos, a private who has never given much thought to religion. Both remember a childhood song:

  You have to walk a lonesome desert,

  You have to walk it all alone …

  Fri’it asks Death: ‘What is at the end of the desert?’ and is told, JUDGEMENT.

  The memory stole over him: a desert is what you think it is.

  And now, you can think clearly …

  There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That’s what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed.

  What have I always believed?

  That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.

  You couldn’t get that on a banner. But the desert looked better already.

  Fri’it set out.

  It is the same for Ichlos, though he puts it more simply:

  ‘My mum told me about this,’ he said. ‘When you’re dead, you have to walk a desert. And you see everything properly, she said. And remember everything right.’

  Death studiously did nothing to indicate his feelings either way.

  ‘Might meet a few friends on the way, eh?’ said the soldier. POSSIBLY.

  Ichlos set out. On the whole, he thought, it could have been worse.

  The next who dies is Vorbis, the single-minded, pitiless, utterly unshakable Omnian Exquisitor. When he sees the desert, his certainties drain away. Though he has taken for granted that there would indeed be a Judgement according to the rules of his religion (and that he would do very well in it), all he can feel is the echo of his own thoughts, and when he looks inside himself all he can see is the horror of what he has done, and the terror of emptiness and solitude.

  The last to die is the compassionate monk Brutha. He too follows Death to the black sand under the starry sky.

  ‘Ah. There really is a desert. Does everyone get this?’ said Brutha.

  WHO KNOWS?

  ‘And what is at the end of the desert?’

  JUDGEMENT.

  Brutha considered this.

  ‘Which end?’

  Death grinned and stepped aside.

  It’s only natural to want to know what lies at the far end of the desert. But this, as Tiffany told the hiver in A Hatful of Sky, is something no words can describe, which is why you have to cross the desert to find out. But before you can even begin, there is something important to be done. You must face and accept Judgement, the Judgement you pass on yourself in the light of clear self-knowledge and accurate memory. And that, as Brutha guessed, begins as soon as you die, at this end of the desert.

  And then Brutha sees Vorbis, hunched on the sand, too paralysed with fear to have even started the journey.

  ‘But Vorbis died a hundred years ago!’

  YES. HE HAD TO WALK IT ALL ALONE. ALL ALONE WITH HIMSELF. IF HE DARED.

  ‘He’s been here for a hundred years?’

  POSSIBLY NOT. TIME IS DIFFERENT HERE. IT IS … MORE PERSONAL.

  ‘Ah. You mean a hundred years can pass like a few seconds?’

  A HUNDRED YEARS CAN PASS LIKE INFINITY.

  Whereupon Brutha, true to his own nature, offers companionship to Vorbis, and they set out to cross the desert together.

  It may come as a surprise to those whose notion of Christian teaching about the afterlife is based on, say, the famous hell-fire sermon in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that what is described in Discworld terms in Small Gods is pretty well what many modern theologians say – at any rate, as regards Brutha, Vorbis, and Fri’it, though maybe not the ship’s captain. Such teachers say that a lifetime’s daily choices determine what we are at the moment of death, and that God’s ‘Judgement’ consists in letting us see, accurately and fully, what we have chosen to become. He does not hurl punishments; those who suffer, like Vorbis, do so because they have imprisoned themselves in their own evil. It is to be hoped that every Vorbis finds a compassionate Brutha.

  The same point emerges from the post-mortem experience of the brutal, murderous, but mentally subnormal thug Mr Tulip (in The Truth). Death makes him see the value of the many lives he had destroyed, and once he understands the truth about himself he is filled with huge remorse and passes his own judgement on himself, saying he wishes he could go back in time to kill himself before he could do such harm, but as that’s impossible he wants to spend the rest of his afterlife feeling ‘really sorry’. As Death notes, Tulip has ‘something in him that could be better’, given enough time. His purgatory is not harsh. Since he has been taught to expect reincarnation, reincarnation is what he gets, in a form agreeable to the best part of him, his love of good craftsmanship and beautiful antiques. He becomes a woodworm in a fine old desk.

