Lit Cult Encounters and Supernatural Encounters (even more new Legends material!)

I'm really not in favor of the notion of lovecraftian evil deities making everyone do evil things.

 

Nice to see a link posted to this thread from starwarstimeline.net

When I do my Star Wars web surfing, I always manage to get on that site and check out the latest news and new stuff. I'm a fan of Joe for sticking to his guns in terms of what many of us feel was established over so many years with the EU.

The translated Plaza Joven Ewoks and Droids storybooks are up on the website. The links to the translated PDF files by Abel Pena in the original articles on Starwars.com are gone. After contacting Abel Pena through JCF and not getting a response, I managed to find where I had tucked them away on an old hard drive in 2014. After I dug them out, I e-mailed them to Joe, and he got them up there on his website. If I had not downloaded them from starwars.com in 2014, I might still be searching for them on the web.

http://www.starwars.com/news/of-and...d-heads-spains-droids-and-ewoks-novelizations

 

Seems like Pena dropped off the face of the earth after the old EU was discontinued.

 

I have not seen Abel Pena nor Leland Chee active on SW message boards in a long time. Abel had some threads on JCF.

 

At least Chee is still active on Twitter; IIRC, Pena hasn't been active there since 2014.

 

@LelalMekha , were you the one who was asking me about these a few months back?

 

It is indeed the correct interpretation. I can tell you because I've briefly discussed it with him. He says he can't do for the new canon what he did for the old one, that his interest in Star Wars continuity belongs to a different context, and that he's shifted his focus away from Star Wars to his interests in science, philosophy and politics.

@jSarek Yes, I was! Thanks, my man!

 

He was likely the patron of the Sith, some 100,000 years ago.

I could see the Greater Deities, around the time they were locked away (in the Kathol Rift? In Otherspace? At the Galactic Core? Several of these?) creating the lesser deities (Typhojem, Gorog, Waru) as their agents on the mortal plane to work against the Celestials.

Gorog's job was to subvert the Killiks, The Dark Nest issue is a vestige of that - Gorog may have been beaten, also locked away, and the Night Spirit of Endor is Gorog, attempting to return.

Waru's job was to create Mnggal Mnggal.

Typhojem's job involved being the patron of the Sith (and maybe various other tentacly races)- stirring them up against the Celestials.

That said, some of the Greater Deities themselves (Ap "Splendid Ap" especially) may have gotten personally involved. Ap's speciality is supposed to be technology and portals - he may be the source of the Gree's hypergates or the Kwa's infinity gates). If they're also tied to the Celestials/Architects - then maybe the Celestials/Architects/The Ones are in fact connected to the Soulworm pantheon?

The Father, could be the "Shunned One" who turned against the others and imprisoned them.

 

Wait the Sith species weren't even united 100,000 BBY but a divided society. They weren't united until not long before the coming of the Rakata under Adas. Hence the name Sith'ari.

Waru was from another universe and was brought in by mistake-in the OT and post OT era. The Mnngal-Mnngal I'm pretty sure were walled off from the rest of the Galaxy by the celestials.

And the bedlam spirits didn't seem like they had been consciously intervening in galactic affairs until Leia and that party of stormtroopers ran into them.

 

They may have been divided, but they were still a growing civilization. We know they have a chief god (Typhojem) from Book of Sith, we know that their society goes back 100,000-plus years (Jedi vs Sith Guide To The Force) - so I conjecture that they were worshipping Typhojem even back then.

The point is that the Cult Encounters article suggests that Waru is one of the three lesser deities. He may have been banished to that other universe by the Celestials.

Yup. But the Star Wars Saga Edition Unknown Regions book (and, I am told, its endnotes) specifically associates it with Waru - so I'm suggesting that Waru was involved with it - maybe creating it - before being banished.

Given the description of the "Grey Swallowing" "Hollowers of Beings" curse that was unleashed by the Rakata against the Celestials (Essential Guide To Warfare Endnote 1) this suggests that the Rakata unearthed it somehow - and that the Galactic Barrier was created during the Rakata/Celestial War to contain it.

 

According to the one excerpt of Supernatural Encounters we have so far, Typhojem is actually the son of Cold Danda Sine, who is implied to be Kopa Khan, and Tilotny, who along with Horliss-Horliss doesn't seem easily identifiable with any of these gods.

 

I thought the Charon ended up there by mistake?

 

They did. They were flipped in there by the Kathol Rift Disaster. Otherspace's native inhabitants would appear to be the Rozzum judging by that pilot's description of the natives as "pale" and "squirming," which was also how Rur described the Rozzum.

