Most if not all Bajorans worship them as gods, asking through prayers for their help, guidance and protection, and believe that Sisko is the Emissary. The Cardassian occupation was no picnic; reminds me a bit of the Old Testament account of the Egyptians lording it over the Jews. But Sisko didn’t arrive at DS9 until the Cardassians were already pulling out, so it’s not as if he was their Moses-like deliverer. The only time I can think of the Prophets actually doing something for Bajor was when they destroyed the Dominion invasion fleet as it passed through the wormhole, and they only did that after Sisko essentially shamed them into it.
Did the Prophets (or wormhole aliens, for you secular humanist Starfleet types) consider themselves to be gods of Bajor, and if so, did they really care at all about what happened to Bajor or Bajorans?
The Prophets didn’t consider themselves gods, being largely uninterested in the corporeal universe, but they did seem to have a special relationship with Bajor. (They describe themselves as being “of” Bajor on several occasions.) They sent Bajor the orbs, which kept the Bajoran religion alive, which was ultimately helpful in unifying Bajorans against the occupation.
It was also the Prophets that persuaded Sisko that Bajor should not join the Federation prior to the Dominion War, and they were right; Bajor would have been destroyed if they were not able to stay neutral.
Don’t forget about the Pah Wraiths. The “bad” Prophets.
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The battle between the Prophets and Pah Wraiths was the classic good vs evil.
I agree the Prophets showed little interest in helping the Bajorans. Given the chance, I think the Pah Wraiths would have enslaved much of that quadrant of space.
Given that Pah-Wraiths were bad prophets, would they have cared about corporeal matters any more than the prophets themselves? I thought they were only interested in the celestial temple ie the wormhole.
Right. I don’t think either the Prophets or the Pah-Wraiths cared all that much about Bajor either way. They had their own things to worry about, like fighting over the wormhole and trying to understand temporality.
I think they cared. They bothered sending the orbs, and it appears the Bajorans have been getting useful visions from the orbs for a couple thousand years. And they warn Bajor not to join the Federation.
There power outside the wormhole seems pretty limited though. So short of telling the future, there isn’t much they can do.
It seemed to me it changed over the course of the series. Early on, they seemed more like inscrutable aliens and the orbs and such were more like side affects of what they were doing, and they couldn’t care less about Bajor. By the end, though, the story treated them more as literal gods, and they were taking an active role in protecting Bajor. I felt the Pah Wraiths were a big symptom of this; they weren’t even hinted at until the fifth season or so.
It’s very hard to say. The Prophets were among the more truly alien of Trek’s extraterrestials; their motives are far more difficult to understand than, say, Q’s.
Of course, I’m in the camp that the John de Lancie Q was telling the simple truth at the end of TNG, which has the happy side-effect of requiring me to ignore Voyager in its entirety.
They were still inscrutable at the end, methinks. And I have a somewhat trippy theory that, in a sense, the Prophets were not aware of Bajor “before” Sisko met them, and that their interventions in Bajor’s past “began” at that moment.
Don’t think about that too hard. It’ll hurt your brain.
Surely you don’t think I haven’t prepared for your inevitable betrayal. You may wish to check the dilithium crystals on those rifles.
Are you protesting my swipe at Voyager or implicit approval of Q? If the former, I’ll admit that Voyager had several good episodes, but they were randomly strewn in among the dreck. At least TOS, TNG, and ENT had the common decency to quarantine the worst of their shit to specific seasons.
I can sorta see how that could work. IIRC, the Prophets didn’t really know what Sisko was talking about, or even where he came from in the first episode. But, ugh, time loops. Maybe next time I see DS9, I’ll watch it with an eye towards this. More likely, though, I’ll be doing my best to ignore anything to do with Bajor religion.
I don’t think even time loop is an adequate description. The Prophets are outside of time, in the way the Xtian God is sometimes said to be. They had the same relation to TrekVerse mortals as 3D folks have to people in Flatland; the sequence of events is simply not comprehensible to a mortal mind.
I also don’t think it’s the case that the Prophets did not understand what Sisko was saying. Rather, it’s that Sisko didn’t understand what they were saying, and his misunderstanding was so profound that he misinterpeted it as a failure on their part. Bear in mind that a major point of the sequence is for Sisko to stop living in the moment’s of his wife’s death.
Though the Q Continuum look more powerful than the Prophets, I think it’s just that they’re showier. The Bajorans are spot-on to call them gods.
Like I said, that’s the essential problem with Voyager. They’d tease you with episodes that were totally awesome and follow up with months of dreck. They’d hire a truly talented actress whoc consistently turned in engaging performances, and then put her in a ridiculous catsuit that made no sense either in-story or out. Et cetera.
I always assumed the Prophets seeded life on Bajor so that the Bajorans could eventually evolve into the Prophets themselves. Similar to how they created Sisko because they knew they would need him. Since they are outside linear time, this wouldn’t even be a paradox. Also there is a precedent in Trek for corporeal beings evolving into noncorporeal beings
