Religion in Farscape Essay, Part II

Like the title says, this is actually part 2 of this interminable and ridiculously detailed essay, so you'll want to scroll down to the last blog entry and read part 1 first. Or just skip the whole thing entirely, I won't mind. I'm mainly posting it here because this is, after all, my main dumping ground for things that hang around in my head and won't leave until I write them down. (Although I did get a google hit today from somebody searching for "Delvian Religion," so apparently somebody besides me is interested in this sort of thing. Ironically enough, though, it looks like whoever it was surfed by about half an hour before I started posting this stuff. Come back, O Web Searcher! I have more content for you! Oh, and as an aside to this aside, I looked at the google page for that search request, and apparently three of the top ten results are mine, from three completely different places on the web. That's actually kinda scary!)

Once again, this post will contain SPOILERS for pretty much the entire show, so you have been warned.

Anyway. Before I go on to talk about Stark (who is the single most complicated religious element in the show all by himself), I should make one correction to something I said last time. I was a little too quick to dismiss D'Argo and the Luxans from the list of people/species whose religious lives we know anything about. I was thinking that, while we see a number of Luxan rituals, none of them seem particularly religious in nature. I had, however, forgotten about the Orican, the Luxan holy woman seen in "Vitas Mortis." Interestingly, while the Orican is explicitly described as "holy" and treated with great reverence by D'Argo, and while she clearly has extremely powerful mystical abilities rather like Zhaan's, there is never any mention in the episode of any deity, or any indication of what religious philosophy or doctrine, if any, the Luxans follow. Indeed, the things we see this "holy woman" do feel much more akin to magic than to religion, to the extent that the two can be separated at all. This is actually fairly common in Farscape, and is something I'll come back to later.

Stark:

So far, we've simply seen that different characters from different cultural backgrounds (unsurprisingly) have different religious beliefs, and that religous mystics (Zhaan, the Orican) do sometimes have what appear to be magical abilities. But we've had no solid evidence as to whether any of those beliefs is actually correct, whatever abilities their related practices might impart to people. Stark, however, changes all this because he appears to possess direct, first-hand experience that, at the very least, verifies the existence of an afterlife.

Stark himself displays a large number of mystical abilities, many of which are very obscurely defined, and a great many of which have to do with the dead and dying. Initially, he claims only to be able to "give a few thoughts," or to telepathically send soothing images, which he uses to comfort the dying Gilina in "The Hidden Memory" and the merely suffering John earlier in the same episode. Later, however, he describes himself as helping dying souls to "cross over" to "the Other Side." He claims to be able to hear the mental screams of the dying Baniks in "Liars, Guns & Money Pt. 2" and of the frozen-instants-before-death, trapped-on-This-Side Interions in "Season of Death," both of which have a noticable negative effect on him. In "Meltdown," he is able to see and talk to Sierjna, a soul "trapped between realms" (in other words, what we would call a ghost), something no one else on the ship can do, and (eventually) he is able to free her from this "realm" and send her on to "the next level." He joins in Unity with Zhaan as she dies in "Self-Inflicted Wounds Pt. 2", and also apparently makes some kind of mental contact with the dying Talyn-John in "Infinite Possibilities Pt. 2." Zhaan uses his energy to bring Aeryn back from death in "Season of Death." He claims in "Relativity" to have brought the temporarily-deceased Rygel back by joining with him, and to have seen the spirit of Zhaan at the same time. Later, in "The Choice," he hears Zhaan's voice speaking to him. Also in "The Choice," he is able to get infomation from a woman who is either already dead on in the process of dying -- it's hard to tell which, but she definitely isn't moving or speaking.

The point is, if anyone knows the secrets of death and the afterlife, it's Stark. So, what does this uniquely privileged invidual have to say to us about the nature of these eternal mysteries? Unfortunately, very little, and much of what he does say is rather difficult to make sense of. Indeed, the only really definitive statement he does make is in "...Different Destinations," when Nurse Kelsa asks him, " If we die, will I be with my daughter... after?" and he replies, "Different beliefs, different destinations. I cannot tell before the end." Now, both halves of this statement are extremely provocative. To take the second half first, "I cannot tell before the end" seems to strongly imply that he can tell at the end, that he has some idea, at least, of where these souls he's helping to "cross over" are crossing over to. In other words, it would seem that Stark really does know the answer, or at least part of it.

So, what can we make of "different beliefs, different destinations"? At first, it's tempting to interpret this as meaning that whatever one believes will happen after death is what happens (an idea that's been used before, in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, for instance) and to extend that to reach the conclusion that all religions are therefore (in some sense) true. But this involves reading a great deal into what Stark actually says, probably much more than is justified. And, while it might appeal to our sense of pluralism or political correctness to postulate that all religions are equally true and valid, it is nevertheless logically impossible since in the Farscape universe, as in our own, many religions are mutually contradictory. Since Stark doesn't expand on his statement, we really have no way of telling what the exact relationship between "beliefs" and "destinations" is. (Nevertheless, I will doubtless be coming back to this particular quote more than once.)

It would seem reasonable to attempt to determine what Stark knows about the afterlife and the nature of life and death by examining his own expressions of religious belief. Unfortunately, this tends to confuse the issue even more. Stark, surprisingly, seems to bring no religious traditions of his own with him; instead the traditions we see him following (with great and apparently sincere enthusiasm) are Delvian. Now, there are a couple of possible explanations for this. It is, I suppose, possible that Delvian Goddess-worship is in fact the One True Religion, that Stark, with his direct pipline to the supernatural, is aware of this, and that that's why he practices it. A rather more likely-sounding possibility is that he took up the practices of that particular religion because of Zhaan. Her religion was extremely important to her, and she was extremely important to him. It's notable that he seems to get more devoted to Zhaan's religion after her death. That may be due to traces of Zhaan's mind or personality lingering within him after he asssited her in her death (something that does happen, as he indicates in "Self-Inflicted Wounds Pt. 2"). It might be the natural reaction of turning to religion for comfort after the death of a loved one. Or -- and this is my own favorite pet theory -- it may be that this goes back once again to "different beliefs, different destinations," and that Stark was eager to embrace Zhaan's religion because he wanted to ensure that he would end up in the same afterlife that she did so that they could be together after death.


Whew. OK, this is just getting longer and longer, and I'm getting a bit tired... I'm gonna post this now and go off and do some other stuff for a while, and hopefully later tonight I'll get back to it and we'll examine the evidence we have for the existence of an afterlife (other than Stark's say-so); take a look at an interesting metaphysical question involving souls, clones, and personal identity; and sum up with some general conclusions and wild-ass speculations. Doesn't that sound like a hoot?