A brief synopsis of Milton’s Paradise Lost from Wikipedia:
The story of Adam and Eve’s temptation and fall is a fundamentally different, new kind of epic: a domestic one. Adam and Eve are presented for the first time in Christian literature as having a functional relationship while still without sin. They have passions, personalities, and sex. Satan successfully tempts Eve by preying on her vanity and tricking her with rhetoric, and Adam, seeing Eve has sinned, knowingly commits the same sin by also eating of the fruit. In this manner Milton portrays Adam as a heroic figure but also as a deeper sinner than Eve. After eating the fruit, they have lustful sex. Both experience new and negative emotions, particularly the powerful pair of guilt and shame, and engage in mutual recrimination. However, Eve’s pleas to Adam reconcile them somewhat. More importantly, her encouragement enables Adam and Eve both to approach God, to “bow and sue for grace with suppliant knee,” and to receive grace from God. Adam goes on a vision journey with an angel where he witnesses the errors of man and the Great Flood, and he is saddened by the sin that they have released through the consumption of the fruit. However, he is also shown hope — the possibility of redemption — through a vision of Jesus Christ. They are then cast out of Eden and the archangel Michael says that Adam may find “A paradise within thee, happier far.” They now have a more distant relationship with God, who is omnipresent but invisible (unlike the previous tangible Father in the Garden of Eden).
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Hit the jump for a more detailed exploration into space – I mean into my theory.
So, Caprica Six is Eve, Baltar is Adam, the Caprica Six and Baltar “angels” are both a composite of the Archangel Michael,and Starbuck is the Archangel Gabriel. Got it?
Let’s break it down.
Eve/Caprica Six
Eve was, according to the Book of Genesis, the first woman created by God, and an important figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Her husband was Adam, from whose rib God created her to be his helpmate. She succumbs to the serpent’s temptation via the suggestion that to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, would improve on the way God had made her, and that she would not die, and she, believing the lie of the Serpent rather then the earlier instruction from God, shares the fruit with Adam. As a result, the first humans are expelled from the Garden of Eden and are cursed.
Yep. Sounds about right. Caprica believes Cavil’s (or whomever) lies and convinces Baltar to eat the apple (the defense computers) thus destroying Caprica (Eden).
Baltar/Adam
According to the Mormon faith (a faith both the OG and the new BSG drew from heavily) Adam was considered to be one and the same as the archangel Michael
Latter Day Saint religion holds that Adam and Michael the archangel are the same individual. Michael the archangel fought against and cast out Satan, “that old serpent”, at the conclusion of the war in heaven during pre-mortal existence (see Book of Revelation 12:7-9). “Michael” was born into this mortal existence as the man “Adam, the father of all, the prince of all, the ancient of days” (see Doctrine and Covenants 27:11 and 107:54). Mormons also consider Adam to be the first among all the prophets on earth.
The War in Heaven
Space, obviously.
Just before the Lord returns to earth, there is going to be a war in heaven. It will be a war to end all wars. The greatest war this universe has and will ever see. The archangel Michael and his angels will fight against Satan and his angels. Satan and his army are thrown out of heaven. They are cast down to earth! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth! At this Woe a third of the human race will be slain!
So, the demons (cylons) have been cast out, too. This explains their need to find a home.
Starbuck/Archangel Gabriel
In Abrahamic religions, Gabriel ‘the (masculine) strength of God’ often translated as ‘strong man of God’ is an angel who serves as a messenger from God. He first appears in the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible.
RIGHT? DANIEL IS STARBUCK’S DAD!
In some traditions he is regarded as one of the archangels, or as the angel of death. He is also known as Saint Gabriel to some Christian denominations.
The new Earth
Paradise found.
Hera
Little chubby baby Jesus.
So humanity sins with it’s evil technology and is cast out of Eden/Caprica into space/heaven to war with the demons/cylons and explore the concept of free will vs pre-destination and eventually, everyone ends up in Africa waiting for Robert Redford to come wash their hair while they camp out in the Veldt.
Or something, class dismissed.
So said me all.
Like the theory. Did you read the Q&As with Ronald D. Moore on the Chicago Tribune’s website? He says that they had no idea people would pick up on the Starbuck/Daniel thing and that it isn’t what they were going for. I think that the rest of it resonates with the rest of the Milton story.
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/en…
Gosh, I wish I had read more in college. Stupid tech degree.
