Unexpected enchantment in unexpected places

Introduction

Glen A. Larson is an American television producer and writer best known as creator of the series Battlestar Galactica and Knight Rider in their original 1970s and 1980s incarnations, respectively. Larson was born January 3, 1937 in Los Angeles, California. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints … His first hit series was Alias Smith and Jones. Larson was involved in the development of The Six Million Dollar Man, based on Martin Caidin’s novel Cyborg, and was one of the program’s executive producers. Larson later secured a then-unprecedented $1 million per episode budget for Battlestar Galactica. The show incorporated many themes from Mormon theology, such as marriage for ‘time and eternity’ and a ‘council of twelve.’ When characters got married, they were ‘sealed.’ A Mormon temple wedding ceremony is called a ‘sealing’ … Battlestar Galactica was revived as a series on cable TV in 2004 with great success. Created by David Eick and Ronald D. Moore, it was military-oriented, a re-imagining of the original series. The series ran for four seasons, ending in March, 2009. (Mormonwiki.com, 2009)

I was aware that Glen had used Mormon influences and how he had created the cosmology, but I’m not that familiar with Mormon belief or practice so it was kind of like whatever was in the show is what I was dealing with … I essentially looked at the original series as mythos and the way it dealt with religion in sort of a global sense. (Ronald D. Moore, in Leventry, 2005)

Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is a widely discussed science fiction franchise including, among other things, a TV mini-series aired in 2003, a TV series that ran for four seasons in the period 2004–2009 and a 2010 prequel, Caprica. It has received widespread attention including scholarly discussion (e.g. Eberl, 2008, Potter and Marshall, 2007; Steiff, 2008), but with one exception (Klassen, 2008), so far, its thoroughly religious nature has gone largely unnoticed. Fandom reception displays the same lack of interest in and understanding of the religious nature of the show, one of the results of which is a thorough disappointment with the show’s ending. However, to a religious mind, the ending follows the relentless religious logic of the show. Religion is a many-faceted and essentially contested concept. In this article, I concentrate on the elements of cosmology, myth and spirituality. By cosmology I mean representations of the world in its entirety; by myth, I mean cosmological narratives that make thinking on more phenomena possible; and by spirituality, I mean the privileging of the non-material (including the materiality of cult and ritual) aspects of religion. I understand religion itself, with the social anthropologist Clifford Geertz, as an exercise in slipping between the profane and the sacred:

The religious perspective differs from the common-sensical in that … it moves beyond the realities of everyday life to wider ones which correct and complete them … It differs from the scientific perspective in that it questions the realities of everyday life not out of an institutionalised scepticism which dissolves the world’s givenness into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses, but in terms of what it takes to be wider, nonhypothetical truths. Rather than detachment, its watchword is commitment; rather than analysis, encounter. (1973[1966]: 112)

The enchantment of this article’s title is the sense of wonder and delight that such slippage may incur. In Geertzian parlance, BSG fandom largely fails to ‘slip’ from the here and now into another privileged realm into which the show invites it. I take this discrepancy between most fandom readings, as they may be spotted all over the internet (as of April 2010, a Google search for ‘Battlestar Galactica’ yielded 8.4 million hits, whereas in November 2012 the number had increased to 27 million) and a religious reading, as indicative of an interesting tension in western contemporaneity. On the one hand, the attention paid to religious thinking is low, and there is a widespread social self-understanding of the age being a secular one. On the other hand, a number of popular culture artefacts are steeped in religion. The rest of this introduction discusses the show’s premise, then I will perform a detailed reading of one type of religious material in the show, namely the Mormon one. In its original 1970s incarnation, the show came close to being an allegory of Mormon theology (Ford, 1983). The creator of the first BSG, Glen Larson, is a Mormon, and he stayed on as a special adviser for the reimagined show. Note that the reimagined show revels in syncretistic uses of religion; my case could be strengthened by highlighting how other types of religious material contribute to the enchanting effort of the show. In conclusion, I note how Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is only one popular culture artefact with wide circulation that is thoroughly religious; other examples include Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials and Avatar. Religion may be said even to be a constitutive element of the genres of fantasy and science fiction: a fact that is particularly interesting where science fiction is concerned since, as its name signals, it is thought of often as a highly rationalist genre. Religion continues to inform our imagination, not least by dominating so many of the age’s big-selling popular culture artefacts, but an apparent decrease in the ability to think in religious terms means that most viewers do not recognise this.

