Supernatural University: Musings on the Mark of Cain

This is one of my purely speculative classes. I don’t try to predict the show’s story, as a rule: I never, ever, want to get invested in my idea of a story and thus be predisposed to reject and be disappointed by any different version – however potentially brilliant – making it to screen. But I’m definitely not immune to the tendency to speculate on the future based on the events of the past, and that’s what this is.

My immediate reaction to Dean acquiring the Mark of Cain was, quite simply, “Oh, shit.” Dean leaping impulsively while refusing even to wait to hear the details of the price was so very Dean, and so very much a recipe for disaster. Dean being worthy of the Mark was something I never questioned: it was the perfect extension of everything we’ve learned about the darkness within him, the unspeakable propensity for enjoying violence and brutality that so terrified and shamed him when he was forced to acknowledge not only the torture he’d done in Hell, but how good he’d felt doing it. The Mark is forcing him to confront that again. And when Cain, by stabbing himself, graphically demonstrated that Ruby’s knife couldn’t kill him, and required as a condition of their deal that Dean promise to return when Cain called and use the Blade on him, I said, “Oh, holy shit” – because my first thought was, did Dean, in taking the Mark, just take the first step to becoming a living demon on Earth, effectively immortal to anything but the Blade because of it? If he is, shit’s gonna get real. And Sam’s going to be hard-pressed to help him no matter how much he wants (and yes, I’m absolutely convinced he does want and will try) to save his brother.

And here’s where all those thoughts came from.

In The Beginning …

Let me start by explaining I was raised Catholic, although I no longer profess any religion. Suffice to say I studied human belief systems and myth structure a lot, and found my greatest inspiration in the work of Joseph Campbell.

Anyway, in the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, first-born Cain became a farmer and his younger brother Abel a shepherd. As the story goes, Cain one day brought some of the produce of his fields as an offering to God, while Abel similarly brought the first-born of his flock and some of their fat. God looked with favor upon Abel and his offering, but not upon Cain, and Cain got angry. When God asked why he was upset, Cain didn’t answer. Instead, he invited Abel to go with him out into the countryside, and Cain killed Abel. When God later asked where Abel was, Cain professed not to know, rhetorically asking if he was his brother’s keeper. God chastised him, saying Abel’s blood cried out to him from the ground, and God cursed Cain, sending him into exile as a fugitive and wanderer, saying the ground he tilled would never again yield crops. Cain protested the judgment was more than he could bear, saying anyone who found him would kill him. To prevent that, God said if anyone killed Cain, sevenfold vengeance would be taken on his killer, and he put a mark on Cain to prevent anyone coming across him from striking him down. Cain journeyed to the land of Nod, east of Eden, and his descendents, as represented eloquently by Lamech, grew even more violent and fierce than Cain had been.

Four little notes on this Bible story. First of all, note that the mark God placed on Cain was intended to protect him by warning off anyone who might have wanted to kill him. It wasn’t meant as a mark of shame, but as an indication that Cain was subject to God’s judgment, not to anyone else taking justice or vengeance into their own hands. Anyone killing Cain would be in a world of even worse hurt than Cain himself was, because blood would be taken for Cain’s blood shed.

Second, the Bible talks about Cain’s descendants, but it never mentions Cain’s death. That’s not particularly remarkable – most of the Yahwistic genealogy lists recite fathers to sons with no mention of what happened to the fathers after they produced their heirs – but it’s an interesting omission given the size of the role Cain played and the importance of his fate.

Third, Sunday-school teachers often explain God’s preference by saying Cain’s offering was inferior to Abel’s, that Cain selfishly held back the best of his crop, but that’s not in the text; it’s a simplification to avoid God appearing to be unfair. God preferring the younger to the elder is a theme running throughout the Bible (Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Rachel over Leah, for example), and many scholars point to it as demonstrating the freedom of God’s choice, his independence from human societal standards (where the first-born was always the primary heir), and his regard for the lowly.

