To Boldy Go: The Manuscripts of Star Trek

The wormhole terminus in the Denorios Belt, some three hundred million kilometers from the sun.

If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d be a member of an international working group with honest to God phenomenons like Johanna Green, Dot Porter or Bridget Whearty then I’d have laughed you out through my front door and into the next street (there’s a nice bar there, so it’s not such a bad thing). But find myself within such a group I did, and the other night we were discussing in passing my deep and abiding affection for Star Trek.

Now, Dot has written a lot about her own enormous love for Star Wars, and her insight and knowledge of that fandom has allowed her to discuss not only the film series itself, but the role of manuscripts within that series. You can read some of Dot’s amazing work here, from the paper she gave at the Fan Cultures & the Premodern World conference held at Oxford University in 2019, to the Sacred Texts: Codices Far Far Away series she created with Dr Brandon Hawke.

During that conversation Bridget suggested that I might be able to consider Star Trek in a similar way as Dot had with Star Wars, and to think about manuscripts and how they are represented over the many iterations of Trek (from old to new, from main timeline to Kelvin). Of course, my first response was to say “oh, but I don’t think manuscripts are really represented in Star Trek”, because my natural instinct is to put the kibosh on any Good Idea that I’m presented with or find for myself.

In my defence, aside from the odd foray into cod-medievalism (think the crew of the Enterprise-D being transported into a Robin Hood-esque adventure in Qpid ), there seemed to be little of the medieval to be found in the Star Trek canon at first glance.

So, I looked again. Of course, I was quite wrong.

Welcome to Deep Space 9

Deep Space 9 is a “love it or hate it” entry into the Star Trek timeline (Avery Brooks as Captain Sisko was, in my opinion, fucking brilliant and Deep Space 9, set on a space station at the edge of a wormhole, a much more realistic idea of space exploration than the idealism of Next Generation or the “fuck everything and find out” energy that Kirk brought to the table). Check out Brooks’ monologue from In the Pale Moonlight for evidence of how good it could be, when it was very good. The seven seasons of DS9 dealt with the aftermath of Bajor’s inclusion within the Federation, after decades under brutal Cardassian rule.

Bajor’s major religion, known as the Way of the Prophets, is based on alien deities who exist within the wormhole – supernatural beings measurable using scientific analysis. There are several religious artefacts associated with the religion mentioned in the series, including physical objects like the Orbs, which occasionally allow Bajorans to commune with the Prophets and to expand their Pagh, or souls. But there are other artefacts, held by the Archivists of Bajor, that have a different purpose.

Now, at this point you need to know that the Pagh-Wraiths are the counterpoint to the Prophets . They’re evil wormhole aliens, cast out by the Prophets, who’ll fuck with your Pagh and deny you access to the Celestial Temple. In S7 of DS9 there’s a sequence of episodes where the Kai, the spiritual leader of Bajor, is lured by the Pagh-Wraiths into turning to the dark side (apologies for crossing streams there). It is fascinating to see how manuscripts are represented in those episodes.

The Text of the Kosst Amojan

Several religious texts are alluded to throughout DS9 and Star Trek more generally, such as Talnot’s Prophecy of the Final Days, many of which are not shown on screen. A manuscript that is shown, however, is the Text of the Kosst Amojan.

Kosst Amojan is kind of the end of season Big Bad for Bajorans, much like our own Devil. One of the Pagh-Wraiths, they are oft to be found dallying in the affairs of humanoids in an attempt to escape from the fire caves (where they have been imprisoned for eternity by the Prophets) to bring about the Reckoning – the Bajoran apocalypse. The Pagh-Wraiths have much the same sort of abilities as the Prophets but they’re nefarious fucks, and have a habit of taking over people’s bodies to enact terrible End-of-world shit.

Now, demons in our own time and space have been known to write things down in manuscripts (like the Devil’s Bible, aka the Codex Gigas, alleged to have been written by a single scribe in one night, adorned with a giant illustration of the Devil himself) and the Pagh-Wraiths are no exception. Their entire body of knowledge is contained within the Text of the Kosst Amojan, held in the Bajoran archive on Bajor, and only the Kai is allowed to read them. Serious shit goes down if anyone else tries to do so, as Gul Dukat found to his cost when the manuscript renders him temporarily blind as he attempts to read its pages.

The Text of the Kosst Amojan. Image taken from Memory Alpha.

Earth manuscripts are(n’t) easy

For a moment, let’s turn away from Star Trek and look at medieval manuscripts more generally. The word ‘manuscript’ comes from the Latin for written (scriptus) by hand (manu), and were generally (before the advent of the printing press) written by scribes using quills made from bird feathers. Inks were laboriously prepared using soot, tannic acid from oak galls, or iron salts, which were mixed with water and gum – a process that would take several days.