In the show, billions of humans live on 12 planets, worshipping a plethora of gods with Greek-sounding names and cherishing a myth of their origin being a far-away planet called Earth, mentioned in the Scroll of Pythia. They create cybernetic organisms, ‘cylons’, who proceed to rebel. Five human-looking cylons (we come to know them as Ellen, Saul, Galen, Tory and Anders) arrive on an exodus from a nuclear holocaust on Earth after a 2000-year long flight (two years to them). The five get the local cylons to break off the war against the humans in return for a promise to help in evolving the local cylons. Having produced hybrids who may navigate ships but who cannot function without being plugged into them, the five go on to produce eight human-looking models, each existing in a number of identical copies. One of these, model no. 1 (John, Cavil), proceeds to kill one of the others, reprogram the final five with false human memories, and then deploy them among the humans. He then spends decades on planning a genocide on the humans. He sends some copies of the other models, some with altered memories, some not, to infiltrate the fleet. Through her liaison with scientist Gaius Baltar, model no. 6 gains access to the defence mainframe and becomes a war hero among the cylons, earning the moniker ‘Caprica Six’. Baltar has a number of functions in the narrative, one of which is to be guided by an angel who takes the shape of Caprica Six.

When Cavil launches all-out nuclear attack, the military fleet is dead in the water. However, the Battlestar Galactica – a ship commanded by William Adama that is about to be mothballed and which gives the show its name – gets away, together with a smattering of other ships, one of which holds the minister of education, Laura Roslin, who is sworn in as the new president of the colonies. Roslin decides that they will flee. The cylons decide to pursue what is left of humanity. A number of episodes turn on cylon–human battles, the heroes of which are the viper pilots (Lee Adama, call name ‘Apollo’, Kara Thrace, call name ‘Starbuck’, Sharon Valerii, call name ‘Boomer’ [an unwitting cylon], Sharon, call name ‘Athena’ [a cylon], etc.).

Earth emerges as the goal, and Roslin plays what she refers to as the religious card to have it remain that way. The fleet finds a planet, Kobol, which confirms Pythia’s description of the route to Earth. However, Baltar challenges her presidency and her choice of goal. He overturns both, and settles the fleet on a planet they name New Caprica. Meanwhile, certain cylons have had second thoughts about the attempted genocide on the humans. When they stumble upon New Caprica, these cylons want to have a go at living in peace with the humans. It does not work, and humanity takes off from New Caprica on a second exodus. An algae planet emerges as a new pointer to Earth. At this point a cylon war has broken out, with those seeing their future in spiritual terms pitted against Cavil and his followers, who want to be true to their nature as machines. The former forge an uneasy alliance with the latter, and together they find Earth, which has not recovered from its nuclear holocaust. There is a showdown between the alliance and Cavil’s cylons. The alliance saves the day and lands on a planet which is inhabited already by pre-lingual humans. In order to break the cycle of humans that create artificial life which then rebels, the alliance decides to break up, settle in small colonies and merge with the indigenous population. As it happens, we who are watching this are the descendants of the resulting genetic mix. The show comes to a close with the two prominent angels, in the by-now familiar shapes of Baltar and Caprica Six, walking among us and wondering if it will all happen again.

Mormonism and Battlestar Galactica

There is a parallel to be drawn between the social conditions that yielded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the USA in the 1820s, and the present-day US as well as European conditions. In both cases, a key theme was how to maintain social order in a situation where a plurality of religions was in evidence. Due to innovation, often the effect of migration, this is a constant theme in human history; however, it takes on particular salience in times of social turmoil, as in a frontier situation or an era of mass migration such as the current one. The key difference between the American 1820s and the American 2000s in this regard is that whereas in the former situation, the challenge was to find some kind of denominator between Christian faiths, now we are looking at a global challenge.

A word on sources: Mormons run their own university, named after their second prophet, Brigham Young. Brigham Young is solid in the whole gamut of academic disciplines. On this background I find it highly unlikely that an evolved Mormon theology should not exist; however, although Mormons are very active in disseminating other knowledge relevant to their faith, such as genealogical tools, one looks in vain for published scholarly theological work. This gives the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints a certain hermetic quality, and means that the interested outsider is relegated to sacred texts, online publishing and the odd commentary in other kinds of work (for example on Mormon history). ¹ The few texts that are available, such as Richard McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine (1966[1958]), were only published after intense power struggles within the church, thus giving testimony to the very limited bandwidth of public discourse on doctrine (Wikipedia, 2012). The Mormon wiki is a nice source when it comes to self-presentation because it is continually edited and hence consensus-seeking; also because it is a work in the public realm and strives to be accessible to believers (who edit it) and non-believers alike. So are internet places such as the (Mormon) Gospel Library. In addition, it should be noted how the academic sub-field of Mormon studies has consolidated during the last decade (Mauss, 2007).

