meta: metaphysics and Seers in the Jossverse

[wisdomeagle]

In lieu of actually ever writing my senior thesis, I went and meta'd. Actually, this is the distilled essence of a bedtime conversation, and since you weren't actually in bed with us, you're missing out on much of the context. Also, the order in which we're watching the episodes (which I'd reccomend to anyone; it's ABC order which is a sufficient randomization device and it helps us view every single episode in light of the entire series, which is very useful for meta and for making connections we hadn't noticed before) is helping frame our conversation.

The topic is broadly, metaphysics in the Jossverse, and narrowly, Seers, particularly Cordelia. It's not my senior thesis. But I love it anyhow. It also took me about three hours to write. Now why can't I focus on schoolwork like that?
[spoilers through circa mid-S5 Angel.]


Throughout, Jossverse means the combined canons of Angel: the series and Buffy: the Vampire Slayer.

I shan't be writing my thesis today since I am a horrible, horrible LAZY person. Perhaps later. So I’m going to read Angel No Limits and talk the Jossverse, so at least I'm doing something that's functional.

So basically, metaphysics in the Jossverse. The problem with interpreting the Jossverse is that canon comes pre-interpreted, not only by Joss/the Writers, but by the characters themselves. I'd say that on Buffy, the metaphysics is pre-set by the Watchers' Council as handed on to the Scoobies by Giles, and the ethics is set by Buffy. On Angel, it's less clear. Angel provides the moral framework, but the metaphysics come from all over. I'd say a large part of the worldview was established by Doyle and never changes, but a lot of it comes from Wesley as well.

What do I mean by metaphysics? I mean the answers to questions like these:

• Why does Cordelia get visions?


• Where do demons come from?


• What is a soul?


• Where do we go when we die?

We just rewatched "Birthday" and "Blood Money" (still plodding through alphabetically!) and so of course I immediately wanted to talk about a grand unifying theory of visions, and the girl and I came up with something that makes a lot of sense to me at least for now. There needs to be a large addendum on the subject of prophecies, but I think we even got a hint of what those might be from "Blood Money." Speaking of "Birthday" though... we hadn't seen it since we watched S4, and it is SO GOOD and also SO CREEPY. Yay? But back to metaphysics.

I want to establish some general principles before going deeply into the subject of visions, particularly this one: reality in the Jossverse is constructed. Reality in every 'verse in constructed, but it's especially strong in the Jossverse since it seems to me to be canon that the strongest magic in the 'verse is the power to change the way people perceive things. For the most obvious instance, see Dawn. The real magic in the monks' spell was not the creation of a little girl made of energy; it was the modification of the memories of probably a couple hundred people: everyone who knows Dawn, everyone who spotted her on the streets of LA or Sunnydale, people as far away as her father in Europe. The memories fit into existing memories in ways we aren't entirely sure, but they probably differ by person, so everyone's mental image of Dawn is slightly different because, well, they all remember having known her differently. That is one really powerful piece of magic. But people's thoughts are powerful forces.

Joss is an existentialist. Joss sees the world as a series of objects that are meaningless in and of themselves that we as human beings give meaning to. We give them purposes, functions, symbolic meaning. (This is metaverse canon, "Objects in Space" commentary.) In a metaphoric sense, the metaphysics of the Jossverse works in the same way. Mystical events are given meaning by the people who observe them, then those meanings are preserved, enhanced, given more than fictive reality. Human (and demon) thoughts shape and change and twist their reality. Humans can make a ball of green energy into Buffy's little sister. Magic aids in that process, and that is (one of the) function(s) of magic in the Jossverse: to aid humans in making meaning out of their world.

To take an example that has been discussed ad nauseum and in more detail than I'm going to go into here, look at Angel's soul versus Spike's soul. It has been proposed that, for various reasons, Angel feels the need for a black-and-white worldview that calls for the Angel-Angelus dichotomy. Angel's being then houses two separate personalities that grow more distinct as time progresses, even in the real time of the show, so that S2 Buffy Angelus goes by the name "Angel" while by S4, Angelus claims that the two are distinct personalities. Angel's soul functions as an arbiter of who gets control of the body.