Various Bible translators have also noted the text where God asks Cain why he was pissed off and unhappy is corrupted, mixing masculine and feminine forms, rendering any translation approximate at best. My favorite version comes from the Jerusalem Bible, which renders God’s speech as, “Why are you angry and downcast? If you are well disposed, ought you not to lift up your head? But if you are ill disposed, is not sin at the door like a crouching beast hungering for you, which you must master?” Okay, I’m biased; I’ve always liked that interpretation because what it says to me is that how we react to things is up to us, and Cain’s first failing was being predisposed to take offense, which opened the door and made him vulnerable to temptation and sin. As I read it, instead of being content with knowing in his own heart that his sacrifice to God had been genuine and true, Cain felt slighted and put upon by perceiving that God – for whatever reason or none at all – preferred Abel. Cain couldn’t master the hungering beast of his jealousy, and that prompted him to kill.

To my mind, that also frames an interesting look at both Sam and Dean, who – as we’ve seen in the past – have each often perceived the other as having an advantage, as being more favored whether by John, the angels, Heaven’s plan, or whatever. In Biblical brotherhood terms, from Cain and Abel to Joseph and his brothers, that envious perception of unfair favoritism – whether the favoritism itself was real or not – was always a recipe for temptation to disaster. And, by the way, I think the same applies to factions in the fandom family, so I’d encourage people to spend more time being happy with the things they like and less time picking at and fighting with each other over the things they don’t. Okay, enough preaching.

Demon Sunday School

Of course, Supernatural always puts its own distinct spin on whatever myth, legend, or story it’s using as inspiration, and this was no different.

In First Born, Cain’s version of the story was profoundly different from the Biblical one. According to Cain, Abel was talking to Lucifer, not to God, and because he couldn’t bear to see his brother corrupted into Lucifer’s pet, Cain offered his soul in Hell in exchange for his brother’s soul going to Heaven – a deal Lucifer accepted on condition that Cain be the one to kill Abel and send his soul on its way. In Cain’s story, he received the Mark from Lucifer himself, not from God. Cain didn’t identify its purpose, apart from noting that the Mark and the Blade worked together; that without the Mark, the Blade was nothing but an old bone with no power of its own.

Crowley’s tale of Cain to Dean in that episode was also fascinating. Crowley told Dean that Cain “became a demon” after killing Abel, and when Dean asked what he meant, Crowley said he became the deadliest demon to walk the face of the Earth, killing thousands.

What struck me about that whole tale was a single telling thought: neither Cain nor Crowley were specific on the timing or location of crucial events. We were told Lucifer talked to Abel and gave Cain the Mark, meaning Lucifer hadn’t yet been imprisoned in his cage in Hell; that the Mark and the Blade worked together and the Blade was useless without the Mark (although significantly to my mind, there was no similar comment about the Mark being useless without the Blade); and that Cain “became a demon” after killing Abel. And my thought was:

What if Cain became a demon without first dying and going to Hell? What if accepting the Mark and fulfilling his contract with Lucifer by killing Abel, all the while feeling justified and good about doing it (emotions that transferred into and were concentrated by the Blade), accomplished what normally took centuries of torture in Hell to achieve: the transformation of a human soul into a demon? What if Cain is walking the Earth in his original, still-living body, Mark and all, experiencing his Hell on Earth? What if Dean, in accepting the Mark, unwittingly accepted and began that same transformation?

My fertile brain went a little crazy with this one. All the demons we’ve ever known, at least as described by Ruby in Malleus Maleficarum, were once human souls broken by torture in Hell to forget their humanity and become demons. I took the “torture in Hell” part to mean they died as humans first, with their souls taking the downward road.

But I also remembered Ruby’s chat with Sam about Lilith during When The Levee Breaks:

“Demon Sunday School story. God prefers humans to angels. Lucifer gets jealous and then he gets creative. And he twists and tempts a human soul into the very first demon as a ‘screw you’ to God. It’s what got him locked up in the first place.”

That made me wonder if in Supernatural‘s cosmology, Lilith, Lucifer’s first demon, might have been made a demon while she was still alive, because until Lucifer did his thing, there wouldn’t have been any mechanism in Hell to make a demon of her, and Hell itself might not yet have existed, at least not in the hideous form we know. After all, in the show’s cosmology, God had no need for Hell until humanity fell from grace and God decided to imprison Lucifer for his rebellion. Milton’s Paradise Lost showed Lucifer and his fellows rebelling first, awakening in Hell, and then deciding to corrupt humans as their way to strike back at God. However, Supernatural reordered those events – at least according to Ruby and to Lucifer himself in The End – to have Lucifer’s rebellion be expressed through his overt demonstration that humans were corruptible and flawed. So: if Hell didn’t already exist and provide a punishment mechanism for generating demons, was the first demon made out of a still-living human soul?

