Lit Ancient Races: Celestials, Rakata, and Co

I just created a few videos on the history of the Celestials & Rakata; not completely extensive, but a broad overview of both.

 

Bumping because that article that was discussed earlier dealing with ancient mystical beings? It finally came out, and with it we've been introduced to perhaps the most ancient and foulest of all the Galaxy's inhabitants - the Old Ones, or the Dark Gods. I say "introduced" but as it turns out we've known most of them for quite some time - Typhojem, Abeloth, the Night Spirit, Cold Danda Sine and Splendid Ap, and Waru are all hypothesized by the article to be members of this forgotten evil pantheon. There's also a mention of one of their number who betrayed them (to the Celestials, maybe?) and helped end their reign over the Galaxy, and their supposed progenitor, the Father of Shadows - who would, presumably, thus be the ultimate Dark Side being.

So yeah, Star Wars, or the Legends-verse at least, is now officially Lovecraftian. Sweet dreams, kiddos.

 

The bedlam spirits weren't particularly malicious actually IR they were quite playful they just didn't grasp or particularly for mortal life-mortal beings seemed to be toys or objects of amusement to them. But they weren't evil.

As for the celestials-they weren't malicious or outright evil though they did apparently scare the Sharu into primitivism but they built star systems, walled off the mnngal-mnngal and seemed to "watch over" or at least observe the humans and duros and other foundational species of the later galaxies.

The Rakata-now their empire was outright evil.

 

The Celestials aren't the Old Ones, though; if anything this article implies they opposed them.

 

Well in the Legends books, it was only ever the Sharu and the Killiks who said they got outright scared of the Celestials. A number of books basically had it that the Celestials were very removed from the material plane. I mean, Sidious and the Sith believed that they were merged with the Force and oversaw everything. So it’s kind of different from the idea of “evil or madness inducing Lovecraftian brings”

 

George Lucas wanted the GFFA to have good forces as its foundation, so he came up with the Old Republic and the Jedi Knights.

KOTOR wanted the GFFA to have dark forces as its foundation, so they came up with the Rakata Infinite Empire.

Ostrander and Denning wanted good forces as its foundation, so they created the Kwa and the Celestials.

And now with the Old Ones, we are back to having the dark forces as the foundation of the GFFA (in Legends).

 

I have to say I like the idea of the Celestials defeating the Old Ones at the beginning of things, as it would fit the motif of the "chaos battle" - a recurring piece of imagery found in pretty much every world mythology. The gods taking on some hideous, primeval thing before the age of mortals can begin. Some famous examples are Zeus vs. Typhon, Odin vs. Ymir, and Marduk vs. Tiamat. The gods of order defeat the monsters of chaos and afterwards the world proper begins.

 

What if the Dark Side of the Force was a sort of technology/magic created by the Old Ones as their weapon? The Celestials create the Light Side to battle them.

 

Eh, I'd prefer the Force to have always existed, the Celestials and Old Ones merely being very powerful in it.

 

I rewatched "Mystery of A Thousand Moons" from TCW recently, and even though it's just a footnote of sorts, I find the idea of the Angels to be one of the coolest things in all of Star Wars. It's one of those things that we just get a sliver of in the films/shows, but has a fantasy elegance about it that really suits the timeless side of Star Wars.

 

Would not be a fan of the dark side being artificial at all honestly

Though the notion of the celestials/force demons/Abeloth etc... Being exceptionally powerful in the force and having an extremely strong connection to it is fine by me.

 

The Gunninga Gap is a pretty overt shout-out to Norse mythology:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Gunninga_Gap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginnungagap

The Silentium's creators:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Silentium's_creators

may be a candidate for "connected in some way to the Old Ones" - the Sharu might be connected through them.

Given the Elder Things from the Cthulhu mythos have fivefold symmetry - "starfish-shaped" - Star Wars starfish-alien species might be a good thing to tie the Old Ones to.

 

To be fair, AOTC and ROTS state that the Sith ruled the galaxy before the Republic.

This is exactly how I feel. The Celestials created the majority of lifeforms and the Old Ones created the Rakata and the Sith species. The Celestials and Old Ones each encourage lifeforms to draw on their energy.

 

edit: double post

 

The Silentium's creators don't work because of timeline issues. The Silentium themselves fought the Abominor in the Vong's Galaxy and we know(or have good reason to believe) the Cremlevian War occurred around 15,000 BBY. And the Vong prior to that had conquered and basically destroyed their own Galaxy and before that had driven out the droid species.

So the Silentium's creators had to be gone extinct by 25,000 BBY assuming a long term struggle between the silentium and Abominor-though I never got the impression there war was that long.

It took the Vong millennia to even have scouts reach the GFFA so I find it difficult to believe the Silentium or their creators did so in pre republic history.

 

And its inhabitants, the Knell of Muspilli, are also either a shout-out to Norse Mythology, or to the immolation of the world in the Last Judgment:
Knell of Muspilli
Muspelheim
Muspilli

 

Do we have any ancient races in canon?

 

The Celestials/Mortisites and Angels/Diathim, at least.

 

Completely forgot about Mortis

 

There is also the planet Kalevala, as in Finland's national epos Kalevala

 

Shout outs of various kinds are pretty common. Shout outs to creation mythologies are going to be a little bit rarer.

In the context of Legends, it would be interesting to see what the 200,000 BBY - 30,000 BBY period looked like, from the Celestials's point of view - the various threats they were having to deal with, including their own workers rising up against them.

 

Kalevala has a creation mythology, first part of it is about how the world is sung into existence

 

True. But we're not being told that the planet was involved in something major in the early days of the galaxy, the way we were with the Gunninga Gap - it seems to be just a namedrop.

Similar with Alsakan - there was a planet by that name in the Lensman series - but besides that, there are no really overt shout-outs to the Lensman stories, in the info we receive about it.