By that I mean that the basic premise being: that the means of (re)creating new technology is lost, the current technology around is treated as sacred and the function marred in elaborate rituals or prayers because they don’t know how to otherwise operate it, and to a lesser extent that new ideas or (often xenophillic) research is met with suspicion or outright rejected because it doesn’t fit with the religious dogma.
I keep feeling that a similar group is somewhere in Star Trek, right on the cusp of my memory, but I can’t seem to recall any specific examples.
TOS has such episodes.
Yonadans in “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” s3e8.
To a lesser extent the people on Beta III in “The Return of the Archons” s1e21. They don’t know how to work the technology, but they fear more than worship Landru.
Maybe the people on Gamma Trianguli VI in “The Apple” s2e5, although I don’t remember whether or not they were descendants who lost knowledge of technology and just started worshiping Vaal.
Pakleds
I think that Trek plays with ideas like this by creating throw away alien races. By that I mean they’re not foundational, but rather are used as a cardboard cutout to illustrate a point for the plot of an episode.
For the tech angle, I think there’s a couple of candidates. The Bynars, for instance, had an intimate coupling of technology and society - and here I’m mostly thinking about the way they were floated in TNG.
At the other end of the spectrum you have the Pakleds. Although they have a high tech space faring society, their grasp of the science and engineering that the tech requires is… rudimentary and primitive. They’re not creating new technologies.
The Aldeans, from TNG’s first season “When The Bough Breaks” are close, though they don’t necessarily treat their advanced technology as “sacred”, though they certainly see it as infallible. The whole setup of the episode is that they would hide the planet away from the universe at large and have only appeared before the Enterprise to steal their children as the now-deteriorating technology is causing the Aldeans to become sterile.
Try that on a small planet, I guess.
