7 Star
Warsesque Essays

 

IV. Is Nothing Sacred in Star Wars?


By Abel G. Peña

Special Thanks to Enrique Guerrero

 

 

In this fourth informal essay exploring the dusty corners of the Star Wars universe, all our powers of concentration are focused on one little word, the term “consecrated.”  The notion of consecration in our world has the meaning of a thing being deemed or made sacred, often through a ritual of some kind.  As the word has its roots in Christianity, it comes as little surprise that the first time we see this word used in the Star Wars galaxy is in the book Truce at Bakura by devout Christian author Kathy Tyers.  In this book, religion and consecration play an important role in the culture of the primary antagonists.

 

    After that first use, thing get complicated, mostly thanks to a Bakura companion book which for some reason latches onto the word consecrated and gives it a very specific meaning in the Star Wars universe—or lack thereof, as it were.  This comes back to haunt Star Wars continuity years later when not only Tyers returns to write another book in a galaxy far, far away, but when the villains of her original novel are resurrected by the hands of new Star Wars novelists.

 

    Usually, I can let little things like this go.  Continuity-wise, there are much bigger fish to fry in Star Wars.  But the queer development of “consecrated,” owed to a deliberate warping of the word, appeals to my fascination with  the concepts of translation, interpretation, and word origins…not to mention the butterfly effect and plain old mischief.

 

    What follows is the exploration of the curious etymology of the word consecrated in the Star Wars universe.  And it is, to say the least, curious.  The attention to detail presented here will probably go over the heads of casual fans, but should give interested parties an idea of just how carefully I mull over potential problems when writing Star Wars.



The Set-up

 

In the Star Wars novel Refugee, second book in the Force Heretic trilogy of the New Jedi Order series, we revisit the Ssi-ruuk, dinosaur-like galactic invaders and their alien ways, including their idea of "consecrating" worlds.  Given that the basic premise of the 19-book New Jedi Order series is the invasion of the Known Galaxy by an all new species of invader, the Yuuzhan Vong, you would think the “conquering foreigner” motif should be used more sparingly, but that’s a separate issue.  That said, I'll make my curious continuity observation.

    This particular word, “consecrate,” has an interesting history in the Expanded Universe. I believe I can count on one hand the number of times that this word has appeared in Star Wars literature. One is obviously the Force Heretic book just mentioned, and I’ll get to that. The first example of it being used, though, comes from the Truce at Bakura by Kathy Tyers, the 1994 novel that inspired one of Refugee's main plot points, the return of the Ssi-ruuk during the Yuuzhan Vong War.

 

    Bakura’s saurian antagonists believe that if they die away from a "consecrated" world, that is, on a world that has not been cleansed via ritual acts, their souls are thereby lost to the ether.  The reason I have been using the term consecrated in quotes is that, apparently, the word does not exist in Basic—the common Star Wars language that comes off as English in the Star Wars films.  This odd distinction is introduced to readers not in the Bakura novel itself, but in the Truce at Bakura Sourcebook, the companion to Tyers’ novel, via the character Voren Na’alNa’al is established as a historian extraordinaire in his frequent appearances in the Star Wars literature published by the roleplaying game licensee West End Games.

 

 

The Joke

 

It was common for West End Games to include vignettes – quarter-page, half-page and page-long stories – in their books, and this was especially true of the Bakura Sourcebook, which almost qualifies as another novel.  The vignette that interests us is the one titled, “The Creation According to the Ssi-ruuk,” in which historian Na’al translates a part of a Ssi-ruuk holy text that explains the origin of the cosmos according to their religion.  The translation ends with this footnote by Na’al:

 

    "Some [parts of this Ssi-ruuvi myth] do not translate smoothly into Basic. I was particularly confused about 'consecrating' worlds. No other references came up during my search. I found one outside reference to 'waters of consecration' in a medical text, but it described tests for infection of spinal fluid. It is probably not relevant to the aliens'
religious practices."

