Before battle on Starkad, Dragoika had told Flandry that perhaps they would meet in the Land of Trees Beyond. Kursovikian religion was an inchoate paganism with tutelary spirits and hidden powers. Flying above Imhotep, Dragoika's son, Targovi, thinks that the continent-wide forest is as:
"...mysterious as the Land of Trees Beyond where some aged people believed the spirits of the dead went." (p. 236)
Losing Starkad and migrating to Imhotep would obviously uproot religious ideas although since, of necessity, the Starkadians have moved to a sufficiently similar planet, they still live near a forest that could, in some minds, reinforce the idea of "Trees Beyond." No doubt Imhotepan Tigeries include conservatives and secularists and maybe also some that reconfigure traditional ideas although we were told in Ensign Flandry that the Tigeries were less interested than human beings in finding ultimate causes.
Starkadian sea-dwellers, also evacuated to Imhotep, might think of "Seas Beyond" except that their world-view, as summarized in Ensign Flandry, was empirical and made no reference to a hereafter.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree the trauma of losing Starkad and the hurried effort to save their species, plus the inevitable deep immersion in Technic culture would shake belief in many of the old ideas and beliefs of the surviving Tigeries.
I suspect that was also the case with the Sea People.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that the rescue effort on Starkad was hurried and necessarily selective. It focused necessarily on the cultures that were already in close contact with those from outside the planet -- probably many remote areas just perished without knowing what was happening.
The Terran Empire saved both the intelligent -species- from Starkad, but I would guess only a small part of the -population-.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, sheer lack of time and knowledge of the rest of Starkad forced the Empire to focus the rescue effort on the Tigeries of Kursoviki and the Sea People of the Six Point (and maybe a few others).
My view is that this rescue effort atoned for many sins by the Empire!
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment