Scientism is the name historians have given to the religion that arose in the Periphery of the Galaxy in the first century after the fall of the First Empire, and which was used by the early rulers of the Foundation as an instrument of control. Although this religion had many names applied to it during and after its heyday, including the Church of Seldon, the Church of the Galactic Spirit and the Church of the Holy Prophet, historians have settled on the name often used by its founder, Mayor Salvor Hardin, who called it the Church of Science, or Scientism.

From time to time throughout human history, a form of entertainment will seize the attention of the masses of mankind and refuse to let go. During Hari Seldon’s boyhood, it was a weekly adventure drama called “Agent of the Emperor”. The drama concerned an Imperial agent known only as Agent X who went out into the Galaxy every week to battle an implacable villain called the Space Fiend. It was produced with a limited budget during a time of declining technical abilities, and like all the entertainment produced on Trantor at this time, it was heavily imbued with pro-Imperial propaganda. However, although “Agent of the Emperor” was only in production for three years, the drama attracted an intensely devoted cult following. The 78 episodes produced were repeated endlessly on millions of worlds throughout the Empire.

By chance, the popularity of “Agent of the Emperor” coincided with the economic and technological collapse of the Periphery during the reign of Cleon I. This meant that at the height of the drama’s popularity, the broadcast networks of over a million worlds suffered terminal technical failures. Without access to the original production, the drama’s devotees began retelling the stories orally among themselves. The drama thus entered the folklore of billions of people, changing over time as oral traditions invariably do. Among the worlds of the Province of Anacreon, the tales of Agent X and the Space Fiend gradually developed into a local religion.

The drama was added to local tales of growing hardship and barbarism to create an epic tale of the Fall from Galactic Paradise. The distant, all-wise Emperor who assigned Agent X his missions became the Galactic Spirit, while Agent X himself became known simply as the Prophet. The Space Fiend lingered longest in the folk memory, as interesting villains invariably do, and retained the name Space Fiend in the Anacreonian faith.

The final elements of the religion were added by the arrival of Foundation technicians during the Mayoralty of Salvor Hardin. The secession of the kingdoms of the Periphery had cut Terminus off from the rest of the Empire. The planet needed new trade routes to replace the lost links to Trantor and the rest of the Empire, and the only candidates were the barbarian kingdoms themselves. The only commodity Terminus had to trade was knowledge, so Hardin signed a series of agreements providing Foundation medical and technical assistance in return for raw materials.

As the Foundation technicians began refurbishing Anacreon’s nuclear power plants and other decayed infrastructure, and electric lighting and power and sewer systems began working for the first time in living memory (which at this point was all that most Anacreonians had), a few people began to speculate that the Galactic Spirit had at last sent its Prophet to reverse the Fall from Paradise. They asked the Foundation technicians where they were from, and the technicians told them the story of Hari Seldon’s Psychohistory Project and the Encyclopedia Foundation on Terminus.

There seemed little doubt among the Anacreonians that Hari Seldon was indeed the Prophet of the Galactic Spirit spoken of in the Epic of the Fall. All they had to do was look around them to see that the effects of the Fall were being reversed, and that the Prophet’s holy men had come at last to lead the faithful back to Paradise.

The first hint the technicians had that they had been promoted to holy men was when the Anacreonians began asking them to bless their children and livestock. The technicians’ efforts to explain that they were not priests of the Holy Prophet Hari Seldon were hampered by the fact that Seldon genuinely was the moving force behind an attempt to reverse the decline of civilization and resurrect the Empire. Helpless to put across the subtle distinction between prophecy and psychohistorical calculations, the technicians finally gave up, and began offering the Anacreonians their blessings.

When Mayor Hardin learned of the unexpected turn of events on Anacreon, he decided that the technicians were right, and that there was nothing to do but go along with the Anacreonians’ beliefs. Besides, there was always the possibility that Seldon had been aware of the mutation of “Agent of the Emperor” into the Epic of the Fall, and had factored it into his equations. Maybe the technicians were supposed to become a priesthood. Thus, Hardin ordered that the technicians continue their blessings on behalf of the Galactic Spirit, and that their red lab smocks be altered into robes. And so it was done.

Faced with a monumental project, a severe manpower shortage, and any number of simple yet time-consuming tasks to perform, it was inevitable that the Foundation’s technicians would begin recruiting some of the abler Anacreonians to assist them in their work. Given the attitude of the Anacreonians toward the Foundationers, it was equally inevitable that the technical training given to the Anacreonians would include a certain amount of theology. Safety instructions were given the force of divine law (aided by the fact that terrible harm would invariably befall anyone who disobeyed them). Improved hygiene was declared to be a sign of holiness. Literacy was transformed from a suspicious activity into a prerequisite for divine favor.