 

    Oh, how wrong you are, dear Voren!

 

    Assuming the competence of the authors of the Bakura Sourcebook, and Kathy Tyers and Eric S. Trautmann (“Dark Vendetta”) are no slouches, the immediate question becomes why this particular word got singled out by the book’s authors.  I'd have to venture that the idea for this probably came from Trautman rather than Tyers, who didn't think to make a big deal out of the word in the original Bakura novel, and who we will see uses this word again with superficially catastrophic results, in light of the word’s established lack of meaning.  In any case, given that consecration is utterly pertinent to the Ssi-ruuk’s religious practices, the wink wink, nudge nudge effect from the line, “It is probably not relevant to the aliens’ religious practices,” is what seems to be the punchline of the footnote; it is a vignette within the vignette, commenting on the human element that makes translations and, more seriously, cross-cultural relations problematic.

 

    Jokes and moralizing aside, one thing, at least, is clear:  while the word consecrate exists in the English language, it does not exist in Basic.1 At least, not up until the events of Bakura and/or not with the same meaning.  Good olVoren, after all, is no slouch either when it comes to research, as the thoroughness of his character is exemplified in such books as the Movie Trilogy Sourcebook, and the companion sourcebooks to Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command.  By extension, Voren doesn’t seem like such a numbskull that he couldn’t or wouldn’t pick up a Basic dictionary and easily deduce what the all-too probable connection is between the Ssi-ruuvi reference to consecrating worlds and their religious practices.  So, it seems we are clearly meant to believe Voren when he says no such references to “consecrating” exist in Basic.2

 

 

The Return of Kathy Tyers


I found it amusing that this well-established aspect of Earth culture had to be canonized into the Star Wars universe, much the same way ducks (A New Hope novelization, The Phantom Menace), dogs (A New Hope novelization, The Lando Calrissian Adventures), horses (Ewoks: Caravan of Courage, Marvel Comics), and other Terran elements were. Unintentionally, though likely due to my strong interest in religions – as well as my continuity radar getting set up by this oblique take on a fairly normal English word in a rather obscure source – I kept tabs over the years on how often I came across "consecrated" in Star Wars literature thereafter.

    It wasn't very hard. There were actually no other references to anything being consecrated at all for the next several years… until, predictably, the word came up again about five years later in the novel New Jedi Order: Balance Point, written by, none other—Kathy Tyers. What struck me this time was that not only were the Ssi-ruuk nowhere to be seen, but the word consecrated was this time used by that aforementioned new alien invader race, the Yuuzhan Vong, who were supposedly from another galaxy entirely and yet used the word in precisely the same context as the Ssi-ruuk,3  i.e. a cleansing ritual.

 

    Yuuzhan Vong use of the term consecration occurs during a conversation between one of the invader’s chief generals, Warmaster Tsavong Lah, and his covert agent Nom Anor, following their conquest of the planet Duro.  In the Vong religion, life is revered to the point that all things synthetic (including advanced technology like artificially intelligent droids right down to basic “unnatural” compounds like concrete, windows, and plastic) are considered sacrilegious.  As such, when Nom Anor gives Tsavong Lah a tour of the facility he’s been using as a laboratory (an unholy “built-thing,” as the warmaster refers to it), Lah decrees that the edifice should be ritually cleansed:

 

    “Then we shall consecrate this built-thing for your future use.”

 

    The reappearance of the word is not a big surprise, given that Tyers is an ardent Christian and that she wrote the book in which the term originally appeared.  However, the problem that the Bakura Sourcebook introduced now becomes all too clear:  if the word consecrate does not exist in the galaxy at large, save as used by a fanatical fringe species of alien invaders (the Ssi-ruuk), how do these extragalactic Yuuzhan Vong also know it?  Even in the best case scenario, the Ssi-ruuk could not have had prolonged exposure to the Yuuzhan Vong (assuming any exposure at all at this point, given that the Ssi-ruuk are on the opposite side of the galaxy from which the Yuuzhan Vong began their invasion).  So, how do these two cultures both have a word in their vocabulary that translates to the non-existent Basic word “consecrated?”

