Folklore of Discworld Read Online Free PDF Page B

fishermen. Nile crocodiles are notoriously savage.
Om
    The Great God Om is the sole god of the land of Omnia, his devotees having zealously exterminated everybody who worshipped any others. By nature he is very liable to outbursts of Wrath, expressed through cursing, trampling of infidels, and smiting with lightning. According to the Omnian priests, he spoke – indeed, he spake – to a series of chosen prophets, dictating to them a vast number of Laws, Precepts and Prohibitions which are enshrined in numerous sacred writings, not to mention some Codicils written on slabs of lead ten feet tall. Sometimes, it is said, Om did his spaking from out of a pillar of flame. Sometimes the chosen prophet sprouted glowing horns, for Holy Horns are Om’s symbol.
    The priests also claim that Om made the world, and revealed to them that it is not a disc carried by a turtle, but a perfectly smooth ball moving in a perfect circle round the sun, which is another perfectly smooth ball; this has become a vital dogma in the Omnian Church. Actually, Om now denies that he ever said this, or that he made the world – and if he had , he says, he wouldn’t have made it as a ball. Silly idea, a ball. People would fall off. Come to that, Om has only very vague memories of having met any prophets, and doesn’t recognize the things he is supposed to have said to them.
    Om’s views on these matters are known because he spent three years or so in the world in the form of a tortoise. This was an embarrassing accident. He had meant to manifest himself briefly in some suitably impressive avatar – most likely, a bull – but what he got was a tortoise. Not a vast mountain-bearing tortoise such as the Hindu god Vishnu once chose, but a mere common-or-garden tortoise. And he found he was quite unable to get back to his own shape. This humiliating failure of god-power was due to the fact that hardly any Omnians had real, true, deep-down belief in Om. Possibly, only one. The rest thought they believed in him, but what they really believed in was the terrifying authority of the Omnian Church and its Quisition. As the philosopher Abraxas wrote:
    Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed. [ Small Gods ]
    To make matters worse, Om-as-tortoise found his physical life in danger. Far too many people he met knew that ‘there’s good eating on one of those’. He was also being hunted by an eagle who had found out that if you carry off a tortoise in your talons and drop it on a rock from a great height, the result is a shattered shell and a rather fiddly meal. If, on the other hand, you drop it on somebody’s head, then you are recreating the Earth legend which claims that the Ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus was killed when a flying eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a rock.
    That eagles in some places have learned to drop tortoises in order to crack them open has been attested to by various sources, and our suspension of disbelief in a bird’s ability to target humans in the course of breaking its lunch was occasioned by a Daily Telegraph obituary of Brigadier John Mackenzie. In the Second World War he worked with partisans in the mountains of Greece, and ‘… on one occasion a brigade rifle meeting on a mountain was disrupted whena flock of vultures carrying various small tortoises in their talons decided to drop them on the mountainside to crack their shells. Two soldiers sustained fractured skulls from the tortoises and there were other injuries; the meeting was abandoned.’
    Om has been affected by his spell as a humble tortoise. The Omnian Church has now disbanded its Quisition. Divine smitings have become noticeably rare. Om’s devotees grudgingly allow foreigners to worship their own deities without being massacred, and his missionaries simply afflict the infidel with hymns and excruciatingly boring