SOLVING the DC Universe's BIGGEST SECRET!

Hi, I'm Tyler, this is the imaginary axis and names have power, or so they say, according to various human traditions, religions, folklore, mysticism, knowing someone's true name can be used to exert a kind of control over them, by pronouncing naming someone's name or using it during a ritual or spell makes the named person vulnerable. This idea is present in dozens of cultures that, as far as we know, have never spoken to each other, and it may sound ridiculous at first until you consider how some of you might react if someone said your real name. In the comments section the names are personal, they identify us and even in the realities of comics like the DC

universe

, some of the most powerful characters use false names to protect themselves.

It's fine for the reader to know that Batman is Bruce Wayne, but a villain could really use it. that information to ruin his life batman has his enemies at a disadvantage and you have him at a disadvantage but that is normal the readers are the highest authority in that relationship the true anomalies are those rare creatures that cannot even be named by the audience those glitches in existence that only seem to comply with their own rules and of all the glitches identified here in the imaginary axis the one that has always fascinated me the most is the strange ghost because if you look carefully this nameless entity is a piece of the DC

universe

that never seems to completely fit his past is constantly inundated with contradictory information even during regular flashbacks there are supposed to be objective accounts of important events he is incredibly powerful but often prefers not to intervene in serious situations multiple cosmic entities have admitted that they don't even really know what he is doing happens and the type of magic he uses is beyond all classification, the stranger even moves in ways that make no sense, reaches places he shouldn't know with information that no one has and occasionally carries a skewed sense of time, it is also one of the only characters with such a fine grasp of reality that he seems to know each of DC's infamous multiverse reboots as they happen, if not before, and unlike everyone else, he retains memories of what was like. the world.

As before, things have changed, so with a resume like that, one would expect our mysterious cloaked figure to be at the top of the Justice League watch list, sitting alongside big names like Lex Luthor Sinestro Brainiac or even Darkseid, but the most impressive thing about him. In reality, it's how low a profile he's managed to keep over the years. Most people don't really question strange ghost heroes or villains or gods, not necessarily because they're afraid of them or anything, but because this exists. natural darkness about him that allows him to go unnoticed even among the DC magical community where his existence is a fairly established fact, it's hard to find anyone who actually knows who he is, I bet some of you viewers don't even recognize him or if you do, you probably didn't pay much attention the last time you crossed paths.

Did you fall for their lies? It just eats one of those backstories or explanations he gave that seemed so definitive when he showed up somewhere he shouldn't be or know something. he shouldn't know as he stands silently in the background shifting the scales of power slightly towards an unclear goal by playing the heroes and villains as pawns. This guy has been given a total of five conflicting origin stories over the years to explain. their amazing abilities when pressed by prying eyes, the first four were revealed at the same time in the same book, which means that none of them are retcons or reboots of each other, they are just four contradictory stories, each of which claims to describe where did this person come from and what. what he can do and what his motivations are.

The fifth origin arrived decades later, after a major shakeup in the DC multiverse, so many people initially assumed that this new explanation was supposed to override the previous ones, but there were some details that never quite added up as time went on. , those details became more and more prominent until references to the other four stories started cropping up in canon again and it became clear that this fifth origin might not be any more reliable than the other four, so what we're left with is is an unknown entity containing untold power who seems to act like a hero most of the time, but also clearly has his own agenda.

No one can agree on where he came from, but we know he's been around for a long time since we first sighted him. Dating back to the French Revolution, the fall of King Arthur, and even the days of Moses, he is a being so out of sync with reality that even in a world filled with alien gods, alien gods, and telepathic gorillas, the strange ghost remains. considered unnatural, these five origins are the closest thing we have to a solid explanation for anything, so as it is one of my duties here, I decided to take a closer look at each of them and see if I could unravel one of the oldest mysteries in the DC multiverse. with these stories and there are nuances to each of them, but for the sake of time, I will mainly highlight the parts that are important to understanding the stranger's true identity.

You can keep track of these icons that I place on the screen as we go. from one legend to another, so buckle up because this first one takes us to a familiar place. The oldest explanation ever given for the strange ghost suggests that he was originally a mortal man born around the time of Christ and who tortured Jesus himself immediately before the crucifixion to satisfy a personal grudge over the death of his family at the hands of Jesus. men who sought to kill the messiah jesus responded to this malice by cursing the stranger to wander the earth until armageddon and his powers come from thousands of years of practicing magic in an attempt to break that curse, the second story maintains that the stranger actually He was born long before Jesus and lived in one of the first settlements of humanity at the beginning of civilization, apparently his city fell into so much chaos and evil that the forces of heaven threatened to erase it completely, but the stranger persuaded them not to even going so far as to commit suicide when they offered to spare his life only as the only righteous person in the city.

