The Folklore of Discworld

– lies elsewhere. When Granny challenges clever young Esk to discover it, Esk examines the hat carefully.
    There was nothing particularly strange about it, except that no one in the village had one like it. But that didn’t make it magical … It was just a typical witch’s hat. Granny always wore it when she went into the village, but in the forest she just wore a leather hood …
    ‘I think I know,’ she said at last.
    ‘Out with it, then.’
    ‘It’s sort of in two parts.’
    ‘Well?’
    ‘It’s a witch’s hat because you wear it. But you’re a witch because you wear the hat. Um.’
    ‘So –’ prompted Granny.
    ‘So people see you coming in the hat and the cloak and they know you’re a witch and that’s why your magic works?’ [ Equal Rites ]
    On Earth too, some people who practised magic for a living appreciated the value of eye-catching clothes and headgear, though there was no uniform style. There was Mother Redcap, for instance, a fortune-teller in Camden Town in London in the seventeenth century, whose appearance was definitely eccentric. She was strikingly ugly, kept a huge black cat, and always wore the red bonnet which gave her her nickname, plus a grey shawl with strange black patches. From a distance, they looked like flying bats. Then there was Billy Brewer, the most famous fortune-teller and magicalhealer in nineteenth-century Somerset, who practised in Taunton from the 1840s till his death in 1890 and called himself the Wizard of the West; he went about the streets wearing a long Inverness cloak, a tattered brown wig, and a sombrero, with gold and silver rings glittering on every finger. This did wonders for his reputation.
    In the matter of pointy hats and broomsticks, it is a curious fact that nowadays, as soon as you say ‘witch’ people just see the hat and the broom, and yet three hundred years ago they were very, very rare. Many people believed that witches could fly through the air, but they were said to do this by riding on all kinds of everyday objects and animals, not just brooms. The fashion for broomsticks began in late medieval France and Flanders, and only started spreading after about 1600; in Germany, cooking sticks were preferred; in Britain, pitchforks and hurdles. In Russian fairy tales, there’s the famous witch Baba Yaga, a child-eating ogress who lives in the forest; she often travels high above the tree-tops, sitting in an iron kettle or a stone mortar.
    As for the hat, nobody, in all the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ever stepped into court and said, ‘I know she’s a witch because she wears a pointy hat.’ No paintings, prints or pamphlets of that period show it; if a witch is wearing any headgear at all, it is that of ordinary everyday dress. But then things change. If we look at William Hogarth’s cartoon of 1762 which mocks ‘Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism’, we can see a preacher brandishing a doll dressed as a witch. She’s an ugly old woman. In a pointy hat. Astride a broom. Something remarkable must have happened, since Hogarth obviously expected everybody to know what his picture meant. And that was only the beginning, because now there are broomsticks, black cloaks and pointy hats in every toyshop in the run-up to Halloween. They are spreading fast, even in countries which had never heard of them fifty years ago. In Sweden, for instance, until quite recently witches wore aprons and head-scarves when they gathered for their annual Great Sabbat (held at Easter), but now it’s cloaks and pointy hats for them too.
    So what can have happened? There can only be one explanation – this costume was invented on the Discworld and rightfully belongs there, but the image it creates is so powerful that it is seeping out across the multiverse, and before long people will recognize it in every other world there is.
S O W HAT DO W ITCHES A CTUALLY
D O , T HEN?
    Whatever might be the case elsewhere and elsewhen, in Lancre witchcraft is seen as an honourable profession. Witches get respected. They don’t go in for fancy titles, but use good old-fashioned homely names which speak volumes for their solid respectability – Dame this, Old Mother that, Gammer t’other, and of course Granny and Nanny. It is to them that the village turns when a child or a cow falls desperately sick, when a woman is having a difficult labour, when those who are dying cannot actually die. It is then that the witch has to bring help – and