SOLVING the DC Universe's BIGGEST SECRET!

hello i'm tyler this is the imaginary axis and names have power or so they say according to a number of human traditions religions folklore mysticism knowing somebody's true name can be used to exert a kind of control over them speaking somebody'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 never spoke with each other and it might sound ridiculous at first until you consider how some of you might react if somebody spoke your true name in the comment section names are personal they identify us and even in comic book realities like the dc universe some of the most powerful characters utilize fake names to protect themselves it's okay for the reader to know that batman is bruce wayne but a villain could really use that information to ruin his life batman has his enemies at a disadvantage and you have him at a disadvantage but that's normal readers are the ultimate authority in that relationship the real anomalies are those rare creatures that can't even be named by the audience those glitches in existence that only seem to abide by their own rules and out of all the glitches identified here at the imaginary axis the one that's always fascinated me the most is the phantom stranger because if you look carefully this uh nameless entity is one piece to the dc universe that never quite seems to fit his past is constantly flooded with conflicting information even during regular flashbacks there are supposed to be objective retellings of important events he is incredibly powerful but he often prefers not to intervene in serious situations multiple cosmic entities have admitted that even they don't really know what's up with him and the type of magic he uses is beyond classification the stranger even moves around in ways that don't make sense arriving in places he shouldn't know about with information nobody has and occasionally carrying a skewed sense of time he's also one of the only characters with such a fine understanding of reality that he seems to know about each of dc's infamous multiverse wide reboots the moment they happen if not sooner and unlike everyone else he retains memories of what the world was like before things changed so with a resume like that you'd expect our mysterious cloaked figure to be at the top of the justice league's watch list right sitting next to big names like lex luthor sinestro brainiac or even darkseid but the most impressive thing about him is actually how low of a profile he's managed to keep over the years you see most people don't really question the phantom stranger heroes or villains nor the gods for that matter not necessarily because they're afraid of him or anything but because there's this natural obscurity about him that allows him to slip by unnoticed even among dc's magical community where his existence is a pretty established fact it's difficult to find anybody who actually knows who he is i'll bet some of you viewers don't even recognize him or if you do you probably didn't pay much attention when you last crossed paths did you fall for his lies just eat up one of those backstories or explanations he pedaled out that seemed so definitive when he appeared somewhere he shouldn't be or knew something he shouldn't know as he hangs around silently in the background shifting the scales of power ever so slightly toward an unclear goal playing the heroes and villains like pawns this guy has been given a total of five conflicting origin stories over the years to explain away his uncanny abilities when pressed by prying eyes the first four were all revealed at the same time in the same book meaning none of them are retcons or reboots of one another they're just four contradictory stories each claiming to describe where this person came from what he can do and what his motivations are the fifth origin came decades later following some major restructuring in the dc multiverse so a lot of people initially assumed that this new explanation was supposed to kind of override the old ones but there were a few details that never quite added up as time marched on those details became more and more prominent until references to the other four stories started cropping up in canon again and it was clear that this fifth origin might not be any more reliable than the other four so what we're left with is an unknown entity containing incalculable power that seems to act as a hero most of the time but also clearly has his own agenda nobody can agree on where he came from but we know he's been around for a very long time since we have sightings dating back to the french revolution the fall of king arthur and even the days of moses he's a being so out of sync with reality that even in a world filled with aliens gods alien gods and telepathic gorillas the phantom stranger is considered unnatural these five origins are the closest thing we have to a solid explanation for anything so as is one of my duties around here i decided to take a closer look at each of them and see if i could unravel one of the longest standing mysteries in the dc multiverse the lead starts with these stories and there is nuance to every one of them but in the interest of time i'll mostly be highlighting the parts that are important for understanding the stranger's true identity you can keep track of these icons i put on screen as we go from one legend to another so strap in because this first one takes us somewhere familiar the earliest explanation were ever given about the phantom stranger suggests he was originally a mortal man born around the time of christ and he tortured jesus himself immediately before the crucifixion to satisfy a personal grudge the death of his family at the hands of men who were looking 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 argues that the stranger was actually born long before jesus and lived