His immortality is a punishment for rejecting the angel's offer of salvation and he wanders the earth in an endless search. to extinguish the sin that spread to the rest of the world from his city as the point of origin, another interpretation claims that the stranger is not supernatural at all, but is actually a time traveler caught in a loop of causality; He was born far, far in the future when the universe was about to run out of usable energy and participated in a project that sought to solve this problem by extracting more energy from the big bang at the beginning of time, unfortunately the plans were sabotaged by a man who He claimed that doing this could cause the universe to never form properly in the first place and retroactively erase everything from existence during the ensuing fight, the stranger discovered that this is what the lead scientist was trying to do, he was a terrorist seeking to erase entire timeline and the only way The Stranger was able to stop it was by jumping back in time to the Big Bang and blocking the siphon with his own body while floating in space at the beginning of the universe.

The stranger realized that the man who warned him about this was actually a future version of being trapped between the siphon and the big bang had altered his biology and was destined to live out the entire life of the universe, sending his older self young man back in time and do it all over again. Another more fantastic legend tells us that the strange ghost is actually an angel created by god who existed before the dawn of time, etc. Supposedly during Lucifer's cosmic rebellion, the stranger could not decide whether to ally himself with the forces of heaven or the forces of hell and, as a result, he is rejected by both sides, accepted by neither. earth ashamed with no identity and no home simply because there is nowhere else to go and finally our last story claims that the unsung hero we have been following is actually the greatest sinner of all time judas iscariot, the biblical figure who studied under Jesus for several years only to finally sell it to the Roman government, which directly resulted in the crucifixion.

He attempted suicide after realizing what he had done, but higher forces intervened and decided that a simple death would not be enough. The 30 pieces. of silver he was paid for betraying Christ was tied around his neck and ordered to wander the earth until he committed enough good deeds to redeem himself for killing the son of god, that's a lot to take in, but it's also quite a range. Wide range of possibilities these stories offer - everything from Jesus to Judas to time travel - so you might be wondering why they're worth considering in the first place.

I mean, can we even hope to get anything useful out of such a random group of rumors and legends? The answer is probably seeing that getting to the bottom of a mess like this would normally involve reviewing what we know about the Stranger today and comparing his verified real-world characteristics to these unreliable origin stories, but that's easier said than done, for example, the first. What most observers will notice about the strange ghost when he enters the scene is actually something I haven't had a chance to demonstrate yet. His intelligence. This guy is easily one of the smartest beings I've ever studied or at least one of the smartest. more knowledgeable, he knows so many things that some people think he knows literally everything, sometimes he seems omniscient, the strange ghost knows things that no one should know,

secret

things, personal things, the gods do not believe in the mysteries of existence, but no knows everything. almost close to that, one of the wisest people in the multiverse, whether asking about

secret

identities, weaknesses, science, magic, history, destiny, there was a time when Marvel's Avengers crossed over to DC to help the League of justice to stop a threat to trans reality and yet the stranger seemed to already know who they were and where they came from without having to tell us at first.

It may seem smart to take this information and use it to reverse engineer the stranger's true identity. His intelligence is one of the clearest things about him, but we know. In reality, we are not given any origin stories that are completely incompatible with these heavenly levels of knowledge. Obviously, it would make sense for an angel to seem all-knowing or a time traveler who has already seen the entire universe unfold once, but even in its most human form. In the origins, it's always implied or outright stated that the stranger has been studying high level magic for at least a few thousand years, that kind of serious dedication to such a powerful art could easily allow a guy to at least appear omniscient to almost every other living person.

All attempts to read the stranger's mind have proven impossible. We also ran into similar problems when trying to deduce his identity by looking at superpowers according to DC's official occult classification system. The strange ghost is considered an arcane wizard, one of the most immensely powerful sorcerers known in the universe. For playing with magic that should be far beyond the reach of mortal hands, this category is typically used to describe a select few magicians who have spent so much time studying with some of the most powerful mystical artifacts in existence that they have transcended them and they have become. they enchanted themselves, but it can also refer to higher magical beings who have fallen to our plane of creation from beyond reality;

In other words, there really isn't much the Stranger can't do, not even the combined forces of the Eclipso Specter and Dr. We don't break it down into time, space, and the structure of the multiverse bends backwards for him, he doesn't even operate by the same physical laws as anything else, so we're not going to figure this guy out by categorizing what magical abilities he has and no. I haven't once created metaphysical weapons that can hurt people on a philosophical level or counter the most powerful magic in existence with one hand. I think it's safe to say your boundaries are pretty fuzzy, but that's okay because I dug deep to find this.

