Souls
From The Great Machine
There are numerous perspectives presented during Babylon 5 regarding the concept of the soul, and how this affects various different belief systems.
This is notable since series-creator JMS is an athiest.
- What the soul was, who's right, and even whether this is SF or Science Fantasy, was it explained enough to merit one over the other ... how can I put this...? I don't want to spoon-feed stuff to people. What I want is not to hit someone with a MORAL, or a message, or "This is what a soul is," or "This is what makes it an SF series," I want to start discussions. Arguments. Preferably a bar fight or two.
- We present an issue. Here are the sides. Now...what do YOU think about it? I want this show to ask, "Who are you? Where are you going?" That's half the fun. Some of my favorite pastimes in college were sitting in the commons, or the library, arguing this stuff from every possible angle. You think I'm gonna tell you what to think? What it means? No. The goal is to provoke discussion. Preferably passionate discussion.
- Otherwise I might as well just start renting billboards and putting up signs.
- -- posted by JMS on 21:58 08 Feb 1994 [1]
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[edit] Minbari: Religious caste
The Minbari are the most overtly religious characters on the show, with an entire caste devited to spiritual perfection.
According to Delenn: All sentients have immortal souls. When a Minbari dies its soul merges with the souls of other dead Minbari. These are reincarnated; recycled into future generations, so as individuals advance their own souls, the Minbari as a whole advance.
- They will join with the souls of all our people. Melt one into another until they are born into the next generation of Minbari. Remove those souls and the whole suffers. We are diminished. Each generation becomes less than the one before.
- -- Delenn (S1E02, Soul Hunter)
- We Minbari have our own relationship with the larger domains of the Universe. Matters of the soul are very private, very personal to us. We have suffered the interference of others in this area, and are thus ourselves forbidden to intervene in matters such as this.
Some Minbari also believe that the soul is not confined to Minbari or Human bodies:
- It is a.. it is very hard to explain. We do not believe in any individual god or gods. But rather, we believe that the soul is a -- what is a good term -- a non-localized phenomenon.
- Well, if I project a beam of light at the wall, you see the light on the wall, but the wall is not the source of the light. It comes in from somewhere else. The soul is also a projection. It does not exist inside us any more than the light exists inside the wall. But this .. shell is the only way we can perceive it."
- -- Delenn and Lennier (S3E05, Passing Through Gethsemane)
- The Universe puts us in places where we can learn. They are never easy places, but they are right. Wherever we are, it's the right place... and the right time. The pain that sometimes comes is part of the process of constantly being born...
- I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station and the nebula outside; that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff, we are the Universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. As we have both learned, sometimes the Universe requires a change of perspective...
- -- Delenn to John Sheridan (S2E04, A Distant Star)
Minbari revere the "True Seeker", the one who strives to perfect their own soul:
- He is a holy man, a true seeker. Among my people a true seeker is treated with the outmost reverence and respect. It doesn't matter that his Grail may or may not exist, what matters is that he strives for the perfection of his soul and the salvation of his race and that he has never wavered a lost faith."
Their religious beliefs also include banning behaviour that will harm their souls:
- Minbari do not lie, Captain. It would be a stain upon honour and soul.
- -- Delenn to Sinclair (S2E15, There All the Honor Lies)
The Rangers tradition shares similar antecedents.
- [The badge has] two figures on either side, one Human, the other Minbari. They blend together in the middle to signify the two halves of our souls uniting against the common enemy.
- --Marcus (S3E12, A Late Delivery from Avalon)
[edit] Narn: Followers of G'Quan
In The Hour of the Wolf, G'Kar discussed the concept of soul or Chad'rasha. This appears to be closely linked with the idea of personality; G'Kar seemed to be wearing Garibaldi's hat, examining his quarters, and investigating his "household god of frustration" to understand him better.
