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theatrical_muse] 323 - Right and Wrong
Feb. 26th, 2010 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prodigalwatcher323 - Right and Wrong
It was a pattern I began noticing while still at the Watchers Academy, an observation that has more than been borne out by my experiences since coming to the States and the years that have followed. While doing research, as I was almost continually doing research in those days, I began to observe a certain similarity amongst the known effects of certain artifacts of demonic or otherwise supernatural origin.
Take, for instance, the Shroud of Rahmon. This particular artifact had a lurid, if rather typical, sort of background for a demonic object: a cloth dyed in the blood of seven virgin women, laid upon the corpse of an especially nasty demon, intended to prevent said demon's resurrection. Unfortunately, the shroud absorbed the demon's power to drive humans quite insane. Angel, Gunn, Cordelia and I were fated to learn firsthand how potent that power was. Unfortunately, a museum security guard paid the ultimate price for that madness, and very nearly so did Detective Kate Lockley.
Even a demon's very physical being can affect our much more fragile and vulnerable mortal bodies. The part-demonic individual known as the late Billy Blim, for instance, could (in a most ironic use of the word) engender in any male the most powerful, furious and murderously misogynistic emotions possible. A man under Billy's influence could become very much a monster, despising any female in his path and posing a very real and present danger to them. This ability was carried down into Billy's DNA, rendering not only the touch of his skin but any part of him to simple blood or sweat able to carry the influence.
Two years or so before that, Angel and Kate ran afoul of another magically empowered object, this time one not of specifically demonic extraction, but created by a human using powerful magic. A worshipper of a number of demons, this man, Allen if he gave his actual name, decided to wreak havoc with an entire police station by imbuing a symbolic object-- a talking stick, a common tool in many cultures and types of therapy-- with the power to unleash and amplify normal human emotional sensitivity. Even Angel was affected, eventually.
One cannot help but wonder why so often, the effects of these artifacts is not to directly cause pain, suffering or death, but to change human behaviour. They make us angry or despondent, drive us into insanity or rage or despair. They can reduce us into creatures of the most base instincts or paralyse us with imagined insecurities. They take away our very concept of right and wrong, or twist it until unrecognisable. But why, one wonders, do these objects not simply destroy us?
Demons, it is known, occupied this dimension long before the development of mortal life. The evolution and eventual ascendancy of mortal beings has long been a source of outrage and resentment for much of the remaining demonic presence in this reality, especially in regards to the human race. A great deal of them hate us simply for existing.
One wonders if these artifacts and their bizarre but thoroughly cruel influences are meant as a bit of revenge.
(522)
It was a pattern I began noticing while still at the Watchers Academy, an observation that has more than been borne out by my experiences since coming to the States and the years that have followed. While doing research, as I was almost continually doing research in those days, I began to observe a certain similarity amongst the known effects of certain artifacts of demonic or otherwise supernatural origin.
Take, for instance, the Shroud of Rahmon. This particular artifact had a lurid, if rather typical, sort of background for a demonic object: a cloth dyed in the blood of seven virgin women, laid upon the corpse of an especially nasty demon, intended to prevent said demon's resurrection. Unfortunately, the shroud absorbed the demon's power to drive humans quite insane. Angel, Gunn, Cordelia and I were fated to learn firsthand how potent that power was. Unfortunately, a museum security guard paid the ultimate price for that madness, and very nearly so did Detective Kate Lockley.
Even a demon's very physical being can affect our much more fragile and vulnerable mortal bodies. The part-demonic individual known as the late Billy Blim, for instance, could (in a most ironic use of the word) engender in any male the most powerful, furious and murderously misogynistic emotions possible. A man under Billy's influence could become very much a monster, despising any female in his path and posing a very real and present danger to them. This ability was carried down into Billy's DNA, rendering not only the touch of his skin but any part of him to simple blood or sweat able to carry the influence.
Two years or so before that, Angel and Kate ran afoul of another magically empowered object, this time one not of specifically demonic extraction, but created by a human using powerful magic. A worshipper of a number of demons, this man, Allen if he gave his actual name, decided to wreak havoc with an entire police station by imbuing a symbolic object-- a talking stick, a common tool in many cultures and types of therapy-- with the power to unleash and amplify normal human emotional sensitivity. Even Angel was affected, eventually.
One cannot help but wonder why so often, the effects of these artifacts is not to directly cause pain, suffering or death, but to change human behaviour. They make us angry or despondent, drive us into insanity or rage or despair. They can reduce us into creatures of the most base instincts or paralyse us with imagined insecurities. They take away our very concept of right and wrong, or twist it until unrecognisable. But why, one wonders, do these objects not simply destroy us?
Demons, it is known, occupied this dimension long before the development of mortal life. The evolution and eventual ascendancy of mortal beings has long been a source of outrage and resentment for much of the remaining demonic presence in this reality, especially in regards to the human race. A great deal of them hate us simply for existing.
One wonders if these artifacts and their bizarre but thoroughly cruel influences are meant as a bit of revenge.
(522)