 

The Wizards of the Night Spirit's home dimension was strongly implied to be Otherspace, at least:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Wizard_of_the_Night_Spirit

Given that the Kathol had "ophidian grotesqueries" - I would speculate that the Celestials are somehow involved in the Kathol Rift Disaster - maybe it was their hyperspace technology that the Kathol were experimenting with when the disaster occurred.

So - we've got the Rozzum universe, the Charon Otherspace, and Waru's universe - all implied to be the same. "Beyond The Veil" where the Aing-Tii deities live, and "Beyond Shadows" where Abeloth lives, the Nightsister spirits live, and the Muspell "apocalyptic deities" live, may also be Otherspace.

Rur being first a devotee of Onrai, and then contacting the Rozzum and summoning them through, strongly suggests a connection of some kind between Abeloth and the dark pantheons, even if she may not be one of them.

I thought that was the term for the deity going from relatively harmless, to ferocious and warlike:

It is said that Maeve had been one of these rebellious girls in her youth. What is known is that she resurrected the Goddess while in captivity, gave her back her teeth and a thirst for blood and vengeance.

The way it's phrased does raise the possibility that the Goddess is the one who's been given back her teeth, and a thirst for blood and vengeance.

Given that Soa, a Rakata, took over the Sith for a while and established an "Infernal Empire" (before being imprisoned) - maybe the Killik Sith Lord was not 30,000 BBY but 27,000 BBY - with the 30,000 figure being rounded off? He could have been one of Soa's henchmen, along with the traitorous Sith, like Soa he learned from them - and when Soa was defeated, he fled to Sarafur along with his "Sith Holocron" (which was more "Rakata Holocron with some Sith teachings in").

 

The Killik Sith has long been a gigantic inconsistency that strangely has never gotten a retcon, considering he was around millennia before the Sith even EXISTED - at least the Sith Order; there's nothing that really prevents him from having ruled the species.

 

The thing I like most of this article is that it doesn't give us any definitive conclusions about anything.

It's the in-universe research of an old man of possibly deteriorating sanity working with scattered fragmentary material thousands of years old or more. Material which is mostly made up of legends which may have some root of truth but have doubtless evolved or twisted over time (I mean look how many wildly divergent Abrahamic or Abrahamic-in-origin sects we've ended up with on a single planet with way less time!) Material which could be the incorrect research of another such researcher several millennia ago, outright lies of malicious and unknown purpose, or most horrifyingly of all the equivalent of kids on the internet claiming to worship "Kek".

Everything in it is up for interpretation. Do these beings actually exist? Are they Gods, powerful Force users or manifestations, extradimensional aliens, or something else? Are the ones he theorizes might be the same being actually the same, or is it a case of coincidental similarity? Or non-coincidental but still a red herring due to inevitable mythological cross-contamination and/or convergent legend-evolution? Have they really been involved in galactic events to any meaningful degree or do they only pop up when someone intentionally draws their attention? Who knows!

I know some people find it frustrating not having things set in stone and nearly categorized, but especially for an article like this I think this uncertainty is the way to go. I'd hate if Star Wars had a clearly defined cosmological and theological truth a la D&D or something. Instead the article gives us all sorts of stuff we can pick up and run with if we like, or disregard as the overly credulous ramblings of an obsessed old man working with unreliable sources if we don't.

 

Mine is kind of the inverse, a Joiner (Killik) that learned enough from the Sith, to proclaim himself a Sith Lord.

Adas is painted as the first "true" Sith Lord - the first to really unite the Sith - but there would have been darksiders with Sith teachings, before him.

 

I mean, if there’s one thing we should all learn from the whole Vectivus debacle is that this community doesn’t do ambiguity well.

 

I have no issue with ambiguity but ambiguity often leads to speculation which can run into being seen as facts.

And the Vectivus point is a good one-it was the writers(and then fan sources like Wookieepedia) that took Lumiya's word as good coin. I would have preferred this not be so.

 

I rather like the notion that most of what's written here is accurate - tying the various "Otherspace" beings together, tying the various "100,000 BBY" references together, and so on.

It becomes almost a SW "Cthulhu Mythos".

 

Learning of these great evil beings makes me really want, if not an outright Legends revival, then a DC Convergence-esque story where the old continuity is revisited one last time and given a more conclusive and satisfying finale than the sudden reboot gave it. I say make it a comic maxi-series and give it to Grant Morrison.

 

The latest issue (16) of the Dr Aphra comic, makes me wonder if, like us, the comic writers have read the Cult Encounters article and are drawing from it for ideas:

Spoiler

specifically, when Aphra describes a "techno-totem of a chthonic worm god from an age of fable and horror."