SHADOWHUNTERS AND DOWNWORLDERS

Exile and the Mark of Cain


In City of Glass, the mundane who was barely worth acknowledging finds himself at the center of the Mortal War, with multiple sides jockeying for the advantage that he, Simon the Daylighter, would bring them. That status makes him uniquely desirable but also uniquely vulnerable, so to protect him Clary Marks him with a rune she has seen in her vision.

Multiple characters discuss the possibility that Cain, the first child born on earth, became the bearer of the first Mark because he murdered his brother, Abel. In City of Ashes, Magnus even quotes from the Torah, “And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a Mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” But in order to understand the significance of Cain’s mark, it helps first to understand the circumstances in which it was bestowed upon him.

According to Genesis, Cain brings a sacrifice, and his brother, Abel, brings one that is superior. God rejects Cain’s sacrifice, and Cain’s countenance falls. He’s disappointed. Upset. God, seeing Cain’s reaction, states: “Surely if you improve yourself, you will be forgiven. But if you do not improve yourself, sin rests at the door. Its desire is toward you, yet you can conquer it” (Genesis 4:7).

But Cain does not listen to God. He doesn’t improve himself—far from it. He kills his brother out of envy and then lies about it to God. God, unsurprisingly, is not fooled: “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Therefore you are cursed more than the ground which opens wide its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall not open up its land to you. You shall become a vagrant and a wanderer” (Genesis 4:10–4:12).

The Jewish sage Tzor Hamor comments that now Cain “will know no more peace than his brother’s blood.” After hearing this, Cain begs for mercy: “Is my iniquity too great to be borne? To become a vagrant and a wanderer on earth, whoever meets me will kill me.” Cain is asking, in essence, whether committing murder merits that he should die too. In answer, God grants Cain mercy. He bestows upon him the Mark, saying, “Whoever slays Cain before seven generations will be punished” (Genesis 4:15).

Simon wonders, in City of Fallen Angels, why he’s saddled with this burden: “He wasn’t Cain, who had killed his brother, but the curse believed he was.” He thinks too, “That’s part of the curse, isn’t it? ‘A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be.’” And I wondered why Simon still considers the Mark of Cain a “curse” when he did nothing to deserve it. After reading these passages in Genesis, though, I think I get it: Simon isn’t like Cain because he killed his brother. He’s like Cain because he wants to kill his brother—his metaphorical one, anyway. Part of Simon wants to drink human blood, to kill his brothers and sisters in humanity.

And part of him always will. “Sin rests at the door,” God says to Cain. The Hebrew word for sin is chet, and it appears in reference to a slingshot that has missed its target. The Hebrew word for repentance is teshuva, which means, literally, “to return.” In explaining God’s response to Cain’s inadequate sacrifice, the Jewish sage Sforno explains: “If you succumb to your evil inclination then punishment and evil will be as ever present as if they lived in your doorway.”3

What’s an evil inclination, you ask? The Jewish idea of the Yetzer Hara (evil inclination) exists in opposition to the Yetzer HaTov (positive inclination). Through no fault of his own, from the moment Simon was transformed into a vampire, he is tempted, as Cain was, to spill human blood—to kill those who were once his brothers and sisters in humanity. This Yetzer Hara, Simon’s nonhuman, evil inclination, is in constant opposition to his moral aims: his Yetzer HaTov, his positive inclination. It tempts him to “miss” his target, to stray from his beliefs and identity as a Jew and as a former human. In an argument with werewolf (and potential love interest) Maia Roberts, she calls him a monster, and “Some part of him wanted to fight her, to wrestle her down and puncture her skin with his teeth, to gulp her hot blood. The rest of him felt as if it were screaming” (City of Ashes).

It is right after he muses about the nature of his curse at the beginning of City of Fallen Angels that Simon, who has so far managed to stave off his thirst, his inclination to kill, succumbs to temptation and attacks Maureen. Before this, before Simon sins and “misses” his target in such a major, unalterable way, he arguably doesn’t deserve to be a fugitive and a wanderer—the “curse” of the Mark of Cain, as he views it. So before he attacks Maureen, what has Simon done to warrant the terrible, damning mercy of the Mark? Is it an injustice?