 

    The answer, thankfully, is that they don’t.  Though the Truce at Bakura Sourcebook establishes explicitly that the Ssi-ruuvi term consecrated does not exist in Basic, when we the readers are exposed to the term again in the Yuuzhan Vong tongue in Balance Point, it is not being spoken to a speaker of Basic, but to another Yuuzhan Vong speaker, and appears to the reader in his native tongue of English.4  And as we well know, the term consecrated does indeed exist in English.  Thus, this coincidence, that the Ssi-ruuvi and the Yuuzhan Vong are both invaders of the galaxy far, far away with a word in their vocabularies that translates best to the word “consecrated” in English, is a mere curiosity and a sign of the indelible mark of author Kathy Tyers on the Star Wars universe.  Tyers is thus exonerated of any wrongdoing, and the Bakura Sourcebook’s unwittingly risqué joke survives unscathed.

 

    But not for long.

 

 

Revenge of the Joke

 

Finally, we return to that most recent “consecrated” culprit, Refugee.  Written by Sean Williams and Shane Dix, it is the middle book in the Force Heretic trilogy, 10 novels down the line from TyersBalance Point, but still developing the same New Jedi Order invasion story arc.  This is relevant because in Refugee, Williams and Dix decide to revisit Tyers’ planet Bakura and that old Ssi-ruuk enemy.

 

    The set-up:  the Bakurans tell Princess Leia, a former senator and diplomat, that their world needs to be “consecrated” so that the Ssi-ruuk ruler of prophecy, the Keeramak, will come to Bakura.  The reason the Bakurans would want the ruler of the old invaders to come is complicated, but in a nutshell, the two parties have apparently formed a truce.  Nonetheless, the point of contention remains the use of the word “consecrated.”  Here’s the quote by a Bakuran army general to Leia, Han, and their entourage:

 

    “In order to make them [the Ssi-ruuk] comfortable, there are details we have to attend to.  [The Bakuran Prime Minister] wanted this Keermak of theirs to come to Bakura to sign the treaty in person, but he—it—wouldn’t come unless Bakura was consecrated.  You see, it believes like the rest of the Ssi-ruuk that if it dies away from one of the sacred worlds, then its soul will be lost forever.”

 

    Within two pages, the word is again directed toward Leia and her crew by the Bakuran Deputy Prime Minister.  Both times, it is spoken by Bakurans in a manner expected to be understood without explanation, and both times Leia, former senator and diplomat, and crew receive the word as if they know precisely what it means and have known it all their lives—a word that is established not only to not exist in Basic in the Bakura Sourcebook, but the meaning of which could not even be deduced by the Rebel’s most respected academic and historian.  Finally, almost a decade after the joke/social commentary was executed in the Bakura Sourcebook, the joke’s now on Star Wars continuity.

 

 

The Solution

 

So, what’s the solution?


    Well, pretty it’s not, that’s for damn sure.  On the one hand, it can be easily assumed that Voren Na’al is a total idiot, and just didn’t know the definition of consecrated, nor could he look it up in a dictionary, or deduce its meaning from the context of the word in the ancient Ssi-ruuvi text.  But this characterization isn’t supported by a look at Na’al’s level of intelligence as seen in other Star Wars books, not to mention being a pragmatic cop-out on par with claiming that Obi-Wan is simply a no-good liar.  It is a betrayal of all the fine effort that’s been made by numerous authors to give the character a realistic persona.

