If you pay close enough attention, you can see a little bit of Star Wars in “By the Waters of Babylon.” The narrator bears a strong kinship to Luke Skywalker; his father a resemblance to Obi-Wan Kenobi. The narrator asserts “I was taught the chants and the spells—l was taught how to stop the running of blood from a wound and many secrets. A priest must know many secrets” is not far removed from old Ben’s teaching Luke the secrets of the Force. The narrator’s movement through the Dead Places and the the Forest People that fear those places is a blueprint for Luke’s movement through a galaxy that somehow seems to have been thrown back in time—an assumption that will be proven true with the arrival of the prequels which reveal the collapse of a Renaissance and the onset of the Dark Ages under the thumb of Emperor Palpatine. Pretty much the same effect is achieved in Benet's tale when the reader finally learns that the story is not taking place in a far distant past, but a terrifying distant future that has witnessed the collapse of civilization as we know it. Is Star Wars based on this short story?
Not really. What Star Wars—the original trilogy—is based on is the idea of the monomyth which is also a thematic concept explored by Benet in his story, though admittedly without the benefit of a name. The monomyth at work in Star Wars is heavily influenced by the work of 20th century philosopher Joseph Campbell and Campbell, in turn, was helped along in the formation of his ideas about the monomyth by stories like “By the Waters of Babylon.”
Campbell provides a fairly simple and straightforward definition of the monomyth: "The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation--initiation—return.” Campbell’s deeper penetration into the foundational element that eventually coalesced into the standard path that forms the basis of the monomyth consistently references specific stories and more general themes found in Biblical scripture. Those broader themes formulate as a result of repetition the separation-initiation-return motif as well as other repetitive elements. This repetition is expressed often enough in the Old Testament, but becomes even more apparent in the New Testament where gospel writers often seem to be linking stories of Jesus to prophetic stories in the older scripture as a way of cementing in the minds of readers the authenticity of Christ.
The very title of the story reveals that Benet is working fully within Campbell’s conceptual basis of the monomyth even if he wrote the story a dozen years before Campbell fully fleshed out his theories in 1948 with the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Babylon immediately links the story in the reader's mind to scripture, ancient history and Biblical themes. Benet’s story is describing a history in which knowledge was separated from civilization and requires the initiation of the narrator to set upon a hero’s quest for the Place of the Gods which will eventually result in a return to the illumination of the light of knowledge from which society has too long been separated.
Just like Luke Skywalker when he defeats Darth Vader, kills the Emperor and brings the dark ages of the empire to a close so that a certain galaxy far, far away can return to the greatness from which it has been long separated.