This reading works fine, but mostly because the story re-told in Paradise Lost is basically the template for every story: things are good, then something goes horribly wrong, then there’s struggle, and then something (often, but not always, Baby Jebus) makes it all better. Sure, BSG adapts it a little more closely than, say, Season 2 Episode 2 of Cheaters or the McCain-Palin candidacy or Moll Flanders, but whatevs.
The point is, lessons are learned and soon we see the story in the discount DVD bin for $7.99 and wonder if we’ve seen it or not, and whether it was any good.
Um, well, no…in this case, I was more specific than
“things are good, then something goes horribly wrong, then there’s struggle, and then something (often, but not always, Baby Jebus) makes it all better”.
But if you want to distill everything in the world down to that theory, then go ahead.
Catcher in the Rye by Dances with Anxiety
“A dude was sad and he got upset and then some stuff happened and someone was mad and people are phonies and then he went crazy.”
I smell a Pulitzer.
DWA is kind of right, though…
ALL HAIL THE NEW QUEEN.
Kiala, as it happens, that’s exactly how I remember Catcher in the Rye: “A dude was sad and he got upset and then some stuff happened and someone was mad and people are phonies and then he went crazy.”
I admit I sometimes overlook the finer details.
The BSG-as-Paradise Lost reading has a lot going for it. It is an intriguing thought that knowledge (building servant robots) got ahead of the deeper wisdom of doing so and that things consequently spiraled out of control from there. This is a direct parallel with Paradise Lost, not to mention Frankenstein, which is yet another version of the Genesis story.
I might be in a better position to evaluate BSG in this literary lineage if I actually watched BSG, but what good would that do you, me, or anyone? This is the internets! If we’re going to start spouting well-grounded opinions, it’s contrary to the spirit. We might as well pull the plug now. And then where the hell would we go for naked boobies? Real life? Don’t even get me started.
BSG takes much of it’s story directly from Jewish and Mormon history or should I say dogma.
The “12 Colonies” obviously is a take on the original “12 Tribes of Israel.”
The Cylon destruction Caprica doesn’t represent some fall from grace or Garden of Eden but the actual Babylonian victory over the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BC.
The “12 Tribes of Israel” were exiled by the Babylonians from their homeland for roughly 50 years. It wasn’t until the rise of Cyrus and Persian Empire that the tribes were finally allowed to return home.
Some tribes never returned from the exile, which leads to the “10 Lost Tribes of Israel.”
In BSG the lost 13th Tribe supposedly went and colonized Earth. In Mormon dogma, the leader of the lost tribes a prophet named Lehi is believed to have taken his tribe and sailed to America.
Oh and Kobol the planet where humanity is thought to begun from? In Mormonism they’ve got this crazy belief that God lives on a planet named Kolob.
I think you are overthinking it. BSG was a great dramatic show for the first two and a half, or so, years. It jumped the shark at the end of season three with the trial of Baltar and revelation of the final four. The contorting of character personalities and plot lines that followed only showed that there really was no internal consistency, or logic, in the overall story. The last season had some brilliant moments, eg.: the whole muntiny thing. But overall it was a bunch of digressions and it felt like the writers were just fucking with us. It was like being blindfolded and led around a room which contained a number of bowls of odd material, having your hands stuck in them, some of which felt interesting, then trying to guess what was in them. But the problem is the bowls had not logical consistency. At the end, the person leading you just tells you, oh, god filled those bowls.
Yeah… it was kinda like that.
Aaaannd…you just described the Book of Job.
not… really. i wish that people trying to draw religious parallels would actually read their source material.
There is no way Adam’s dick was that tiny.
I’ve read my source material and Paradise Lost was really a bad choice for a BSG comparison. Again the themes within BSG have a lot more to do with Mormonism than anything else out there. I’m not the first person to have noticed this either.
Regardless, if BSG story really intended to start on the lines of Genesis or Paradise Lost it would have centered on the planet Kobol and not Caprica since that’s where Humanity supposedly got it’s start from.
I mentioned the Mormonism, John.
KS, do you mean Adam’s pre- or postlapsarian package? As I understand the literature on it, Adam was really well hung before the fall. And Eve went from something like a DD down to a B (and B is probably generous).
So much was better before the fall — apparently you could ride dinosaurs, keep badgers as pets, carry scorpions around in your pockets without fear, etc.
Then again, if all this is true — and far be it from me to doubt anything in the leading brands of holy texts — Fear Factor must have sucked even harder in Eden.