Fascinating differences in the way the ancient Sith Empire was depicted, before the prequels

The Legions were the ones that caused First Great Schism of the Jedi Order, between Jedi and Dark Jedi, from my fact-checking it was around 24.500 BBY but Ajunta Pall and his fellow Dark Jedi are the ones from the Second Schism from 7000 BBY, then those Dark Jedi came down to Korriban and dominated the Sith Species, they were crowned Dark Lords of the Sith and creating the Sith Empire, so yeah Ajunta Pall was the first Dark Lord given he was originally the leader of the Dark Jedi group, but Xoxaan, Remulus Dreypa, Karness Muur and Sorzus Syn were crowned with the title att the same time, and the way Ajunta recalls their history in KOTOR implies they were all close in power as they eventually destroyed each other, so they all share the title of "First Sith Lord" in my eyes.

A lot of the cultural mortifs from the Old Sith Empire were already there before the Sith Lords came around, like the division of work between the sub-species, the usage of the Dark Side for what it's called Sith Magic, and the Dark Jedi adapted those elements to their dark practices, when the Dark Jedi met the Sith Species it's implied that the species wasn't that powerful in the Dark Side although we know they have a natural tendency towards it, and that in the past, like i said, were Sith Kings of Korriban like Adas, from the Infinite Empire days, but the Sith Kings and Sith Lords are not the same thing, even if the Kings did use the Dark Side, the practices of the Sith Order and the Dark Lords are a mixture of the Sith Magic and the Dark Jedi's forbidden techniques, creating Sith Alchemy and many other terrible applications.

The Third Schism (4250 BBY) was largely unimportant to the overall history of the Dark Siders/Sith, and the Fourth Schism is the rise of Darth Ruin in 2000 BBY over a millenia after the Sith Species and the original Sith Empire are forgotten, but it is the one that eventually leads to Darth Bane.

So the Legions of Lettow from the First Schism didin't have anything to do with the Sith Empire, nor were they the first Dark Siders as it seems the very first Dark Siders predate even the Je'daii, the quote in general speaks of Dark Siders in the past in a broad sense, hence why at the end it says some of the Dark Siders were "Jedi", but it's not until after it goes "Again and again" meaning a long time after the first Dark Siders that "Made themselves into gods" the way their powers are described, it seems that they were from the Celestials' era, but of course this is all conjeture to make everything fit with an old source, but i think it works very well with the later lore introduced about the Celestials, the Ones of Mortis and even what Supernatural Encounters was trying to go for with that time period.

Here i am basically hypothesizing about the possible first Dark Siders the quote speaks of, before the Rakatans or the Sith Species, before the followers of Bogan, and before the Sith Lords and Jedi Schisms.

 

@Irredeemable Fanboy
Grazie! I have watched videos and read tomes which were muddled and confusing, but you laid it out so I can understand simply.

Much obliged.

 

No problem! I am glad it was useful as i feared i would make it too confusing lol.

 

I don't think it was until Exar Kun/Ulic Qel-Droma that the Sith Empire officially became the Republic's Carthage.

 

Any interesting question is when is it really The Sith and not Dark Jedi, Acolytes of Darkness, or Forerunners?

I am going to use an analogy. The Catholic Church existed prior to 1054 A.D. It developed and its Bishop had risen to prominance, but 1054 is when it broke from Eastern Orthodox Church, and for all intensive purposes is when it really became it own recognized separate tradition and church.

So in the same way, is there a distinct moment when The Sith no longer were Dark Jedi or Forerunners of Shadow, and the traditions of the Sith took over and formed into its unique makeup?

 

I think it was when they discovered Korriban and conquered the Sith species. They combined the traditions of King Adas with their own to form the “Sith” ideology.

 

Thank you, that make sense. It is what I have seen most referenced.

 

Considering what happened at the end of the Great Hyperspace War, when the republic fleet attacked the Sith on their own territory, i think that was the moment.

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The subject of Sith cooperation is still very interesting to me. Some EU authors disagreed with Lucas and believed cooperation could happen under certain conditions.