And if so with the first demon, might Cain have been the second, also transformed while his soul was still in its original human body, bearing the Mark branded into it by Lucifer before Michael cast Lucifer down? And might that be the same body Cain is still in now, rendered virtually indestructible by Cain being the most powerful demon still in existence and perhaps protected by the Mark? After all, even though he referred to bestowing the Mark on Dean as “transferring” it, we saw the original Mark still on Cain’s arm when he was rolling up his sleeves preparatory to dealing with the small army of demons he’d trapped in his house. Whatever demonic power Cain possessed, I believe he still has it all.

We’ve seen that human bodies possessed by demons can’t be killed. Well, not quite; we’ve actually seen that mortal injuries to human host bodies won’t affect the demons possessing them, unless the weapon used – such as an angel blade, the Colt, or Ruby’s Kurdish knife – is something fatal to the demon. Remember Meg, who was flung out a window several stories above the street by the daeva in Shadow and then shot by the fake Colt in her “brother” demon’s hand in Salvation; the demon within her body couldn’t cure those wounds, which killed the real Meg when the demon was exorcised in Devil’s Trap, but the demon had no problem making the body work and look normal despite the damage it had taken. We’ve also seen that the more powerful the demon, the fewer the things able to kill it; like Cain, Alistair resisted Ruby’s knife, and the whole reason for the First Blade quest was the lore that only the First Blade could kill a knight of Hell.

I’m thinking that in the show’s cosmology, the “mistaken” Bible story of the Mark given by God protecting Cain from being killed might have been a twist on Cain’s true curse being that the Mark made him a demon in his own human body who couldn’t die, unless he was killed by the Blade in the hand of another bearing the Mark: someone even more doomed and damned than Cain himself. Oh, I suspect there would be a few other ways out – it’s hard to imagine that Death, who’s confident of his ability to reap God, wouldn’t be able to take any lesser being if he decided he had reason to do it directly, for example – but arranging those circumstances would not be easy.

And all of that makes me fear for Dean.

You’ll Get Used To The Feelings. Even Welcome Them.

Based on Dean’s reaction to having the Blade in his hand in Blade Runners, I’m betting the thing took him straight back to his final ten years in Hell when he lost every vestige of the nurturing compassion that defined him for most of his life and instead found sick, twisted pleasure in torturing others. We saw the toll that realizing both what he had done and how he had felt in Hell took on him throughout season four, especially in Heaven And Hell, Family Remains, and On The Head Of A Pin. He became afraid of liking the killing too much, knowing from experience what he was capable of becoming. I believe that’s never entirely gone away since, although his year in Purgatory muted the effect by putting him in circumstances where killing had a black-and-white simplicity and a justified enjoyment he hadn’t known since meeting Lenore way back in Bloodlust called into question the absolute righteousness of the monster-hunting he’d always accepted before then.

I think Crowley had it right in Mother’s Little Helper when he accused Dean of stalling in his search for Abaddon because he was afraid of how the Blade made him feel, but I also think it’s a lot deeper than that. I think we’ve been watching Dean realizing and knowingly weighing the cost of becoming what he’s always hated and already knows he can be – a demon, a true monster – and beginning to decide to accept those consequences for a whole lot of reasons: guilt, shame, the self-loathing he’s never quite lost since Hell, and the feeling (totally wrong) that he’s already lost Sam and doesn’t matter to anyone else. I’m afraid he’s concluded that accepting what he feels from the Blade as being who and what he really is will be the only way to access the full level of power he’ll need to be able to kill Abaddon. In doing that, I think in part he’s punishing himself, sentencing himself to Hell on Earth for his perceived failures. And the real Hell is, the more he lets go of who he’s always been, the closer he comes to the point where the pain will warp into seductive pleasure instead and he won’t care what he’s done or become. Judging from the way he nearly lost control while interrogating Gadreel in Meta Fiction and all the scariness he evidenced in Alex Annie Alexis Ann, from his expression in the shower and contemplation of himself in the mirror through delighting in his vampire interrogation and kills, playing possum to be able to get the upper hand even while Sam was bleeding out, and tapping demon-level physical strength to overpower a vampire in hand-to-hand combat, his acceptance of the Mark and commitment to using the Blade is already changing him.