In a less admirable development, the technicians’ understandable desire to avoid the brutally harsh Anacreonian criminal justice system led to the creation of a separate ecclesiastical court system to try any crimes committed by the new “priesthood”. This effectively gave the Foundationers and their local recruits immunity from Anacreon’s laws. Human nature being what it is, it wasn’t long before the technicians began to abuse their immunity. When stories began to filter back to Terminus of the unbridled behavior of some of the technician-priests, Hardin realized he would have to take direct control of the priesthood. He established a church hierarchy with himself at the top as Chief Primate, placing control of the technician-priests in the hands of the Foundation’s ambassadors to the new kingdoms, who were themselves elevated to the rank of High Priest of their respective worlds. Hardin also created a Holy Inquisition to investigate complaints against the Foundation’s priests, and to operate the ecclesiastical courts.

The same manpower shortage that led to the recruitment of local “novitiates” in the kingdoms was also present on Terminus itself, and it wasn’t long before the same solution was applied. The training courses given to the novitiates were evolving into full-time religious schools, and Hardin initiated the practice of bringing the top students to a sort of “church university” on Terminus itself. There, the novitiates were given a comprehensive technical and theological education, then sent back to their homeworlds to serve as an under-hierarchy of priests.

Any novitiates who proved clever enough to see through their theological training and work out the physical basis for the Foundation’s power remained on Terminus to become research students in the Foundation’s secular school system. They received Foundation citizenship, and formed a growing pool of secularly-educated Outworlders among the population of Terminus.

Within the Four Kingdoms, the Foundation’s priesthood was becoming an object of hatred among the nobility. The nobles were fearful of the priests growing power, and contemptuous of their popularity among the commoners. Worst of all from their point of view was the priesthood’s immunity from attack. Whenever a priest was injured or killed, the agents of the Holy Inquisition, armed with the Foundation’s technical expertise, were quick to discover the attacker’s identity. If the local criminal justice system allowed the attacker to escape justice, the Inquisition was willing and able to arrest the attacker on its own initiative, and extradite him to Terminus for trial and punishment.

The growing hostility between nobility and priesthood finally came to a head in FE 80, when the noble leaders of the Anacreonian military launched an armed assault on Terminus. The Foundation-trained priesthood was able to use its technical mastery to cripple the Anacreonian assault before it could reach Terminus. In the aftermath of the Anacreonian assault, Mayor Hardin signed a new set of treaties with the Four Kingdoms giving the Foundation Ambassadors/Chief Priests veto powers over the official actions of the Kings.

For the rest of his time as Mayor, Salvor Hardin was content to leave the situation as it was. After Hardin’s death, Sef Sermak of the Actionist Party won election as Mayor. Sermak had been pressing Hardin since before the Anacreonian assault to increase the Foundation’s control over the Four Kingdoms. Hardin had resisted Sermak, but his death in FE 84 opened the way for Sermak.

Unlike Hardin, Sermak was temperamentally unsuited to play the part of Chief Primate of the Scientistic Church. Upon becoming Mayor of Terminus, Sermak appointed Lewis Bort to the duel roles of Chief Primate and Foreign Secretary. It was Bort who carried out what became known as the Sermak Reforms. In FE 85, the High Priests of (and ambassadors to) the Four Kingdoms were appointed First Minister of their respective kingdoms, placing them for the first time in direct control of the Royal governments.

Despite the Foundation’s greater control over the Four Kingdoms, the feudal nobility were still implacably hostile to the Foundation and its priesthood. Thus, the first of Sermak’s reforms was the sweeping Land Reform policy which aimed to destroy the power of the nobility by breaking up their estates and redistributing the land to the peasants who worked it. This led to the Great Revolt among the nobles of Smyrno and Loris in FE 86. The nobles’ revolt was doomed from the start by the lack of popular support. Taking the form of sporadic and poorly-coordinated attacks on outlying Scientistic Temples/power plants, the nobles’ chief accomplishment was to persuade the Foundation’s leaders of the need to strike back with overwhelming force.

One policy of Hardin’s which Sermak approved of was his reorganization of the Four Kingdoms’ military establishments. Following the Anacreonian assault of FE 80, the traditional aristocratic leadership of the Four Kingdoms’ militaries was systematically purged and replaced with officers drawn from the commoners. By the time of the Great Revolt, the military establishments of all four kingdoms had become markedly pro-Foundation. Acting with the advice and support of the Church’s chaplains, the military leaders of Smyrno and Loris were able to mobilize their forces within days and systematically destroy the centers of noble resistance. A month after the first attacks against the Temples were launched, the Great Revolt was over.

