Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels combine humor with commentary on serious issues. My favorite in the series is Small Gods. It doesn’t have a close connection with any other Discworld book. Its time period is earlier than most of them, except for Pyramids.

If you haven’t read any Discworld books, you should! In brief, Discworld is a flat planet whose sun orbits around it. It lies on the backs of four gigantic elephants. They, in turn, stand on the back of Great A’Tuin, a turtle who swims through space, making even the elephants look small. However, if you live where the priests of the great god Om hold power, saying this could get you into trouble. They insist, in spite of all the evidence, that their world is a globe.

Discworld has many gods. They live on belief. If no one believes in them, they dwindle into helplessness and become the small gods. Om used to be a great god, but at the start of the story, he’s well on his way to becoming a small one. He has powerful priests, and Omnia’s terrified populace obeys the commandments of his prophets — but no one actually believes in him. They believe in the Quisition and its power to torture and kill heretics.

Actually, Om has one believer, named Brutha. Brutha, a novice in one of Om’s temples, has an eidetic memory and a very simple outlook on life. A single believer isn’t enough to sustain a great god. Om has found himself trapped in the body of a tortoise. Only Brutha can hear him.

Om’s personality, at least as his prophets have presented him, is quite reminiscent of Yahweh, the deity of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. He’s often represented as a fierce bull. He likes to smite unbelievers and trample the unrighteous. Being a tortoise, though, limits his options and starts to change his outlook on godhood.

The big theme of the book is belief, especially as it fits in with religion. Although Om exists within the novel’s context, the religion which sustains him is a human creation. The Discworld philosopher Koomi explains it:

And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn’t in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a much better job of it…

And yet there seemed to be a lot of lesser gods around the place. Koomi’s theory was that gods come into being and grow and flourish because they are believed in. Belief itself is the food of the gods. … Any god could start small. Any god could grow in stature as its believers increased. And dwindle as they decreased. It was like a great big game of ladders and snakes.

This is a pretty good description of how religions grow and decline. Zeus and Osiris once had many devoted followers. Now just some neo-pagans conduct rituals for them, and it’s questionable whether anyone actually believes in them. Yahweh grew from being the deity of a league of Middle Eastern tribes to the most worshipped god in the world.

Om is real for the sake of humorous fantasy. Pratchett supposedly said, “I think I’m probably an atheist, but rather angry with God for not existing.” He was also the co-author of Good Omens, which was made into a very good miniseries, and between those two books it’s clear he didn’t take theistic religion very seriously. That is, he didn’t take it seriously as an account of reality, but he knew how serious its effects are.

If we’re going to look at his views on belief, we should also look at his Hogfather. On the surface, it’s a lighter book than Small Gods, but it touches some dark places. The eponymous character is Discworld’s version of Santa Claus. An assassin has an assignment to kill the Hogfather. There’s no way to do it directly, but he sets out to kill him by magically killing children’s belief in him.

Death, ironically, sets out to save the Hogfather. (Death appears in nearly all the Discworld novels and is a sympathetic character whose function is to start dead souls on their way to the afterlife. It’s never clear what this afterlife is, and it seems to be different for each person.) He does this by taking the Hogfather’s place. A robed skeletal figure coming down chimneys is a poor substitute, but his effort buys time.

Belief makes the Hogfather exist. It’s another aspect of Koomi’s theory, but this book goes further in a dialogue between Death and Susan. Susan is a realist and skeptic — at least as much as she can be when magic works, monsters exist, and Death is her grandfather.

YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY.

That’s the most naive kind of reductionism. Death doesn’t understand people very well, as Hogfather and other Discworld books show, so that’s not necessarily Pratchett’s view. However, Susan’s responses are confused, and she doesn’t offer a good comeback. In Death’s view, everything we do and believe is a pretense. Maybe seeing everyone die makes him think that way.

The Hogswatch Festival, like Yuletide, is closely connected with the return of the Sun after the winter solstice. The Hogfather must be there for it to happen. A little earlier, Susan and Death have this bit of dialogue:

“The sun would have risen just the same, yes?”

NO.

“Oh, come on. You can’t expect me to believe that. It’s an astronomical fact.”

THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN. …

“Really? Then what would have happened, pray?”

A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

That’s an allusion to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis:

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”

If justice is a “big lie,” as Death claims, why bother to believe in it, much less take chances to advance it? Why not pick some other, more convenient lie to believe? Whether they reflect Pratchett’s views or not, Death’s remarks are disturbing.

Piranesi, The Neverending Story, Small Gods, and Hogfather all present perspectives on the relationship of fantasy, reality, and belief. Michael Ende’s warning about the difficulty of reaching Fantasia and coming back again makes the most telling point.

Fiction shows us something that didn’t happen, and good fiction has applicability to what could happen. It may tell us what we can hope for or what can go wrong. It could deal with the fate of the universe or a personal step toward or away from happiness. It can motivate or dissuade us.

We can learn from fiction, but we need to keep our focus on reality. We can look at Brutha’s dealings with a god and a fanatic and perhaps think of better ways to handle powerful people. Should we teach children to believe in Santa Claus so that they’ll believe big lies later? Please, no. Rather, let’s find stories that, though they’re fictional, help us to understand the big truths of life.

And that suggests half a dozen books I could write about for future posts.

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