The Folklore of Discworld

unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is ‘Don’t do what you will, do what I say.’ The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can’t avoid it. [ Witches Abroad ]
    Yet something of the notion of a coven has leached into the Discworld, particularly affecting the minds of beginners in the craft. In her younger days, Magrat yearned for one:
    It had seemed such a lovely idea. She’d had great hopes of the coven. She was sure it wasn’t right to be a witch alone, you could get funny ideas. She’d dreamed of wise discussions of natural energies while a huge moon hung in the sky, and then possibly they’d try a few of the old dances described in some of Goodie Whemper’s books. Not actually naked , or skyclad as it was rather delightfully called … that wasn’t absolutely necessary …
    What she hadn’t expected was a couple of crotchety old women who were barely civil at the best of times and simply didn’t enter into the spirit of things. [ Wyrd Sisters ]
    Occasionally, there were Lancre girls who preferred a more intellectual and ritualistic kind of magic, more like wizardry – the kind which involves chalk circles and Cones of Power and candles and Tarot cards, and which promises spectacular displays (on Earth, it’s often called High Magick). Such a girl has had an education. She probably wears a big floppy black hat, and black lace, and lots of occult silver jewellery. She paints her fingernails black. She adopts a new, flamboyant name. Arrogant and domineering, she creates a coven which she runs entirely to suit herself, bullying and mocking her followers. One such girl was Diamanda (real name Lucy Tockley), who thought she could challenge Granny Weatherwax, and became dangerously involved with elves, as is told in Lords and Ladies .
T HE T OOLS OF THE C RAFT
    Young witches tend to attach too much importance to their tools. Magrat, for instance, at the start of her career, used to read grimoires, drew sigils on her cottage walls, and owned a fine assortment of wands, robes, crystals, grails, crucibles, magical knives, mystic coloured cords, candles, incense, and occult jewellery, including bracelets bearing the hermetic symbols of a dozen religions. (She would have felt quite at home among the Wiccans and Neo-Pagans of Earth today, in a society where a pentacle is just another ornament; fifty years ago most people would simply think you were Jewish but hadn’t thought to count the points on your star.)
    But older witches avoid showy items of magical equipment. Crystal balls, for example. Granny Weatherwax loathes crystal balls, especially big expensive quartz ones (‘Never could get the hang of this damn silicon stuff. A bowl of water with a drop of ink in it was good enough when I was a girl’). Instead, both she and Nanny Ogg use old green glass ones, which had once been buoys for fishing nets.
    Pondering on this fact, young Agnes Nitt sees that there are good historical reasons for it.
    A glass fishing float, five hundred miles from the sea. An ornament, like a shell. Not a crystal ball. You could use it like a crystal ball, but it wasn’t a crystal ball … and she knew why that was important … Witches hadn’t always been popular. There might even be times – there had been times, long ago – when it was a good idea not to advertise what you were, and that was why all these things on the table didn’t betray their owner at all. There was no need for that any more, there hadn’t been in Lancre for hundreds of years, but some habits get passed down in the blood.
    In fact things now worked the other way. Being a witch was an honourable trade in the mountains, but only the young ones invested in real crystal balls and coloured knives and dribbly candles. The old ones … they stuck with simple kitchen cutlery, fishing floats, bits of wood, whose very ordinariness subtly advertised their status. Any fool can be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple-corer. [ Carpe Jugulum ]
    There are practical reasons too. If you believe that a spell will only work if you wear your robes and use the right coloured ink on the right kind of parchment while burning the right kind of incense on the right day of the week, you will be helpless if an emergency arises and you don’t have all your paraphernalia at hand. The three Lancre witches once needed to invoke a demon, but as they were in Nanny Ogg’s washhouse at the time Magrat protested:
    ‘Oh,