Mayor Sermak was not inclined to allow the nobles a second chance to attack the Church. Treason Tribunals were organized throughout Smyrno and Loris, and hundreds of nobles were systematically arrested and executed. Thousands more fled the two kingdoms to settle elsewhere in the Periphery. The Royal governments of both kingdoms were abolished, and republican governments were set up in their place (ruled by bicameral legislatures consisting of a lower House of Commons and an upper House of Clergy). By FE 90, the Church hierarchy held undisputed sway over the two former kingdoms.

Although the kingdoms of Anacreon and Konom had not taken part in the Great Revolt, the nobility of both kingdoms were brushed with the taint of treason and sacrilege. Encouraged by the Church, republican movements quickly grew in both of the remaining kingdoms. In FE 94, King Ellek of Konom was forced to abdicate, and three years later the same fate befell King Lepold of Anacreon. The Sermak Reforms finally came to an end when an Anacreonian noble assassinated Chief Primate Bort shortly after Lepold’s abdication. The remaining nobles were driven out of the Four Kingdoms, and the last vestiges of secular rule were extinguished.

After the establishment of the Church, the Anacreonians’ oral history of the Fall from Galactic Paradise was recorded and compiled into a definitive version called the Book of the Prophet, which became the Church’s holy text. At that point, the Epic of the Fall ceased being a cultural artifact of the Anacreonians, and became one more instrument of control in the hands of the Church. Being pragmatic men who did not themselves believe in the tenets of the Church they led, the Mayors of the Foundation and their Chief Primates did not worry overmuch about deviations from the established text of the Book of the Prophet. It was Salvor Hardin in fact who established the practice of publishing regional editions of the Book of the Prophet to take account of regional variations in the various extant versions of the Epic of the Fall. However, with the rise of universal literacy which followed the Foundation’s efforts to revive civilization within the Four Kingdoms, the inconsistencies in the various editions of the Book of the Prophet began to cause conflict within the Church. Lewis Bort’s successor as Chief Primate, Salvor Merek, eventually created the Office of Textual Reconciliation to produce a Universal Edition of the Book of the Prophet.

The publication of the Universal Edition marked an important milestone in the history of the Church. For the first time, the Church leadership had been forced to bow to the wishes of the Church membership, rather than vice versa. The Foundation was beginning to lose control over the religion it had helped create and foster.

Despite themselves, Chief Primate Merek and his successors found themselves becoming prisoners of the role they had assumed. More and more of their time was spent mediating doctrinal disputes, papering over schisms, even excommunicating heretics. Meanwhile, the Church itself was drifting away from its original purpose of restoring and maintaining the infrastructure of civilization in the Four Kingdoms. The purely technical aspects of the Church’s function was being performed to an ever greater extent by “lay brothers” who concentrated on physical operations while receiving only superficial theological instruction. The priesthood, by contrast, tended to specialize in theological education and study, learning little of technical matters.

Matters finally reached a crisis point (in the Seldonian sense of the word) in FE 154. By then, the technical arm of the Church had split completely from the spiritual arm, while the Church’s missionary efforts among the worlds outside the Four Kingdoms were hampered by the perception (an accurate one) among their rulers that acceptance of Scientism meant ceding control of their worlds to the Foundation.

The crisis of Scientism was brought to an end by Mayor Hober Mallow, the first Mayor since Salvor Hardin to also hold the office of Chief Primate. Mallow made official the divide that had grown up between the spiritual and technical arms of the church, splitting off the technical arm to form the Foundation Technical Service. The technical classes of the Temple School in Terminus City were relocated to the campus of the University of Terminus. The Church of Scientism itself was disestablished as the official state religion of the Four Kingdoms in FE 162, and the post of Foundation Ambassador was made separate from that of High Priest for each of the ex-Kingdoms. In addition, Mallow dissolved each ex-Kingdom’s House of Clergy, vesting all legislative power in the Houses of Commons. By FE 165, Mallow’s clerical reforms had progressed to the point where he was able to step down as Chief Primate of the Church (though he retained the post of Foreign Minister for the rest of his life).

The Mallow Reforms had left the Church of Scientism bereft of temporal power, but all the more powerful spiritually. Now that it was no longer an arm of the Foundation’s government and a tool of Foundation foreign policy, opposition to the Church’s missionary endeavors began to wane. Operating from their bases on Terminus and the Four Kingdoms, the Church’s Missionary Service spread the Gospel of Seldon across the breadth of the Galaxy, giving rise to legends on millions of worlds of the mysterious Magicians of the Periphery, and paving the way for the Traders who represented the next wave of the Foundation’s expansion across the Galaxy. To this day, the Church of Scientism remains the single largest denomination in the Empire, with temples located on every inhabited world of the Galaxy.

Disclaimer: The characters and situations in this story are the legal property of the Estate of Isaac Asimov. This story is in no way intended as a challenge to that ownership, and is offered solely for entertainment purposes.