The value of sacred texts for extracting doctrine is not only bogged down by the usual problems of reception history, but is reduced further by the central and dividing role played in Mormon theological tradition by all the new practices and doctrines introduced by the First Prophet, Joseph Smith, in the immediate years before he was killed by vigilantes in 1844 (Arrington and Bitton, 1992[1979]). These included a firming of the belief in the heavenly father and Jesus as people in the flesh, the eternal and hence non-God-created spirit of man, sealing polygamy and secret temple rites [i.e. sealing in the Mormon sense of a marriage for life]). ² The temple rites were influenced by Masonic rites (Smith became a Mason in 1842) (McKeever, nd). The hermetic nature of Freemasonry and Mormonism complicates the task at hand here, but the key point for the making of BSG is clear enough. Humans have godly parentage, and are capable of transforming themselves into gods: indeed, that is the entire point of existence. Here we have, among other things, the explanation for how Caprica Six is able to appear in front of Baltar without anyone else noticing, and how they are able to communicate in telepathic, verbal and carnal ways.

The mini-series

Religious motives are presented already in the mini-series that resuscitated BSG: 25 minutes into the series, a cylon copy of what we come to know as No. 6 tells Gaius Baltar that she fixed the defence mainframe computer because God wanted her to do so. In response, Baltar tells her that he is ‘not very religious’ and proceeds to juxtapose her beliefs with her intelligence, implying that religion equals superstition. In his speech on the occasion of the planned decommissioning of Galactica, Admiral Adama regrets that humankind ‘wanted to play God’ when it constructed artifical life. Kara prays to the Lords of Kobol. Leoben, a cylon, suggests to the admiral that the cylons may be God’s retribution for humanity’s sins.

The mini-series draws to an end around a funeral service, where a priest from Geminon, Elosha, tells us that the first line of the sacred Scrolls of Pythia is: ‘Life here began out there.’ This myth of origin, we are told, specifies that humanity (and implicitly, humanity’s children – the cylons) trekked through space to the 12 colonies from Earth. Adama makes a rousing speech to his downcast crew, stating that they are without hope and direction. Latching on to the myth of a trek from Earth, he states that he knows where it is, and that Earth will be their goal and refuge. In a tête-à-tête with President Laura Roslin shortly afterwards, she calls his bluff: there is no Earth. Adama readily agrees, but states that everybody needs something to live for: ‘Let it be Earth’. The story to be told in the series is the one of a forced exit (exodus) to a place that is known from sacred texts.

The key constituent of Mormon collective tradition is the exodus from Illinois to Utah (1846–1857), which followed widespread religious persecution, including an official order by the Governor of Missouri, Lilburn W. Boggs, which declared that the ‘Mormons must be treated as enemies, must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary, for the public peace’ Arrington and Bitton, 1992[1979]: 44). ³ Brigham Young, Smith’s successor and the leader of the exodus, is referred to often as the ‘American Moses’ or ‘Mormon Moses’ for leading his people deep into Native American territory for a new start: land which became the Utah territories as part of a wider 1850 compromise between the federal authorities and Mormons.

The mini-series presents the myth of origin of the 12 colonies of Kobol, namely that their ancestors arrived on a trek from Earth, and it singles out this myth of origin as the key storyline of the series. In terms of cults, we are introduced to the state religion of the 12 colonies, which is revelatory and polytheistic: prayers are addressed to the Lords of Kobol. However, note that there is considerable confusion about the extent of this polytheism, as already noted, Adama did not charge humanity with wanting to play gods, but stuck to the singular (so do many other humans at various occasions). By contrast, we get to know that the cylons are unequivocally monotheistic. We also get to learn that there are various kinds of non-believers. Adama is agnostic about gods, but, like Durkheim (1995[1915]), he sees great value in religion as a political phenomenon whereby the polity worships itself.

The religious tone of the mini-series is underlined further by the use of stage sets. In the bonus track accompanying the mini-series DVD, production designer Richard Hudolin states that he was aiming for ‘a cathedral-like feeling throughout the whole film’. The sets and the props remain the same throughout the series and add to the sacral touch. For example, the dramaturgy of the frequent funerals in the series always feature a row of silhouettes standing above the priest at the far back. If we compare this to the layout of the only purpose-built place of worship to which we are introduced in the series, the Temple of Athena, we find the same silhouettes. The various religious themes voiced in the mini-series – God’s intervention in human action, the nature of God as being love, the ideas of hubris and divine punishment and also the idea that God is on our side – are all well known from a number of different theologies.