in one of mankind's earliest settlements at the start of civilization apparently his city fell into so much chaos and evil that the forces of heaven threatened to wipe it out entirely but the stranger persuaded them not to even going as far as to kill himself when they offered to spare his life alone as the only righteous person in the city his immortality is punishment for rejecting the angel's offer of salvation and he wanders the earth on an endless quest to extinguish the sin that spread out to the rest of the world from his city as the origin point yet another interpretation claims the stranger isn't supernatural at all but he's actually a time traveler stuck in a causality loop he was born far far in the future when the universe was about to run out of usable energy and he took part in a project that looked to solve this problem by siphoning more energy from the big bang at the beginning of time unfortunately plans were sabotaged by a man who 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 struggle the stranger discovered that's what the lead scientist was actually trying to do he was a terrorist looking to wipe the entire timeline and the only way the stranger could stop him was by jumping back in time to the big bang and blocking the siphon with his own body as he floated 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 himself being caught between the siphon and the big bang had altered his biology and he was destined to live out the entire universe's lifespan send his younger self back in time and do it all again another more fantastical legend tells us that the phantom stranger is actually an angel created by god existing before the dawn of time etc supposedly during lucifer's cosmic rebellion the stranger couldn't decide whether to ally with the forces of heaven or the forces of hell and as a result he's rejected by both sides accepted by neither he walks the earth in shame with no identity and no home simply because there isn't anywhere else for him to go and finally our last story claims the anonymous hero we've been following is actually the greatest sinner of all time judas iscariot the biblical figure who studied under jesus for several years only to eventually sell him out to the roman government directly resulting in the crucifixion he tried to commit suicide after realizing what he'd done but higher forces intervened and decided a simple death just wouldn't be enough the 30 pieces of silver he was paid for betraying christ became bound around his neck and he was 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 a pretty wide range of possibilities these stories offer everything from jesus to judas to time travel so you might be wondering why they're even worth considering in the first place i mean can we even hope to draw anything useful out of such a random cluster of rumors and legends well the answer is probably see getting to the bottom of a mess like this would typically involve looking through what we know about the stranger today and cross referencing his verified real world characteristics with these less than reliable origin stories but that's easier said than done for example the first thing most observers will notice about the phantom stranger when he walks onto a 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 most knowledgeable he knows so many things that some people think he knows everything literally he seems omniscient at times the phantom stranger knows things nobody should know secret things personal things things the gods don't believe the mysteries of existence but he's not all-knowing he's just close to it one of the wisest people in the multiverse whether asking about secret identities weaknesses science magic history fate there was one time when marvel's avengers crossed over to dc to help the justice league stop a trans reality threat and even then the stranger seemed to already know who they were and where they came from without having to be told at first it might seem clever to take this information and use it to reverse engineer the stranger's true identity his intelligence is one of the most clear-cut things about him but we aren't actually given any origin stories that are completely incompatible with these celestial levels of knowledge obviously it would make sense for an angel to seem all knowing or a time traveler who's already seen the entire universe play out once but even in his more human-based origins it's always implied or outright stated that the stranger's been studying high-level magic for at least a few thousand years that kind of serious dedication to such a powerful craft could easily allow one guy to at least seem omniscient to pretty much anybody else alive all attempts to read the stranger's mind have proven impossible we also run into similar problems when trying to deduce his identity by looking at superpowers according to dc's official occult classification system the phantom stranger is considered an arc mage one of the universe's most immensely powerful sorcerers known for playing with magic that should lie 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 potent mystical artifacts in existence that they've transcended them and become enchanted themselves but it can also refer to higher magical beings that have fallen to our plane of creation from beyond reality in other words there really isn't much the stranger can't do even the combined forces of the spectre eclipso and dr fate couldn't put him down time space and the fabric of the multiverse bend over backwards for him he doesn't even operate by the same physical laws as anything else so we're not gonna figure this guy out by categorizing which magical abilities he does and doesn't have once you've created metaphysical guns that can wound people on a philosophical level or counter the most powerful magic in existence with