The parallels to Sam’s season four demon blood addiction are obvious, but Dean – unlike then-addict Sam – knows a significant part of what the Blade’s endgame is likely to mean for him: he’s already gone the full-blown Hell route once, which makes facing it again so much worse. And while the stories are the same in that the brother-witness can’t stop what’s happening unless and until the brother-addict is willing to admit that he needs help, I’m afraid that this time, there might not be anything Sam could do to offset the effects of the Mark of Cain before they take their toll on Dean.

Same Circumstances … I Wouldn’t.

I need to say a few things here about Sam. First and foremost, while he is still and has every right to be majorly pissed at Dean for tricking him into unwittingly accepting possession by an angel to save his life, I do not for one moment believe Sam doesn’t love Dean or wouldn’t do everything in his power to save Dean’s life in a crisis. But he wouldn’t consider it in his power to override Dean’s own clearly expressed will in the process, and right now, that’s the key difference between them Dean can’t fathom.

I submit when Sam told Dean at the end of The Purge that he wouldn’t have done the same thing Dean did in I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here if their positions had been reversed and the circumstances were the same, what Dean heard wasn’t remotely what Sam said. Dean’s take-away from that conversation was that Sam wouldn’t do anything to save his life. Stung and hurt, Dean saw Sam’s statement, particularly coming after other things he’d said earlier, as a negation of brotherhood, a rejection of love, and a dismissal of Dean having any importance to Sam at all – and none of that is true.

Despite Sam’s profession that he wanted to keep things strictly business between them, his love and concern for Dean have been on open display every single time Dean has been in danger since Sam regained sole possession of his body. Sam was worried the moment he saw the Mark of Cain in Sharp Teeth. He ran to the rescue when he got Dean’s drugged call in The Purge. After escaping with Mrs. Tran in Captives, he raced to rescue tied-up Dean from Del the demon. Cuffed and helpless himself, he nearly went crazy seeing mad Roger about to slit Dean’s throat in Thinman. Flung out of Cuthbert Sinclair’s hidden mansion in Blade Runners, Sam went into overdrive to figure out how to get back in to save Dean from his prison, and he used the only weapons he had – his voice and his love – to reach Dean through the brutal curtain the Mark and the Blade together had pulled across Dean’s mind. He expressed his worry about Dean’s obsession with Abaddon in Mother’s Little Helper, and we could see his concern growing every time he touched base with Dean and Dean continued to refuse to join him. He was scared when he returned to the factory in Meta Fiction to find Dean slumped against the wall beside the unconscious Gadreel, and the look on his face after Castiel saw the Mark on Dean’s arm and told Sam to keep an eye on him spoke volumes about his worry and fear. It’s very clear that Sam loves Dean as much as ever, and won’t hesitate to put his own life on the line to save Dean’s.

Loving someone doesn’t mean they can’t piss you off and drive you to angry distraction, however. My view is that Sam’s been trying to figure out how to change the dynamic between them because what he can’t tolerate any more is Dean’s constant insistence on being in control, on making decisions for and in place of other people regardless of their own desires. Dean has persuaded himself that he’s right and knows what’s best and it’s up to him to make the choice and pay the price. That’s exactly what Dean did when he decided to help Ezekiel/Gadreel trick Sam into saying yes despite knowing and even saying that Sam himself would NEVER agree to being possessed, not for any reason. By trickery, Dean forced on Sam what he knew Sam would have vehemently refused if he’d understood what was going on.

And I submit THAT was all Sam actually said in The Purge: that under identical circumstances, if Dean were dying and the only way to save his life would have been to trick him into agreeing to become an angel condom despite knowing Dean himself would never have said yes, Sam wouldn’t have fooled him into possession. Sam was saying he would have yielded to Dean’s fierce independence and insistence on remaining himself and free even knowing it would have meant his death, because in those circumstances that’s what Dean would have wanted and it would have been Dean’s decision to make.

