The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together. – General Obi-Wan Kenobi
Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, and Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), Lucasfilm
Myths are a powerful storytelling form that serve an important purpose in any culture. They describe what that cultures values and imbue lessons to the young on how to live a good and virtuous life, as well as outlining the perils of falling from that virtuous path. Larger-than-life divine or supernatural forces shape the lives and destinies of the mortal players in these stories.
These gods (small “G”) each have areas of responsibility within their portfolios, and often suffer from the same flaws and foibles of the mortals they reign over. Imagine the drama created when a poor mortal must appease many different divine players to be blessed favorably in their life, and yet those same divine players are at odds with each other! Many offerings must be made to appease the jealousies and vanities of these fickle gods!
Tate Donovan as Hercules in Hercules (1997), Walt Disney Pictures
Archetypes and the Mother
Joseph Campbell latched onto the idea of the mono-myth – that each culture and civilization had their own unique stories that nevertheless shared a similar structure. He defined 12 common steps in the Heroes Journey.
He also recognized that there were common archetypal roles that appeared in each of these myths. These could range from the Father of Justice to the Flawed Knight to the Wise Mentor, to the Crone/Witch – but no matter which culture was telling the story, roles that were roughly analogous had a tendency to appear.
Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, exclusively on Disney+. ©.
The Mother figure in mythology holds an interesting place, as she often serves a dual role. On the positive side, the Mother is referenced as the creator of life, and protector of her children. She represents life, vitality, and abundance. On the negative side, the Mother is referenced as the Destroyer – she is both the beginner and ender of all things, a representation of chaos itself.
While the Good Mother represents every Mama Bear that has ever protected her cubs, the Evil aspect represents the Devouring Mother so often referenced by Jung – the narcissistic matriarch who infantilizes her grown children – when scorned, her dance of destruction destroys the universe and the cycle begins again.
George Lucas and the Force
George was fascinated with Campbell’s theories and the Heroes Journey structure. He adapted this structure when creating the original Star Wars. Rather than have a personified deity, Lucas chose to have a non-personal energy field that created and worked through all life.
He borrowed liberally from Taoism while infusing some Christian themes to create his initial cosmology, but left the Force itself impersonal – it had a will, but could also be bent to the users design. In many ways, the Force was a sleeping god – at least at first.
Jon Favreau, George Lucas, Rosario Dawson, and Dave Filoni in Master & Apprentice: A Special Look at Ahsoka (2023), Lucasfilm
Time and the Clone Wars Change All Things
Initially, the Force was described as having two separate aspects – The Light Side, and the Dark Side. The light obviously reflected selflessness; goodness; kindness and charity. The Dark Side represented selfishness; evil; indifference, and the acquisition of power.
But as Lucas tackled the Prequels, he expanded on his cosmology.
He introduced the concepts of the Living Force and the Cosmic Force, as well as midichlorians. The Living Force was that from which all life sprang, and the midichlorians were the conduit from which living beings could hear or manipulate the Force. The Cosmic Force is where that life energy drains when life reaches its end – that life energy is not destroyed, but converted back into the wellspring of the Force itself, as potential – where it flows back into the Living Force and springs again.
Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn and Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace (1999), Lucasfilm
The Gods of Mortis
In the third season of The Clone Wars, George further fleshed out some concepts within the ethereal realm of Mortis. In this story arc, Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka encounter an ancient ship in space – as they are drawn into it, they are transported to a strange realm where time and the natural world obey strange and different laws.
There, Anakin is tested by The Ones – The Father, The Son, and the Daughter. The Father represents balance, and has dominion over his children. The Daughter represents the Light and the Living Force, and the Son represents the Dark and the Cosmic Force. Through the course of their adventures there, Anakin learns that the Father is dying and needs a replacement, but Anakin refuses the call to adventure, which appears to lock the path of the Galaxy to the coming darkness and his eventual transformation into Darth Vader. The Father, the Son, and the Daughter are all killed, though Ahsoka appears to take on aspects of the Daughter’s power. All are transported back to the known galaxy, where they wake up disoriented. Anakin’s memories of the dark vision he saw had been removed from his memory by the Father prior to his death, and the memory of the others were fuzzy, as though in a dream. No time had passed since their departure.
Left to the audiences imagination was what the strange arc represented – were The Ones real physical beings? Was this nothing more than a vision? Or was this the Force communicating directly to the protagonists in an allegorical way – through means they could understand in some small way?
The Father and Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: The Clone Wars “Overlords” (2011), Lucasfilm
Abeloth – Mother of Chaos
The question was taken up in one of the later storylines of the EU. Many decades of new lore had been created since the conclusion of the Original Trilogy and the recent conclusion of the Prequel Trilogy. In that time, Coruscant had been taken and a New Republic established. An Imperial Remnant had been organized under the leadership of Grand Admiral Thrawn. After his defeat, the Emperor had been resurrected and Luke Skywalker had become his apprentice for a brief time. After the Reborn Emperor was defeated, Luke founded a New Jedi Order; Imperial Warlords preyed on sectors under their control. Rediscovered superweapons; marriages; births; deaths; kidnappings and coups! Intrigue! Betrayal! Political alliances and heartbreaking defeats! Ancient galaxy-shaping devices of alien and unknown origin had been discovered or utilized or studied. Alien invasions occurred and whole planets burned.
