We all know the Jedi have their beliefs about life and death and their ghosts remaining in the Force to guide the living.
But what about others?
Imperial stormtroopers tucking prayer cards under their armor imploring any and all galactic deities to protect them – on planetside drops, on ship-boarding missions, or just in the halls of the Executor to protect them from a slow gasping death from an invisible hand.
People who swear Tarkin’s ghost haunts the halls of the second Death Star and that his lingering outside Jerjerrod’s quarters is slowly driving the younger Moff to insanity.
Clone cadets who tell stories of brothers – ‘bad’ ones with vision that
blurred when they tried to focus or who limped and stumbled when they ran – who
vanished in the night and whose little ghosts still wander the
halls of Kamino’s facilities. The sounds of their footsteps and cries all seem to lead to a locked door in an area that even the big ARCs won’t go near. (All cultures have their child-abducting monsters – some
were just much realer than others.)Pilots who hear the voices of the dead coming from their comms, warning them to turn or spin or dodge the bolt that will kill them – sometimes too late.
Sightings of rebel commandos and scout troopers racing each other through the high canopy on Endor decades after the battle was done, speederbikes and camouflage and white armor flickering with luminescence that no living being possesses.
First Order troopers who have never seen Phasma un-armored seeing her as more deity than soldier, their Mother Mary with a blaster rifle. The propaganda posters of her take on the cast of Orthodox icons with offerings of scraps of charred Resistance insignia and stolen guns laid on a shelf under it.
Lost and wounded ships, imperial and Rebel alike, with limping hyperdrives and failing life supports being flanked by squadrons of battered TIEs and X-wings with unresponsive comm channels whose numbers only seem to swell as the ship’s crews slowly succumb to death.
Clonetroopers who comfort grieving brothers with the tale that they’ve just gone on Eternal Leave and that someday they’ll all reunite with their brothers long gone to the barracks beyond the veil, and they will at last know a life beyond the war they were bred to fight.
Just, give me all the superstitions and folk religion that would develop in a world with so much war and so many soldiers to fight them.
Yessss.
Religions that are born from legends that were stories that were something somebody saw once, and passed along.
Darth Vader can steal your soul and leave you living, say one trooper to his squad as they are transferred to the Executor. A new trooper came to his squad, once, a rare survivor of the Death Star, and told them how he’d seen Vader walk by with a woman in white, all fire and courage, and watched him return with her later, her eyes dead, her movements that of a doll.
(They call her the Sacrifice, and sometimes they argue over whose sacrifice she was. Some say Vader destroyed her for power to vanquish Tarkin; others say she sacrificed herself, deliberately, to call down destruction upon the Death Star. Since both goals were achieved, they’ll never have an answer.)
The older troopers say that there’s a god of soldiers, and he walks incarnate among them when needed, always with the same face, old or young. Here and there a trooper with some un-rooted-out artistic talent draws his face, and all the older troopers will recognize a face they’ve seen some other trooper wear, a long time ago. Some will mention that he had tattoos, and that makes no sense, when were troopers allowed to have tattoos? It’s never the same tattoos either, so most of them dismiss it as embellishment, or proof of godhood.
(They wonder what it means, that these sightings get rarer all the time. Firsthand becomes thirdhand as the youngsters listen, and wonder.)
When the newest troopers come apart after a battle or a purge, the veterans will tell them that the Emperor protects them from ghosts of the vengeful dead. That so long as the Emperor lives, those they killed need not haunt their nightmares nor their consciences, but will rest where they belong.
(Where this belief comes from, they don’t know. Maybe they just needed to believe it, or maybe some officer invented it when confronted with reports of troopers having problems after being made to kill people, with the intention of shutting them up. Either way, after reports of the Emperor’s death hit the galaxy, it’s a bad night for everyone. Stormtroopers wake screaming from nightmares of accusing dead, but their superiors explain it away as grief, and by the time the First Order rolls around, Emperor Palpatine has become the patron god of dreams.)
Some time after the Emperor’s death, some squadron has chance to come in extended contact with a group of slaves, and from here they import a new deity, the Breaker of Chains. Depicted roughly or in great detail, the image varies, but it is always a female figure, dressed sparsely, a collar around her neck and a chain in her hands, strangling the figure who holds its end.
(Sometimes this second figure is huge, bloated; other times, human. Often she appears dressed in shredded stormtrooper armor, a helmet by her feet, and people believe she was a stormtrooper. Sometimes she’s a symbol of Imperial might, defying Rebels or pirates; other times, especially after FN-2187′s defection, people think she might be a previous escaped trooper whose identity was quashed. It’s rare to find her, among the troopers, depicted in the gold bikini so common to slave depictions of her, a costume that tends to endure across species and stylistic variations in the mythology of slaves.)