Supernatural University: Shameless Spoilery Speculation – S8, The Search For…Limbo?
I avoid spoilers, but accept teasers – by which I mean sanctioned interviews with writers, actors, producers, and directors. So I did follow the coverage from the San Diego Comic-Con (although I haven't had time to see it all!), and of course, it sparked some thoughts in my overly fertile brain. What follows is just speculation, pure and simple, so don't take it as anything more. It's probably totally wrong, and trust me, I'm perfectly fine with that; I'll welcome seeing whichever way Season Eight goes, and I trust Jeremy Carver & Company to take me for a fine ride! But while I'm waiting to board the Supernatural Season Eight soul train, I'm going to indulge in a little wild-assery – come along if you dare!
This little thought session was prompted by the various SDCC interviews with Carver and others where folk said the theme for this coming season was “This time it's personal” and that the season would involve a quest for something that (1) harked back to the very earliest days of the series; (2) was desired not only by the Winchester brothers, but by Crowley and the remaining angels; and (3) would set up a continuing mythology that could service the show for years to come. And so I thought …
What happens to ghosts when their energy link to the living world – whether their bones, other physical remains, or a meaningful article such as an old flask – is burned? Are they truly destroyed, or do they go … somewhere else, somewhere that's not Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory? And would that be the same destination for demons whose bones are burned? What about angels who are killed? Do they have spirits (if not souls as such), and do those spirits wind up … somewhere?
What if all of them went to the same place? What kind of power would be available to the being who could access that place, with all the souls and spirits it contained? And could someone open a door to allow souls and spirits from that place to journey to other places, including Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, or Earth?
What if Season Eight begins with the quest for what I'll call Limbo, the realm of the in-between – possibly including Mary and John Winchester, Bobby Singer and all other hunter-burned ghosts, and every sword-slain angel, including Uriel, Zachariah, Gabriel, and Sebastian?
And what if our characters, knowing from the events of Reading Is Fundamental that at least some tablets containing the actual Word of God still remain on Earth, decide to go on a quest to find and decipher them and thus get answers to all the mysteries of creation – including understanding the fate of all humans, angels, demons, ghosts, and monsters?
Those of you who know me know that I always have some logical, rational support for my occasional wild-ass speculations, so bide with me for a while as I explain where this particular insane notion came from. Give me the benefit of the doubt for a while longer before you dismiss this out of hand, okay? No knee-jerk reactions here, please! Thanks …
The Principle of Conservation of Creation
In Supernatural's cosmology, God is very much a conservationist.
As revealed by Death in Meet The New Boss, God created the Leviathan before he created angels or humans. Rather than destroying them when he realized that, left to their nature, they would devour the rest of his creation, God simply confined them in Purgatory, later making it also the home for the souls of all similarly hungry monsters.
We also know from the history of angels, described in such episodes as Heaven And Hell and The End, that when Lucifer rebelled against and disobeyed God by refusing to bow to humans, God didn't destroy him; instead, he simply imprisoned Lucifer in a secure cage in Hell. He also decreed Hell as the home for the souls of humans who chose evil, beginning with Lilith, whom Lucifer – to prove his point about human inferiority – had warped into the first demon, as we were told by Ruby in When The Levee Breaks, after Casey in Sin City had also referred to Lucifer as the demons' creator.
What I meant in that first sentence about God being a conservationist is simply this: Beings were imprisoned and beings died, but none of them were destroyed; their souls, their essence, simply went elsewhere, and most stayed there. Some demons occasionally escaped Hell and some monsters similarly escaped Purgatory (remember Dr. Visyak, revealed as a Purgatory escapee in Let It Bleed?) to roam the Earth, but even when they were exorcised, banished, or physically killed, they simply returned to whence they came – and sometimes, like Meg, they came back again, or were brought back, like Eve.
Season Six revealed that human souls themselves were pure power – something put into very concrete terms by Eve in Mommy Dearest – and that Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and the beings that ruled them all drew their power from the souls that came to inhabit those domains after their physical death. From what we've been given to understand, God evidently designed creation so that human souls, upon the deaths of their physical bodies, would go either to Heaven or Hell, as appropriate to the choices they made in life, and would become the energy powering those realms. Monsters, having been transformed from humans by Eve into predatory lesser kin to Leviathan (much as demons were developed from humans by Lucifer), were separately consigned upon death to Purgatory.
