The Folklore of Discworld

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 morestrongly 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. Hisworshippers, 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 Herne 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 wasabout 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