Tom Veitch showed a functioning dark sider society in Dark Empire, where one ruling dark side Master who is more powerful than the other dark siders maintains balance in the group by controlling who shares in his power. This is pretty similar to John Ostrander’s One Sith from Legacy, even if those Sith ostensibly believed they were all part of an uber-Sith who was embodied in Darth Krayt (or something, that was always a bit confusing).

But Lucas opposed the idea of a society of dark siders because he believed they would eventually turn on each other. Specifically, this was in reference to having more than one Sith Lord, with all the power and influence that entails. And yet even the Sith Lords are based on feudal lords, who did historically find a balance of power under certain conditions. Even in Lucas’s own backstories for the Sith, they had balance for a time while the first Sith Master was alive. But then they turned on him and on one another.

But would Palpatine in the movies have entertained the creation of new Sith? If he was already secure as Emperor and light-years ahead of any other Sith Lord, would he have been open to strengthening his grip on the galaxy by training more Sith? Presumably, as long as there were new systems to conquered, this could’ve worked for a time. Maybe this is what Abrams and company had in mind in those early TROS scripts that reference the Emperor’s regeneration as the emergence of a “Sith King” (in contrast to Sith Lord).

My own speculation of the Lucas Sith backstory is that this is precisely how the first Sith Lords functioned. As long as they had territory available to conquer, the Sith could co-exist. But then the Jedi helped more and more systems defend themselves, stopping the growth of Sith dominion and creating the territorial tensions that made the Sith destroy themselves. It maintains the Jedi’s defensive ethos and highlights how they could’ve nonetheless contributed to the Sith’s implosion.

 

@Sauron_18 Before Golden Age of the Sith #2 was published, did people think that the Massassi seen in Dark Lords of the Sith and The Sith War were human before Naga Sadow mutated them?

 

@darklordoftech

That’s an interesting question. I think different writers have had different ideas over the years. But I don't know what fans themselves thought.

The name "Massassi" comes from early drafts of the first Star Wars movie, where "Massassi Outpost" was the name given to the rebel base on Yavin IV. No other information was given at the time, and it seemed to be just a name for the base, much like "Echo Base" would be for the rebel base on Hoth in Empire Strikes Back.

Then there was a comic strip in 1982 that featured a creature known only as the "Night Beast" being released from the temple complex in Yavin when the rebels were living there. In the story, this creature is a member of the ancient race who built the temples, and he was abandoned there a long time ago as they left to another world. Luke is able to communicate with the creature and help it leave the planet to track down its people.

More than a decade later, Kevin J. Anderson would write his Dark Apprentice trilogy, which featured Luke's Jedi Academy on Yavin and the ghost of the long-dead Dark Lord of the Sith, Exar Kun. In that story, Luke sees visions of the race that built the Yavin temples, who were an alien race clearly based on the Night Beast creature from the comic strips. The books said these were the Massassi people, who had been enslaved by Exar Kun to serve him during the ancient Sith War. Some of this information was also included in another book Anderson wrote around that time, The Illustrated Worlds of Star Wars, which clearly served as a bit of a tie-in for that book trilogy.

At this point, Anderson had already been in communication with George Lucas about who exactly the Sith were. But all that he and fellow writer Tom Veitch were told was that the Sith were a people who had been conquered by fallen Jedi. When Veitch started writing his Tales of the Jedi comics, the Sith were consistently referred only as an ancient people who had developed dark-side teachings. They were more a culture than a species. And even in Anderson's book trilogy, they were referred to in much the same way.

Then Anderson and Veitch collaborated on the first story to actually feature the ancient Sith, Dark Lords of the Sith. In this story, the Sith people were first portrayed as a human-like race. The Massassi who appear later in that comic book do look more alien and rather similar to the race that Anderson had described in his book trilogy and which was based on the Night Beast from the comic strips. And in Dark Lords the explanation was given that the Massassi were indeed the descendants of the Sith people, but they had been mutated by Naga Sadow's alchemy until they ended up looking like the aliens who turn up in this story.