But now – with the prequels done and the Clone Wars being developed, the EU authors chose to try to unite the sometimes disparate story threads and one-offs using the Gods of Mortis – and this time, they were going to be more well defined.
If balance must be maintained in the Force – then the son and daughter were the aspects being balanced. If the Father represented Balance, then the missing aspect was Chaos – and that must be the Mother.
Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen) in Lucasfilm’s STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved
The backstory chosen delved back hundreds of thousands of years to the early days of the Ones – here, a mortal servant provided for the needs of the Ones, primarily serving as the peacekeeper between the Son and the Daughter. She grew to love them as her family, but being mortal aged and grew weak. Fearing her own death and being unwilling to lose what she saw as her family, she sought to take on the forbidden power of the Mortis Gods herself.
She drank from the Font of Power and Bathed in the Pool of Wisdom – but rather than becoming like the Mortis gods, her form was twisted into a horrible nightmare. With power similar to H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones, she represented a threat to reality itself.
Rejected by the Ones, they imprisoned her in the Maw cluster. In times when the Force was out of balance, she escaped her prison and caused great chaos, but the Ones always restored her to her prison – until they were killed and no longer able to contain her.
The conflict that came when she once again could exert power on the galaxy presented such a great threat to reality that the Jedi and a long-lost Sith Tribe had to unite in the Realm of Shadows to defeat the Mother of Chaos once and for all.
(L-R): Aktropaw (Jeryl Prescott Gallien), Klothow (Claudia Black) and Lakesis (Jane Edwina Seymour) in Lucasfilm’s STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
The Mother Figure in Disney Star Wars?
If rumors are to be believed, Disney will try this week to change how the Force is viewed going forward. Rumors also indicate that Anakin will be retconned into carrying the spirits of Osha and Mae from The Acolyte within him.
Seeds for other plot points have been laid out in other media – most notably in Ahsoka, in which Baylan Skoll sought great power on an extra-galactic world called Peridea, ruled by a Nightsister cult.
The Nightsister cultists represented were based on the Fates of Greek Legend – who pulled and weaved the strands of Fate to influence the mortal realm. They even took on corrupted names of the Fates of legend: Klothow for Clotho, Aktropaw for Atropis, and Lakesis for Lachesis.
(L-R): Lakesis (Jane Edwina Seymour), Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen), Aktropaw (Jeryl Prescott Gallien) and Klothow (Claudia Black) in Lucasfilm’s STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
The witches of The Acolyte advance a theory that the Force is a weave of threads, and that these threads are what actually bind the galaxy together – their interpretation is manifested as Nightsister Magick.
Given the agenda of Disney and Lucasfilm of late, my suspicion is that in the course of the series, they will reveal that the original Mother of the Nightsisters (whose clans are organized under a Matriarch who all take on the title of “Mother”) was the true first practitioner of the Force, and that the jealous Jedi stripped her of her power and imprisoned her on Peridea.
While this wouldn’t be the corrupted form of Abeloth from the old EU, it would certainly paint the Jedi in a completely different light – as complicit in the subjugation and imprisonment of a powerful female, and the coverup of the truth for thousands of years. It turns the Jedi from heroes into villains, and turns the villains into oppressed victims.
This is all speculation of course – but it would seem to be in character with the ideologies of the creators involved.
Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) in Lucasfilm’s STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved
READ: Leslye Headland Confirms ‘The Acolyte’ Is The “Gayest Star Wars,” And Claims That R2-D2 Is A Lesbian
Conclusion
Lucasfilm and Disney would do well to remember the concept of Balance.
Life CANNOT be created without a masculine and feminine participant – no matter how much they may wish it so.
If The Acolyte does follow this path, it will be yet another case of virtual “Stolen Valor.” The current creators of Star Wars seem to heave a deep level of contempt for the creator of Star Wars, the fans of the property, and men in general. They seem to see themselves as the Good Mother – the creator of all things. Unfortunately, they are fulfilling the role of the Devouring Mother – seeking to live vicariously through the accomplishments of others and claiming them as their own, while likewise scorning their “children” who don’t obey their will.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – MAY 23: (L-R) Leslye Headland, Dave Filoni, Chief Creative Officer, Lucasfilm and Kathleen Kennedy, President, Lucasfilm attend the launch event for Lucasfilm’s new Star Wars series The Acolyte at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California on May 23, 2024. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
As the rumored quote attributed to Kathleen Kennedy said: If she can’t have it her way, she will burn “this nonsense” to the ground.
To me – it sounds like Kathleen Kennedy DOES have a role in Star Wars after all: as Abeloth – the Mother of Chaos.
I think this will turn out to be spot on, unfortunately. Star Wars can only be saved by jettisoning most of the “Disney canon”.
It’s win/win for them in their own twisted way. They do this with all popular American brands. If everyone accepts their deviance, they win. If everyone rejects their deviance, then they destroyed a piece of Americana. Do you think we won on the Bud Light thing? Really, they did because they destroyed what is seen as an American brand. They are locusts and they move around in swarms, destroying things they think we hold dear. Star Wars will never be saved. It will either be woke forever or be destroyed.