Parchment, made from animal skins, was even more hard work: soaked in lime, stretched on a frame and, when dried, cut into folio. Scribes would then undertake the writing and illustration of these objects – check out Kathleen Doyle’s blog post for the British Library on the enormous amounts of effort that went into the creation of an earthly manuscript.

Back to the Kosst Amojan. We obviously have no way of knowing what processes went into the creation of a Bajoran manuscript, though we can probably hazard a guess that they were similar to our own, given the similarities between Bajor and Earth. Perhaps the Pagh-Wraiths cooked their texts up in one night. This seems fairly plausible as not only are the Pagh-Wraiths interdimensional bastards with the power to do that, the manuscript as shown on screen is a bit, well, disappointing-looking, and definitely like something I’d rushed to complete in one night because I’d forgotten to do my homework.

The pages are crumpled, obviously in a bid to denote their age, but in a way that I don’t think parchment would crease – this looks more, to me, like paper would be scrunched up, a bit like one of those high school projects one does when you create a pirate map or an old letter, with teabags for staining the pages to just the right colour of brown to make it look really old. Of course, Bajor might have access to other materials which might behave in this way, but for now let’s assume that manuscripts on Bajor perform in the same way as their Earth-bound compatriots.

The illustrations within the Kosst Amojan remind me somewhat of an image (shown above) which I saw recently in this JSTOR article (perfectly entitled Mantras to make Demons Into Gods) and which discusses “four mantras that are intended for use during the bhūtakālas (‘sacrifices to demonic forces’)”. The image outlines the way a food offering should be prepared and laid out.

There are also nods to medieval Psalters (which held the Book of Psalms alongside other materials, such as lists of saints’ names and liturgical calendars) like this folio in British Library‘s Arundel MS 60, A Lunarium for bloodletting; The Six Ages of the World; A list of the bishops of Winchester, and medieval Arabic manuscripts such as Ptolemy, Kitāb al-Majisṭī, books 1-6 of the Almagest, which is heavily illustrated with diagrams and tables and can be found online at the Qatar Digital Library.

MS Arundel 60, f.1v

Astronomical diagram from the Almagest of Ptolemy (Add MS 7474, f.11v)

The Bajoran Archive

The way the Archive is represented in these episodes of DS9 also gives us an insight into the way in which archives (manuscripts, and knowledge generally) are perceived within the Star Trek universe, and in our own. Here, the manuscripts are reverently, fearfully carried to the Kai by an elderly archivist who is transparent in his disapproval of the Kai even asking for the Text (I mean, with good reason as the Kai is definitely going to try and release the Pah-Wraiths from the fire caves, but still).

He (of course, it is a man, and a white one to boot) warns that the manuscript has not been removed from the archive in 700 years, and that the knowledge contained within it is dangerous. “Knowledge is never dangerous in the right hands” says the Kai sweetly (because, she would say that wouldn’t she?) but the Archivist is having none of it. “He who studies evil is studied by evil” he warns, casually invoking Nietzsche and underpinning the Kai’s ever-quickening move from Team Prophet to Team Wraith (with the help of Cardassian Fascist Gul Dukat)

These are powerful texts, to be sure, but the underlying message from this sequence of events is that knowledge should only be handled by the few, and with great pomp and ceremony. It is enormously telling that when the Kai (played with great menace by the phenomenal Louise Fletcher) opens the manuscript, the pages are initially blank – once again, knowledge can only be accessed by those who are deemed worthy of it. The text is only activated when Ranjen Solbor, the aged archivist, is murdered by the Kai and his blood spills onto the pages of the Text: another nod to the Derridean idea that knowledge can only be accessed one we are free of the Archons, with added bloodletting for maximum impact).

These are the voyages

For those who are interested in the many other ways that our world influences Star Trek, you should look to Val Nolan‘s module at Aberystwyth University, which covers how utopian, historical and political fictions, together with modern mythology and issues of representation and ideology, are portrayed across fifty years of Star Trek stories.

For my part, I’m going to continue this intermittent series of Star Trek Manuscripts, looking at things like the Book of the People and the Bible of Omega IV from the Original Series, to the Kir’Shara from Enterprise, to examine all my favourite things: medieval manuscripts, materiality, and the usual digital woo.

With grateful thanks to Bridget, Dot and Johanna for the usual encouragement, and my Uncle Martin for introducing me to Next Generation at the age of 9.