The Folklore of Discworld

but you can’t. Not here. You need a cauldron, and a magic sword. And an octogram. And spices, and all sorts of stuff.’
    Granny and Nanny exchanged glances.
    ‘It’s not her fault,’ said Granny. ‘It’s all them grimmers she was bought.’ She turned to Magrat.
    ‘You don’t need none of that,’ she said. ‘You need headology.’ She looked around the ancient washroom.
    ‘You just use whatever you’ve got,’ she said. [ Wyrd Sisters ]
    And in fact the demon was successfully summoned by means of a copper, its paddle, a scrubbing brush, a washboard, and a lump of soap. Magrat learned the lesson well, and not long afterwards was able to bring surging life back into the long-dead timbers of a dungeon door, by sheer force of imagination and will, with no artificial aids whatsoever.
    Yet tools can be very, very useful for impressing the client, especially when combined with a few little white lies. Take healing, for example. Magrat is a good healer because she knows a lot about herbs, but Granny is an even better one because of her skill in stage-management and the use of props. She gives people a bottle of coloured water, tells them they feel better, and they do. As she explains to young Esk:
    ‘I saved a man’s life once. Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I’d bought it from the dwarves. That’s the biggest part of doct’rin, really. Most people’ll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.’ [ Equal Rites ]
    Similarly on Earth, the village healers who were known as ‘cunning folk’ or ‘wise women’ knew just how important it was to add a touch of drama. In County Clare in Ireland in the nineteenth century there was a woman called Biddy Early with a great reputation as a healer. She used all sorts of herbal brews, but what impressed people most was the small blue bottle which she kept always at hand, and used as a focus for her Second Sight when she was scrying (which is the same as crystal-gazing, only without the crystal). When a sick person came to consult her she would shake it, stare fixedly into its cloudy depths, and then tell him what ailed him, and what he must do to get well. Some said this bottle had been given to her by fairies. It is said, too, that on her death-bed she made herfamily swear to throw it into a lake, on pain of some terrible curse if they disobeyed. So they did, but as soon as she was dead they hurried down to the lake to fish it out again – after all, she hadn’t expressly told them not to, had she? But they never found it, and though many people have tried, no one has yet. At least, that is one story; another is that the parish priest threw it into the lake. And there is another, which says that later on, a dark stranger appeared in the village, went to the lake and—
    But that’s another story, and stories cling to Biddy like iron filings to a magnet. There is a consensus that she was born in County Clare in 1798 and died in Kilbarron, near Feakle, in 1874. In between, she has become folded and moulded by narrativium, and defined by the kind of accounts that begin, ‘I heard tell when I was a boy’. In short, for the purposes of this book, she could be thought of as Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg rolled into one. By all accounts she had a fine grasp of practical psychology as well as some expertise in folk medicine, and was famous for her cures; she was said to have got her powers from the fairies or some similar ‘sponsor’ and probably did nothing to discourage this belief. She liked a drink, too, and when it came to payment she was on the Whiskey and Chickens standard. She must also have liked men, because she had four husbands.
    Nowadays, if you go looking for ‘Biddy Early’s Cottage’, you will eventually be directed to a lonely, tumbledown building at the far end of a weed-choked path. You will find that others have been there before you, leaving their tokens on windowsill and doorstep – coins, flowers, strips of cloth, candles, beer bottles. She is not forgotten.
    In fact Biddy Early needs a book of her own, and our bibliography has at least two.
O F H ATS AND B ROOMS
    There is of course the pointy hat. And the broomstick. Every Discworld witch uses these, and as far as we know they always have. Yet the broomstick is merely a convenience, and the hat is not in itself magical. Its secret – and it is one of the great secrets of witchcraft