Feature - The Silan Altar and Lair

Whilst on the planet Arorlia, Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn and his padawan learner have several encounters with usual characters and beasts. Obi-Wan unwittingly falls for a squollyhawk's camouflage entrapment and he only narrowly escapes its deadly lunge. The beast breaks its jaw on a branch, condemning itself to a slow starvation.

Meanwhile, Qui-Gon has rescued a moggonite called "Mosko" from a blasgwahr snare. Mosko later betrays the two Jedi to a group of raiders, who Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are forced to kill, along with Mosko.

They set of on their journey again, leaving the forest behind, and enter a rocky and mountainous region filled with lakes. It is here that they encounter the Silan sacrificial altar, placed in a pool by unknown worshippers. Obi-Wan's surprise at finding such dark shrine and his comment, "A Silan!? I thought they were just mythical creatures like Barracles or Glooths," is a testament to how rare such an encounter is.

As far as I know there has never been any other material written on the Barracles, Glooths, or the Silans in any other EU literature. The Dark Side Sourcebook written by Bill Slavicsek and J.D. Wilker (Wizards of the Coast, 2001), though published later than the story, does not mention this Dark Side creature.

The sacrificial altar is, from appearance, made of stone and formed in the shape of a huge skull. It resembles the Silan to some extent, with multiple openings in the shape of mouths near the top. The edifice is huge, towering over both Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan. The entrance, in the shape of an elongated mouth is tipped with sharp rock spikes. Around the main structure is what seems to be an imitation of a rib cage, made up of six curved rocks. Behind the structure are hundreds of sharpened poles with pierced alien skulls. These are obviously victims sacrificed in a hideous ceremony to the Silan living in the mountain behind.

Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan then proceed to a cave complex high up in a nearby solitary mountain where they kill the gigantic creature. The Silan's appearance is the stuff of nightmares. A huge grey blob, it has multiple mouths with sharpened teeth and huge tentacles to defend itself with. The Jedi seem to make short work of this creature.

From Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan's
conversation on route to destroying
the Silan, we learn a few things
about it - Though the Jedi live by a
code of peace, Qui-Gon feels that
the Living Force is instructing him to
destroy the Silan, to the extent that he
comments, "It isn't every day a Jedi has the
opportunity to rid the Universe of a Silan."

The Silan is one of the primordial creatures of the
Dark Side. Through Qui-Gon's actions, and the
influence of the Living Force, it can be understood that
such a creature is an abomination whose existence in the
natural world is an anomaly. Testament to this is Qui-Gon's
earlier attitude towards Mosko and the squollyhawk. He refused to
attack either of these on first encountering them, whereas he
seemed determined that the Silan should be destroyed. Later
Obi-Wan questions their actions in killing such as large creature and states
that, "But … it felt wrong to me. I thought serving the Living Force meant
having respect for all creatures … The Silan had its place in the natural scheme of things, didn't it?" Qui-Gon's answer is that they may have been "the agents of retribution. Perhaps we performed an act of liberation. We cannot know … we can only serve [the Living Force]." It seems that the survival of this creature was detrimental to the will of the Living Force, though it seems to contradict the morality of the Jedi Order's stance on the natural world. If such a creature is so dangerous, then how could the two Jedi dispose of it so easily? These are all unanswered questions.

Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon's earlier discussions allude to their being similar such creatures in the universe. The Silan is definitely not a Sith magic creation, as by being a "primordial" creature [1], it was there at the beginning of the Galaxy. Unless other such creatures are encountered in the EU, which I doubt they will, the mystery of the Silan on Arorlia will remain just that …

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All cultures have ceremonies and theories dealing with death and the afterlife. It is a part of the Life's cycle. In some cultures, such as in ancient Egypt and the Etruscans of pre-Imperial Rome, preparation for the afterlife took a huge role in life. In medieval Christianity, wealthy nobles paid for tombs to be made many years before the owner's death, chantry chapels to be set up in local churches and cathedrals so that prayers could be said for the soon-to-be-departed and for eternity, and a whole code was written called the Ars Moriendi ("The Art of Dying") to help a person perform a "good death". The cult of death is prevalent in some cultures, whilst very much taboo in others.

Images (from left): [1] Aztec altar (Date unknown; Natural History Museum, New York) [2] Chac-Mool (means "red or great jaguar paw") from the Shrine of Tlaloc, the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan - present-day Mexico City (1325-1521 AD). Below right: [3] Thuggee temple in Pankot Palace from the motion picture, "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"

But some take this fascination with death and pain to extremes. From the black magic of Voodoo shamen, to the blooded altars of the Aztecs (see the two images above), to the Thuggee cult dedicated to Kali (as portrayed in the motion picture, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), there is no greater embodiment of the Dark Side in our reality than human sacrifice and torture. No matter what the reason behind such actions, such lack of regard for human life can only be termed as being evil.