Season 1

An angel makes its appearance in the very first episode of season 1: the spiritual being takes the likeness of Caprica Six. She tells Baltar that if he does not repent his denial of God’s existence, he will be exposed. Baltar duly repents and is not exposed. Caprica Six’s conversations with Baltar are our main source on cylon religion. Caprica Six states that ‘God has a plan for everyone’, and repeatedly holds that ‘God is love’, but he also may take away what he has given. God is a God who is active in the world, be that as a loving or a punishing God. Caprica Six insists that Baltar form a personal relationship with God and give himself over to His divine will. Baltar responds by accusing her of speaking metaphysical drivel. Six disappears and in her place appears a real cylon six model, Shelley Godfrey (God-free shell?), who proceeds to accuse Baltar of treason. Baltar is put in the brig, where he converts and promises to carry out God’s divine will. Immediately afterwards it transpires that the evidence against him, which up to this point had seemed watertight, is counterfeit (Season 1, ep. 7: ‘Six Degrees of Separation’). In this case, Baltar’s slippage into another dimension not only seems to have altered his view of reality by making him a believer, it also seems to have changed the in-show reality.

In the mini-series we were introduced to places of worship. In the Christian tradition of which Mormonism is part, the body is the soul’s temple. The human body is sustained by 33 vertebrae. The name of the first episode of the first season is named ‘33’ (which is ostensibly the number of minutes between the faster-than-light jumps that allow the humans to escape the cylons). It is also a particularly holy number in Jewish tradition, as well as in Freemasonry. Freemasonry maintains that life has extraterrestrial roots, as does Mormonism. ⁴ The two most sacred numbers of Mormonism, 33 and 13 (the 12 tribes of Israel plus the one that went overseas), are on prominent display in BSG.

In the following episode, we are introduced to yet another kind of slippage, when Laura Roslin sees the cylon Leoben Conoy in a vision. A stowaway Leoben is then found and tortured. He tells the viper pilot Kara that she is trapped in a prison of her own making, and, as did Six to Baltar, that she should turn to the one true God. He also tells her that he can see the future; the fleet will find Kobol, the home of the human gods, and Kobol will lead them to earth (Season 1, ep. 8 ‘Flesh and Bone’). ⁵

According to Mormon doctrine, Kolob is the planet that is closest to the Heavenly Throne. According to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints teaching, ‘The Plan of Salvation, as revealed by Christ to His prophets, states that all people lived (before they were born onto the earth) as spirits in a pre-mortal existence, the spirit-offspring of God’ (Mormonwiki, 2012). Spiritual entities emanate from around Kolob and provide the soul for each and every human being here on Earth, and beings on countless planets elsewhere. Note that Mormonism is already the dominant religion on thousands of these planets. The corollary is that humans have a pre-mortal existence, not only a post-mortal one. To quote the Mormonwiki (2011):

Mormons believe that a veil of forgetfulness comes between man and God when men are born on earth; they forget their pre-mortal existence in the heavenly realm, to the end that they can be tested here and learn to develop faith.

As to pre-mortal existence, Arrington and Bitten explain how:

All men and women, in an existence long before they came to this earth, were actually born of Heavenly parents; that is, for each person an eternally existing ‘intelligence’ was given a spirit body so that it could begin to learn and exercise choice and thus progress. As spirit children they were taught and assisted by those Parents – God the Father and their Heavenly Mother – in preparation for coming here to mortality for further advancement. Because the Divine parents impart something of their own nature to their children, human beings can think of themselves as ‘gods in embryo,’ as being able to continue on the path those Parents started them on – until eventually, if they remain faithful, they become like them … Mormons believe there is no final judgment immediately after death but that life goes on in another sphere. The eternal spirit, separated from the mortal body, returns to a spirit world and continues the process of learning and making choices while awaiting the resurrection of all God’s children. In that spirit existence all who did not have the necessary opportunities for progress and fulfillment while on earth will have a fair chance. (1992[1979]: 186) ⁶

