Tonyblack said:
Does anyone think that Terry is parodying the British Royal family when Teppic does his tour of the embalmers/model makers/pyramid builders?
Definitely! But possibly not Prince Philip - he wasn't 'innocently' rude enough...
And swiftly back to religion once more, but the one we're supposed to be looking at.
You
can believe in gods on the disc of course, 'cos they live on the highest mountain on the planet and the 'specialist' ones like Teppic and his family do tend to 'manifest' occasionally, like when his dad dies and he's still in A-M. I expect most of us recognised the first exploration (yet another ground-breaking 1st
) of god-like splurges of fertility in his case with the wheat which also happened later on in Wintersmith for Tiffany (aside from the cornucopia, when she had to wear extra socks - was it to stop flowers bursting out all over)?
That only happened the once for Teppic of course and presumably on the later expanded principle of gods needing belief to be gods on discworld. With his dad dead presumably the whole kingdom of Djelibeybi started to believe very strongly that Teppic was the new god so the sun would come up the next day? So he
was a god in that sense and in that only, meaning Dios
did really create the godhead for the kings of the Djel valley, unlike the ones he simply dreamed up as those were made 'real', not through belief, but through the pyramid 'magic' carrying them all to the plane of existence where they'd function. I use inverted commas for magic there, as we also have the astral plane with the Sphinx that You Bastard strays into with Teppic before getting it right, which does seem to confirm that mathematical magic is not confined to pyramids - in other words camels are better at it. :twisted:
Skipping blithely on (because the month's nearly done and we all know the case for disc-gods is mostly unassailable) there's the matter of Teppic being sent to learn how to be an Assassin. Far from being an idle plot device for Terry to parody Tom Brown's Schooldays this is in fact crucial to Teppic 'saving' his country. The Assassin's Guild creates killers essentially, but their graduation tests use dummies (because the apprentices aren't being paid to kill presumably, so using real people is simply 'not done'). This also means that the novices go through a crisis of confidence over whether they can in fact kill somebody. Teppic realises he can't kill a real person, but finishes the course anyway because he's reasoned that it is a dummy and so safe. Because he
hesitates before stabbing the dummy (or whatever he did) thinking about this seems to be why Mericet is so grudging in his congratulations aside from loathing Teppic. The whole Ankh-Morpork section then seems pointless therefore except when we get to the critical point in the nightmare version of Djelibeybi where Teppic realises he has to inhume the great pyramid and
that is why his Assassin training - or rather his climbing prowess is needed to stop the power off and return the kingdom to normality (and throw Dios literally into the time loop again).
Well it works for me as a theory anyway