 

    What then.  The most obvious answer to me seems to be the following:  it’s likely that in the 28 years between the events of the Truce at Bakura and Refugee, the Rebels have been exposed to the Ssi-ruuvi concept of “consecration,” which they have come to equate with the familiar Basic term “sacred.”  This is not only possible but likely.  According to Star Wars: The Essential Chronology by Daniel Wallace, the Rebels shipped off for the Ssi-ruuk homeworld Lwhekk following the events of Bakura, waged war on the invaders, and won.  Furthermore, in Wallace’s Essential Guide to Planet and Moons, it is stated that “over the next few years” after Bakura, the Rebels made “numerous forays into Ssi-ruuk territory,” presumably other than the war alluded to in the Essential Chronology itself.  Thus, it was probably during or in the aftermath of this war that the Rebels were again exposed to the concept of consecration and came to understand its meaning as the equivalent of the word “sacred” in Ssi-ruuvi culture and religion.

 

    Next question:  how were the Bakurans so familiar with the term “consecrated?”  Like the Rebels, the Bakurans were never demonstrated to have been exposed to the concept of consecration during the events of the novel Truce at Bakura, and unlike the Rebels, they were not shown to have been exposed to it at all afterward.  Nonetheless, a way out can again be inferred from a line in Plants and Moons:  “Although the immediate threat from Lwhekk seems to have been ended, the New Republic can never afford to let down its guard against such a formidable enemy.”  And if the New Republic (a synonym for the Rebel Alliance for our purposes) can’t afford to let its guard down against the Ssi-ruuk, it would probably make sense for Bakura, the planet which suffered the brunt of the Ssi-ruuk’s preliminary invasion, to not let its guard down either.  Hence, it’s likely that not only did the Rebels keep up their intelligence on the Ssi-ruuk, but that the Bakurans also had every reason to.  In fact, the Corellian Trilogy by Roger MacBride Allen, which hits smack in the chronological midway point between the first appearance of the Ssi-ruuk in Bakura and the last in Refugee, specifically states that the Bakurans had long prepared for another Ssi-ruuvi attack.

 

    So, we have every reason to believe that intelligence on the Ssi-ruuk, including the meaning of this strange word “consecrated,” was mined independently by the Rebels and the Bakurans, and any information gathered was probably exchanged freelybetween the two parties over the next 28 years, thus realistically explaining how an academic like Voren Na’al didn’t know what the term “consecrated” meant (it didn’t exist in Basic at the time), but how three decades later, Leia and the Bakurans would be so comfortable with this new word that they could pass over it without any noticeable effort made by either party to make sure that the meaning of the word is understood.

 

    Postscript:  What remains strange though is that this word, however it is spelled, pronounced, etc. in the Ssi-ruuvi language, can be translated into anything intelligible at all.  That is, in the Ssi-ruuvi tongue – a whistling, flute-like language – what does the word “consecrated” sound like, and how was the decision made to translate this word, non-existent save for the meaningless phrase “waters of consecration,” into the Basic word “consecrated?”  This was likely a problem not considered by the authors of the Truce at Bakura Sourcebook, and is beyond the scope of this essay, and not to mention sanity.

 

Abel G. Peña is the author of numerous official Star Wars articles and fiction pieces.  Visit his Star Wars blog at http://blogs.starwars.com/abelgpena for the latest news on projects he’s working on, as well as other essays and observations about the Star Wars universe.  You can e-mail him at abelgpena@star-wars.net.

 


 [1] Significantly, this isn’t to say that the term or concept “sacred” does not exist in Star Wars.  Indeed, it does, and has been used frequently in Star Wars literature.


 [2] On the other hand, the "reference" to which Voren is referring could be applied to the idea of not only consecrating, but consecrating worlds.  However, this interpretation, while practical, is not supported by the text.


[3] …and the English-speaking world, obviously.


[4] A similar solution has been applied to explain how Wicket speaks Basic in the Ewok telemovies, which take place before Return of the Jedi, in which he does not speak the language, i.e. it was not English that he was speaking in the telemovies, it was only translated to English for the audience’s convenience.




Return to the main page


STAR WARS is ®,TM, and © Lucasfilm, Ltd. (LFL) All Rights Reserved.
This site is for entertainment purposes only. Please don't sue us!