Note that in Mormon theology, spiritual transitions from one planet to another happen via God’s throne near Kolob. In BSG, the road from Caprica to Earth goes via Kobol. The plot thickens as the fleet spots a cylon base and decides to attack. Everything hangs on Baltar making the right guess and, with some help from Caprica Six, he does. The fleet wins the battle against heavy odds – Baltar’s guess turned out to be spot on. His conversion to religion is firmed by this experience, and he begins to entertain the idea that he is an instrument of God. However, quoting a 3600-year-old prophecy from the Roll of Pythia, Six predicts that the victory ‘will lead to a confrontation at the home of the Gods’, i.e. at Kobol. Quoting from the same prophecy, Elosha points out Roslin as the leader who will lead the people to the new land, but will die en route. In addition, we are told: ‘All this has happened before, all of this will happen again.’ Given that we already know the first line of Pythia – ‘Life here began out there’ – we may now patch together an entire historiosophy where time is cyclical and revolves around interplanetary travel, with Kobol as the hub. The fleet then duly discovers a planet that Roslin identifies as Kobol, the orbit of which is already teeming with cylons. At considerable political and personal risk, Roslin proceeds to put herself in the hands of a greater power and act on her impulses. In a move that eventually will lead to her being deposed and put in the brig, she dispatches Kara Thrace to Caprica in order to retrieve the Arrow of Apollo which, according to the Scroll of Pythia, will point the way from Kobol to Earth.

Season 3

In Season 3, the fissures between the cylons deepen, with the Cavils being the most outspoken atheists and the most anti-human cylons. Conversely, among the humans, Adama the agnostic leader asks people to pray if that is their way, and to keep people in their hearts if it is not (Season 2, ep. 16, ‘Sacrifice’). Another religious practice is highlighted in the double episode evocatively called ‘Exodus’ (depicting what is later called the second exodus from New Caprica), where D’Anna Biers has a dream and goes to a human oracle. The oracle knows of and interprets her dream, which is that Hera (‘the fruit of two peoples’) is alive, and, insisting that Zeus knows all, presents it to her, saying: ‘I have a message from your God’ – the implication being that there is only one God, but that God may be addressed in many forms (for a different interpretation, compare Klassen, 2008). In a later episode, ‘Sacrifice’, the suggestion that the human gods and the cylon god are one and the same is made explicitly (Season 3, ep. 11, ‘The Eye of Jupiter’). The human oracles have their mirror image in the cylon hybrids, navigators (cf. Gr. kyber, helmsman) of the cylon ships, who were early attempts to produce cybernetic organisms that may only survive on electric power; the hybrids are the other group in the BSG universe to make prophesies. ¹⁰

At a stretch, we may note another Mormon source for a BSG storyline here. In Mormon history, when Joseph Smith died, Brigham Young took over the leadership and became the second prophet. However, there was a group of Mormons who did not acknowledge him: instead, they chose to follow the leadership of Joseph Smith, Smith’s son, but did not acknowledge Smith fils as a prophet. These Mormons, now making up a community of some 250,000 people, also reject the innovations made by the prophet Joseph Smith in his final years. We learn that the centurion followers of the first cylon hybrid, those who broke away from the other cylons when they started making new hybrids, sees the first hybrid as the voice of God and take little interest in the hybrids that came later (Season 3, ep. 1–2, ‘Razor’).

The episode ‘Sacrifice’ also sees Adama egging on his men and women by promising them that if they save the humans on New Caprica, they will ‘find immortality as only the gods once knew’. Of course, this may be taken metaphorically, but in a Mormon context it is meant to be taken literally: humans are born with the potential of becoming gods, and their souls are immortal. In the Season 3 finale, two cylons (Six, D’Anna) and a human (Baltar) on board the cylon baseship, and two cylons (Six, Athena) and a human (Roslin) on board Galactica share dreams. They explicitly point out the infinitesimal possibility of this being due to chance. It is strongly suggested, both by the personae themselves and by the way in which the visions link in with earlier visions on the same theme, Hera in the opera house, that this is a premonition of the future – a transcendent phenomenon (Season 3, ep. 19–20, ‘Crossroads’). The finale ends with another inexplicable phenomenon: Kara Thrace returning from the dead. We are invited subsequently by the first human/cylon hybrid to see her as a ‘destroyer of worlds’ (Season 4, ep. 2, ‘Razor II’). A cylon hybrid tells her that ‘the children of the one reborn [Kara] shall find their own country’. Again, the theme is exodus under divine leadership, and in a subsequent episode we learn that Kara actually crashed on Earth: what returned must be a being from another dimension, which is one way to say a God. Kara believes that she has been gone for more than six hours, whereas to the people on Galactica, she has been gone two months. ‘Godtime’ (or ‘Godspeed’, to use a term from BSG) seems to be at work here (Season 4, ep. 3, ‘He That Believeth In Me’).

The Book of Abraham, a sacred Mormon text which states that Kolob is the star closest to God’s throne, also notes that the time on Kolob is the Lord’s time, one day of which equals 1000 Earth years:

And the Lord said unto me, by the Urim and Thummim, that Kolob was after the manner of the Lord, according to its times and seasons in the revolutions thereof; that one revolution was a day unto the Lord, after his manner of reckoning, it being one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest. This is the reckoning of the Lord’s time, according to the reckoning of Kolob. (Abraham 3:4; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 2012a).