If God didn't outright destroy the most dangerous and most disobedient elements in his creation, and if he developed realms to house and draw power from souls, why would he cause ghosts (and demons, given their origin as human souls) to be destroyed simply by burning their bones or other physical link to Earth? Why not instead conserve the power of their souls by sending them elsewhere, if indeed they didn't qualify as monsters for Purgatory and had forfeited or lost their originally intended place in Heaven or Hell?
And what provision did God make for the essence of angels – unearthly beings otherwise designed to be immortal – slain in battle? We've seen from the deaths of angels that they contained immense power, perceived by human eyes as blinding light released when slain in a human vessel on Earth. Was all that power simply converted into another energy form and consumed in conflagration, destroying the individual, or did that power and personality go somewhere else, as a human soul does upon death?
God's tendency in Supernatural to conserve energy and life would seem to me to argue for preserving and making use of all the elements of creation, including ghosts and angels.
Conversion Versus Destruction
In many episodes, most plainly in Roadkill and Of Grave Importance, we learned that hunters really didn't know what happened to the souls of ghosts whose bones or artifacts they burned. They guessed those ghosts were simply gone, negated, destroyed – neither in Heaven nor Hell – but they had nothing on which to base that guess other than knowing that ghosts, once their real link to Earth was burned, never returned. We learned in Weekend At Bobby's that a demon whose bones were burned did not return to Hell; Crowley admitted having wondered where his missing crossroads demon was and what had happened to her. Being the king of Hell, he would have known if she'd returned there.
We do know that simply burning physical remains doesn't have any effect on the soul of a human who died and properly went either to Heaven or Hell, nor does it prevent at least some part of a person from being brought back as a ghost by someone else. Jo had been cremated in the most spectacular fashion possible in Abandon All Hope, but that didn't prevent Osiris from summoning and – clearly against her will – commanding her ghost in Defending Your Life. As far back as Hollywood Babylon, we saw the ghost of the cremated electrician killed by a fan brought back to Earth by the frustrated screenwriter's spell. We don't know what had happened to the bodies of all the people later brought back and compelled as ghosts by the Raising of the Witnesses spell in Are You There, God? It's Me, Dean Winchester, but fire and bones clearly don't fully define the fate of souls.
We have a lot of reason to believe that a ghost contains part if not all of a human soul. The entire experience with Bobby's ghost in Season Seven speaks to the full essence of Bobby having been present, despite being seriously affected by his ghostly compulsion for revenge on Dick Roman. Also, look at three ghosts we saw transformed peacefully into light rather than burned in agony when they themselves chose to depart: Father Gregory in Houses Of The Holy, Molly in Roadkill, and John Winchester in All Hell Breaks Loose, Part II. When they left, they seemed complete: they accepted their situation, they were no longer driven by anger or fear, and they were far from the one-dimensional nature we've always associated with ghosts. They simply let go, and went in peace. We never saw what finally happened to the death omen Claire in The Usual Suspects, but I consider it a fair bet that she also vanished, never to return, when her goal was accomplished and her killer was dead. Bobby seemed unable to let go completely on his own because his need for revenge remained unresolved, but he clearly welcomed his burning in Survival Of The Fittest as a release.
The concept of true guaranteed destruction for spirits and souls – death with no afterlife anywhere – was first introduced with the Colt, initially as a seemingly unique thing. A demon killed by the Colt, according to the lore spoken by John Winchester in Dead Man's Blood, wasn't simply returned to Hell with the potential for escape again, as happened with an exorcism driving the demon from its host body. Instead, a demon slain by a mortal shot from the Colt would be entirely dead, truly destroyed. Later, we encountered Ruby's dagger, which appeared to have exactly the same effect on lesser demons if wielded to deliver a killing blow, although it wasn't powerful enough to terminate Alistair with a near miss to a perfect heart shot delivered by Castiel in On The Head Of A Pin.