Spike's soul functions in a dramatically different way and while there is a disjunct between Spike sans soul and Spike with soul, the difference (once Spike gets away from Sunnydale) is far less than the difference between Angel and Angelus. I think the difference between the function of Angel's soul and Spike's soul is a concrete, (meta)physical reality, and it's not as if Angelus could just act like Angel if he really wanted to, or like Spike too could have multiple personalities if he just tried hard enough. I think rather that the form that a metaphysical reality (the soul) will take in the body of any given vampire is determined by said vampire's deepest psychological makeup. It's unconscious, but it's there, and it shapes the way the Jossversian world works.

The power of expectations and preconceptions in the Jossverse cannot be overemphasized. In fact, it seems to be the strongest and most potent force in the 'verse. You need not look further than the citizens of Sunnydale for an example. They are living atop a hellmouth yet they see nothing, perceive nothing, until absolutely forced to. Vampires and demons are real, yet most of the world remains ignorant of this fact. They do not see what they don't want to see. It takes Joyce Summers two years to acknowledge that her daughter is a vampire Slayer, not because Joyce is stupid, but because willful ignorance is the most powerful force in the universe in which she lives.

This brings us to the meat of this essay: Visions and Seers.

I am assuming in this argument that all the Seers we have seen can be put into one category, that they have some basic, innate similarities, much like all potential Slayers have traits that make them susceptible to the magic that Calls a Slayer, or like certain people (Willow, for instance) have innate magical ability while others (Xander) have none. Similarly, there is some innate Seer quality, some psychic suggestibility, that is constant in all the Seers we have known. It is possible that this ability can be transferred or given by one Seer to another.

Who are the Seers? They include:

• Slayers, including the First Slayer, Buffy, Faith, and Dana


• Doyle


• Cordelia


• Drusilla


• three young Seers in "Blind Date


• Cassie

All Seers have the ability to pick up on certain kinds of events that cause strong mystical reverberations, from your everyday demon attack to the restoration of a soul, the turning of a particular mortal, large-scale spells, deaths, large-scale slaughter, and so forth. [Note to self: at some point, you will make a catalogue of all known visions in the Jossverse and correlate them.]

We might say, then that these mystical reverberations echo through the world all the time. Some events have stronger echoes than others, perhaps, but they all have power. They seem to be strongest closest to the time that the event in question occurs, which makes sense.

Every Seer filters this set of psychic impressions before even experiencing them consciously. Thus, every Seer has a filtering mechanism of some sort to prevent the sort of mental overload we saw in "To Shanshu in LA." To experience every possible vision at once would be a burden no human could bear, possibly no creature. So Seers filter. How? Well, to start with, temporally. All the Seers we know except Drusilla seem to filter out visions of events removed from them further than a few months, a few years at the outside. This makes sense as a defense mechanism; most Seers would be unable to handle events from the distant future or distant past and have no way to prevent them. Drusilla's vampirism and insanity combined probably allow her to see events much further removed (e.g., in "Darla," "I could be your mummy.")

Secondly, every Seer has a stronger ability to see events that concern her personally and that are geographically close to her. There are dozens of instances, but to name just a few: as a human, Drusilla seemed to sense when Angelus looked at her that something was going to happen. The look of fear on her face seems to imply that we are to understand that she has somehow sensed Angelus's intentions towards her. Another instance: Cordelia in "Epiphany" sees herself being attacked by the demons seconds before the attack takes place. Buffy sees her mother breaking a plate, something that should have no psychic reverberations whatsoever but that she picks up on anyhow.