Once it became obvious that I would need some fine details to solve this mystery, I reviewed all the evidence and I mean it, I read every strange ghost apparition I could get my hands on and in the end I came out okay. Back to where I started, Secret Origins #10 was the comic that featured the first four conflicting stories of our cryptic character. If thecover looks familiar to you, then you are not alone. I had the same thought and a little research led me to this famous one. m.c escher's wood engraving is called another world and the origin of the strange ghost takes more than a few design cues, but why talk about his own work?

Escher said this: man creates a superficial image, but if he does not give it depth, let him To make his representation at least as complete as possible, let him try to make an image more or less similar to the scene of a bird whose eyes look almost all the space around him at the same time he sees at a glance in front of him. both sides up and down let him try to get closer to that bird's eye view because where he is is determined not only by what he sees right in front of him but also by the ceiling above his head and the ground under his feet in other words.

The original artwork was designed as a challenge to encourage Escher fans to consider their entire surroundings as one rather than fixating on a single perspective and it was then that my friends assured me of my answer to the origin of the strange ghost. He is not just one. of these things he is all and one. The abstract cover of the comic is not our only evidence. Another clue came years later, during the DC Universe's Blackest Night event, when the dead rose from their graves thanks to a coordinated effort by the Black Lantern Corps at one point during the invasion of one of the Lantern zombies.

They tried to enter the strange ghost using their ghostly possession abilities and this is what he saw immediately before being forced to retreat by the enormous amounts of psychic feedback, not one, not two, but three of the conflicting backstories, all in a single thought. If this doesn't make any sense if only one origin is true and the rest is just made up, we are literally inside the strange ghost right now, he even lectures the black lantern about this after he is thrown away, telling the zombie that he has seen everything and Nothing, yes, that's how I describe having witnessed three incompatible events with my own eyes, so at least we have a basis for this idea that each origin could have some truth, but the obvious problem is that they all become They contradict each other quite a bit.

Add, I mean there is no room for the stranger to have originally been an angel, for example, and then settled on earth only to be cursed with immortality by another angel. These stories stand on their own and all offer a different beginning. and they're all really looking to explain the same thing, the strange properties of the stranger, how events like the origin of Judas and the origin of the vengeful family man would fit together. They both take place in the same time period if history is set in stone then. It is absolutely impossible for even two of these origins to be true at the same time, but what if it isn't?

What if the stranger's past has changed? What if it changes constantly? And no, I'm not talking about reboots, retcons or alterations of the timeline believe it or not, the strange ghost is usually immune to that kind of thing, he is a constant, sees everything, remembers everything, one of the characters responsible for rebooting the multiverse in the first place is even tied to his fifth origin story, so we know them. The moments were not caused by the reset, they are before it, whatever it was before each of these great cosmic events, afterwards it was the same, but what if I told you that there are deeper forces beyond of the typical multiverse that changes comic reality?

The force of the sci-fi fanfare is fully capable of setting the stranger's entire story in motion, and not only that, but his presence is practically woven into every corner of the stranger's identity. I'm talking about the ancient magical tradition known as Hermeticism and if you've never heard of it before, don't worry, it was simply operating under a different name. Hermeticism is essentially a fundamental set of fundamental beliefs and practices that act as a basis or at least a major contributor to much of Western philosophy and mysticism. Today if you know what you're looking for you can find it practically everywhere but wow, its traces are all over the magical side of the DC universe don't worry, we'll get to that later the important thing for now is that you can consider hermeticism as the basis of many of the magical themes you have probably seen arise throughout your life and one of its guiding principles is the idea that the reality we live in and experience at its core is a product of the mind.

It's like this when you break down the physical world, everything that exists is just a collection of matter and energy at a basic level. This card I'm holding in my hand is just a group of specific atoms arranged in a specific pattern, light bounces off those atoms. hits your eyes and your brain paints a picture of the card based on the pattern it detects, that's how you perceive everything your brain gives you, shapes, symbols and mental representations of the world outside your body and those are the things with which that you interact as a result. Hermeticism holds that none of us actually experience the outside world directly.