Kara’s travel is not the only one in BSG that draws on the idea of time moving at different speeds. Five cylons turn out to have come to the cylons who originated on Caprica from Earth. The Final Five’s travel from Earth to the Twelve Colonies took two years for them, but 2000 years as seen from Caprica.

Season 4

In a key Season 4 episode Kara, who is out with a skeleton crew looking for Earth, is approached by the cylon Leoben, who informs her that a religiously based civil war, pitching atheists against believers, has broken out among the cylons and that the believers once again seek out the humans in order to start anew, this time by approaching an alliance (Season 4, ep. 6, ‘Escape Velocity’). The episode caps an arc where the cylon civil war is cross-cut with religiously based tension on Galactica, pitting a rising church that is forming around a reconciliation-seeking Baltar against the establishment in general (he tries to break up a sermon in honour of Zeus), and a vigilante group called the Sons of Ares in particular. In Mormon history, a vigilante group with strong links to US government officials pestered the Mormons (and eventually killed Joseph Smith). Baltar has to fight old religious beliefs among his followers, but eventually wins the right of assembly and is at least able to reconcile his own differences with Galen Tyrol, who refers at his wife’s funeral to ‘The Lords of Kobol, as many and as varied as mortal men’. Baltar, who is himself a staunch monotheist, does not object to this polytheism.

The theme of monotheism versus polytheism is absolutely central to BSG. It does not stop at the overt difference between polytheistic humans and monotheistic cylons, or at the cases of conversion to monotheism, such as Baltar’s. The question is always there, lurking as an uncertainty throughout the show. In the Christian tradition, the issue is usually mixed up with the nature of the Trinity: a topic that has been prominent in just about all schisms in the doctrinal history of Christianity. Nonetheless, Mormons seem to be particularly undecided on the issue. To take a typical example, the then-church historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Leonard Arrington, prefaces his discussion of the topic with references to American authorities such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin: ‘Here was one American, at least, who was prepared to accept a plurality of worlds and even a plurality of gods while still advocating a kind of working monotheism’ (Arrington and Bitton, 1992[1979]: 25). ¹¹ Mormonism postulates one supreme being, but nonetheless, given that this godhead consists of three separate entities (and not simply aspects of one God), it must be said to be polytheistic. Jesus (who is the Jehovah of the Old Testament) lives with his heavenly father somewhere in the vicinity of the Planet Kolob. All this makes for uncertainty about the degree to which Mormons are monotheistic. For example, in an article sketching out Mormon themes in the original 1970s series, James Ford (1983) noted about the elohim that the Mormon variant of Genesis has in the beginning ‘Gods’ (plural) created the heaven and the earth. According to the Book of Abraham, a papyrus manuscript bought and then translated with God’s help by Mormon founder Joseph Smith and published as part of The Pearl of Great Price, ‘the Lord said: Let us go down. And they went down at the beginning, and they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth’ (Abraham 4:1).

The elohim seems to be of particular relevance to BSG. It is a Hebrew word used in Mosaic holy scriptures with both singular and plural verbs. In an American setting, where it is not widely known that the suffix ‘-im’ is the plural, elohim has come to be used as a singular for the heavenly father but its basic meaning seems to be the godhead, which is a collectivity headed by the heavenly father. Shorn of its Hebrew plural marker, it has Helo as one of its near-acronyms. In BSG, Helo is consistently represented as the conscience of the fleet, the one who points out responsibility before the radical Other and puts his life on the line to prevent genocide. Furthermore, the name of Elosha, the major religious official of the show, may be read as a derivative of eloha (e.g. Alexander/Alexandra – Sasha, Eloha – Elosha). These are persons to be understood as corporeal entities. ¹² Furthermore, there are other, distinct gods which are seen as distinct physical entities living close to Kolob. They are the parents of Jesus. There are also gods (exalted beings) living elsewhere. Crucially, we are all God’s spirit children (and we are all potentially gods) – so in a sense, Jesus is humanity’s elder brother. One thing is for certain: when Galen makes reference to ‘The Lords of Kobol, as many and as varied as mortal men’, we are certainly moving within a Mormon frame of reference.

