The Folklore of Discworld

home to Valhalla and sit down together to drink again.’
    It’s a magnificent option, an offer one can’t refuse. But sometimes, sometimes – well, maybe only once in all the centuries of the Discworld, and never on Earth – there come Heroes like Cohen the Barbarian and his Silver Horde, who do refuse it, as is told in The Last Hero . As their confederate Mr Saveloy had once pointed out (in Interesting Times ), it does sound like spending forever in a room full of sports masters. And it involves hobnobbing with gods, which isn’t to everyone’s taste. Instead, Cohen and the Horde choose to ride away to the stars.
D EMONS OF THE N ETHER P IT
    Demons have existed on the Discworld for as long as the gods, whom in many ways they closely resemble. There are millions of them. They find it very galling that those stuck-up bastards in Dunmanifestin refuse to take them seriously.
    The demons live in a spacious dimension which is more or less on the same space-time continuum as that of humans, and which they have tastefully decorated in shades of flame and keep heated to roasting point, as tradition requires. It is arranged in eight circles, surrounding a bubbling lake of lava-substitute, from which rise the majestic towers of Pandemonium, the Demon City. Demonic society is strongly hierarchical, murderously competitive, and devoted to tradition. Its higher ranks have added impressive titles to theirsonorously supernatural names – Lord Astfgl, Duke Vassenego, Earl Beelzemoth, Duke Drazometh the Putrid. This, incidentally, is equally true on Earth, where the famous grimoire known as the Lemegeton , attributed to King Solomon, is intensely class-conscious. It lists seventy-six aristocratic demons: eighteen kings, twenty-six dukes, fifteen marquises, five earls and twelve presidents, besides various minor groups.
    Demons take a lively interest in observing human affairs, partly out of curiosity and partly because they do so much admire human ingenuity when it comes to devising ways of hurting one another. Like the gods, they can peer across multidimensional space, and take note of events and ideas on the Earth as well as on the Disc. This is useful to them, since they are about as capable of original thought as a parrot is of original swearwords. Their Infernal Regions would have been pretty bleak without the picturesque notions they pinched from human imaginations. From the Bible they got the idea of a lake of fire, mentioned in the Apocalypse (Book of Revelation); from the medieval Italian poet Dante, the idea that Hell is a deep funnel-shaped pit, with circular terraces running round it – Dante talked of nine circles, but the Discworld demons opted for eight, the preferred magical number in their universe. In Milton’s Paradise Lost , it is said that devils built themselves a palace in Hell by the power of magic and music, and called it Pandemonium:
    Anon out of the earth a fabric huge
Rose like an exhalation, with the sound
Of dulcet harmonies and voices sweet –
Built like a temple, where pilasters round
Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid
With golden architrave; nor did it lack
Cornice and frieze, with massive sculptures graven;
The roof was fretted gold …
    And so on and so forth – brazen doors, marble pavements, starrylamps, a jewelled throne – the lot. But still, it was just one palace. The Discworld demons can do better than that: their Pandemonium is a whole city.
    Most demons are rather old-fashioned as regards their personal appearance, liking to look as disgusting as possible. Thus Urglefloggah, Spawn of the Pit and Loathly Guardian of the Dread Portal, who welcomes newcomers to Hell, has various well-fanged mouths and more tentacles than legs, though fewer arms than heads. First impressions are so important. Then there was Quezovercoatl the Feathered Boa, a demon who went off to become a god to the humans of the Tezuman Empire and teach them how to cut the hearts out of one another on top of pyramids. It is thought that he had picked up his ideas from the Aztecs of Mexico, and likewise (more or less) his name. He was half-man, half-chicken, half-jaguar, half-scorpion, and half mad. However, he was also only six inches high, so when forced to manifest himself physically he came to a sad, squishy end.
    At the time of the events described in Eric , Hell was ruled by a relatively new king named Astfgl, who was determined to modernize everything, including his own appearance. His predecessors had