(This vision of Buffy's deserves further exploration. It's from "Innocence," and she sees Drusilla killing Angel and her mother breaking a plate. That morning, her mom drops the plate, and she wigs. This is, I think, a good example of Buffy's visions: heavily symbolic bordering on vague, temporally close, concerning her personally, and insignificant events connected to significant ones.)
More than that, each Seer (subconsciously) chooses how she will experience the visions. Thus, Slayers experience the visions as dreams. Doyle and Cordelia experience them as surround-sound sense-o-rama complete with splitting headaches, while Dru seems incapable of distinguishing them from her thoughts and daydreams. (To return to "I could be your mummy," it seems clear from context that we the viewers, seeing this scene for the first time in "Darla," then watching Dru turn Darla in "The Trial," are supposed to understand that Dru Saw the turning a hundred years or so before it happened. Dru slips it into a string of babble. There's no, "Okay, I'm having a vision, you guys," and it's not a dream. But it's how Drusilla experiences the Sight.)

Most interesting to me, of course, is how the Seers who care to think philosophically at all choose to interpret their visions, especially Cordelia and Doyle with their whole PTB shtick. But before looking at them, let's look at a totally different Seer with a totally different worldview. Let's look at Cassie.

Cassie can see into the future. She sees small things and large things, and she tells people the truth about their lives with softness and certainty. She knows she's going to die and she knows there's nothing she can do about it. She has an angsty webpage and she writes bad poetry. She knows she's going to die and it doesn't bother her. Cassie knows she's going to die and she's one of the most serene characters we've ever met.

Cassie sees events that are close by and related to her and those around her. She sees her own death most strongly. She sees herself as psychic, but doesn't think there's much she can do about the things she sees.

Or look at Buffy. Buffy has experienced dreams since she was sixteen (movie canon) of other Slayers. Her dreams connect her with the Slayer line, making her part of a grand tradition with its own rites and lore. Her connection with Faith is stronger because of the dreams they share. She has a heavy, symbolic dream about the coming of her sister (a mystical event of huge proportions that doubtless resonates strongly) that she doesn't understand at the time. She ties to use her dreams to stop bad things from happening (see "Surprise" again) but she rarely can. Mostly, her dreams connect her to the mystical forces that surround her, demarcate her place in the universe.

Look at human Dru, who sees herself as a child of the devil because of the visions, who has been told by priests that she is evil because of her ability to see horror, who becomes somehow connected to the dark things she is capable of seeing. Drusilla sees herself quite differently from the way Cassie sees herself, the way her Watchers have told Buffy to see herself.

Now let's look at Doyle and Cordelia. I had to go look at a transcript of "Hero" to remind myself of what gvambat was talking about last night, but sure enough. As Doyle tells the story, his relative asked him for help in hiding from the Scourge, Doyle refused, his relatives died, and he got the visions for the first time. To quote, "When I got the visions for the first time, I thought I was having a stroke. I didn't know what the images meant. But I had to know if what they showed me was a dream - or real." The vision turns out to be real: it was a vision of his dead relatives. Whoops. Gvambat says that essentially, Doyle wished the visions on himself as punishment: for his demon side, for failing to help his relatives, you know the drill. Doyle is just simmering with guilt.

In "City Of," Doyle says of the visions and who sends them, "I’m honestly not sure. They don’t speak to me direct. I get - visions. Which is to say great splitting migraines that come with pictures. A name – a face. I don’t know who sends them. I just know whoever sends them is more powerful than me or you, and they're just trying to make things right."

This is the first interpretation we get of the visions, and it will be magnified and further illuminated without much further evidence for the existence of the Powers as the show continues. Doyle believes in Powers, in greater beings who want to set things right. He figures that it's his responsibility to relay his visions of people in distress to Angel, who will right the world's wrongs. It is Doyle who sets up the Seer-Champion dyad in the first place, but Cordelia will perpetuate it.