Baltar’s sermons, along the lines that God’s spark is within each and all (one possible reading of which is the Mormon, that we are potential gods) and that we are perfect just as we are, is gaining a hearing beyond his own embryonic church. A dying woman tells her fellow cancer sufferer, Laura Roslin, that Baltar is right about life after death. ¹³ She recounts her physical meeting with her relatives, who are awaiting her in the flesh in another dimension. Roslin subsequently has a similar vision. The vision echoes Mormon beliefs about the afterlife

By Season 4, the sharing of premonitions and the acceptance of a divine plan – religious themes – are what keep the emerging human–cylon alliance together. Religion is also at the heart of the cylon civil war, which is what makes the human–cylon alliance possible in the first place. The cylons who are drawn to an alliance are revolting against cylon atheism, and opt instead to be with another kind of cylons: namely, the Final Five. For this they are willing to give up physical immortality. They want to be mortal, because that is what will make them whole (as Six puts it, the one thing humans fear is what make existence worth living; Season 4, ep. 9, ‘Guess What’s Coming For Dinner’). Put simply, these cylons do not give up on immortality but rather trade physical immortality for transcendent mortality. Again, the Mormon idea of immortality, understood as a series of resurrections where the flesh remains the same – as with Kara or, for that matter, as the reborn cylons – is in evidence. At this point in the show, religion has become the glue of the human–cylon alliance and is overtly at the heart of the show’s politics. The goal of reaching Earth – or when it turns out that Earth is a red herring and yet another exodus is called for – the goal of reaching a habitable planet is the operational goal of the alliance, with the tactical goal being to stave off the other cylons, and the strategic one being to live in peace with one another. Premonitions are shared regularly between members of the two species. As they are being accepted as citizens, cylons partake in the up-to-now exclusive ritual of posting pictures of their dead on a memorial wall (Season 4, ep. 18, ‘Deadlock’). Resistance against the human–cylon alliance takes on a sacrilegious flavour. ¹⁴ Baltar and Six see angels with increasing regularity, and Kara is confirmed as a being from another dimension. Interestingly, there seems to be no immediate reaction to Baltar’s sudden religious innovation, when he rails against God for having left his children to their fate and insists that God should ask his children’s forgiveness, not the other way around (Season 4, ep. 14, ‘A Disquiet Follows My Soul’). This theme of believing in but then giving up on a god, perhaps in favour of a greater God that is truly universal, is well known from Christian tradition (see Pagels, 1989[1979]), but is not a part of Mormon tradition. In what turns out to be the last funeral held on board Galactica, all its three major denominations – believers in the Gods of Kobol, believers in the cylon god and Baltar’s followers – join in mourning the dead in an ecumenical service.

The final BSG episode, ‘Daybreak’, draws on another idea popular with new agers and perhaps best known from the work of Erich von Dänichen. Pia Andersson, a sociologist of religion, has named it the ‘ancient astronaut thesis’, describing it as follows:

Space aliens arrived on earth once upon the time in the distant past. They found the planet ideal for creation and thought insemination and genetic manipulation created a hybrid of homo erectus and themselves that became us …[The aliens] are often associated with the lost Atlantis and Mu/Lemuria. (quoted in Palmer, 2004: 28)

Whereas the first episode title, ‘33’, references the human as a vertebrate, the last episode title, ‘Daybreak’, references the human apotheosis consonant with Mormon belief in what happens to believers, who go from being humans to being reborn as humans and, if all goes well, eventually as gods. The choice of evolutionary method for how to break the cycle of human–cylon violence is rife with Mormon echoes: it begins with giving up on technology and tilling new land. Once again, there is a reference to the Mormon historical experience. As Arrington and Bitten put it, ‘Like the Adam of Mormon theology, [second prophet Brigham] Young chose a world of struggle and growth over an easy but static Eden’ (1992[1979]: 113).

In the coda to the final episode, the two principal angels of the show walk the streets of Los Angeles, making references to a God that does not like to be called by that name (a Hebrew echo), and pointing out how our own existence here on (new) Earth is in danger of being yet another repetition of the basic historical pattern, which may only be broken by coincidence (‘the law of averages’). One way of reading this coda is as an invitation to look at the whole show as a representation of another realm, one that the viewer has been able to slip into by watching BSG and which has direct relevance for our lives here and now (compare Geertz, 1973[1966]; Neumann, 2006).