The Colt reportedly had the same gift for killing monsters, although I would argue the lore didn't necessarily speak to what would happen to the monster's soul. We saw the Colt kill a vampire in Dead Man's Blood despite the lore reporting decapitation as the only effective means for killing a vampire, and the light show we saw was akin to the Colt destroying a demon. Despite that, I'm not fully prepared to say that the Colt had the same effect on a monster soul as on a demon one, if only because it seems that no human hunters before our present-day ones – including Samuel Colt – actually understood that the souls of slain monsters went to Purgatory. And even if it did, who's to say that the Colt or Ruby's dagger actually destroyed a demon's or a monster's soul? What if it simply sent the soul somewhere else – perhaps to the same place burned ghosts go?
There are a fair number of arguments that, despite God's seeming penchant for the conservation of matter, energy, and souls, souls could actually be destroyed, at least in terms of them being converted to other forms of energy that would dissipate the individuality and personality we would deem essential to the self of a soul.
We saw souls depicted simply as energy in My Bloody Valentine, when Famine consumed them – along with the smoke-souls of demons! – to fuel his existence and power. We saw Castiel, in The Man Who Would Be King, focus the power of souls obtained through Crowley from Hell as a blast of energy to counter Raphael's normally superior, Heaven-fueled strength. We saw Castiel suck into himself all the souls in Purgatory in The Man Who Knew Too Much, assuming the stature of a god. Some of those souls evidently were converted into other forms of destructive energy to fuel Castiel's strikes against those who opposed him, and I suspect souls used that way or eaten by Famine may indeed have been “destroyed” in the process by losing their individuality and personality. However, we know the Leviathan retained their selfhood while they were inside Cass, and we saw the bulk of the monster souls returned to Purgatory when Castiel let them go, which leads me to believe that any souls not directly converted and discharged as destructive energy still remained individual and intact.
Episodes have also suggested that ghost souls could be destroyed. In the pilot, we saw Constance's ghost trapped and seemingly consumed in conflagration by the ghosts of her murdered children. In Home, Missouri stated that Mary Winchester had sacrificed herself to destroy the poltergeist who was terrorizing the Winchester family home and threatening Sam. The follow-up to Missouri's conclusion came in Dark Side Of The Moon, when Ash said he'd been looking for both John and Mary Winchester in Heaven since he had arrived, but had never found them. That suggested either that John and Mary both had truly been destroyed, or that they were someplace other than either Heaven or Hell. We also saw the two ghost brothers in Red Sky At Morning disperse each other into water, never to return.
Of Grave Importance introduced three other potentials. The first was the illustration of one ghost consuming the essence of another as food or fuel for his own continued existence. We, Bobby, and Annie Hawkins saw Van Ness seize other ghosts and siphon off their energy, seemingly destroying them in the process. He had begun trying to do that to Bobby when his own bones were finally burned, ripping his ghost-soul away from Earth. We also saw Van Ness, as a ghost, not only killing people, but deliberately trapping their souls in ghosthood, when we'd previously understood ghosts to be people who'd intentionally evaded or refused their Reapers in order to remain on Earth. Annie told Bobby she'd never even seen a Reaper; she didn't even know she was dead until she met Bobby as a ghost. Third and final was the episode's presentation of the inevitable degradation of ghosts into mindless, unaware things that would ultimately dissipate into an insanity of nothingness – what Bobby appropriately termed “ghost Alzheimer's.”
Thesis
I would argue, based on all these things, that Supernatural does contemplate that some souls, at least, may have been truly destroyed, in terms of losing their self-awareness and individuality as the power they represented was converted into and used as other forms of energy. But I also think there's a lot of support for the concept that the show contemplates that ghosts (and some otherwise undefined spirits/souls, possibly including slain angels and demons) may inhabit another realm we simply haven't discovered yet, the state I'm currently calling Limbo.
Combined with the characters' discovery that previously unknown tablets containing snippets of the Word of God may still be hidden on Earth and deciphered by such prophets as Kevin, I would posit the possibility that Season Eight (and beyond!) may involve a search for more of the Word of God, and specifically for clues to Limbo, as a means to ransom the souls of the Winchesters' ghosts, including John, Mary, and Bobby, and to seek answers to all the questions about life, the universe, and … everything.
And I may be flat-out wrong. And I'll repeat: I'm fine with WHICHEVER way this comes out, whether my guesses are right or wrong!
