The Folklore of Discworld

take responsibility. Nobody knows this better than Granny Weatherwax.
    There were stories that were never to be told, the little secret stories enacted in little rooms …
    They were about those times when medicines didn’t help and headology was at a loss because a mind was a rage of pain in a body that had become its own enemy, when people were simply in a prison made of flesh, and at times like this she could let them go . There was no need for desperate stuff with a pillow, or deliberate mistakes with the medicine. You didn’t push them out of the world, you just stopped the world pulling them back. You just reached in, and … showed them the way …
    She’d been a witch here all her life. And one of the things a witch did was stand right on the edge, where the decisions had to be made. You made them so that others didn’t have to, sothat others could even pretend to themselves that there were no decisions to be made, no little secrets, that things just happened . You never said what you knew. And you didn’t ask for anything in return. [ Carpe Jugulum ]
    Well, true enough, you didn’t ask , but, as Nanny Ogg says, ‘There’s ways and ways of not askin’, if you get my meaning. People can be very gen’rous to witches. They do like to see a happy witch.’ And it was indeed amazing how many people would pop round to a witch’s cottage from time to time with a basket of this or a bottle of that, and would volunteer to do a bit of digging, or to check that the chimneys were OK.
    Magrat once grumbled that Granny Weatherwax hardly ever did ‘real magic’ – ‘What good is being a witch if you don’t do magic? Why doesn’t she use it to help people?’
    To which Nanny Ogg replied that it was precisely because she knew how good she would be at it that she didn’t. Nanny meant that magic is power, and where there is power, there is always the temptation to abuse it. Granny steered clear of that temptation, knowing its strength only too well. Moreover, she thought that you could not help people with magic, though you could certainly help them by headology and hard work.
    All this is very much like what used to go on on Earth up to a hundred years or so ago – maybe even more recently, in some parts. There were women who knew charms and cures, who told fortunes, who acted as midwives and nurses, who knew what counter-spells to use against bewitchment. And men too. You could find them in both villages and towns, and their clients came from miles around. Some openly made a career of it, taking payment in cash for their services, others used Nanny Ogg’s technique (with an edge to it). A Sussex village witch in the 1890s, for example, was described to a folklorist in 1941, in the Sussex County Magazine .
    Her reputation was very valuable to her. If she stopped a childand said, ‘What a fine crop of plums your mother had down Crabtree Lane, dearie,’ the result would be a basket of the best plums, as otherwise the tree would wither and die. So she kept herself provided with good things.
    But you had to be careful what you called such people, since on Earth the word ‘witch’ so often meant someone who uses magic to harm, not to help. It was more polite to say ‘wise woman’, ‘white witch’, ‘charmer’, ‘cunning man’, even ‘wizard’ – and latterly a ‘District Nurse’. But shorn of the little nods to superstition, what they had and have in common has been a certain strength of character, practical experience and the ability to take charge of a situation.
    Yet, in spite of these parallels, there are important differences between magical practitioners in the two universes.
    The most far-reaching concerns the source of their power. On the Earth it was generally assumed that magic power must originate in some non-human source, and that the witch had received it as a gift or reward, or through some pact or bargain. Those who feared and hated witches accused them of having pledged their souls to devils. Some of the more learned magicians boasted that their knowledge came from angels and spirits. Some Scottish wise women claimed they had been taught charms and remedies by elves, whom they would visit in the hollow hills, or by the dead. In other lands, gods and the spirits of ancestors were the power sources.
    The witches of Lancre have no such ideas. Their skill and power are their own innate gifts, carefully honed by practice and observation. They have no dealings with the gods or the