The Folklore of Discworld

good witches are supposed to give the baby three gifts. You know, like good looks, wisdom and happiness.’ Magrat pressed on defiantly. ‘That’s how it used to be done in the old days.’
    ‘Oh, you mean gingerbread cottages and all that,’ said Granny dismissively. ‘Spinning wheels and pumpkins and pricking your finger on rose thorns and similar. I could never be having with all that.’
    In the end, however, Granny agreed. Each gave her gift separately, and these gifts shaped the child’s destiny, for, as the Anglo-Saxons used to say, Wyrd bid– swid–ost , ‘Fate is the strongest’, and Wyrd bid– full aræd , ‘Fate is inflexible.’
    As a result of this episode and of the events in Witches Abroad , Fairy Godmothers are officially defined in the Discworld Companion as ‘a specialized form of witch with particular responsibility for the life of one individual or a group of individuals’.
M AIDEN , M OTHER , C RONE
    When Magrat got married, she gave up witching for a while. This caused problems for the other two, because not only is three a good number for witches, but it has to be the right sort of three. The right sort of types . Nanny Ogg brooded on the matter:
    As a witch, she naturally didn’t believe in occult nonsense of any sort. But there were one or two truths down below the bedrock of the soul which had to be faced, and right in among them was this business of, well, the maiden, the mother and the … other one.
    Of course, it was nothing but an old superstition and belonged to the unenlightened days when ‘maiden’ or ‘mother’ or … the other one … encompassed every woman over the age of twelve or so, except maybe for nine months of her life.
    Even so … it was an old superstition – older than books, older than writing – and beliefs like that were heavy weights on the rubber sheet of human experience, tending to pull people into their orbits.
    They needed to be three again. [ Maskerade ]
    Nobody would dream of arguing with Nanny on a point like this. The Discworld is about what people believe is true. So if Nanny says it’s a truth down below the bedrock of her soul that three witches must be of different ages, then – on the Discworld – it is. If she says that it’s a superstition older than books, older than writing, then – on the Discworld – it is.
    But on Earth it’s not. It’s just over one hundred years old, actually. Will Shakespeare’s witches were all the same age. So were the three Fates, the three Norns, the three Graces, the three Mothers in early Britain, the three War Goddesses in Ireland, and other female trios in old mythologies.
    It was in 1903 that a Cambridge scholar, Jane Ellen Harrison,decided that all the many goddesses in ancient religions could be tidily sorted out into three aspects of one great Earth Goddess: the Maiden, the Mother, and a third she did not name. She was mainly interested in the first two; so was her colleague Sir James Frazer (he of The Golden Bough ), who thought they were a mother-and-daughter pair like Demeter and Persephone in Greece.
    The first writer to pay much attention to the third one was the magician Aleister Crowley, who called her ‘the crone’ and identified her with the sinister Hecate, a Greek goddess of darkness and black magic. He seems to have loathed her. In his novel Moonchild in 1921, he wrote:
    Artemis [the moon goddess] is unassailable, a being fine and radiant; Hecate is the crone, a woman past all hope of motherhood, her soul black with envy and hatred of happier mortals; the woman in the fullness of life is the sublime Persephone.
    And then the idea took root in the mind of the poet Robert Graves, and grew into his book The White Goddess (1948), the picture of a lovely, cruel threefold deity who brings both life and death, inspiration and despair. Her third aspect is the crone, the hag, the destroyer, but beyond the pain she represents there is a promise of reward and renewal, so she is not to be seen as evil. This powerful image which Graves created is now firmly imprinted on the minds of modern occultists on Earth, where the trio of identical figures which Shakespeare knew has faded away, morphing into the sharply differentiated group of Maiden, Mother, and Crone.
    But if Nanny Ogg is right (and she always is) it all began on Discworld way back in the mists of time. There is leakage between universes.
    So she and Granny Weatherwax had to find some way of setting up a threesome of the