Season Eight is not so far away … 🙂
(And in other articles, I plan to further explore why Castiel – alone among angels – keeps being brought back to life; and to explain why I'm not disturbed by interviews indicating that Sam gave up on finding Dean and abandoned the hunting life, and that Season Eight will see the brothers being more mature and more able to live within themselves, not just as a unit of Sam'n'Dean. Stay tuned!)
That’s an interesting theory. Now I’m really excited to know if it right or what they’re looking for!
Me, too! *grin*
(Please excuse this newbie for waffling – but I don’t know any non-online people who watch Supernatural and so I end up with long, long theses in my head and now I have a place to share them)
I love this article! So glad to see someone discussing this. I think my theory is the same as bardicvoice’s.
My problems with this whole Heaven / Hell thing is that on Supernatural heaven is not a place where people are totally happy, it isn’t in fact ‘heaven’ – if your mother can torture you in heaven then there is something wrong with the place. Also the angels torture and kill each other there. Doesn’t really follow the definition.
In the same way you can go to hell for all eternity for a deal? Really? There are lots of people who go to hell during the series who aren’t evil or even bad, some of them are making sacrifices. Hell is not designed for them.
I think that heaven and hell in the show’s reality are intermediate points on the way somewhere else – a type of prison/waiting room (even heaven – see Dean’s conversation with Pamela).
My religious education is a little rusty but on the ‘last day’ don’t all the souls get taken from wherever they are and judged and sent to their eternal life? So there must be another level of existence. (am I reading too much into this? :D)
Anyway this might help with the theory that anyone who is in Heaven, Hell or Purgatory can return to earth in some form but once they have been removed from the reality that contains these four places they can’t come back any more.
[i]Supernatural[/i]’s take on Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory differs markedly from the Christian versions; something not to be forgotten! The series’ mythology steps aside from tradition as much on the religious side as it does on its interpretation of monsters. Purgatory, for example, was never mentioned in the Bible – although a Limbo-style antechamber to Heaven was suggested as the place where all Heaven-bound souls had to wait until Jesus opened the gates with his own sacrifice. Theologians came up with Purgatory as the place where human souls would be purified and refined after death in order to enter into the perfection of Heaven. That’s a world away from the show’s use of Purgatory as the home of monsters!
I’m always fascinated by the way the show puts its own stamp on myth, legend, and the underpinnings of human belief and faith. I expect that to continue!
Yes I agree. It really does add to the depth of the story-lines. Just to clarify I was talking about the various angel/demon/God story-lines from the point of view of ‘mythology’ (for want of a better word and not to offend anyone) and not as interpretation of specific religions, which I know is something the show tries to avoid.
That’s an interesting theory. It makes a lot of sense. I’m looking forward to your other essays.
Thanks! So am I – it feels really great to be able to write a little again. I hope to be able to keep it up … 🙂
I suspected from some of the teasers that the “it’s personal” had to do with their family. I thought that they might be in purgatory somewhere and are used as pawns somehow by Crowley or another powerful being. That scenario made less sense the more I thought it. I’m intrigued by yours. I am looking forward to your other articles, particularly about the numerous Cas resurrections. Could it be more than just a cheap device to keep bringing back a popular character? The implication is that it’s God. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts. Thanks for the thought -provoking article!
Thanks for coming and reading! I’m looking forward to seeing what the show actually does.
On Cas – I’m having fun with my speculations. It will take a little time for me to complete that meta, but yes: I think God is involved, based on what we’ve seen. The question, however, is [i]why[/i] … 🙂 How often do you get to speculate on the motives of God?!? Only on [i]Supernatural[/i]!
I’m always glad to see an article by you, Mary, because the ideas brought forth are well-thought out, as well as thought-provoking. You’ve brought up some interesting points that I’ll briefly discuss.
So far, the show has set up definite ‘soul rules’ for the various realms.
Human souls go to either Heaven or Hell.
Monsters souls go to Purgatory.
Evil humans go to Hell and are turned into demons, and demons can be returned to Hell following exorcism, and monsters can be returned to Purgatory.
I hope the Show doesn’t monkey with these clearly-established rules they’ve set up, because that brings up reminders of puking out episode plots again, instead of following canon and maintaining consistency.
