So what are your thoughts on Pokemon religion? Its gradually become more prominent in the games, climaxing at Sinnoh with its main plot. How do you analyze this? It clearly goes deep into the Pokemon world as the trippy as hell vision in the Sinjoh ruins shows. (I’m started at least five threads in as many Pokemon sites to crack that sigil, only getting about halfway through.)

Well… what are you asking, exactly?

I think the tacit assumption is that people in the Pokémon world follow a religion similar to Shinto, the traditional Japanese faith.  This makes things difficult for me because I don’t really know a whole lot about Shinto, although from what I can gather it’s much less dogmatic than the Abrahamic religions followed in the West, is built mainly around a generalised reverence for tradition, order and the natural world, and sort of merged with Mahayana Buddhism a few centuries back to create something that’s as much a way of life as it is an organised religion.  Basically, it’s kinda vague and it’s difficult to tell where religion ends and culture begins.  The Pokémon universe is the same kind of thing.  They revere Pokémon, but they don’t ‘worship’ them exactly, which makes it difficult to tell precisely how the nature of their relationship with legendary Pokémon in particular has changed over the centuries.  Clearly no-one worships them as gods anymore, but many of them are still thought of as ‘sacred’ in some sense, perhaps as much because of their connection to the past as anything else (think of the way N plans to gain spiritual authority by reenacting the events of the old Unova legends).  This is further complicated by the fact that many of the original myths, although largely forgotten by the common people, may actually be true – it’s entirely possible, for instance, that Dialga and Palkia really do ‘rule’ time and space in a very meaningful sense.  The people of the Pokémon universe seem to have ‘forgotten’ a lot of their religion, one way or another – they know sites like the Cave of Origin or the Celestic Town ruins were once very important, and still respect them very deeply for that reason, but most of them don’t exactly know why anymore.  Sometimes this can come back to bite them.

I think the vision Arceus shows you in the Sinjoh Ruins is as much an illustration of the scope of Arceus’ power as anything else.  It’s doing something dramatic for you, it’s got your attention, and it wants to show off, so it says to you “this is my kingdom, puny human – the land and the stars, the sea and the sky, your entire civilisation, and all life, from your cells up to the planet itself.  Make a baby Dialga for you?  Piece of cake.”  Your final comment confuses me – by ‘sigil,’ you mean the triangular design that appears where Arceus is standing?  What makes you think there’s something there to ‘crack,’ exactly?