Since time immemorial, the Jedi and the Sith in Star Wars have been fighting a battle for dominance over the fate of the galaxy, but who was the first Jedi Knight that defected to the other side and founded the Korriban Empire?
When you break down the galaxy far, far away and its narrative to the most basic level, this has always been a classic interpretation of good vs. evil in the form of the Jedi and the Sith. The Jedi are the “warriors of peace and justice,” upholding righteousness and guarding order in the face of chaos and anarchy, while the Sith cultivate it in order to gain personal influence and power.
In the Skywalker Saga timeline, the Sith have fallen from their former glory, and it is only through Sheev Palpatine’s teachings that their particular school of thought survives. Palpatine was taught by his master Darth Plagueis the Wise, while Plagueis himself was taught by another called Darth Tenebrous.
The tradition of having only one apprentice at any given time goes back a thousand years before the Clone Wars. In that period — what we now know as the Old Republic — the Jedi and the Sith fought a devastating war over control of the galaxy, but the formation of the Sith and the Brotherhood of Darkness goes back even earlier.
In that war, the Sith expanded their control over the galaxy and presided over an empire that thrived on slavery. The Jedi, meanwhile, continued to militarize and fight back. At several points during the conflict, the Old Republic came close to being overwhelmed, but due to the infighting in the Sith Empire and the vicious ambition that corrupted their ranks, the Jedi were ultimately triumphant, wiping every Sith from the face of the galaxy. Or so they thought.
One Sith Lord, called Darth Bane, survived. Bane went into hiding, and it was then that he created the Rule of Two, to make sure that the Sith’s inherent flaw of greed wouldn’t get in the way of their ultimate goal, which was to bring the Jedi and the High Republic to heel.
But Darth Bane wasn’t the first Sith Lord. The first Sith were Jedi, and they deviated from the Code in an event known as the Great Schism. While the details of that period are up to speculation — especially given the fact that Disney has repeatedly changed the Expanded Universe — here’s everything we know about the first Sith Lord, based both on the canon timeline and the so-called “Legends” reality.
Who was the first Sith Lord?
In the official Star Wars canon post-Disney acquisition, the first Jedi who defected to the dark side is an unknown individual. According to the Geektionary, which is a canon reference book, this mysterious individual became disillusioned with the teachings of the Jedi Order and believed that the true potential of the Force could only be achieved by tapping into both the light and the dark side. The Jedi Council were obviously indignant, which is why they exiled said individual from the Order.
That person gathered followers of his own, and taught them the ways of the dark side of the Force, resulting in the period known as the Hundred-Year Darkness, where the Great Schism caused many Jedi and other Force-sensitive individuals to defect to the dark side and establish the Brotherhood of Darkness. From there, the Sith invaded the Old Republic and the great Jedi-Sith war took place, culminating in the supposed destruction of the Sith.
In the “Legends” timeline, that first individual who founded the Sith is named. Ajunta Pall was a human Jedi Master who spurned the Order because of their arrogance, and he and his followers set out to find a calling of their own. Ajunta eventually arrived at a planet called Korriban and came in contact with a primitive species known as the Sith.
That’s right. The Sith were originally not ideologic adversaries of the Jedi, but rather a species that were attuned to the living Force. The Sith were originally red-skinned humanoids who had face tentacles, but thanks to the arrival of humans and the subsequent interbreeding that followed, they slowly morphed into something else over millennia.
Ajunta came to meet the Sith’s king, but he resisted the rogue Jedi’s attempts to bring them under their rule despite being far superior in knowledge and technology. Ajunta eventually managed to usurp the king’s throne by force, whereupon he and his followers became the dominant rulers of the Sith empire. The species native to Korriban came to worship Ajunta as their god, being awed by the technology of the Old Republic and the Dark Lord’s mastery of the Force. He, in turn, cultivated their dark side affiliation and essentially established the Brotherhood of Darkness (later known as the Dark Lords of the Sith) as the opposite of the Jedi Order.
While Ajunta — or that unnamed individual, if you prefer to follow the canon timeline — was influential in the formation of the Sith and the devastating war that followed it, his philosophy of the dark side was flawed. Now, that’s not to say what Darth Bane came up with was foolproof either, but Bane understood something about the Sith that Ajunta and his cronies failed to realize.
Betrayal and deception are what constitute a Sith Lord’s way of thinking, so they’re inevitable even in the Rule of Two. Darth Bane himself was defeated by his apprentice Darth Zannah, while Palpatine betrayed and murdered Darth Plagueis. The emperor didn’t make the same mistake as his predecessors, pre-emptively betraying both Darth Maul and Count Dooku, his apprentices, before they had a chance to betray him, but that still didn’t stop Darth Vader from killing him in Return of the Jedi. Now, granted, Vader’s motivations weren’t to supplant the emperor, but he still ended up dancing to the rhythm of history.
Ajunta’s order didn’t survive because of in-fighting, but Bane assured that there would always be at least one Sith Lord to move the plan forward. That is also when the Sith mastered manipulation, and not brute force, as a means of achieving their goals, which is why we’ve never had an all-out Jedi vs. Sith conflict since the last war a thousand years before the events of the Skywalker Saga.
As for Ajunta’s fate, it’s unclear how the first Sith Lord died, but due to his extensive knowledge of the Force and other sciences, Ajunta bound his spirit to this world and lived on to observe his Sith Empire. When he saw the in-fighting among the Sith, he came to regret many of his decisions and even questioned his initial deviation from the light. Ultimately, and hundreds of years after his death, the legendary Darth Revan visited Ajunta’s tomb, where the two conversed over the fate of the Sith and how their legacy affects the galaxy. Revan convinces Ajunta to return to the light side, and, letting go of his hatred and pain, he finally finds peace and becomes one with the Force.