That’s a world away from saying “I don’t love you and I wouldn’t save you.” To my ears, it sounds a lot more like, “I love you, and because I love you, I won’t take away your right to make your own decisions, even though they might hurt both you and me.”

That’s the right road to take when it comes to love, but it’s a damned hard one to walk. For example, it’s killer when we see someone we love making bad choices and pursuing things we fear will hurt them. Sometimes, we know what they’re doing is wrong, or that something they can’t control – like addiction or mental illness – is driving their actions and decisions. We can guide, persuade, and argue, we can try to intervene and show them a different way, we can seek to get them help, but ultimately, we can’t make their decisions for them. And that’s a hard thing to accept.

It’s also really hard when death is involved, especially when we’re called upon to make choices on behalf of someone who can’t speak for him- or herself. We never want to think about our own death, but even less about losing someone we love. We want to keep them with us and hold them close. We don’t want to admit death, so we don’t talk about it. But if we know our loved ones’ unequivocal wishes and disregard them in circumstances where they can’t object, we’re putting ourselves ahead of them, and that’s not right. Love is hard then.

Without what Dean did, Sam would have died. Just like Dean, we love Sam; we can imagine all too well how empty life would feel without him. (Not to mention the show would cease to exist … *wry grin*) Dean didn’t even have to imagine it; he’d already lived it once, in the year following Swan Song. It’s hard to condemn what Dean did out of hand precisely because we all shared his grief and desperate pain and can’t help but be happy right along with him that Sam is still alive, still vital, still here. Even pissed off. At the same time, we wouldn’t – we couldn’t – want Sam to be dead, but in Sam’s place, how would we feel? Violated, helpless, angry, horrified at being used to murder Kevin – we share those things with Sam the same way we shared Dean’s agony of impending loss. We’re torn because we can see and feel both sides, but we’re also a little biased because we know without Dean’s action, Sam wouldn’t be alive to protest, and like Dean, we want and need Sam alive to have our story continue.

Bottom line, though? Dean was wrong. Just because Sam is alive and himself again doesn’t make what Dean did to him right. Sam having survived doesn’t make up for Dean having tricked him into becoming an angel condom, putting his own fears and desires ahead of Sam’s right to the privacy and sanctity of his own mind and life, to freedom from the unforeseen horror of being used for murder by Gadreel. To fully mend his relationship with Sam and regain his brother’s trust, Dean needs to accept and learn from that. It’s not enough for him just to apologize, feel guilty, bury it, and move on. He needs to decide to stop infantalizing other people by taking control of their lives and usurping decisions that belong to them to make things come out the way he thinks is best. He managed to do that once before in Swan Song, when he acknowledged and abided by Sam’s right to make his own decision despite knowing Sam would die. Could he do it again, after all he’s been through and all he’s lost? I don’t know. That’s his struggle. How he deals with it or not is his story, and it’s part of what makes him humanly real.

Sam’s struggle is to find his own balance. He loves his brother, but what Dean did put Sam through experiences he would never have accepted of his own will. Anger, fear, horror, betrayal, and resentment are all swirling around, and how could they not? Mind you, I believe the love is always going to win; of his own untainted will, Sam would never simply stand by and watch Dean die. I will point again to Sam’s actions since learning the truth, and quote the aphorism that actions speak louder than words. Sam’s words are his weapons and he’s used them with brutal intent – being as close as they are, he and Dean can wound each other deeper and more accurately than any enemy – but his actions betray the truth of his enduring love for his brother.

I think Sam’s also going to face his own challenges trying to help Dean deal with the combination of the Mark and the Blade. How will Sam handle the decisions Dean makes, especially if the Mark and the Blade – like the demon blood Sam was addicted to once – bias him toward increasing brutality and aggression, pushing him to become the worst of himself? On that score, more speculation …

And This? This Is What You’re Gonna Become!