Mormonism in the original series and in the remake

There is a key difference between the original series and the remake in this respect. Glen Larson’s original Battlestar Galactica may be read as an allegory of Mormon theology, and features as a candidate in Mormon debates about how to define ‘Mormon Cinema’ (Astle, 2009: 11). The allegory is itself a favoured Mormon genre:

It should be observed that among Mormons, art is seldom for its own sake. The most favored expressions of art, like the most favored educational pursuits, are those that are useful in achieving ends other than mere self-expression or even personal expansion … A creative writer will be praised more for a producible play or a poem that teaches a moral principle than for a publishable novel or a volume of confessional poetry. (Arrington and Bitton, 1992[1979]: 306–307) ¹⁵

Here we have one reason why the original series has not held up very well. The tradition which brackets artistic expression in favour of didactics goes back to Plato, who held that the arts were immoral because they expressed good and evil with equal savour. It follows logically that the appeal of such works for those that do not want to be preached to is limited. The remake does not make the same choice. Drinking, smoking, swearing and promiscuous sex, all of them anathema to the Mormon tradition, are on ample display, and the merging of good and evil things make for a central problematic of the show. To quote from a standard tool used to teach the young within the church, The Aaronic Priesthood Manual 2: ‘Keep television shows with suggestive conversation and experiences out of your home’ (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 2012b). If taken literally – and Mormon scriptures as well as instructions from one’s elders are meant to be taken literally – the BSG remake is off limits for saints.

What is at issue here, then, is not direct missionary activity. Furthermore, the show cannot be categorised as an allegory or a parable. The direct references to Mormon expressions are less interesting than the wholesale use of Mormon experiences, such as formatting an exodus on a former exodus that happened 2600 years ago (in BSG, 3600 years ago), raids back home to retrieve artefacts of utmost religious significance, guidance by scripture and angels who are clearly of a kind with humans (to the extent that intercourse is possible), pairing eschatology with continuous reformation of two groups locked in fatal combat, facing the end of time and reigniting religion (as Mormons claim happened when Smith had his first vision, hence the self-identification as Latter-day Saints), staking a new beginning on hard, physical labour rather on an easier course, and so forth.

Conclusion

Anthropologists have demonstrated how societies are dependent on shared myths that explain their origins and underpin their cosmologies (e.g. Leach, 1954). Imagined worlds are no exception. Myths may be secular, but most myths are religious. Religion remains active. There is a discrepancy between the analytical nature of this material as religious, on the one hand, and the hermeneutic understanding of it as being non-religious, on the other. As a result, religion remains active as a social fact, but for individuals it may be experienced as such only on a subliminal level. One case in point is the executive producer of the show himself, Ron Moore. Referring to his previous experience as one of the successors to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, he told Wired magazine how:

I’m a recovering Catholic now … Gene Roddenberry felt very strongly that by the 23rd and 24th centuries that all the major religions had vanished and it was all regarded as superstition. That was his view of the future. I just never quite bought that. I thought, that’s part of who we are, it’s part of what it is to be human, to seek to answer the questions of: Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more? What happens after you die? It didn’t seem like that was going to go away. (Rogers, 2008)

As seen from Europe, the USA is a thoroughly religious place where religion plays an active part in the official sphere. The former president, George W. Bush, tucked in general references to religion as well as specific ones meant for his evangelical constituency on a regular basis (Mansfield, 2004). However, for other parts of the USA – and here supposedly we may include a large chunk of BSG fandom – religion is not a key factor in social life. This makes for an epistemological chasm in society, where two different discourses will try to enroll any one phenomenon in a culture war of interpretation. Religion, understood as a knowledge system, overtly sustains one of these discourses. It is a point of departure for analysis rather than a conclusion that a popular culture artefact changes its meaning dependent on discourse. However, what should make us pause is the distance between discourses. Not so many years ago, an American or European who pontificated on any cultural product without having at least a basic understanding of how religious thought operates would have been an oddity. The overall failure of BSG fandom to see religious themes in BSG (although angels, sacred scriptures and conversions are prominently on display) and the failure to grasp that the ending of the show make perfect sense within a religious frame of reference, Mormon or otherwise, demonstrate at least two things. First, this is not a profane age in the sense that religion just fades away. Contrary to predictions made from Comte via Weber to present-day intellectuals, enchantment is still an important part of our lifeworld. The level of viewer recognition of religious themes seems to be sinking, but this does not mean that the religious themes are lost, only that they may be decoded differently. For example, whereas high viewer recognition of religion in BSG makes the show’s ending appear logical, low viewer recognition makes it look incongruous. However, since the incongruous element is a religious one – namely, angels – all viewers at least will recognise to some degree the presence of religion in the show. Second, large sections of western populations, including many ostensible specialists on knowledge systems, also known as intellectuals, still live in enchanted worlds but without the intellectual tools to analyse them. If religion is not going to disappear any time soon, it is time that we regain lost capabilities and read up on religious knowledge systems. It has been my aim in this article to demonstrate that on closer inspection, many popular cultural artefacts offers themselves as particularly apt objects for such an exercise.