The Folklore of Discworld

He went with two disciples to the bank of the River Vltva, and moulded a human form of clay. Then one disciple danced round it seven times from right to left, saying certain words which invoked the element of fire, causing it to glow like red-hot metal. The other disciple danced round it seven times from left to right, saying words to invoke the element of water, and by the time he had finished steam was rising, and the golem’s hair and nails had begun to grow. Finally Rabbi Loew himself danced round seven times, breathed air into the golem’s nostrils, and put a parchment with a word on it into its mouth – or, some say, wrote a word upon its brow.
    Then the golem came to life and stood up, though it lacked the power of speech. Rabbi Loew said: ‘Your mission is to walk the streets of Prague and keep my people safe from persecution. You will obey my commands, and go wherever I send you – into fire, into water, or down to the floor of the sea.’
    What was the word that gave a golem life? Some say it was schem , which means ‘name’, and refers to the Tetragrammaton JHVH, the never-to-be-spoken Holy Name of God. Others say it was emeth , ‘truth’, and that one could destroy the golem by rubbing out the first letter, leaving meth , which means ‘death’. For eventually, all legends agree, something will go wrong, and the golem will have to be ‘killed’. Perhaps it has grown so big and powerful that its maker can no longer control it. Or perhaps he has forgotten to give it its orders for the day, and it has gone berserk through having nothing to do, and is about to devastate the city.
    In Prague, Rabbi Loew kept his golem till 1593, but then, knowing the danger of persecution had passed, he and his disciples reversed their rituals, reducing it to a mere mass of clay. This theysealed up in the attic of the Synagogue, and Rabbi Loew ordered that nobody was ever to set foot in that attic again. And nobody ever has.
    Such was the sad destiny of Earth’s golems. In the Discworld, thanks to the ferocious sense of justice of Commander Vimes and the pragmatism of Lord Vetinari, golems are now in process of buying their freedom from their masters, and have acquired speech and independence of thought. The words in their heads are those they have chosen themselves. Still untiring and sternly moral, some have found a role as law enforcers (one instance of this is described in Going Postal ). Naturally, this requires a certain modification of one of the basic Laws of Golems, which now runs: ‘You shall not harm a human being, or allow a human being to come to harm – unless ordered to do so by a properly constituted authority.’ As we have said, Lord Vetinari is a pragmatic ruler. That is not the same as nice.
W EREWOLVES
    Wherever wolves are found in the multiverse, there are werewolves too, yet the condition of werewolfery (or lycanthropy, as those of more scientific bent prefer to call it) remains mysterious. What can be the cause? Is it voluntary or involuntary? Is it a magical power, or a form of madness? Are werewolves heroes, victims, or criminals?
    The clash of theories is obvious on Earth. Several Ancient Greek writers blamed religious cannibalism, allegedly practised in honour of Lycean (i.e. ‘Wolfish’) Zeus in the wild hilly region of Arcadia. According to Pausanias, a Greek geographer writing in AD 166, the first werewolf was a certain King Lycaon of Arcadia, whose very name means ‘wolf’.
    Lycaon brought a human baby to the altar of Lycean Zeus and sacrificed it and poured out the blood upon the altar, and they say that immediately after the sacrifice he was turned into a wolf. For my own part I believe the tale: it has been handeddown among the Arcadians from antiquity, and probability is in its favour. They say that from the time of Lycaon downwards one man has always been turned into a wolf at the festival of Lycean Zeus, but that the transformation is not for life, for if while he is a wolf he abstains from human flesh, in the ninth year afterwards he changes back into a man, but if he has tasted human flesh he remains a beast for ever.
    About a hundred years earlier, the Roman author Petronius had included a werewolf story, more or less as a joke, in his comic novel Satyricon . To him, it was simply magical shape-shifting: a young soldier deliberately turned into a wolf by taking off his clothes in a graveyard by moonlight and pissing round them, and went off to kill cattle and sheep