'But I think that "officially," the Colonial religion is only Greek — if you start throwing in Egyptian and even Italian it fails to be linkable with the Terran Greek religion...'
Well, it fails to be linkable directly, neatly, with Greek religion. But I don't think it was ever meant to be a straight, clean correspondence, a la "Agamemnon's troops get a rocketship and start building robots"--rather, we were supposed to see a web of connections from one to the other. More Greek than anything else, but we've got two definite non-Greek connections established (Mars and Isis).
So I don't think you can say that non-Greek gods mean their religion "fails to be linkable with the Terran Greek religion". They worship Zeus and Hera and Apollo--well, there's a pretty big link to Greek religion. It's just that they also have a lot of other elements which aren't strictly Greek. Like a body of sacred scriptures, for example--that's far more Jewish than Greek. (The scriptures seem to have an authority in a believer's life that is far more like the Jewish attitude towards the Tanakh than like a Greek believer's attitude towards, say, the Iliad or the Theogony.)
One possibility that just occurs to me--it might be that the full-on Lords of Kobol are the Olympian gods, but that there are other figures, below the level of the LoKs, that correspond more closely with non-Greek gods. We know that Isis has some significance to the colonials, but we don't know just how. Perhaps she and Mars are demigods, or venerated heroes, or great ancestors--and they just ended up being worshipped as gods in Egypt and Italy.
For what little it's worth, the Colonies in the original BSG series were much more Egyptian in flavor. The new series conciously decided to shift away from Egypt and toward Greece, but I don't think they meant the shift to be entire.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-10-21 07:12 pm (UTC)Well, it fails to be linkable directly, neatly, with Greek religion. But I don't think it was ever meant to be a straight, clean correspondence, a la "Agamemnon's troops get a rocketship and start building robots"--rather, we were supposed to see a web of connections from one to the other. More Greek than anything else, but we've got two definite non-Greek connections established (Mars and Isis).
So I don't think you can say that non-Greek gods mean their religion "fails to be linkable with the Terran Greek religion". They worship Zeus and Hera and Apollo--well, there's a pretty big link to Greek religion. It's just that they also have a lot of other elements which aren't strictly Greek. Like a body of sacred scriptures, for example--that's far more Jewish than Greek. (The scriptures seem to have an authority in a believer's life that is far more like the Jewish attitude towards the Tanakh than like a Greek believer's attitude towards, say, the Iliad or the Theogony.)
One possibility that just occurs to me--it might be that the full-on Lords of Kobol are the Olympian gods, but that there are other figures, below the level of the LoKs, that correspond more closely with non-Greek gods. We know that Isis has some significance to the colonials, but we don't know just how. Perhaps she and Mars are demigods, or venerated heroes, or great ancestors--and they just ended up being worshipped as gods in Egypt and Italy.
For what little it's worth, the Colonies in the original BSG series were much more Egyptian in flavor. The new series conciously decided to shift away from Egypt and toward Greece, but I don't think they meant the shift to be entire.