Beliefs. Umbagollians live in a state of panpsychism, that is, the belief that every object, down to and including rocks and amoeba, is somehow sentient, and therefore worthy of recognition, if not respect. This is not an organised religion, but rather an innate, recognised part of the Umbagollian character. Its roots lie in the mentality of the original Umbagollians who were kept as slaves in the nameless country across the Two Shows Mountains (see: Ancestors.) They could not understand time sequentially. Instead, they experienced every object at every moment in time existing simultaneously as part of one great entity, giving rise to the modern expression, 'Everything is the same as everything,' meaning roughly that 'We are all on the same level' and 'We are all connected.' Studied formally, the subject is, in fact, called 'Connections.' Umbagollians will spend a long time looking at the relationships between opposites, (a hard rock and a soft flower, for instance) or parallels between different periods of time in the hope of recognising a common thread that links them together harmoniously. Experiences of unusual beauty or grandeur are assumed to connect the person who experiences them to this sense of 'everything.' "Not only this thing is like this: everything is like this, and I have been lucky enough to feel it." Goolooians, especially, will look for beauty in anything, from an insect to a scrap of fog. The field has its critics. A student studying Connections at the University of Ex began an essay thus: "We have devolved! Where we see all things being connected by some nameless ethereal 'thread' or 'notion' and are content to go no farther than that in the way we anticipate the universe, our ancestors had a complex understanding of the real ties behind the surface of things, for was not eveything they saw or felt a dream, either a waking dream or a sleeping dream, they dreamt with their eyes open and with their eyes shut and hence were in constant contact with the real face of eternity, the ever-shifting never-shifting psycho-rational non-foundation which we dimly perceive, while compensating for our half-understanding by (correctly!) perceiving personalities in rocks and bushes as well as in one another! I urge us to cast off our certainties!" The student carries on in this vein for the next three pages. He got a B. Another student wrote: "The danger with Connections is that people can make associations based solely on what they expect to see. For example, a Goolooian prejudiced against Poidians might find that the connections they make between past and present events and objects they encounter every day, perhaps passages in the books they like to read, all point toward the conclusion that Poidians are dispicable people. However, a more dedicated, brave and rigorous Connectionist would discover that there at least as many points against what they believe as for it." Jublet totems. Any visitor to Gum Gooloo Gum Jublet will immediately notice a profusion of jublet totems. The jublets are an inheritance from the old country - the place the original Umbagollians crossed the Two Shows Ranges to escape from. The presence of these glum-faced stubby figures makes a Goolooian feel rested and happy, although no-one knows why. Their history is a mystery. Are they supposed to represent 'everything?' We're not sure. They are regarded by the Goolooians as characters in their own right, as honourary, blessed, slightly stupid yet beloved people. Goolooians paint their jublets blue, pink and yellow to keep them pretty, feed them with honey and mashed cardoons and locate them in gardens so that they have leaves and flowers to look at. "For Pete's bloody sake. I didn't come here to watch adults play with dolls." (Poise Emmet, farmer and Governor of the North-West Province, on his first visit to Gum Gooloo) The Goolooians know that there is more to the jublets than 'playing with dolls,' and they stick to their beliefs with their typical quiet stubbornness. Mystics. Mystics are people who, for one reason or another, believe that their behaviour is governed by forces outside themselves. Those Umbagollians who are not mystics divide them into three groups. Aescetic Mystics. The rarely-seen aescetic mystics have made a deliberate retreat from civilised life. Meditative, they fade away into the forests and mountains to live and die in contemplative silence. Drowned Mystics. The lives of these people are so glutted with sensations - sounds, smells, voices, rolling ecstasies - that they can barely move. The universe drowns them in an ocean of feeling ; their defense against it is as thin as tissue paper and easily breached. Some Drowned Mystics enjoy their condition while others are afraid of it. The universe becomes more real to them than their bodies. They start to disbelieve their own existances. A distressed Drowned Mystic will deliberately set out to hurt himself in order to prove that he still possesses a body capable of feeling pain. Their mania for self-inflicted harm is sometimes fatal. The famous fragmentary text, The beliefs of a Mystic, is probably a record of a Drowned Mystic. Dangerous Mystics. Dangerous Mystics roam the country screeching ecstatic gibberish and tearing at themselves with sticks and nails. They are noisy and pushy and violent. There are similarities between their behaviour and that of a distressed Drowned Mystic, however, a Dangerous Mystic is not out to prove her own existance, but that of other people. Her violence is a coded form of communication. Each Mystic has her own code which she is waiting for the outside world to decipher. In her eyes she is speaking perfect sense, and if the outside world cannot understand then the outside world is, ergo not really there at all. In Gum Gooloo it is not unusual to wake up in the morning and find a dangerous mystic sitting outside your window in the flowerbed. Exians meet them in the marketplaces and North-Western farmers come across them rolling in the crops.