- I came here to remind myself of his soul, his centre, his chad'rasha, we call it. It will help me! (S3E01, The Hour of the Wolf)
[edit] Episode: Soul Hunter
During (S1E02, Soul Hunter) three different perspectives were offered on the soul. Sinclair heard all three, and didn't know which to believe. All he knows is what he saw.
[edit] Scientific, Secular
According to Stephen Franklin: There is no soul that survives the body. With advanced technology, it might be theoretically possible to preserve a record of someone's personality, but death is death.
- ...that what the Soul Hunter is saying is truly impossible - that, with enough technology, a person's thoughts could be saved, but that the idea of taking someone's "soul" is not possible.
[edit] Soul Hunter/Shak'toth
All sentients have ephemeral souls. When a person dies, their soul expires into oblivion. However, Soul Hunter have a prescient attraction to death - if they so choose they can capture and preserve a soul "for the greater good" at the moment it leaves the body. They carry with them a bag full of the souls they have "saved", each in its own glass vessel.
For a Minbari, the Soul Hunter's method of preservation is true death, for it cuts a soul off from the rest and diminishes the next generation; for a Soul Hunter, the true loss is uncollected souls lost forever.
These are utterly irreconcilable belief systems.
Soul Hunters are also quite dismissive of other people's beliefs:
- [Minbari reincarnation is] A great lie. A pretty fantasy. The soul ends with death, unless we act to preserve it. We will help you... in spite of yourselves." -- Soul Hunter (S1E2, Soul Hunter)
- Ok. So I believe in heaven. You've got a problem with that?
- No heaven. Nothing beyond. Only the dark, impenetrable wall of death.
- -- Zack Allan and Soul Hunter, (mov The River of Souls)
Since the Earth-Minbari War, some Minbari also have a belief about the relationship between Human and Minbari souls.
- It is our belief that every generation of Minbari is reborn in each following generation. Remove those souls and the whole suffers. We are diminished. Over the last 2000 years there have been fewer Minbari born into each generation. And those who are born.. do not seem equal to those who came before. It is almost as if our greater souls have been .. disappearing."
- -- Lennier to John Sheridan & Ivanova (S2E01, Points of Departure)
[edit] Children of Time
In (S1E10, Believers), a minor alien race called The Children of Time offer a different (not necessarily contradictory) perspective on the soul.
Their strong religious belief is that any kind of invasive chest surgery releases the soul, and therefore refuse all operations of this kind, even in the face of physical death. Obvious Human parallels include Jehovah's Witnesses' rejection of blood transfusions.
- You don't understand! Food animals are cut open; it's alright because they don't have a soul. But the Chosen of God may not be punctured!"
- We are the Children of Time. We cannot break our covenant any more than you could cease to be the descendant of egg-sucking mammaloids! ... There are more important things in life than the next breath! Without his spirit, he wouldn't be alive anyway!
- The area that cannot be opened is the chest area, primarily; a nick or cut or scratch really doesn't count; it's puncturing to the body cavity wherein the soul is housed.
- -- posted by JMS on GEnie 1994-04-15
In response to the operation being performed on their son, against their wishes, tragically the parents' only possible response was to end the soul-less life of the body.
- Do not grieve --- this was not our son. This was only a shell. There was nothing to do but end the pain of the shell.
- I'm not quite sure if we're talking about the same thing; the two parents never said that the kid would die if he underwent the surgery, only that his soul would escape. This would leave him "soul-dead," for lack of a better phrase. And how are we to tell that they weren't right? I don't think it's quite as cut and dried as you seem to present. (And again, they were acting very much out of their real beliefs of how the universe operates. If someone here is injured, and declared brain dead, most folks think it's okay to pull the plug...even though one could make the argument that there's still a living soul in the body. This is the opposite situation; one may argue that there is still a mind somewhere in the body, but the soul is dead or gone. The phrase they use is that they put the shell out of its misery. To their mind, he was dead already.)
- -- posted by JMS on GEnie Apr 29 1994
