Okay, it’s time to be honest. I’ve been very hard on the Bajoran religion over the last month but I hope it’s clear that comes from a place of love. (For storytelling, if not Bajorans.) However there is admittedly one piece of important context I’ve been glossing over up until now. That piece is called paganism. The modern equivalent to that is humanism but that’s a topic for another time. For now what’s important is to remember that the central purpose of religion is to connect people to the transcendent.

Paganism arises when people look for the transcendent in the material. Whether it be the unbridled power and fury of the storm or the frightening dark deeps of the ocean there are glimpses of the transcendent all around us. The pagan mindset points to these material things as the place where the transcendent meets us.

In some ways the pagan mind is the purest expression of mankind’s quest for that which exceeds us, looking for the eternal under every stone and behind every cloud. However like pure steel, paganism is very fragile. If you venerate the sea then your culture must live by the sea or your culture will fail. How long can you remind believers of the power of the tide if you’ve never seen a body of water wider than a creek? Not very long, I’d wager.

What about mankind itself? Even the Abrahamic religions agree that men have a bit of the divine in them, why can’t we rely on what’s inside ourselves to transcend? Well, that gets a bit tricky. The problem with vesting transcendence in mankind is that mankind is very flawed and those flaws get in the way of the transcendent. God kings tend to have feet of clay. They crumble quickly, leaving no place for belief to vest in. Even a dynasty tends to fail after a few generations, leaving a new line of “divinity” to take over and ultimately destroying the glimpse of transcendence the religion was supposed to give.

In short, paganism tends to obscure the transcendent behind layers of human frailty and politicking.

The Greek and Roman gods are more notable for their constant adulterating and infighting than anything else. The Norse gods give glimpses of transcendent ideas that are eventually destroyed at Ragnarok. The gods of Egypt and Babylon were a mix of constantly churning elements similar to those of other pagan beliefs but they didn’t last any longer than their peers.

For the Bajorans the transcendent thing they pursued was the Prophets and the material place they sought that transcendence was their own circumstances. The Bajorans are obsessed with prophecies of trying times to come. As a result most of their religious stories revolve around someone trying to match a prophecy to a situation or receive a prophecy of their own. In many ways this is reminiscent of apocalyptic scholarship/cults of the Christian tradition.

However, the understanding of prophecies is a thing rooted in a single situation, rather than something transcendent. While there’s much debate over the End Times in Christianity, it has little bearing on the religion’s core principles. For the Bajorans the prophecies are the core tenants. As I said before, if there are no prophecies or no Bajorans the religion basically ceases to exist as this leaves the transcendence they seek out of reach. It is this weakness that makes pagan religions so very fragile.

If a group of people changes their pagan rites begin to die out. This problem can be mitigated, yet paradoxically becomes worse, if the pagan rite is centered around a divine ruler. Pharaohs and other god-kings provide stability through a line of succession. Even if an entire nation is wiped out and the material circumstances of a nation change totally if the spark of the divine still vests in a single ruler then they can transfer that conduit to a new, transcendent power.

When the shorelines flood they can retreat into the mountains and declare them a stairway to heaven. When the king dies, the divinity passes to his son. However, if the ruler does something to make themselves and their people unworthy of divinity then the entire culture is thrown into chaos. The cyclical nature of Chinese dynasties and the monotheistic experiment of Akhenaten give hints of what that might be like.

The Bajoran battles over the rank of Kai suggest their own religion shares these strengths and failings. Kai Winn practically converts the main branch of the religion to worshiping their own version of the devil, the Pah Wraiths. Likewise, the coming and going of the Cardassians poses many difficulties for Bajoran believers. While I, personally, consider the invasion of a foreign power something that should totally change native pagan religions, if not wipe them out entirely, the Bajoran religion otherwise behaves much like other pagan beliefs in Earth’s history. On that count I think it functions just fine.

Like with all the aspects of belief and storytelling that I’ve discussed this month, how you choose to handle the pagan search for transcendence in a story is a matter of taste and desired outcome. Not every story calls for exploring the way pagan religions inevitably collapse under circumstance. Most stories take place over a very short period of time and, while pagan beliefs are fragile, it still takes a generation or two for that kind of change to play out in society. While I think these themes are underused these days they don’t have to be explored.

What I really hope people get out of this is that there’s rich depth and meaning, symbolism and theme that you can find in exploring how your characters seek and believe in the transcendent. Much of our modern storytelling is immediate. Focused on survival, materialism and personal gain. Very little is about the transcendent or the timeless and if you’ve read anything here that inspires you to go out and write about those things then my job here is well done.