The Prophecy of the Chosen One is a fairly
major part of Star Wars lore, as, after all, the main saga is about Anakin Skywalker fulfilling
it. The prophecy functioned as a sort of savior myth for the Jedi, which generally followed the
same lines most iterations of the Chosen One trope do in other fictional works. But while the
Prophecy of the Chosen One is pretty well known, far fewer fans are familiar with the
Sith’s counterpart to the legend. Yes, the Sith had their own Chosen One prophecy, the Prophecy of the Sith’ari, and in this video
we’re going to be discussing it in detail. The Sith’ari will be free of limits.
The Sith’ari will lead the Sith and destroy them. The Sith’ari will raise the Sith from
death and make them stronger than before. This was how Sorzus Syn, the first Shadow Hand of
the old Sith Empire, translated the prophecy of the Sith’ari, the perfect being, in around 6900
BBY. The actual prophecy had been written long before that, but that was the first time it had
been recorded. Previously, the Kissai, the ruling priest caste of the ancient Sith, had deemed it
too sacred to put into writing, and passed it down orally from generation to generation. They
had kept the legend alive for tens of thousands of years before the coming of Syn and her
comrades, the self-proclaimed Lords of the Sith, dutifully awaiting the day when the Sith’ari
would come and change the course of history. Let’s take a step back. The term Sith’ari
was an ancient one, roughly translating to “overlord,” and dated back to around
27,700 years before the Battle of Yavin. In those days, Korriban had been newly
discovered by the Rakata of the Infinite Empire, who wanted to claim the planet’s
native Sith as a slave species. But for the first time in their history, the
Rakata met substantial resistance on Korriban. The armies of the Sith fought back with a
tenacity that they weren’t prepared for, and that not even the greatest of their legions
could overcome. The resilience of the Sith resistance, the Rakata soon learned, was due to
the Sith’s faith in their leader - King Adas. The Sith, in those days, were
a contentious and brutal people with great strength in the Force, and a
tendency to lean towards the Dark Side. For millennia, they had been divided into
countless warring kingdoms - or rather, they had been before Adas came onto the scene. From
the outset, Adas had been marked for greatness, as he had been born with obsidian-black skin, a
rarity among the red-skinned Sith. As he matured, he became one of the greatest warriors the Sith
had ever seen, known for wielding a massive, alchemically-enhanced battleaxe in combat.
In his youth, he seized control of one of the Sith kingdoms and conquered all the others,
becoming the undisputed ruler of all of Korriban. Adas lived an extraordinarily long life,
ruling for nearly three hundred years. The Sith came to see Adas as a god, and it was
he who first claimed the title of Sith’ari. It was under the leadership of this legendary
king that the Sith defeated the Rakata, making history in the process. Adas personally
led the armies of Korriban in battle against the invaders, laying claim to their ships so
he could pursue the Rakata back to the stars. He succeeded in driving the Rakata from Sith Space
altogether, but the attempt cost him his life. After Adas’s death, the Sith fractured.
Their homeworld, Korriban, had been rendered desolate by the war with the Rakata, and so most
of the Sith abandoned it, relocating to nearby Ziost and a few other worlds. For the next
twenty thousand years, the Sith Worlds were once more consumed by internal strife, as kings
who claimed to be heirs to Adas rose and fell, and their realms waxed and waned. The prophecy of
the Sith’ari likely originated from this period. The Kissai were divided on its meaning. Some
believed it meant that Adas would return, while others believed it foretold the coming of
another, who would follow in Adas’s footsteps. Either way, the fulfilment of
the prophecy would surely mean great change for Sith civilization,
just as had happened under Adas. Which brings us back to Sorzus Syn. As we
mentioned earlier, she and eleven other Dark Jedi came to Korriban in 6900 BBY, having been
exiled from the known galaxy by the Jedi. Under the leadership of Ajunta Pall, they conquered Sith
civilization and became the Lords of the Sith. They built the first Sith Empire,
in which Pall ruled as Dark Lord and Sorzus Syn served as his
Shadow Hand, or second-in-command. Pall, Syn, and the other Sith Lords
completely reshaped Sith society, transforming it into a massive war machine that
they hoped would one day crush the Republic. Syn heard of the Sith’ari prophecy as she was
researching the culture of her new subjects. She quickly came up with her own interpretation of
it, which would become the default interpretation going forward. She agreed with one
of the more popular interpretations among the Kissai - that the prophecy
foretold the coming of another like Adas, not that it foretold his return. As she
interpreted it, this perfect being would break free from the limitations placed upon them,
following which they would come to rule the Sith, destroy the Sith, and bring them back
from the dead in a more powerful form. Naturally, Syn immediately leapt to the
conclusion that the prophecy foretold the coming of the Exiles to Korriban. After all, the
Sith Lords had broken free of the limits the Jedi Council had placed on them. They had seized
control of the Sith and destroyed their old civilization, on the ruins of which they built an
empire, stronger than any prior Sith civilization. Thus, the Sith’ari must have been one of the
Exiles, likely either Ajunta Pall or Syn herself, as she determined. But it wasn’t quite that
simple. As we all know, neither Pall nor Syn were the last great Sith Lords, nor the
last to completely transform the Sith. Dozens of immensely powerful Dark Lords
rose and fell over the course of the next seven thousand years - and pretty much
all of them thought they were the Sith’ari. As you might expect from the Sith, most major
figures in Sith history thought they were a match for the prophesied perfect being, for
various reasons. Naga Sadow, the Dark Lord who first led the Sith Empire to war against the
Republic, believed he would become the Sith’ari by conquering the galaxy. Exar Kun, Darth Vitiate,
and Darth Ruin were all held to be candidates for the title due to the dramatic changes
they made to the Sith orders of their time. Kun was considered to have been responsible
for bringing the Sith back from death. Vitiate believed himself to have
been a god, free from all limits. Ruin’s divisive teachings nearly destroyed
his own Sith Order, and yet his New Sith went on to nearly destroy the Republic. All,
seemingly, matched parts of the prophecy. Darth Bane, the Dark Lord who came up with the
Rule of Two, was perhaps the best candidate for a Sith who had destroyed the order and then
brought it back from death. Darth Sidious, on the other hand, considered himself to be the
only Sith to have been free from limitations, due to the undisputed power of his Galactic Empire.
