On Reading Small Gods

You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you can do is give them a meaningful look.
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods


The great god Om has returned to the Discworld . . . as a tortoise. This reincarnation—a slow, awkward form that Om finds too close to earth—is far from the raging bull he had intended for himself in order to demonstrate his power and instill fear in the souls of his worshippers. Something is definitely wrong with his godly powers. And, to aggravate matters—as well as to help explain his current predicament—Om discovers that he has only one follower left: Brutha, a novice monk who has been relegated to tending the garden because he is a simpleton. Yet, in spite of his severely limited intellect, Brutha, Om's last genuine worshipper, has two things in his favor: a photographic memory and absolute faith in his god.

Thus begins Small Gods, Terry Pratchett’s masterful parody of how humans construct and deconstruct religious beliefs.

Several years ago, as a birthday present, my good friend, the Oxford philosopher Benjamin Murphy, gave me a copy of Pratchett’s novel. The questions Pratchett raises in this book haunted me; and they continue to do so.

I recently included Small Gods in a literature class I’m teaching. The students, mostly 11th and 12th graders, after getting over the initial shock of being assigned—in a “serious” literature class—a fantasy novel about a tortoise who claims he’s a god, enjoyed the process of extracting meaning from Pratchett’s work.

We accompanied Om and Brutha on their journey to retrace the origins of faith. And we were joined by their nemesis, Vorbis—the cruel and ambitious inquisitor who uses fear, lies, torture, war, and death as his preferred tools in his quest to become the next Great Prophet and head of the Omnian Church.

At the novel’s end, most of us in the classroom arrived to this conclusion: that Terry Prachett’s novel illustrates how, after centuries of repression and fear, humans will start to worship their Church instead of their god.

This revelation stunned me, perhaps more so than it did the students. But, without a doubt, Pratchett’s humorous story, about a tortoise-god, helped us to better understand the nature of the religious conflicts that prevail in today’s world.