The Science of Discworld II

ook.’
    â€˜He says he’s just finding the books, okay?’ said Rincewind. ‘And he’ll leave them in a pile and go out of the room and no one is to look at them while he’s gone, because if they do he won’t know about it , and if he coughs loudly before he comes back in that will only be because he’s got a cough and not for any other reason , okay?’
    1 Lancre was so backward that its population of 500 had only one civil servant, Shawn Ogg, who handled everything from national defence and tax gathering to mowing the castle lawns, although he was allowed help with the lawns. Lawns required care.

TWENTY
SMALL GODS
    â€˜R ELIGIOUS,’ SAID THE D EAN .
    â€˜Oh dear,’ said Ridcully.
    Discworld’s wizardry is not terribly keen on religion. Given the history of the Discworld, this is not surprising. One big problem is that on Discworld, gods are known to be real. We list a few later on, but we can set the scene with reference to the god of mayflies. In Reaper Man , an old mayfly is telling some youngsters about this god, as they hover just above the surface of a stream:
    â€˜â€¦ you were telling us about the Great Trout.’
    â€˜Ah. Yes. Right. The Trout. Well, you see, if you’ve been a good mayfly, zigzagging up and down properly—’
    â€˜â€”taking heed of your elders and betters—’
    â€˜â€”yes, and taking heed of your elders and betters, then eventually the Great Trout—’
    Clop .
    Clop .
    â€˜Yes?’ said one of the younger mayflies.
    There was no reply.
    â€˜The Great Trout what?’ said another mayfly, nervously.
    They looked down at a series of expanding concentric rings on the water.
    â€˜The holy sign!’ said a mayfly. ‘I remember being told about that! A Great Circle in the water! Thus shall be the sign of the Great Trout!’
    Roundworld religions avoid the difficulty of gods that you can actually see, or meet or be eaten by: most of the world’s current religions find it best to go the whole hog and locate their gods in a place that is not just outside Roundworld the planet, but outside Roundworld the universe. This demonstrates admirable foresight, for regions impenetrable today may be a forest of tourist hotels tomorrow. When the sky was an unexplored and unfathomable realm, it was fashionable to locate gods in the sky, or on top of unscalable Mount Olympus, or in the halls of Valhalla, which amounts to much the same thing. But now all significant mountains have been climbed, people routinely fly across the Atlantic, five miles up, and reports of encounters with gods are few.
    However, it turns out that when gods don’t manifest themselves in physical form on an everyday basis, they acquire an impressive degree of ineffability. On Discworld, on the other hand, it is possible to run into gods in the street or even in the gutter. They also lounge around in Discworld’s equivalent of Valhalla, known as Dunmanifestin, which is situated on top of Cori Celesti, a ten mile high spire of green ice and grey stone at the Disc’s hub.
    Because of the everyday presence of tangible gods, on Discworld there’s no problem about belief in gods; it’s more a matter of how much you disapprove of their lifestyle. On Roundworld, deities do not infest the highways and byways – or, if they do, they do so in such a subtle guise that the unbeliever does not notice them. It then becomes possible to have a serious debate about belief, because that’s what most people’s concept of God rests on.
    We’ve already said that on Discworld everything is reified, and that’s pretty much the case there with belief. Now B-space, the space of beliefs, is huge, because people have vivid and varied imaginations and can believe almost anything. Therefore G-space, the space of gods, is also huge. And on Discworld, phase spaces are reified. So the Discworld not only has gods: it is infested with them. There are at least 3,000 major gods on the Disc, and scarcely a week passes without the research theologians discovering more. Some use props like false noses to appear in religious chronicles under hundreds of different names, which makes it difficult to keep count accurately. Among them are Cephut, the god of cutlery ( Pyramids ), Flatulus, god of thewinds ( Small Gods ), Grune, the god of unseasonal fruit ( Reaper Man ), Hat, the vulture-headed god of unexpected guests ( Pyramids