'... 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.
If you are religious, and you want to feel comfortable about what we're saying, you can always assume that we're talking about all the other religions, but not yours. Some years ago, during Ecumenical Week, Rabbi Lionel Blue was giving the 'Thought for the Day' on BBC Radio 4, as part of a series on tolerance. He was the first speaker in the series, and he ended with a joke.
'They shouldn't have asked me to start the series,' he said, and then explained how the later speakers from other religions would differ from him, and how he would be tolerant about that.
'After all,' he said, 'they worship God in their way ... whereas I worship Him in His.'
If you see that this is a joke, as the good rabbi did, but also understand that outside that cosy context this is not, in a multicultural world, a good way to think, let alone speak, then you're already getting to grips with the ambivalent role that religion has played in human history. And with the mental twists and turns required to live in a multiculture.
The big problem with religion, for a dispassionate observer, has nothing to do with belief versus proof. If religion were susceptible to scientific-style proofs or disproofs, there wouldn't be a lot to argue about. No, the big problem is the disparity between individual human spirituality -the deep-seated feeling that we belong in this awesome universe -with the unmitigated disasters that organised, large-scale religions have at various times, including in all probability yesterday, inflicted on the planet and its people. This is upsetting. Religion ought to be a force for good, and mostly it is ... But when it isn't, it goes spectacularly and horribly wrong.
In both Pyramids and Small Gods, we see that the real problem in this connection is not religion as such, but priests. Priests have been known to seize upon the spiritual feelings of individuals and twist them into something terrible; the Quisition in Small Gods was hardly an invention.
Sometimes it had been done for power, or for money. It's even been done because the priests really believe that this is what the god of choice wants them to do.