one hand i think it's safe to say your limits are pretty unclear but that's okay because i dug deep for this one once it became obvious i'd need some fine details to solve this mystery i poured over all the evidence and i do mean all of it i read every single phantom stranger appearance that i could get my hands on and in the end i wound up right back where i started secret origins number 10 was the comic book that introduced the first four conflicting stories for our cryptic character if the cover looks familiar to you then you're not alone i had the same thought and a little research brought me to this famous woodcut print by m.c escher it's called another world and the phantom stranger's origin takes more than a few design cues from it but why speaking on his own work escher had this to say man creates a superficial image but if he doesn't give it depth let his depiction be at least as complete as possible let him try to make an image more or less similar to that scene by a bird whose eye looks at almost the entire space around him at the same time he sees at a glance in front of him to both sides up and down let him try to approach that bird's view for the place where he is located is determined not only by what he sees right in front of him but also by the roof over his head and the ground under his feet in other words the original art piece was designed as a challenge to encourage escher's admirers to consider all their surroundings as one rather than fixating on a single perspective and that my friends is when i became certain about my answer to the phantom stranger's origin he isn't just one of these things he's all of them and a single abstract comic book cover isn't our only evidence either another clue came years later during dc's universe-wide blackest night event when the dead rose from their graves thanks to a coordinated effort by the black lantern corps at a certain point during the invasion one of the zombie lanterns tried phasing into the phantom stranger using its ghost-like possession abilities and this is what it saw immediately before being forced back out by the enormous amounts of psychic feedback not one not two but three of the conflicting backstories all in one think about it this doesn't make any sense if only a single origin is true and the rest are just made up we are literally inside the phantom stranger right now he even lectures the black lantern about it after it's thrown out telling the zombie it's seen everything and nothing yeah that's also how i describe witnessing three incompatible events with my own two eyes so we at least have a basis for this idea that each origin might have some truth to it but the obvious problem is that they all contradict each other pretty thoroughly i might add i mean there isn't any room for the stranger to have originally been an angel for instance and then to have later settled down on earth only to be cursed with immortality by another angel these stories stand on their own they all offer a different beginning and they're all really looking to explain the same thing the stranger's weird properties how would events like the judas origin and the origin about the vengeful family man ever fit together those 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's constantly changing and no i'm not talking about reboots retcons or alterations to the timeline believe it or not the phantom stranger is usually immune to that kind of stuff he's a constant he sees everything he 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 those moments weren't caused by the reboot they predate it whatever he was before each of these big cosmic events he was the same thing after but what if i were to tell you that there are deeper forces out there beyond the typical comic book reality shifting multiverse sci-fi fanfare force is totally capable of throwing the stranger's entire history into flux and not only that but its presence is practically woven throughout 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 that before don't worry you have it was just operating under a different name hermeticism is essentially a pivotal set of fundamental beliefs and practices that act as the bedrock or at least a major contributor for a lot of western philosophy and mysticism even today if you know what you're looking for you can find it practically everywhere but boy are its fingerprints 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 the foundation for many of the magical themes you've probably seen pop up over the course of your life and one of its leading principles is this idea that the reality we live in and experiences at its core a product of the mind think of it like this when you break down the physical world everything that exists is just a collection of matter and energy on a base level this card i'm holding is just a bunch of specific atoms arranged in a specific pattern the light bounces off of those atoms hits your eyes and your brain paints a picture of the card based on the pattern it detects this is how you perceive everything your brain gives you shapes symbols and mental representations of the world outside your body and those are the things you interact with as a result hermeticism argues that none of us really experience the outside world directly humans live entirely within the consensus universe that we paint for ourselves in our minds if everybody were to simultaneously shift their perspective and decide that these light patterns and nerve impulses should instead be interpreted as a lamp then for all practical purposes the card no longer exists it's a lamp now this is the basis for all magic the universe is mental and if everybody stops viewing it one way only to view it another then they effectively change the universe this is illustrated beautifully by the sandman story dream of a thousand cats in