I agree that the various beings that ruled monsters or ghosts all were able to draw power from the souls that came to inhabit those various domains after their physical death. I can’t explain how that works, though. The Show never really made it clear, but it did show a still-hanging around Earth ghost absorbing the ‘souls’ of other ghosts, that Crowley gained power by the number of souls he had in Hell (he never tried to absorb that power, as far as we know), and that Cas was after Purgatory souls so that he could absorb them and gain power over Raphael.
I think the question that I have about your theory is that it seems to me it could just as easily be argued that the Show is saying that all of this ‘soul’ power the universe contains is there to serve mankind’s benefit. I’m not explaining this very well, but it would be in the sense that human life is so extraordinary, so precious, so remarkable that the forces of nature; be that pure evil, grades of evil, pure good and/or shades of pure good are there for humanity encounter and navigate through, and that humans do that (overcome or enhance the forces of nature), because they are so favored by God and; thus, improve or harm the world for all their fellow humans.
Wow, that sounds ethnocentric doesn’t it? But, it’s just a point about a hierarchical ladder the Show seems to have established that I’m bringing up.
I do that because, at this stage in the Show, demons who die; like Alistair, those killed by the Colt or Ruby’s knife, ghosts that move on, and the angels so far just cease to exist.
What has been lacking is that the Show has never explained, not only the point that you bring up, but:
1. If some human souls were more powerful than others (say Mary and John’s soul), and if Sam and Dean were such special humans that they were the only true archangel vessels, are their souls more powerful than other humans or are all human souls equal in their nuclear power-ness?
2. If some are more powerful than others, then why didn’t Cas, Raphael, or Crowley try to kill them and absorb their souls to win their war?
3. If monster/demon/angel souls just dissipate into some other energy source, could that place simply be dissipated into the universe and that is what maintains the balance between good and evil so that humanity isn’t overcome with one or the other?
This is too long already, and I’m really just thinking out loud. Your theory is very possible, and Limbo is the only realm that they Show hasn’t brought up. I kind of doubt that the Show will go that way, though, because Carver has stated that he thinks the mytharc overpowered the show in the past and he was going to tone it down and focus on the brothers.
I’m with you, though, in that I’m willing to go along with Carver in whatever direction he comes up with.
Hmm, I find your #3 particularly interesting!
Show has never gone into exploring why God created our universe and all the things within it, and why, when he built humans, he decided they should be primary – something suggested by God having commanded his angels to love humans more than him. There’s clearly more to the story than human souls merely being power sources!
I think there’s still a lot of possibility for the show to play in more mythology without getting bogged down in it, especially if the story is set up as a quest. The adventures that happen while our heroes are in pursuit of a goal just serve to demonstrate that life is the journey, not the destination, and the journey itself may be the whole point.
Thanks again for commenting!
So happy to see you writing again Mary! I’ve missed you this past year. I’m hoping you again have some time to indulge in your reviews and University courses. Missed you.
Love your theory whether it comes to pass or not. Like you, I’m happy to wait and see what Jeremy and his writers come up with.
I just hope that the ones we love, Mary, John, Bobby, Gabriel, Rufus etc. have not been destroyed, but exist somewhere waiting to be reunited with their loved ones.
Thanks, Bevie! I hope to be able to do more writing from now on. Things will probably be a little dicey until December, but from then on, I think my engine will be fully engaged. 🙂
I’d love to learn that those we love aren’t lost and gone forever. I’m with you on that!
I actually have similar thoughts, Bardicvoice. One of the first things I really thought of was that they’d be looking for a place as you say or an object that might somehow help them get back some of the people they lost. As you mentioned, we don’t really know where John and Mary are at this point.
I kind of always thought that anything classified as supernatural when it was ‘destroyed’ went to Purgatory, but I wasn’t quite sure about that yet or how the angels might fit in. The idea that they might be somewhere else entirely, along with the ghosts, is fascinating to me. I love that there might be all these realms out there, some yet to be discovered, that house all these souls. It certainly makes sense in a way since one of the fundamental principles of science states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, only changed into other forms. In this case then, God created all the energy, but that energy in the form of those souls can only be transferred into other forms, or sent to other places…I love it. And if Sam and Dean find a way to find this out or get to this place, maybe open doors to get people out…It would give them incredible power (no wonder Crowley would want it too)Wow, to bend all the freaking rules of the universe…? It would be pretty awesome if it played out like that.