We humans live completely within the consensus universe that we paint in our minds if everyone simultaneously changed their perspective and decided that these light patterns and nerve impulses should be interpreted as a lamp then for all practical purposes the card no longer exists it is a lamp now this is the basis of all magic the universe is mental and if everyone stops seeing it one way only to see it another way then they effectively change the universe this is beautifully illustrated by the story of sandman a dream of a thousand cats in which one of the DC's Most Powerful Entities Dream tells of a version of the world where cats are the dominant species and humans are small, defenseless creatures that serve as food and play for their pets, a day when the human race becomes aware of the power behind the mentality. and they are capable of remaking the world into one in which they are the dominant life forms simply by imagining it on a large enough scale.

They dreamed the world so that it would always be as it is now. There was never a world of cat ladies and lords, they changed the universe from the beginning of all things to the end of time. This is the same reality. The strange ghost lives in a reality governed by perception and, as one of DC's main magic users, his story is absolutely steeped in the concept. An even more relevant example for our purposes can be found in the 2018 dark Justice League series, when a magical hero named Dr. Destiny explains the true origin behind the Lords of Order, a group of often higher entities. treated like gods. responsible for ruling the multiverse what we have told mortals throughout time we are gods from another world angels of justice we knew the power of stories we knew we could forge a foothold in the realm of the gods if that belief was powerful enough but we are Not gods, I had the opportunity to speak with the writer of this comic, James Tynan, in June and asked him if this involved what I thought was specifically mentioning the dream of a thousand cats as an example and his The answer was a resounding yes.

That's exactly what I was referring to. The Lords of Order were originally very powerful magicians, but they told people that they were gods who had existed for billions of years. Once enough people believed that story, it became true, they created a multiverse where they really are divine, so let's go. apply those same principles to our stranger a man who has done everything possible to hide his identity for eons a magician with no history by intention that is my proposal people who ashamed of his past the stranger intentionally abandoned his original name and put humanity in the perfect position to give him a new one with no context to extract from his observers he reinterpreted his existence over and over and over and over and that belief made those stories come true the amulet of origins the key that opens the door to god in which this has been amulet my possession for longer than even u7 could imagine it was a gift entrusted to me when I traveled through another world that existed long before this one in this scene the strange ghost is unambiguously judas that's why he is dressed the way he It is, it is explained at the beginning of the comic of the seven people he is talking to four possibly five are ancient primordial entities older than the earth itself let alone Israel Judas or the Roman government and that amulet he claims to have had for the longest time He has been seen wearing the exact same amulet in every incarnation of his character, regardless of the backstory implied at the time he has been all of them and remembers it, but who was he? at first?

That's the point where he doesn't want anyone to know his original identity is so taboo that he'd rather be Judas if he had the chance, but deep within the earth, locked in one of the seven eternal layers of hell, lies a soul that has been trapped for centuries. Rumor has it that he knew the stranger and that they were there. a little more than friends near the beginning of her journey her name is na'ama she is the mother of a powerful demon and her crime was daring to love an angel when she was very young eons ago in the grand scheme of things just moments later from the beginning of time itself I was charged to exist as I do my own indecisions brought this yoke upon my being and I alone must bear the burden of its verdict postpone it as long as you want but all journeys eventually end even yours so when you are old and gray and nodding by the fire just remember that I will be waiting for you according to Jewish tradition na'ama was the great-granddaughter of kane and seduced the angel shamdan with her beauty to give birth to asmodius, a powerful demon prince could shyamadan have been an angel neutral unable to decide in the war between heaven and hell so distraught by what he had done that he was willing to reject his name entirely imagine seeing someone like that and not knowing who they were so you tell yourself stories about the wandering family man cursed by jesus judas iscariot is still alive and working toward redemption the tragedy of sodom and gomorrah why that town was saved even the story about the time traveler has aspects borrowed from an old legend told among the green lantern corps reality It's confusing and confusing maybe even impossible to observe directly, but stories give it a kind of shape and some people would tell you that's magical.

The strange ghost wants to be what you think he is because despite his past, he really is trying his best to do the right thing. hero a seeker of balance a multiversal guardian genuinely more concerned about your well-being than his own but he is also imperfect like you and me at some point he made a mistake and wants to leave it behind maybe we owe him that chance after all if you know who is anyone today? What's in the name? Anyway, is he even a stranger? Man, talk about a trip, but listen to it personally. I really appreciate that you watched to the end.

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