Do Romulans undergo Pon Farr?
- Thread starter M.A.C.O.
- Start date
I find this thread rather fascinating and couldn’t help but to take another look at Spock’s original statement in “Amok Time”:
You humans have no conception. It strips our minds from us. It brings a madness which rips away our veneer of civilisation. It is the pon farr. The time of mating. There are precedents in nature, Captain. The giant eelbirds of Regulus Five, once each eleven years they must return to the caverns where they hatched. On your Earth, the salmon. They must return to that one stream where they were born, to spawn or die in trying.
I'd hoped I would be spared this, but the ancient drives are too strong. Eventually, they catch up with us, and we are driven by forces we cannot control to return home and take a wife. Or die.
Spock is already on the edge and he desperately needs to return to Vulcan because his mate is waiting there. I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that he exaggerated and used analogies to persuade Kirk to get him there. After all, he did return - but he didn’t take a wife and he didn’t die!
Since he talks about “ancient drives” I’d presume this would also include the Romulans because they and the Vulcans haven’t be separated for more than just 5,000 years. But the Romulan civilization didn’t die 4,993 years ago because they couldn’t return to Vulcan.
The more I think about it, the Pon Farr looks like a result of their own self-imposed behavioural practices, where it becomes impossible to ignore the Vulcan sex drive for any period extending seven years. Hardly the thing Vulcans want to go public about, thus it’s covered up like an ancient biological thing outside of their individual control.
Looks like Spock hints that in "Amok Time":
KIRK: I guess the rest of us assume that it's done quite logically.
SPOCK: No. No. It is not. We shield it with ritual and customs shrouded in antiquity.
Of course, ST III:TSFS still suggests otherwise but I wonder which rationalization makes the most sense in the big picture.
Alternately, we could always pretend that there was more going on between Spock and Chapel in "Amok Time":
CHAPEL: Yes, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: I had a most startling dream. You were trying to tell me something, but I couldn't hear you. It would be illogical for us to protest against our natures. Don't you think?
Bob
You humans have no conception. It strips our minds from us. It brings a madness which rips away our veneer of civilisation. It is the pon farr. The time of mating. There are precedents in nature, Captain. The giant eelbirds of Regulus Five, once each eleven years they must return to the caverns where they hatched. On your Earth, the salmon. They must return to that one stream where they were born, to spawn or die in trying.
I'd hoped I would be spared this, but the ancient drives are too strong. Eventually, they catch up with us, and we are driven by forces we cannot control to return home and take a wife. Or die.
Spock is already on the edge and he desperately needs to return to Vulcan because his mate is waiting there. I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that he exaggerated and used analogies to persuade Kirk to get him there. After all, he did return - but he didn’t take a wife and he didn’t die!
Since he talks about “ancient drives” I’d presume this would also include the Romulans because they and the Vulcans haven’t be separated for more than just 5,000 years. But the Romulan civilization didn’t die 4,993 years ago because they couldn’t return to Vulcan.
The more I think about it, the Pon Farr looks like a result of their own self-imposed behavioural practices, where it becomes impossible to ignore the Vulcan sex drive for any period extending seven years. Hardly the thing Vulcans want to go public about, thus it’s covered up like an ancient biological thing outside of their individual control.
Looks like Spock hints that in "Amok Time":
KIRK: I guess the rest of us assume that it's done quite logically.
SPOCK: No. No. It is not. We shield it with ritual and customs shrouded in antiquity.
Of course, ST III:TSFS still suggests otherwise but I wonder which rationalization makes the most sense in the big picture.
Alternately, we could always pretend that there was more going on between Spock and Chapel in "Amok Time":
CHAPEL: Yes, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: I had a most startling dream. You were trying to tell me something, but I couldn't hear you. It would be illogical for us to protest against our natures. Don't you think?
Bob
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^I don't see why the biological and the cultural need be mutually exclusive with regard to pon farr: a periodic urge to mate that has been intensified by Vulcans suppression of emotions. What normally works for Vulcans tends to fail around this time is there is no object for those urges.
I'd argue that anything this convoluted and artificial is indeed the doing of the Vulcans themselves. Not something biologically built into them by their Maker (even though this cannot be discounted, as Vulcans arguably are a planted or transplanted species and the party moving or seeding them might have had an agenda or two), but something they imposed on themselves because it sounded like a good idea at the time.
Since Vulcans are deeply telepathic, and there's a telepathic angle to all this bonding business and apparently to Vulcan copulation as well (the finger-telepathy thing), it sounds natural to assume that the seven-year cycle was imposed on Vulcans telepathically at the time when isolated desert communities needed to be motivated out of interbreeding and into optimal intrabreeding.
We need a person who said "With this spell, thee shall go nuts with lust exactly every seven years". That is, the idea of individual self-control failing after a given number of years would dictate a cycle of three to eleven years, not seven years sharp (or dull, or whatever). But a telepathic law imposed across all the communities under the influence of a powerful sovereign or high priest would perfectly allow for the seven-years-sharp thing.
And we may choose to give credence to all the noncanon stuff about ancient Vulcans having been even more powerful mages than the modern ones (heck, there's even the canon Stone of Gol), making it easier for them to have imposed this particular curse on the entire species. Or then it's simply tradition, and imposed on each and every Vulcan separately at birth (and apparently even a temporary death and rebirth cannot undo it), or at some later date such as the bonding age. Romulans and nontraditional Vulcans might skip it, then.
Timo Saloniemi
Since Vulcans are deeply telepathic, and there's a telepathic angle to all this bonding business and apparently to Vulcan copulation as well (the finger-telepathy thing), it sounds natural to assume that the seven-year cycle was imposed on Vulcans telepathically at the time when isolated desert communities needed to be motivated out of interbreeding and into optimal intrabreeding.
We need a person who said "With this spell, thee shall go nuts with lust exactly every seven years". That is, the idea of individual self-control failing after a given number of years would dictate a cycle of three to eleven years, not seven years sharp (or dull, or whatever). But a telepathic law imposed across all the communities under the influence of a powerful sovereign or high priest would perfectly allow for the seven-years-sharp thing.
And we may choose to give credence to all the noncanon stuff about ancient Vulcans having been even more powerful mages than the modern ones (heck, there's even the canon Stone of Gol), making it easier for them to have imposed this particular curse on the entire species. Or then it's simply tradition, and imposed on each and every Vulcan separately at birth (and apparently even a temporary death and rebirth cannot undo it), or at some later date such as the bonding age. Romulans and nontraditional Vulcans might skip it, then.
Timo Saloniemi
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