Doyle strikes me as an Irish-Catholic poet and mystic, making sense of the world through "Powers That Be" that function as a God-substitute in a world far more demonic and chaotic than the Christian one, but one still ultimately controlled by forces for good. Doyle's beliefs affect Cordelia far more than she realizes. Gvambat suggested that Cordelia in effect wishes the visions on herself after Doyle's death as a sort of atonement; perhaps she simply wants to continue his legacy, to continue the fight she perceives Angel and Doyle as fighting.

Because you see, as others have pointed out, Cordelia is a mystic too. Mysticism claims her when she leaves Sunnydale, in those formative years post-high school when she's looking for her place in the world. Sure, she falls in with some demon hunters, supernatural detectives – that's not the point. She's known people like that for three years now. The point is that their way of looking at the world will shape her own in ways she doesn't realize consciously until perhaps it's too late, if then. But Cordelia becomes a true believer. She believes that there are Seers in the world, and that they get visions from the Powers, and when she gets her first vision -- splitting headache, just like Doyle always said -- she takes his identity as her own.

Cordelia's mental filter shapes her experience of the visions the same way Doyle's did: she experiences them as intense, multi-sensory, and painful, and they are almost always of people in the LA region who could benefit from the help of Angel and his team. As with other Seers, her personal safety occasionally registers in her visions, although the ultimate birth of Jasmine seems not to until it is too late.

It is significant that Cordelia's filtering mechanism seems to be flimsy and easily breakable. I suspect this is for several reasons. First, Cordelia is already punishing herself with more visions than she should reasonably be able to handle, and she's experiencing them violently and painfully. In "Birthday" it's revealed that they are literally killing her; it's only her sheer strength of will that's kept her alive. Second, I strongly suspect that Cordelia wasn't born to be a Seer but that the ability was given to her by Doyle, and a copy of a thing is never quite as good as the original. Cordelia's visions are already unnatural (in the sense that she wasn't born with the ability), so it makes sense that malignant forces should be able to hijack her visions to their own purposes.

This happens twice canonically (everything else is speculation, regardless of how reasonable it seems.) In "Shanshu," the filtering mechanism is removed entirely; in "That Vision-Thing," it's unclear exactly what happens, but perhaps it is something like this: Fez-Boy (does he have a name?) taps into Cordelia's psychic receptors and implants certain particular sensations; Cordelia experiences them as she would a normal vision, except more powerful and more literal.

Of course, other significant visions need to be considered, particularly the vision in "Belonging" of Fred being sent to Pylea, which seems to have been arranged particularly. The best theory I have heard is that it was arranged by W+H to get the visions a) away from Cordelia and b) to a representative of their own in the form of Groo. However, it is also possible that Cordelia's already buggy filtering system took the presence of portals in the area as an indicator that she should know a little something about their history, and that's also entirely possible. Portals are powerful magic; the portal that allowed Lorne's cousin through was created by Fred, and Cordy's vision is of Fred. The complexities of "cause" in the Jossverse are entirely too great to get into here; we're just deconstructing the visions. So.

Ultimately, we decided, Cordelia is in control of her own visions. She chooses to experience them in a way that will allow her and Angel to help people, and that happens to mean blinding and deathly pain. The pain is probably the price she must pay for the vividness and temporal appropriateness of her visions. Her filtering mechanism is part of her unconscious, but it is a real and present entity in her psychological makeup. It chooses visions that help Cordelia fulfill the purpose she believes she is born to, and it also reinforces those beliefs.

Cordelia consistently attributes her visions the Powers. In "Billy," she suspects the reasons she sees a murder that was committed a week ago is because the Powers are punishing her for her role in releasing Billy from hell. I would interpret that same event as Cordy's subconscious guilt allowing the vision of the murder in; she thinks it's her fault and that she "deserves" to see it.

Cordelia has the power to control her visions, and she could stop them at any time. Any sufficiently strong-willed seer could; most seers aren't strong-willed because of their psychic suggestibility. Seers are mystics, they are sensitive, they are people with poetic souls. Cordelia, who received the visions by accident or malice, unnaturally and against her nature, could will them away. Not by wishing them away, I said, not by sitting around AI and saying, "Not going to have any visions today, nope, not me!" but by, oh say, going on vacation with her boyfriend for three weeks?

