Unggue

Unggue is the nearest thing goblins have to a religion. Pastor Mightily Oats, whose treatise is considered to be the final work on the subject, has written:

The goblin experience of the world is the cult or pehaps religion of Unggue. In short, it is a remarkably complex resurrection-based religion founded on the sanctity of bodily secretions. Its central tenet runs as follows: everything that is expelled from a goblin’s body was clearly once part of them and should, therefore, be treated with reverence and stored properly so that it can be entombed with its owner in the fullness of time. In the meantime the material is stored in unggue pots... This is a magically sound view, as one of the fundamental thaumic laws is that anything that is personal to someone can be used, voodoo-like, against them; this is demonstrated in Hogfather.

Unggue Had

It is clear that those who wish to store their own bodily secretions will fail, unless they "are in possession of great wealth, considerable storage space and compliant neighbours". Therefore, as is the case with most hard-to-follow religions they follow the more lax form of the religion, called the Unggue Had, which requires that goblins collect the trinity of earwax, finger- and-toenail clippings and snot. Goblins have the surprisingly forward view that urine is merely something that passes through the body, there being no change before and after (this is certainly the way in the standard goblin cave, if not the human household, as sanitary causes are considered less important for goblins). Faeces also is merely considered to be food that has undergone a change of state. Surprisingly, goblins seem to be one of the only races on the Disc that attaches no importance to teeth, believing that they are merely a type of fungus; Trolls see them as a quick way of getting money, humans stress the importance of the Tooth Fairy, and even Vampires do not underestimate the pain toothache causes. Hair is also considered unimportant, although, it must be said, they have little of it.

Unggue Pots

Until the bodily secretions are buried with the owners, they are stored in Unggue Pots: small, snuff-box sized creations crafted out of leather, wood or bone. Some rarer ones are made of precious minerals, the stealing of which has coloured goblin-human relations to the present day. The goblins up in the mountains, being quite protected, can afford to make quite large and intricate ones, while those down on the plains, who think the mountain ones are quite peculiar, make smaller, portable pots for daily use which are then decanted into a set of pots they keep in the cave (to avoid theft) at the end of the day. The pots made in the mountains are quite sophisticated, with various Unggue brushes and the ceremonial Unggue mask being available to create these. Each goblin makes their own pot, so it can be quite precious to them (and indeed priceless to others, if you can find someone with the...right taste in ornamentation). They only change hands in times of great distress (see the Soul of Tears) but some of the younger goblins, like Tears of the Mushroom, are flexible in their outlook, so will trade pots for other precious items. The magic of the pots is their brightness; they fill the air with a rich gold, the very echoes of light. They are to the jewels treasured in Ankh-Morpork as a bold stallion is to a mule sold by someone called Honest Harry. Indeed, the goblin standard is quite high: even a masterpiece, if of inferior build, will be broken up without a moment's thought. It is interesting to note that when this happens the pot is reduced to a grey dust, without a hint of sparkle. Each pot has a different name; the Unggue Cat, for example, contains nail clippings. There is nothing feline about it, but there are only a certain number of syllables in the world.

Soul of Tears

One of the more macabre pots, this is created when a goblin mother, in times of terrible famine, must face the dreadful algebra of necessity, and eat her child, in the hope that they will be reborn in the goodness of time. They then make the pot, and weep their tears into it, and send it away until a better time. The pots are very small and have a floral decoration, and, when picked up by a non-goblin, initiate a geas in which the pot belongs to said non-goblin, and quite often changes the owner to act in a goblinesque fashion. The only time this has happened to date in the Discworld chronicles is the sad story of Fred Colon, as recounted in Snuff.