Ch. 10: The Hathor Heresy
The Hathor Heresy is the name given to the event that burned the Second Imperium of the Sith to the ground, thus entering another period of dormancy. The Hathor Heresy is actually a series of massive wars, social and political upheavals, and widespread calamities all stemming from a few mistakes in Sith teachings. It began with a Sith Lord named Hathor being appointed to the rank of Grand Inquisitor. (circa. 13,100 BBY) At this time, the Imperium was already in a state of disorder. It was already over a thousand years old and while it seemed stable, tensions were rising right beneath the surface. Many of the member planets were in a state of poverty and succession looked imminent. Additionally, various illegal cults broke out among member worlds causing the Inquisition to crack down of freedoms and hunt down those spreading heresy. As a result, the office of the Grand Inquisitor was one of the most powerful positions in the entire Imperium, perhaps second most powerful only to the Emperor himself, as the Grand Inquisitor was the head of the Magisterium, or official council of all doctrinal disputes, and this council had almost free reign when it came to hunting down rouges and heretics.
Hathor was fairly young when she was chosen to be the Grand Inquisitor, many believe that she was under the age of forty. Despite her youth, her natural strength in the Force was among the highest of living Sith Lords and she was one of the most enthusiastic and conservative supporters of Sith dogmas and teachings. This is a bit unusual, considering that many of the previous inquisitors were known to use their office simply to advance their own political or monetary wellbeing. However, Hathor was ruthless and determined to set the Imperium back on the right track by preserving passed down teachings and removing those that were tacked on in the past millennia that were weakening the Sith.
It all started when Hathor made a shocking discovery. She was a bookworm who prefered to spend much of her time reading Sith history and philosophy, and one day she discovered a flaw that ran to the heart of the current Sith teachings. The actual doctrinal dispute is far too complex to go into here, but the essence was that she believed that most of the Sith teachings did not stem from the Sith at all, but were borrowed from their contact with the Killiks, Rakata, and Anzati. The reason for this is because many of the Sith teachings that founded the Order stemmed from immediately after the Killik-Sith War. Because Sith were joiners, it is likely that they passed on teachings that were originally Rakatan. Similarly, while Adas killed a most of the other dark-skinned Sith infiltrators, many of them were previously teachers who spread Rakatan influence into the heart of Sith culture; these teachings Adas was unable to catch. In the case of the Anzati, because the Anzati crash landed on Ziost, their teachings took root in the heart of the Imperium. In all, Hathor faced the revelation that not only were the sacred texts corrupted with Rakatan influence, but the teachings that founded the Imperium were as well.
The Sith teachings were built into the heart of the Imperium, and based upon Sith lore and mythology, the Sith justified their conquest and slaughter of 'lesser species' by pointing to what the, now mythological, Rakata and Killik had done to them. The revelation that most of what it meant to be a Sith was stolen from the species that they hated with a passion would, if exposed, tear the Imperium apart. When Hathor discovered this, she at first told only her most trusted acquaintances. She came to believe that all the problems the Imperium was facing ultimately stemmed from these flawed teachings. She and her followers began to redact and purge many of the Sith teachings. However, when the rest of the Magisterium found out, they were not happy. They demanded to know why she was tampering with the archives. She presented her case to them. Many were shocked, but some seem to have suspected for a while but just didn't care. The Magisterium was divided. Many wanted a full scale reformation. Others wanted to keep a lid on the discovery since if it ever broke out, it could tear their civilization apart. Still others did not care, as they thought that because the Sith teachings were so old and central it really did not matter where they came from.
After weeks of conflict, Hathor decided to call a council. He wanted to go forward with her plans for a full-scale reform, no matter the costs. However, many Sith did not agree with her. She had not yet told the Emperor what was happening as she wanted to keep the affair under the jurisdiction of the Magisterium. However, her opponents decided to get him involved. They went to the Emperor and told him what had happened. Now, it does not appear that the Emperor really understood what was happening. He seemed to think that Hathor herself was injecting Rakatan and Anzati teachings into the sacred texts. Perhaps her opponents told the Emperor the opposite just to get him riled up. It worked anyway, and he demanded that she be burned at the stake as a heretic. However, when he found out that the Council was already underway, he assumed that they were all in a conspiracy to ruin the Sith.
This anecdote should give the reader an idea of the sorry state the Imperium was in at the time. The emperors were not too intelligent nor forward thinking. They were mainly concerned with securing their own power and having massive parties/orgies. As a result, the emperors would be quick to lash out and call massive purges against any and all political opponents. This is made even worse by the fact that the emperor was changed on average every three years. A few times, there were even as many as three emperors alive at the time. This Emperor was no exception. When he heard of the council, he immediately called in the military to blow it up. It worked, and thousands of Sith priests died, but the Emperor did not care to be thorough as he assumed that things would just go back to normal.
Hathor and several of her followers survived. Luckily for her, she had many allies among the rich and powerful senators. They sheltered her and she was able to reform the Magisterium. She declared the Emperor to be a heretic and was able to assassinate him herself. In response, the late Emperor's supporters ordered a purge of all Sith priests and their friends in the senate. This created a power vacuum causing the already tense and decaying Imperium to collapse. A series of civil wars ensued for almost a century. Hathor and her followers retreated to the outer planet Tund from which their faction used as a base of operations. Eventually, several of the other factions were able to travel to Tund and bomb it to oblivion.
During this, Hathor died, but her memory lived on. Many remembered her as a martyr, while others remembered her as a vile heretic who single-handedly caused the Imperium to collapse. The civil wars raged as each side created their own variations on the Sith dogmas and tried to impose these on everyone from either Ziost or Korriban, which became the main capitals of either faction.
Eventually all factions of the original wars fell apart into their own nation states. After decades of throwing bodies at each other, nobody had strength to hope to rule all of Sith space. However, personal vendettas and grudges could not die even as each faction split into several. Each faction then launched a series of crusades against their rivals. After almost a century of civil wars, the Sith Crusades lasted almost two. Eventually, after over 250 years of fighting, many of the warring planets began to experience the effects of a nuclear winter. Seeing that their planets were dying, the Sith did the only thing a reasonable Sith could do- launch one more campaign of absolute annihilation to inflict the curse on everyone else. As a result, almost every Sith world experienced a nuclear holocaust.
The only worlds that were able to escape the apocalypse were those small and insignificant outer farm worlds. As a result, things went back to the way they were before the Imperium. The farm worlds continued to do their thing, while every other world became like how Korriban originally was. Even to this day, these planets have a much higher level of background radiation in comparison to other planets, although the fallout has long since decayed to the point where it it harmless. As a result, by around 12,700 BBY, the Sith entered another period of dormancy, this one lasting for almost six thousand years.