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The World of The Dark Crystal
“I wanted to create the world first. I wanted to start with a visual world of what these characters looked like and what the whole place was, plants, trees, rocks, all of that, and then have the story grow.” -Jim Henson
Out of time and place the world of THE DARK CRYSTAL is beautiful and strange with a secret, sometimes frightening ambience. It is a world of fantasy and imagination where the forest and swamp breed danger and mystery. Creatures strange beyond experience hop, crawl, and skitter, singing sweetly or shrieking in unknown languages. Here everything is alive. Plant and tree have the gift of speech, water murmurs the music of forgotten days, and the possible replaces the impossible as mountain and rock become moving beings. The very air is alive with the scent and magic of ancient mysteries. And dominating all is the mystery and the power of THE DARK CRYSTAL.
Rotating around the large planet of Thra is a small, dark moon. Nobody really knows if it's there because it doesn't reflect light. Aughra believes that the gravitational pull of the moon may have something to do with changes that occur on the planet during the conjunctions.
It has been proposed that Thra's overall shape must, in fact, be triangular in accordance with the dominant patterns of thought. There seems to be some room for doubt here; what is known of the climate is not consistent with the presence of glaciated regions, which would surely be formed toward the apexes of the triangle. And at the apexes, if the world is rotating as is generally supposed, centrifugal force would be great and gravitational force small, leading to an inexorable tendency for the apexes and the ice on them to fly off. It is not certain that the world does rotate.
Day and night are far from the opposites they appear to us; nor is there a regular alternation of summer and winter.
THREE, the trine number, and NINE, which is three times three, are of great importance in a world with three suns. What to us can seem simple opposites--odd and even, light and dark, good and evil--are not so in a world where opposites cannot exist without resolution in the third side of the triangle.
Triangular symbols permeate all the art and life of the world of the Dark Crystal: Aughrian, urRu, Skeksis, or Gelfling. Among their more usual connotations are the four universal elements of water, earth, air, and fire--denoted by additional lines on the triangles--and the opposed principles of sulphur and mercury, which between them compose all metals. These sometimes occur equally combined in the hexagon.
In a pattern uniquely emphasized in the Dark Crystal world, they may also be combined in the conjunction-portal symbol of the three solid triangles enclosing an empty third. Some suppose that this symbol contains a reference to the fifth element of the higher alchemy, the void; but if this concept is present it is well concealed, as indeed it should be.
It is dynamically more likely that the world traces out a complex path between and around the various suns, and that Aughra's Observatory (quasi-Ptolemaic system) is erroneous.
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This is an unofficial DARK CRYSTAL website. THE DARK CRYSTAL, characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of The Jim Henson Company. © 2001. Artwork by Brian Froud. Visit the official website at www.henson.com.