Warning: contains spoilers for Star Wars #35!In Star Wars, the core of a lightsaber is its Kyber Crystal, and a new comic has revealed just how absurdly ancient these crystals really are. This revelation puts the Jedi and Sith’s rituals surrounding the crystals into a new context and makes the eventual destruction of most sources of Crystals that much worse.
Star Wars #35 by Charles Soule, Madibek Musabekov, Rachelle Rosenberg and Clayton Cowles reveals that most Kyber Crystals are actually way over one million years old. In the comic, Kyber expert Dr Cuata gives Luke Skywalker a ‘raw’ uncolored Kyber Crystal to potentially replace Luke’s broken yellow 'saber, stating that the newer Crystal is young at only a million or so years old.
This reveal makes Kyber Crystals older than the Jedi Order themselves. This makes sense considering the Crystals are typically mined from a planet or moon, all of which are of course ancient themselves.
Kyber Crystals Are Older Than the Jedi & Sith
For artifacts so commonly used in lightsabers by Jedi and Sith alike, the exact nature of Kyber Crystals is still somewhat mysterious. All Kyber Crystals are deeply connected to the Force and are implied to have some level of sentience themselves. Through meditation, a lightsaber wielder attunes to their saber’s Crystal via the Force, giving the Crystal its color and making the lightsaber closer to an extension of the wielder’s own will than just a simple weapon. The process of choosing, and of being chosen by, a Crystal is a key part of a Jedi apprentice’s coming of age known as ‘the Gathering’, which comes directly before they create their lightsaber. Similarly, the Sith practise ‘Bleeding,' in which they use the Dark Side to turn a Kyber Crystal red, or ‘bleed’ it. For everything known about the technical side of making a lightsaber, there's still an element of deep spirituality that helps to set the weapons apart.
The age of Kyber Crystals recontextualizes the reverence the Jedi show toward both them and lightsabers. Crystal-filled planets or moons such as Ilum and Jedha are sacred to the Jedi, with Ilum being the site of the aforementioned Gathering. Ilum’s location in the Outer Rim is a closely guarded secret, and as Ahsoka Tako says in season 6, episode 5 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars ‘The Gathering’, "There is no place more sacred to the Jedi." It's also worth noting how wrong fans are to see Kyber Crystals as a mere ingredient in lightsabers - in the existence of the crystals, that use is an incredibly new and fractional aspect of their existence.
The revelation of how old Kyber Crystals are makes the Empire’s exploitation of these Kyber-rich planets all the worse. After the Jedi order’s destruction Jedha was mined to help create the original Death Star, while Ilum was first invaded by the Empire as seen in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and eventually converted into the planet-destroying Starkiller Base by the Empire’s successors in the First Order. While this was always an act of vast environmental and cultural destruction, it’s only made worse now that readers know just how much history was truly lost. Not only are they destroying some of Star Wars most important locations for the Jedi and their lightsabers, but they’re wiping out a whole history stretching back further than fans ever imagined.
