This article is about the concept of small gods. For the Discworld novel also called Small Gods, see Small Gods (novel).
Small gods are a special classification of deity unique to the fictional Discworld. They are the gods of slightly significant places, say the point at which two ant trails cross. On the Disc, the power and presence of a god waxes and wanes according to the number of believers. A small god therefore is a god without enough believers to manifest in any significant form. There are two very different kinds: those who have yet to accumulate enough believers and those who were once powerful but have been forgotten. Of the former there is an almost infinite number on the Disc; Pratchett compares their hidden ubiquity to that of bacteria in our world. The other may still have memory of its former days, but its identity will be almost completely lost, even to itself.
A god may become small even if it has a large following. It is well established in the novel Small Gods that while many people call themselves Omnians, this has more to do with the participation in the religious institution rather actual direct belief. Therefore, while the following is large, the god Om himself is very small, both in size and power.
A household god on the Discworld is a small god that has a limited number of committed believers, perhaps only one, but nonetheless enough to manifest in a specific visible form. The Unseen University was plagued by a plethora of household gods in Hogfather when a surfeit of belief caused by the Hogfather's absence led to their uncontrolled random generation. It could be argued that the great god Om, having been reduced to just one true believer, was a household god for most of Small Gods.
The city of Ankh-Morpork has a Temple of Small Gods, which provides spiritual solace to those who, while they may accept the idea of a deistic presence in the universe, don't really have a clue what it might be. Its cemetery is the favoured burial ground of the City Watch.
The following is a list of those gods named so far which could be considered small gods or household gods:
Read more about this topic: Discworld Gods
Famous quotes containing the words small and/or gods:
“Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)