Once she receives a demon aspect, that part of her is capable of buffering the pain of the visions, of incorporating them into its makeup, changing forever the way Cordelia experiences visions. The aspect of the demon has its price, of course, but it will continue to withstand the pain of the visions for her until she enters that final coma. They (Jasmine-and-Cordy) still receive the visions throughout S4; Jasmine probably ignores most of them, but she does experience them.

The Powers That Be don't send Cordy visions. No one does. The visions are out there, and Cordelia receives them, choosing to view specific ones according to her deepest understanding of herself and her mission. Are there Powers out there? That's a question for another day (what fun!) But if they are out there, they certainly aren't nearly as active as even Cordelia and Doyle thought they were.

Since we've been kerfluffling about authorial intent, you probably want to know if I think that's what Joss and the Writers intended this interpretation (which is a very, very far cry from canon as it is presented.) I honestly don't know, and I kind of doubt that they thought it through in this much depth. Joss is not a philosopher, and I wouldn't want him to be. He's a writer and a director and an artist of some magnitude, but a deep thinker he need not be. That's what I'm here for. (Me and, you know, the rest of fandom.) However, I do think that my reading is consistent with Joss's personal philosophy as near as I can discern. It's existentialist, and it's personalistic, and it's agnostic. It also puts Cordelia's power back into her own hands, although she immediately surrenders that power the minute she becomes a devotee of the unseen Powers. That, too, is consistent with Jossian thought.

Further questions for consideration:
-Is Angel really a fatalistic show? It reads like that on first glance, especially as a counterpoint to Buffy's sense of personal responsibility and empowerment, but is it really? I get the sense that it is a show about tragic characters making tragic decisions based on their most firmly held moral viewpoints, but the responsibility is ultimately theirs. They choose their fate not in the day-to-day way that Buffy does, but on a broader scale, when they pick their battles, choose their friends, forgive or fail to forgive their enemies.
-Jasmine. (Jasmine is always a question for further consideration!)
-I continue to read the Jossverse as essentially, totally, and necessarily agnostic on the subject of ultimate Truth, the existence of Gods, the possibility of heaven, and the meaning of life. Will discuss this further in the future.
-Also to consider more deeply: the power of the mind in the Jossverse and the Whedonverse as a whole. Consider also River (and Early) and whether in fact the power of perception is the strongest magic in all of Joss's realities.

Comments

[karendreamer.livejournal.com]

Wow, it is obvious so much thought went into this. Very balanced and detailed. Really interesting and thought provoking.

If your thesis reads as good as this, you will rock.

[wisdomeagle]

Aww, thank you. :) Hope you have good thoughts.

*glares at thesis*

[scrollgirl.livejournal.com]

Link to mutant_allies! You really should! I have no thoughts to share right now besides that, but will try to re-read this on the weekend when I have time to comment :)

[wisdomeagle]

Joined comm. Linked. Joy! Now more "No Limits." I wish I had a Cordy icon.

[scrollgirl.livejournal.com]

buffy_icons. Seriously, some fantastic stuff there. I haven't visited in a while, but I got most of my early Jossverse icons from there. I don't have the comm friended because it's updated so often and it'd totally clog my flist. You don't have to join to snag pretty icons! Just follow the rules!

(I'm being such the community pimp today, aren't I? Hee!)

[dawnie1970.livejournal.com]

Wow! This is so great! Thanks for the wonderful read! Excellent research and thought process! *hugs*

[zulu]

*hugs the meta*

[kattahj.livejournal.com]

This was a really interesting interpretation. I'm not sure I believe in it, but it definitely raises some great possibilities.

I have jokingly argued at times that visions are an STD and that Doyle had probably been boffing someone about the time Lucas showed up. But your idea is better.