which one of dc's most powerful entities dream recounts a version of the world where cats are the dominant species and humans are small helpless creatures that serve as their pets food and play things one day the human race becomes aware of the power behind mentality and they're able to remake the world into one where they're the dominant life forms by simply imagining it on a large enough scale they dreamed the world so it always was the way it is now little one there never was a world of high cat ladies and cat lords they changed the universe from the beginning of all things until the end of time this is the same reality the phantom stranger lives in a reality ruled by perception and as one of dc's premier magic users his story is absolutely steeped in the concept an even more relevant example for our purposes can be found in the 2018 justice league dark series when a magical hero named dr fate explains the true origin behind the lords of order a group of higher entities often treated as gods responsible for governing the multiverse what is it we have told the mortals over time we are gods of another world angels of justice we knew the power of stories we knew we could forge a foothold in the sphere of gods were that belief powerful enough but we are no gods i had an opportunity to speak with the writer of this comic james tynan back in june and i asked him if this was implying what i thought it was specifically bringing up dream of a thousand cats as an example and his answer was a resounding yes that's exactly what i was going for the lords of order were originally very powerful magicians but they told people 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 apply those same principles to our stranger a man who has gone out of his way to hide his identity for eons a magician with no story by intention that's my proposal folks that ashamed of his past the stranger purposefully abandoned his original name and put mankind in the perfect position to give him a new one with no context to draw from his observers reinterpreted his existence again and again and again and again and that belief made those stories true [Music] the amulet of origins the key that unlocks the door to god this amulet has been in my possession 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 phantom stranger is judas unambiguously that's why he's dressed the way he is it's explained at the beginning of the comic of the seven people he's talking to four arguably 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 longer than even they could imagine that is without a doubt the exact same amulet he's been seen wearing throughout every incarnation of his character regardless of the backstory being implied at the time he's been all of them and he remembers it but who was he in the beginning that's the point he doesn't want anyone to know his original identity is so taboo that he'd rather be judas if given the opportunity but deep beneath the earth locked away in one of the seven timeless layers of hell lies a soul that's been trapped for ages rumor has it she knew the stranger and they were a little more than friends near the beginning of his journey her name is na'ama she's mother to 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 mere moments after the beginning of time itself i was charged to exist as i do my own indecisions led to this yoke on my being and i alone must bear the onus of its verdict postpone it as long as you like but all journeys end eventually even yours so when you're old and gray and nodding by the fire just remember i'll be waiting for you according to jewish lore na'ama was a great granddaughter of kane and she seduced the angel shamdan with her beauty to give birth to asmodius a mighty demon prince could shyamadan have been a neutral angel unable to decide in the war between heaven and hell so distraught with what he'd done that he was willing to reject his name entirely imagine seeing someone like this and not knowing who they were so you tell 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 was that one town spared even the tale about the time traveler has aspects borrowed from an old legend told among the green lantern corps reality is messy and confusing maybe even impossible to observe directly but stories give it a kind of shape and some people would tell you that's magic the phantom stranger wants to be whatever you think he is because despite his past he's really trying his hardest to do the right thing he's a hero a seeker of balance a multiversal guardian genuinely more concerned about your well-being than his own but he's also imperfect just like you and me at some point he messed up and he wants to leave it behind maybe we owe him that opportunity after all if you know who somebody is today what's in a name anyway are they even a stranger at all man talk about a trip but listen personally i really appreciate you watching to the end of all that these videos can get a little crazy at times which is part of the reason they take so long to make but you should subscribe to be ready when more come out i've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes since our last drop and if all goes well this is going to be a big year for the channel you don't want to miss it of course if you're new we also have a ton of related videos you might be interested in we don't only answer questions about comic books we've got anime video games check some of it out but no matter what you do have a fantastic day and i'll see you soon

Channel: The Imaginary Axis

Views: 813,590

Keywords: phantom stranger, dc comics, dc, dceu, the phantom stranger, stranger, comic books, dc universe, dc magic, cw, swamp thing, constantine, snydercut, justice league, infinite frontier

Id: cEiPCkLQzhg

Length: 23min 18sec (1398 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021