Shrine in the Depths

The Sith constructed the shrine on the planet Coruscant no later than close to five millennia before 14 BBY, during a period in which the Sith dominated the galaxy on top of the mountain peak of the sacred spire, a powerful light side vergence, hoping to corrupt it with the dark side of the Force, which eventually succeeded. The enormous black edifice stood against the Coruscant sky as a symbol of Sith dominance until it was razed by the Jedi at the end of a great war. Following the Sith Order's defeat, the Jedi built their own shrine over the Sith shrine's foundations.

Eventually the Four Masters erected the Jedi Grand Temple in a symbolic attempt to bury the legacy that the Sith had left behind on the galactic capital. Over the following centuries, the Jedi Temple slowly took form. The ruined foundations of the Sith shrine were steadily buried beneath layers of plasteel and ferrocrete as a massive, flat-topped ziggurat was built around them. The Jedi also hoped that the placement of their Temple over the shrine, and the presence of so many light-side adepts within it, would serve to neutralize and cap the dark power inherent in the shrine, and eventually return the vergence to the light side. In truth, the dark side energy from the vergence had seeped upward and outward since its entombment, infiltrating the hallways and rooms of the Jedi Temple, and weakening the Jedi Order. Unbeknownst to the Jedi, a hidden portion of the shrine endured in the foundations of the mountain, forgotten yet still active. The shrine itself was something of an oddity, as such places were known to exist only on planets that had been historically considered to be Sith worlds.

About a thousand years before the destruction of the Jedi Order at the hands of Darth Sidious and Darth Vader, the existence of the shrine became known to the Sith Lords of Darth Bane's revised Order, and remained a closely guarded secret. The Jedi normally kept the shrine covered by a meditation area, only opening the shrine to perform rituals aimed at neutralizing dark side artifacts. During the High Republic Era, a set of four statues found at an ancient Amaxine space station was brought to the Shrine to be neutralized. However, those performing the ritual discovered that the statues contained nothing to neutralize, and realized that the Jedi who had brought the statues in had misinterpreted their true purpose. Jedi Master Harli Cogra mentioned Shrine in the Depths in Chronicles of the Jedi, a document detailing the Jedi of the High Republic written in the weeks following the destruction of Starlight Beacon in 230 BBY.

Following the destruction of the Jedi Order, and the reformation of the Galactic Republic into the Galactic Empire, Darth Sidious—known publicly as Emperor Palpatine—had the Jedi Temple converted into the Imperial Palace. It was at that time that Sidious made the decision to excavate the shrine, the process of which was carried out entirely by machines under the supervision of Sidious' personal droid, 11-4D. The shrine's existence remained as much a secret as it ever had; only Sidious himself was known for certain to possess knowledge of it. Even Darth Vader, Sidious' Sith apprentice and second in command, was unaware of the shrine's existence as of 14 BBY. Sidious used the shrine as his private sanctum and spent much of his time there meditating on the nature of the dark side. Eventually, he planned on enlisting Vader's help within the shrine to probe the dark side for its most powerful secrets, hoping to gain the ability to reshape reality according to his own ideals. In 3 ABY, Sidious felt a disturbance in the Force—which he later identified as the rebel Luke Skywalker—while meditating in the shrine.

The Sith shrine was introduced in the 2014 novel Tarkin, written by James Luceno. It was first identified as the Shrine in the Depths in the 2021 novel The High Republic: Into the Dark, written by Claudia Gray.

The idea of the Jedi Temple being built over a Sith temple would have been explored in a story arc in the television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but the show was cancelled before such episodes could be produced or released. In the arc, former Jedi Padawan Ahsoka Tano would have returned to the Jedi Temple and, with several other Jedi, taken drilling machines down far beneath the Jedi Temple and discovered a Sith temple beneath it. Series director Dave Filoni and creator George Lucas decided that the Jedi Temple had been built over ruins from ancient worshipers of the Force, possibly including the Sith. The concept of the Jedi Temple being built over a wellspring of dark side energy was previously introduced in the continuity of Star Wars Legends.

In introducing the concept through Tarkin, Luceno compared the shrine and the construction of the Jedi Temple atop of it to how Hernán Cortés, the Spanish Conquistador, destroyed the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. After the destruction, Aztec temples were razed and churches were built in their place, with legends persisting that the churches had not entirely eliminated the power of the temples. In Tarkin, Luceno introduced a similar concept where he postulated that the Jedi were not able to stop the power of the shrine.

The Tarkin novel established that no sentient being except for Darth Sidious in close to five thousand years had set foot in the shrine. The High Republic: Into the Dark novel contradicted this statement. The 2023 reference book Star Wars: Timelines erroneously dates the destruction of the Shrine in the Depths on Coruscant and the construction of the Jedi Temple to c. 1032 BBY.

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