  However, there is nothing good in the other thug, Mr Pin, who puts his trust in a lucky potato and whose remorse is simply pretence. He too reincarnates, but the outcome will not be pleasant. He becomes a potato, and is fried, since ‘Reincarnation enjoys a joke as much as the next philosophical hypothesis.’

  But to Death, a nature like Mr Pin’s is no joke.

  Death sighed deeply. WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?

  The Death of Rats looked up.

  SQUEAK, he said.

  Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE. [The Truth]

  One who may have answers to the questions that trouble Death’s lonely mind – questions about goodness and evil, and justice – is Azrael, his Lord. On Earth, ‘Azrael’ is the name given in the traditions of Islam to the Angel of Death, whose name is nowhere mentioned in the Bible itself. Muslims say he is one of the great Archangels, equal to Michael, Raphael or Gabriel in rank, and greater than them in wisdom. His name is Arabic, and means ‘Help of God’.

  But the nature of Azrael is best seen on the Discworld. He is known there as the Great Attractor, the Death of the Whole Multiverse, the Beginning and End of Time. He is so vast that he can only be measured in terms of the speed of light, and whole galaxies are lost in his eyes. Our Death, the Death who harvests all lives on Earth and on the Discworld, is only a little Death, and Azrael is his Lord.

  And at the end of all stories, Azrael, who knows the secret, thinks: I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN. [Reaper Man]

  16 Perhaps she recalled the words of St Francis: ‘By your holy death, help us to live each day as our last and to welcome sister Death.’

  Bibliography and suggestions

  for further reading

  Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (Yale University Press, 1988. ISBN 0-300-04126-8 hardback, 0
-300-04859-9 paperback)

  Briggs, Katharine M. A Dictionary of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and Other Supernatural Creatures (Penguin Books, 1977. ISBN 0-14-00-4753-0 paperback)

  Briggs, Katharine M. The Vanishing People: A Study of Traditional Fairy Beliefs (Batsford, 1978. ISBN 0-7134-1240-2 hardback)

  Davies, Owen. A People Bewitched: Witchcraft and Magic in Nineteenth-Century Somerset (Bruton, 1999. ISBN 0-9536390-0-2)

  Frazer, Sir James G. The Golden Bough: Abridged Edition (Macmillan & Co., 1922, frequently reprinted)

  Lenihan, Edmund. In Search of Biddy Early (Mercier Press, 1987; paperback 1995)

  MacManus, Dermot. The Middle Kingdom; the Faerie World of Ireland (London: Max Parrish & Co., 1959. Paperback edition: Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe & Co., 1973. ISBN 0-900675-82-9)

  Maxwell-Stuart, P. G. Witchcraft: A History (Tempus Publishing, 2000. ISBN 0-7524-2305-3 paperback)

  Miles, Clement A. Christmas Customs and Traditions: Their History and Significance (1912; reprinted by Dover Books, New York, 1976. ISBN 0-486-23354-5)

  Roud, Steve. The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland (Penguin Books, 2003. ISBN 0-141-00673-0)

  Roud, Steve. The English Year: A Month-by-Month Guide to the

  Nation’s Customs and Festivals (Penguin Books, 2006. ISBN 0-140-51554-2)

  Russell, Jeffrey B. A History of Witchcraft (Thames and Hudson, 1980. ISBN 0-500-27242-5 paperback)

  Ryan, M. Biddy Early: The Wise Woman of Clare (Mercier Press, 2000)

  Silver, Carole G. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-512199-6)

  Simpson, Jacqueline. British Dragons (Batsford, 1980. ISBN 0-7134-2559-0 hardback. Wordsworth paperback, 2001. ISBN 1-84022-507-6)

  Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-2100019-x hardback, 0-19-860766-0 paperback)

  Westwood, Jennifer, and Jacqueline Simpson. The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends (Penguin Books, 2005. ISBN 0-141-00711-7 hardback, 0-141-02103-9 paperback)