Andrew Dabb teased in a recent interview that season 9 will end with a cliffhanger, saying: “We leave our guys in a situation they’ve never faced before …”

Speculation runs rampant. Perhaps Dean becomes a perfect copy of Cain, transformed by killing Sam with the Blade whether in deliberate sacrifice as Cain killed Abel, or as he struck his beloved wife Colette while trying to kill Abaddon. On the flip side, it might be Sam killing Dean, whether to prevent him from becoming a demon or accidentally on Sam’s part because Dean elected to commit suicide by brother to prevent himself from following in Cain’s footsteps. Then there’s the thought that Hell might be locked the same way Heaven is, trapping not only angels and all human souls on Earth, but also any demons who happened to be outside the gates when they closed – including both Crowley and Abaddon. And there’s the idea that maybe rogue Reapers know the back door to Heaven the same way they know illicit ways into Purgatory and Hell, and might be bribed either to let Castiel’s faction stage a raid or even to give Crowley or Abaddon a shot at grabbing Heaven as well as Hell and Earth.

I have no idea where the writers are going with the story, especially not concerning Heaven and Hell. But somehow, I don’t think any of the brother-killing scenarios would fully come to pass. True, one brother actually killing the other would be a situation they’d never faced before – well, unless you count that time in Mystery Spot when Sam accidentally killed Dean while they struggled over the fire axe Sam was taking to the place to try keeping him alive! – but they’ve gone after each other with murderous intent more than once before, and they’ve died separately so often that it’s pretty much expected. They even died together once. They’ve been in all four of the basic locations. They effectively became temporary ghosts once and learned how to function as spirits.

So it intrigues me to think that maybe this time, instead of death being the biggie, immortality might be. Wouldn’t it be a kick in the feels if Dean were to be mortally injured – and didn’t die, because the Mark, the Blade, and what he’d done with them had made him, like Cain in my analysis, a living human demon? What would it do to Dean to discover himself virtually immortal – and to know Sam isn’t? To know he’d be alone forever and doomed to keep on living after Sam died? And to be aware of just how much of a monster he’d become, and would always be?

And what could Sam do to help him? Sam would want to save him, but an exorcism wouldn’t free him, because Dean wouldn’t be possessed: he would still be in his own body, having freely accepted the Mark and the Blade. For the same reason, the demon cure Sam was using on Crowley – human blood to make him feel human emotions and connection again – wouldn’t work, because Dean would still be alive, already experiencing his own human emotions. Even if Dean became for a while the worst of himself, with his acceptance of the Mark and the Blade unleashing again the ugliest depths of what he’d found in himself in Hell, I’m betting Sam could and would reach him. After all, Colette broke through to Cain despite his millenia of bringing chaos and darkness; he forswore violence and lived as a humble man in order to be worthy of her love and acceptance. He took up the Blade again when the knights snatched Colette and he slew all but Abaddon, but he then honored his promise to her for over a century after Colette died, until Dean and Crowley found him. Cain’s humanity was always still there, even within his demon shell; so, I think, would it be for Dean. And that would be an exquisite torment and one hell of a problem for Sam to have to solve: how could he save his brother by making him fully human and mortal again

Now that would be a situation the boys had never faced before. Wouldn’t you agree?

My parting words are these: this has all been nothing more than speculation, a thought experiment. The writers may take – probably have taken, knowing the episodes have already been shot! – a totally different direction, and that would be absolutely fine by me. This is just an example of the way my imagination works when I let it off its leash. If you enjoyed this, well and good. If you disagree vehemently, that’s fine too. We’re all free to go wild and crazy when we’re desperately trying to figure out what’s coming. Over the next three weeks, we’ll learn the truth. Or rather, we’ll learn what they want us to think is the truth, right up until the opening reveal of the season ten premiere turns it on its ear!

And that’s as it should be. Supernatural is not my story to tell. It’s mine to interpret, mine to enjoy or critique, but not mine to write or direct. The same goes for us all. We fans are no more entitled to have a TV show go the way we think it should or might want it to than we are able to rewrite a book we’re reading. So whatever you’re speculating about? My advice is, don’t get wedded to it. You might be closing yourself off to being wowed by something even better.

Three more episodes to the season. Three more weeks. A lot more wine.

Okay. I’m ready.

Bring it.