In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Lucasfilm /
Paramount; 1984), the thuggee cult of the nineteenth
century has been restarted in Pankot Palace by the
evil priest Mola Ram who now controls the Maharajah
and enslaved local children to work in mines. Beneath
the palace is a secret area of worship, with a huge
multi-armed Kali statue and sacrificial pit where victims
are lowered into a pool of lava below. During the film,
Mola Ram places an earlier guest in the palace above
into a cage. Then through some dark magic, the evil
priest rips the beating heart out of the still-living
victim and then plunges the cage containing the victim
into the molten lava.

There seem to be few web resources on the historical
group known as "thuggees", who plagued travellers
on Indian roads during the late eighteenth and
nineteenth century before the British colonial authorities
stopped them. One scholarly account, by Parama Roy,
has this to say of contemporary ideas on the group -

"The thugs, as they are narrativized in nineteenth and twentieth-century colonial representations, were a cult of professional stranglers who preyed on travellers--though never on Englishmen--as an act of worship to the goddess Kali. They were represented as hereditary killers drawn from all regions, religions, classes, and castes, united by their devotion to Kali and the act of strangulation, which was, in this reading, quite literally sacralized. The thugs were bound to their calling--and to each other--by shared signifying systems: a language, a belief in the divine origin of the practice, and a dizzying array of minutely observed rituals, prohibitions, and superstitions. The thuggee system functioned as a quasi-religious fraternity that, paradoxically, would accommodate just about every Indian."

"Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee", Parama Roy
(The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996) pp. 121-145)
[Located at http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/yale_journal_of_criticism/9.1roy.html]

We see one of these professional stranglers in "The Temple of Doom" when he tries to kill Indiana Jones in his palace guest room. The historical thuggees and their film equivalent should not be confused with each other. Those in the film are clearly extremely evil, and this is mistakenly placed on the historical group and worshippers of Kali as a whole. This issue caused controversy for the film because of its, fictional (and possibly misleading) portrayal of a historical group with links with aspects of Hinduism, though obviously not representative of Hindus as a whole. But would the normal cinema-goer know and understand this? The evil thuggee group (from the film) and their association with a Hindu goddess shows that even something created as a force for good can be turned into something wrong, an issue repeatedly discussed in the New Jedi Order Star War books. The Force has both Light and Dark sides, but would a Jedi using a power from the dark side in a benevolent action not be tainted? For example, should force lightning (as used by the Emperor in ROTJ and documented as a dark side power) be ever used by a Jedi as it would surely corrupt them, even if a person's life is saved by such an action?

The placing of human skulls on spikes has a historical precedence. Vlad Tepes III, also known as Vlad the Impaler (and the basis for Bram Stoker's Dracula), was a brutal fifteenth century ruler of Wallachia (present-day Romania) who defended his countries' borders from the invasions of the Ottoman Turks. He gained the nickname of Dracul, meaning the "Devil", and he is notorious today because he was fond of using impalement as punishment, though this was a practice used in eastern European countries during the Middle Ages. Heads on spikes were a deterrent placed on the battlements of many city gates. At one time a whole field of skulls on spikes could be seen in the capital of Wallachia at the request of Vlad. This act of capital punishment was also an act of the utmost evil.

Images (from left): [1] Woodcut of Vlad Tepes and impaled victims (Fifteenth Century AD) [2] Contemporary portrait of Vlad Tepes [3] Egyptian god Set protects the sun barge of Re on its nightly journey through the underworld from the representative of choas, the gigantic snake Apophis (Date unknown; ancient Egyptian papyrus).

The sacrificial altar of the Silan embodies such an act of evil, something in the SW universe which is the embodiment of the Dark Side. People were sacrificed to appease another being. The Yuuzhan Vong invaders, from the series of Star Wars novels collectively called the New Jedi Order, also believe in sacrificing what they term "Infidels" or unbelievers to their many gods. Such fanaticism can only be evil, as people who adhere to the Light Side of the Force try to hold all life as sacred.

The design of the Silan lends itself to the dark creatures and gods of the Cthulhu Mythos created by American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. In these stories humanity is insignificant in the cosmic scale of things, compared to dark entities that have existed for untold years. Many of the world's cultures describe a chaos before the creation of the universe, including ancient Egypt. The gigantic snake-like creature Apophis, a monster of chaos, was there at the beginning and continued its eternal struggle to destroy the gods of Egyptian mythology who represented order. The Silan was created at the beginning of the universe, and its form represents something of that chaotic time. Star Wars EU does not normally delve into such dark recesses of our universe, but the Silan story shows that no matter how strong the Light Side is, there must also be the Dark Side. Without one, how do you define the other?

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Footnote [01]:

Definition: primordial adj. existing at or from the beginning; primeval ["The Collins Paperback English Dictionary", HarperCollins, 1990].