The Folklore of Discworld

this cruelty, Nanny Ogg persuades the other two that it is right to fight fire with fire, using her own beloved one-eyed cat, Greebo, who she thinks is nearly human anyway. ‘And it’ll only be temp’ry, even with the three of us doing it,’ she said. And so the three of them concentrated.
    Changing the shape of an object is one of the hardest magics there is. But it’s easier if the object is alive. After all, a living thing already knows what shape it is. All you have to do is change its mind.
    Greebo yawned and stretched. To his amazement he went on stretching.
    Through the pathways of his feline brain surged a tide of belief. He suddenly believed he was human. He wasn’t simply under the impression he was human; he believed it implicitly. The sheer force of the unshakeable belief flowed out into his morphic field, overriding its objections, rewriting the very blueprint of his self.
    In his human form, Greebo is a grinning, swaggering, six-foot bully-boy in black leather, with a broken nose, an eye-patch, and an excitingly lascivious smile. He is just as keen on fighting and love-making as when he was in cat-shape. And there can still be claws on his hands, if he so wishes. A few hours later he reverts to his natural felinity, but it turns out that he has been left with a problem seldom encountered by cats. It is one of the laws of magic that no matter how hard a thing is to do, once it has been done it becomes a whole lot easier, and will therefore be done a lot. For the rest of his life, part of Greebo’s soul knows that he has one extra option for use in a fight, and that is: Become Human. He has become a spontaneous shape-changer, even if the effect never lasts long – fortunately for him, and for others.
T HE D IS -O RGANIZATION OF W ITCHES
    There have been times and places in the multiverse when people got really paranoid about witches. For about three hundred years in most countries of Europe, they felt sure that there was a huge conspiracy of malevolent women, hundreds of whom would gather to hold sabbats where they worshipped the Powers of Evil, plotted magical murder and mayhem, and held unimaginably sexy orgies. German and Swedish witches were said to choose the peak of a bare mountain for these gatherings.
    In England, early in the twentieth century, one scholar (Margaret Murray) maintained that witches had indeed been members of a real secret society, but that they did no harm – all they were doing was to keep an old religion going, honouring gods and goddesses of earth and moon, of sex and seasons and crops. She claimed that they were tightly organized into covens of thirteen, and had been holding exactly the same ceremonies to mark the seasons on the same dates all over Europe for hundreds of years. Nobody seems to have reminded her that spring in, say, Italy doesn’t come in on the same date as in, say, Sweden, weather being rather more relevant to the idea of a ‘season’ than the mathematics of the calendar.
    Nowadays, historians and folklorists think Murray’s theory is an elaborate house of cards built up on hardly any evidence at all. On the other hand, a whole new religion called Wicca sprang up in England in the mid twentieth century, based on her ideas. Wiccans worship the powers of nature as personified by a Triple Goddess and a Horned God, and yes, many of them do gather in groups of thirteen. They tend to say that it doesn’t matter too much what the facts of history may have been. What matters is whether their magic works for them .
    Whatever may or may not have happened on this planet, the true witches of Lancre don’t form covens and secret societies, and they don’t go in for sabbats. They are totally dis-organized, thoughthey do hold periodic competitive Witch Trials, where each can display her skills. Each is an individual, working in her own way, and often alone, though when she grows old she will probably take on a girl and train her (in exchange for a bit of help with the housework), so as to hand over the area to her when she dies. Even those witches who act as a threesome only do so on the understanding that the arrangement is entirely voluntary and non-hierarchical. Except, naturally, that Granny Weatherwax gives the orders, and Magrat makes the tea.
    Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There’s a conflict of dominant personalities. There’s a group of ringleaders without a ring. There’s the basic