First Dynasty

Basic Details

Who was the founder? Darius Moor AKA Moor
Founding Date: 1997
End Date: 1999

History

Rise

The Force Academy was originally founded as a Star Wars fan forum by "Forcemaster" - a web developer and Star Wars fan. Context is important here - During the dot com bubble, a site with enough views could be worth millions to advertisers, and that was how the Force Academy started - as a way to capitalize on Star Wars to attract enough views to be valuable.

To get more viewers, the site needed content - so in an attempt to produce more content for the site, Forcemaster got in touch with the person most active on the site - Moor.

Moor explained to Force Master that the people using the site weren't interested in just talking about Star Wars - they were talking about how they could actually live as Jedi in the real world. Force Master was initially disappointed, but they spoke more and came up with a new site structure.

Moor suggests they use that desire and create philosophical and quasi-religious content. After all, Lucas was inspired by multiple different religions when writing Star Wars - Star Wars was in a lot of ways the sum of all religions. Moor suggests playing off the light vs dark theme that was already emerging by creating three councils; The Light, The Dark, and The Inner (basically administrators). Forcemaster is put in charge of the Inner Council, so that he has an excuse about why he doesn't post content. The Shadow Council is then later created. The Light and Dark council would be in charge of developing their own material in a similar way to how covens work; Apprentices would learn the material, witches who would write the material, and the Coven Lord would rule, conducting ceremonies, governing their needs, and testing apprentices. The hope was the material would attract more eyeballs, and more eyeballs would create more ad revenue - although this never panned out, and the site became more than its original intention.

Moor used the teachings he had developed at the Black Coven, and edited them to be Sith-centric.

Beliefs and Structure

Moor, for his part, took a very spiritual route when he founded the Dark Aspect. When he joined the Force Academy as a way to better his English, he was already an accomplished Witch in a coven.

As a witch, when he saw people talking about the "Force", he realized they were talking about very real concepts; Zen, Buddhism, Witchcraft - but using Star Wars terminology to describe it. Moor saw this as a route for teaching a new generation about witchcraft, and as a tool for recruitment to his coven.

The First Dynasty gave structure to the Sith; providing ranks, lectures, teachers, and a place for people to become Sith. He built a "legitimate" mythology in the real world that allowed the path to feel like it had a history (which it did, in witchcraft).

His followers were split into "awakened" and "unawakened" secretly - The Dark Council only trained those they viewed as awakened, often in secret, allowing the rest of its members to exist unaware. Over time, this caused a lot of resentment from the "unawakened" who weren't being taught anything. This led to Moor eventually assigning his apprentice, Satelle to lead the unawakened to help placate this group.

Fall

Throughout his term, Moor had been secretly recruiting members for his coven. Although the Inner Council knew about this (there was even a secret forum for his coven within the Force Academy), it wasn't talked about openly. Moor aims to leave the Force Academy to focus on his coven duties, and tries to name a successor - this fails.

Satelle used the growing resentment of those who were being refused training and called for Moor to be removed from his position based on his lying to students about his motives.

Moor exiled himself to focus on growing his coven, occasionally still recruiting from the Force Academy, and Satelle became the next Head of the Dark Aspect.

Satelle would later write:

First, I asked for Moor to be removed from his position because he was using the FA as a bait and switch space to recruit for his black witchcraft coven. While I don't have anything particularly against the practice of witchcraft, it was very misleading, bordering on lying to students. Andy and I felt it was not acceptable, and Andy removed him. Incidentally, Moor and I remained friends, and I have great respect for him.

Kronos’ Musings: Whatever his faults, nobody can deny that Moor was the true beginning of this path. It's hard to create something from nothing. But Moor did.

By adapting the material he learned as a Witch, Moor gave our new path a rich history and framework - what would have taken years of development, was done within a few months.

Regardless, of its usefulness now - having so much material available so quickly allowed us to have something to latch on to, to change, agree and disagree with.

It gave us a starting point to grow from.

Lectures from the First Dynasty:

Lectures

Forum Discussions

Practical