Looking forward to some of those other articles!
Thanks, Wolf! Glad you enjoyed!!
Just while I’m still thinking about the subject (I love that you made me think about this too). I know you just said that you’re calling this place Limbo, but I always thought Limbo to be the place where ghosts are when they choose to stay on Earth? They’re not actually on Earth, or at least they’re not really part of our reality unless they make themselves known, and they’re not of course in Heaven, Hell or Purgatory so I figured that was Limbo, even though I don’t think it was mentioned specifically.
It was never mentioned. Bobby wasn’t aware of himself as a ghost except when he was conscious on Earth; he reported blacking out when he over-exerted his spirit-self. Perhaps he was elsewhere in a non-corporeal dimension, at least partially; that remains an unknown apparently even to ghosts!
I find your theory very intriguing. You may very well be right about all these souls, where do they actually go? Remember Bobby’s wife was also brought back in “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” even though she had been cremated. Now does that mean that Bobby might possibly be brought back (yes, please!)? But if he does come back, I want him corporeal and not to be a “The Ghost and Mrs Muir” type spirit.
I love to read your essays, they are always so interesting. I’m looking forward to the one you will do on Cas.
Thanks, Sylvie! I do think there’s a chance Bobby might yet be brought back, if the circumstances proved right; it all depends on where Carver & Company choose to take the story. And I’ll follow wherever they lead. 🙂
I’m looking forward to finishing the essay on Cas, too!
Bardicvoice: How thrilling to see you are posting again! [b]Your voice has been sorely missed![/b] If it is true that you might have more time open up after Christmas, does that mean that you might be cajoled in to beginning to write episode reviews once more??? Pretty please????
Can’t wait to read your Cas article. Oh how I have missed reading your fascinating insights!
Thanks, suzee51! I am planning on writing episode commentaries again. I hope to do it from the beginning of season 8, but I will DEFINITELY be back on the stand by the end of December! (I can’t wait, either!!)
I’m really liking your ideas here. Finding out where John & Mary are has been a series-long question for me. I’m rusty on my physics, but isn’t there some theory of conservation of energy, that it’s never lost, just transferred from one form to another. Thus a place like Limbo makes sense. Plus, I won’t believe that John & Mary’s souls could have been truly destroyed; I’m still holding out for that big family reunion (whether on Earth or Heaven or wherever) at the end of the series!
Thanks! Yes, I was definitely considering the laws of conservation of matter and energy when looking at the issue of souls; physics rules!
I’m also hoping we’ll learn that all the important souls we (and the brothers) have lost may yet be reunited someday. I don’t expect to see John or Mary Winchester walking the Earth again (well, except perhaps in flashbacks!), but the promise that they might be found by Sam and Dean (and each other!) in Heaven, if nowhere else? Yes. That. And I hope more for Bobby, given how recent his death was. (Love me some Jim Beaver …)
So you’re thinking Limbo and Purgatory are two different places?
Short answer? Yes! At least, in [i]Supernatural[/i]’s cosmology … *wink*
I am really looking forward to your essay on why it’s okay that Sam doesn’t look for Dean because THAT one teaser has me totally off balance to the point of being ready to leave the show. I am desperate for hand waving, fan wanking, considered hypothesis or anything to settle the sick feeling I get every time I think about it.
Inmteresting theory but I’m gonna go with no I dont think this is where the writers are heading.
Im gonna go with something a lot more simplistic and say that the word of God Crowley is searching for/the powersource/the game changer is finding the means to banish the angels from earth one and for all. No angels to interfer, the tipping of the scales in hells favour, Crowley to have free rein to take over the earth? On the flip side the angels would be dong all they can to make sure it doesnt happen and Sam and Dean will be fighting to save the human race from such a fate. The common goal is the powersource.
This ties all three (hell, heaven, earth) together as all are affected. Explains Crowleys role, Kevin’s role, Cas’s role, Sam and Dean’s storyline. Could also tie in the Purgatory storyline with the mosters being used as a weapon for one side or having their own adgenda? Myabe the writers are gearing uop for an all out war, a storyline that could last several seasons if you think about it?
As for Limbo what if the plan is to banish all the angels their?They dont go to Purgatory when they die, maybe they go to Limbo?