"REMIND ME AGAIN ... HOW DO THESE LITTLE HORSE-HEADED FIGURES WALK?"
Sometimes you have to sacrifice a pawn or a knight to save more valuable pieces - a queen, a king. But there are people, kings, parliaments, church hierarchs, who prefer to play games not on a square wooden board, but in real life and for them people are like inanimate chess pieces.
Born Terence David John Pratchett, Sir Terry Pratchett sold his first story when he was thirteen, which earned him enough money to buy a second-hand typewriter. His first novel, a humorous fantasy entitled The Carpet People, appeared in 1971 from the publisher Colin Smythe.
Terry Pratchett's fantasy is never divorced from human reality. Each book touches on certain themes, it is like a little research on history, mythology, world problems, human values.
In "The Petty Gods," through the story of Bruta and the god Ohm, the topic of faith, the gods, the development of religion, its impact on the course of history, and what people are willing to do to gain the highest office in the church, and with it, power.
"Gods need faith, and people need gods. Sometimes that's where it stops, but sometimes it goes further. Stones are added, domes are erected, and a temple is built in the place where a tree once grew. God gathers strength, and people's faith pushes him upward. For some, the sky is the only limit. And for some, even heaven won't stop them."
Omnia is a country that worships the Great God Om, and there are temples and statues of Om. But as it turned out, everything became a decoration, a toy: there are temples, but there is no faith. And the Great God Om has turned into a land turtle, while in the meantime church ceremonies in the country continue to be performed to glorify the god. The rituals are there - there is no faith.
"...you're floating along, enjoying the rhythm of the universe, thinking that all those people have holy faith in you down there, sometimes you go down to shake them up a bit, and then suddenly bam! ...and you're a turtle... you go down... and you're a turtle, and you don't have the strength to stop being a turtle at all."
But the quiz in Omnia is a real quiz: just try to doubt the correctness of even one clerical tenet. Dissent is severely punished here (how can we not recall from history the "holy" Inquisition). "The Inquisition keeps us on the right path! It works for the glory of the church." "Blood has always been considered an extremely effective detergent."
Like a skilled chess player, the Church of Omnia lines up its side of the board, calling the Omnians to fight the Ephebians. Gathering around its pawns, knights, and bishops and imagining itself as rooks and queens, and making a king out of a god demanding immediate protection, the Omnian church starts a religious war. According to the Omnians, confident in the truth of their religion, the Ephebians worship idols and demons (a truth reminiscent of how European countries went to war on supposedly barbarians). And there, in Ephebe, there are simply many gods and a different attitude toward the gods.
Throughout the story Bruta and Om will walk together. Bruta, the only one who believes in him, "not some pair of golden horns. And not in a great majestic building." From an insecure, weak-willed novice he will become strong, independent, thinking. And Om, of course, will become the Great God again, but it will happen at the moment when Brutus needs his help the most. From just a Great God, Om will turn into a protector of Omnia, who can prevent the offensive movement of the unification alliance of other countries against Omnia (by returning to the mountain of gods, Om instantly explains to the gods, who only gamble, what's what and what they really have to do).
It must be said that Pratchett in this book is ironic not only to believers, but also to atheists, the hard-headed part of them who love to talk about their unbelief at every turn, even when the conversations are not about faith.
"Gods only encourage atheists-if, of course, your atheism is thorough, fervent, ardent... A true atheist devotes his whole life to unbelief, he hates the gods because they don't exist. Hard stone atheism, comparable to the rock. It is like faith."
Omnia is a combination of a medieval state with crusades and the Inquisition and an early Christian society like the Copts, whose religion at an early stage was something in between the old faith and the new Christianity. "...cross the terrible wilderness, and you weigh their hearts on some scales... If a man's heart is heavier than a feather, you send the sinner to hell." This brings to mind the ancient Egyptian judgment of Osiris: the scales on which the gods Thoth and Anubis weigh the heart of the deceased. On one side of the scale is the heart, soul and conscience of the deceased, and on the other side is the pen of the goddess Maat, the symbol of truth. If the man had led a righteous life, the scales weighed equally, but if he sinned, the heart weighed more. The justified went to the afterlife, and the heart of the sinner was eaten by Amat - a lion with the head of a crocodile.
So Pratchett reminds us that religions once adapted to new realities, some objects or phenomena of former faiths fit into new conditions, as, for example, we have Shrovetide, once a pagan ritual, is now quite consistent with Orthodoxy. Throughout the book, the writer seems to take the reader through all the stages of development of all the world's religions that were and are.
Terry Pratchett himself was an atheist; he simply did not believe, or rather believed, in his Death. He was not the kind of man who would go on television or radio about his unbelief, but he held to his opinion. "I'm an atheist, at least to the extent that I don't believe in the objective existence of any big beards in the sky. That is a religious position, by the way. - said in an interview. Rather, he might even be defined as a humanist, a European humanist who believes in Christian virtues but does not recognize the existence of an object-subject of faith.
While Pratchett held to his point of view, he also understood and accepted that another might have a very different view. Likewise, in his book he does not moralize, does not try to offer his opinion as the ultimate truth, but analyzes, reasons, and allows the reader to draw his own conclusions.
Comments