Darth Plagueis, who considered himself a scientist and a staunch materialist, saw the prophecy of the
Sith’ari as superstitious nonsense, but even he thought that the prophecy seemed, quote, “uniquely
specific to the actions [he was] taking.” In his own words, which echoed the thoughts of
virtually every notable Sith Lord before him: “If the robes of the Sith’ari fit,
I see no reason not to claim them.” Naturally, this begs the question of who was
actually the Sith’ari. Were any of the potential claimants to the title uniquely qualified?
Did the prophecy allude to multiple Sith’ari, as some believed? Or, perhaps, was the whole
thing a load of Sith? The answer is that the prophecy was indeed alluding to one specific
being, and not the one that some might expect. The true Sith’ari was none other than
Darth Bane. Though this may come as a bit of a surprise to some, this is actually the
confirmed answer to the question in Legends, though in-universe, there were still a
good many Sith with their own theories. In a general sense, Bane really was the perfect
being from the Sith perspective. He was one of the few Sith Lords who genuinely believed in
the ideology of the Sith, which he saw as one of personal freedom. Bane understood the Dark
Side better than anyone before or after him, and this understanding led him to develop the
Sith Grand Plan. As we all know, the Grand Plan was what allowed the Sith to finally take over the
entire galaxy, all thanks to Bane’s reforms. But, of course, there was more to the prophecy of
the Sith’ari than just being a good Sith Lord. Bane, however, met all the other
criteria of the prophecy as well. To start, in his own way, Bane really was free
of limits. Though Darth Sidious argued that he didn’t fit this criterion because he still
had to account for the rule of the Republic, Bane saw the Republic as having no
power over him. He was concerned entirely with personal power, the strength
the Dark Side granted him as an individual, and while he was dedicated to the Sith
cause, others only concerned him insofar as they affected him. From his point of view,
he had no masters, and therefore no limits. Bane defined his life as a story of moving
past limitations, in fact. On his homeworld, he freed himself of his abusive father by crushing
his heart through the Force. He freed himself of the hard labor of the mines by joining the Sith
army, and from the whims of his foolish superiors by joining the academy on Korriban. As a Sith
Lord in training, he slew first his rivals and then his master, and then, in the Seventh Battle
of Ruusan, he tricked the rest of the Sith into wiping themselves out with a thought bomb.
Bane destroyed all who dared to try to impose limits on him, and he reigned unchallenged
as Dark Lord of the Sith for twenty years. As we just mentioned, Bane led the
previous incarnation of the Sith, the Brotherhood of Darkness, into battle
on Ruusan, where he also destroyed them. Seeing the Brotherhood as weak and a
betrayal of what it meant to be Sith, Bane tricked them into destroying themselves,
leaving himself as the last Sith Lord alive. He then went on to raise the Sith from death
by founding the Order of the Sith Lords, becoming its first Dark Lord and taking
Darth Zannah as his first apprentice. Lastly, by implementing the Rule of Two, Darth
Bane did indeed make the Sith stronger than ever before. As Bane rightly observed, the Dark Side of
the Force was like venom - the more concentrated it became, the more powerful it was, and
vice-versa. The history of the Sith showed that, whenever there were more than two Sith, it
weakened the order, as lesser Sith tended to band together to kill stronger masters. As Bane
saw it, this led to a dilution of the strength of the Dark Side, something he was determined to put
a stop to. His reforms concentrated the power of the Dark Side in as few individuals as possible,
allowing his Sith to be as powerful as possible. Under his system, each new Dark Lord was to
be greater than the last, having overcome their master through superior power and skill,
unaided. The Rule of Two was the only sustainable way for the Sith to operate, and because of it,
Bane’s heirs went on to take over the galaxy. Darth Bane may not have been the most memorable
Dark Lord of the Sith. He didn’t have an unendingly long kill list, he didn’t command
vast armies of Sith, and he wasn’t as flashy or ostentatious as some others. But these things
ultimately weren’t what made one a Sith. The Sith were all about individual power, not about
orders or empires or conquest. Over the millennia, that had been forgotten. It took Darth Bane, the
Sith’ari, to bring the Sith back to their roots, to allow them to remember what they once were.
In doing so, he sealed the fate of the Republic. So, that’s the legend of the Sith’ari,
the Sith version of the Chosen One. But what do you think? Do you agree that Darth
Bane best fits the bill, or is there another that you think was the true Sith’ari? Feel free
to post your thoughts in the comments below.
