Psychogeology

Place and the imagination

My very favourite fictional character – the one on whom I most definitely plan to model my old age – is Esmerelda (‘Esme’) Weatherwax. More commonly known as Granny Weatherwax, she appears in several of the Discworld novels written by the late English writer Terry Pratchett. Granny Weatherwax is a witch – but she’s rather different from the witches we typically find in other stories, old or new. Granny finds her strength in practical tasks and hard work, and has little time for the bells, whistles and miscellaneous contraptions associated with what she sniffily refers to as ‘magick’. She has no time for witches who find pendants, crystals and pentagrams necessary for the practice of their craft, and in spite of her own considerable power she rarely uses magic in any obvious form; instead, she prefers to rely on ‘headology’: an idiosyncratic and wonderfully pragmatic brand of folk-psychology.

In Equal Rites, the first novel in which she appears, Granny’s definition of headology highlights the deep differences between the magic of Discworld witches and wizards:

‘It’s all down to –’ she tapped her head ‘– headology. How your mind works. Men’s minds work different from ours, see. Their magic’s all numbers and angles and edges and what the stars are doing, as if that really mattered. It’s all power. It’s all –’ Granny paused, and dredged up her favourite word to describe all she despised in wizardry, ‘– jommetry. ’ … ‘It’s the wrong kind of magic for women, is wizard magic … Witches is a different thing altogether … It’s magic out of the ground, not out of the sky, and men never could get the hang of it.’

She also refers to witches as ‘the handmaids of nature’. And it’s this focus on the ground and the natural world that makes Pratchett’s witches unique, because each of his witches not only has an intense relationship with the land that she inhabits, but is an expression of its geology. Granny, for example, is a granite witch; she not only derives her power from the mountains where she lives, but she reflects them in her own character and in her practice of magic. And so, in Wintersmith, Granny Weatherwax says of the new teenage witch Tiffany Aching:

‘“She calls to the strength of her hills, all the time. An’ they calls to her! Hills that was once alive, Miss Tick! They feels the rhythm of the dance, an’ so in her bones does she, if she did but know it … She has the strength of her hills,” said Granny.’