This is a little something for those who have read the book. It is one of my favorites. But only recently did I realize what Terry was trying to say with all that about the mirrors - he was showing us narcissism.
Granny, who knows who she is, good and bad and all the rest, avoids mirrors until the climax. And at the climax easily escapes the mirrors and death because she knows who she is. She is real.
Lilith, Granny's sister, is the person Granny could have been if she had used her power for self advancement. Lilith - if you don't know the myth of Lilith it is easily found online... let's just say it is a name rich with too much pride - uses mirror magic for self advancement, and is especially prone to do so in the midst of several mirrors.
The mirror represents a means of knowing yourself. Granny looks in a mirror and knows she has a bit of Lilith in her own psyche. We see this in Granny's pridefulness, which is appropriate self respect often, and a little too much ego other times. We see Lilith has gone off the track when we learn that she uses multiple mirrors. In multiple mirrors you see yourself going on and on infinitely, like an omnipresent being. You begin to believe that that is what you are, and there is great power in what you believe to be true about yourself... so Lilith makes herself powerful by being fatheaded.
This is what narcissists do. They have no balanced sense of who and what they are, so they create stories about themselves and their own greatness. Deep down they are wounded and feel insignificant, perhaps the world mirrored this to them at a point when a child looks to the world for its own place in it to be defined. Their egotism is denial of and balm for this wound. Narcissists use stories much like Lilith did, just not literal fairy tales. They mythologize themselves and their 'wonderful lives'. Did you ever hear Bill Clinton talk about when he first saw Hillary? That is a story that likely never happened, but even if it did, it leaves out the truth of his womanizing (or worse) - this is what I mean.
So we see Terry is saying we have a true self and a false self. The false self is all about survival through self promotion, at least in the case of the narcissist. It is sick and insecure. And it is capable of great wickedness.
So that's it really. You are a divine child of God. We all are, and the narcissist doesn't acknowledge that - that you are too. But the thing is, until you know your correct relationship to God, as an undeniable truth through the experience of being that, you are not being truthful with yourself to declare it (Godhood) and expect others to acknowledge it.
#Narcissism, #TerryPratchett, #Mirroring, #WitchesAbroad, #Symbolism
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