In later comic book stories, Anderson would go on to portray even the un-mutated Sith as an alien race with several features that would connect them to the Massassi and the later Night Beast, such as red skin and fleshy extensions on their jaws. What's evident is that the Sith species was created in reverse, starting with the originally unrelated Night Beast and then being connected to the mysterious Sith people who were conquered by the Dark Lords of the Sith.

I don't believe Lucas necessarily saw them as aliens when he provided his input to Anderson and Veitch. We just don't know what he imagined, though his early drafts for Star Wars imply the Sith people were something closer to a clan of pirates/warriors like the Mandalorians. But whatever Lucas imagined, Veitch and Anderson had different ideas, with Veitch thinking of them as a human-like race and Anderson seeing them as an alien race. Since Anderson wrote far more than Veitch in the Expanded Universe, especially in relation to the Sith, I'd say its likely that his view was always dominant among fans, even before the Sith were officially depicted in the EU as an alien species.

Personally, I was only exposed to the EU after many of these works had already come out, and I was certainly the type of person to love and be attached to the canon being developed by the Publishing group. So I took it as fact that the Sith people were always aliens, with the Massassi being the warrior caste who was later mutated by Naga Sadow. But in retrospect I recognize how much of that stems from trying to link originally disparate elements. And, additionally, how differently each creator involved may have viewed even this simple concept.

 

I like the Massassi design, but I don't understand why they look so little like the Night Beast they were based on. DH didn't even make the Beast red when they colourised the original strip.

One piece of the Sith species confusion that I find really interesting is the Great Schism flashback in Golden Age of the Sith #2, where the Sith people are red-skinned and tendril-faced - but so are the Exiles and Jedi. It makes me wonder if the whole thing started as some kind of Marvel method art error.

 

Making it even stranger is the description of the Massassi in Jedi Academy: Dark Apprentice, which says that they’re “grayish-green” and have “large lanternlike eyes.” Otherwise I would say that KJA might have learned about the Massassi from the WEG Yavin Galaxy Guide without having read The Night Beast.

The idea might have been that Ragnos, Kressh, and Sadow misremembered the Exiles and Jedi as having resembled the Sith species. In Golden Age of the Sith #0, Odan-Urr talks about the same event and the flashback shows the Exiles and Jedi with lightsabers.

 

Perhaps they just like red.

 

From when Golden Age of the Sith #3 was published until when Evil Never Dies was published, some fans thought Ziost was the homeworld of the Sith species.

 

In "Book of the Sith" it was. With Korriban practically abandoned for a long time, when the Exiles arrived.

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It could be so easy. Retcon the Sith species to be able to change color for some reason like the Falleen can go from green to red when... You know!



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Or simply different races among the Sith species.

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Impossible! Every Bith must be yellow and musically-inclined, every Rodian a green-skinned bounty hunter, and every Hutt a gangster. It's a known fact that until the Galactic Republic had made contact with the Echani, everyone was a dancer-fighter. Every street was full of martial artists and nobody had even heard of concepts outside of fast-paced cardio exercise.

 

We see Kalgrath in The Sith War and he’s red.

 

Considering the aesthecial changes between the various TOTJ mini series, i guess the way he appeared in Sith War might be not what he really is supposed to look like.

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@Sauron_18 I think you’ll like this post. Click on the image and scroll down to see the rest of it.

 

I truly want to know who created the Sith Order in the Legends universe was Daegen Lok or Ajunta Pall? i think Lok created one of the first Dark Side philosophies and then Ajunta Pall updated the concepts to create the Sith Order the Jedi Order was created shortly after Dawn of the Jedi comics so during Hundred Years of Darkness many years later the Jedi already had a presence in the Galaxy

I would have liked to see a sequel to Dawn of the Jedi to know the answers to these mysteries

 

It’s been a little while since I read this. Interesting that he says the comic would reveal the Sith people. I suppose it did, though we mainly see the remnants of their civilization and their mutated descendants. But most of what we learn about them is indirect, with Naga Sadow being the big Sith character who is often referred to but only barely seen.

 

It’s been confirmed to be Ajunta Pall.

It could have been called, “Dawn of the Sith”.