I don’t think it is. I think—even though Simon doesn’t yet—that the Mark itself isn’t his curse; the Mark isn’t what makes him a fugitive, a wanderer in exile. So what does?

His refusal to assimilate.





Cultural Assimilation


There are benefits to being a vampire in the Shadowhunters’ world. Immortality. Beauty. Strength. Community.

But Simon rejects that community. He rejects vampire ideals by not relishing his vampire status. He consumes blood to stay alive—but only animal blood. He tries to hide the truth from his mother—because he is ashamed and in denial about what he has become. And perhaps most tellingly, Simon resists interacting with other vampires. He doesn’t live with them. He doesn’t feed with them. He doesn’t befriend them. He behaves more like vampirism is a disease he has, rather than something that defines who and what he is. He does not see himself as being one of them.

But if he chose to, he could be.

When Simon finally acknowledges and proves to his mother that he is a vampire in City of Fallen Angels, she calls him a monster and casts him out of his own home. That devastates him, to the point that he actually asks Raphael if he can stay at the Hotel Dumont—with those who initially turned him into the thing that he hates. It’s a request of last resort—Simon literally feels like he has nowhere else to go, having been kicked out of his mundane home and being unable to enter the Institute with his friends. But as Raphael says, “In every way you do not accept what you really are, and as long as that is true, you are not welcome at the Dumont.” Camille Belcourt, another vampire, says to Simon, “You befriend Shadowhunters, but you can never be of them. You will always be other and outside.”

The primary authority figures in Simon’s new, adoptive culture—vampire culture—express disdain at his refusal to assimilate, to acculturate to their ways. Raphael takes the position that Simon is in denial about his true nature—that his humanity (his positive inclination, his Yetzer HaTov, of which Jewish identity is a significant part) is gone. Camille attempts a subtler, more subversive pressure; she doesn’t deny Simon’s humanity—she appeals to it. To his yearning to belong and to his feeling of loneliness with infinity stretching out before him. But even Camille then mocks his inability to speak the name of God, saying that if he were to simply abandon his beliefs, the name of God would lack meaning and he could speak it without a problem.

Simon ultimately rejects her and Raphael both. He is unwilling to abandon his Jewish identity, his humanity, his Yetzer HaTov, even though it means forgoing community. Even though it means remaining separate and Other from Downworlders and Shadowhunters still. In his staunch refusal to assimilate into vampire culture—despite the benefits it affords, despite how harmonious it would doubtless feel to not have to constantly struggle with his Yetzer Hara, or vampirism, if he were to truly identify and live as one of them—Simon embodies the commitment of the Jewish people to adhere to the core beliefs and traditions that have made us separate, distinct, and Other from every other culture for centuries and for millennia.

It is a fundamentally Jewish act.

Simon is a denizen of two worlds—the Downworlders’ and the mundane world. But while he can’t be a part of the mundane world anymore, he chooses not to belong in the Downworlders’. He is a wanderer not because of the Mark of Cain, not because he is “cursed.” He is in exile because he chooses to be. Simon would rather belong nowhere than belong with other vampires; he would rather be nothing than be the creature ruled by his Yetzer Hara, the animalistic instinct we glimpsed in that Jewish cemetery.

In City of Glass, Valentine says to Simon:

“I’ve seen you choke on the name of God, vampire…As for why you can stand in the sunlight—” he broke off and grinned. “You’re an anomaly, perhaps. A freak. But still a monster.”

Simon is a freak among freaks, Valentine says. A monster among monsters, who can’t even speak the name of God. But here is a character who was transformed into a predator that has to harm others to survive, and still he wrestles with his “evil inclination,” his instinct to kill and drink blood. The Jewish concept that sin rests always at the door is truer for no one than it is for Simon. But despite how he suffers in City of Fallen Angels—despite the fact that he is tested and fails (with Maureen), missing his target spectacularly—Simon refuses to accept that being a vampire is what he is. He doesn’t let his Downworlder blood define him and embraces belief instead, even though doing so cuts him off from those who most closely resemble what he has become.

Perhaps it’s the Jewish will to survive and endure, to persist unchanging in our beliefs despite the most horrific circumstances, that lends Simon the strength to survive and endure and hold onto his Jewish identity and humanity, to embrace his moral aims even as a new, dark, intruding part of him urges him to let go. But whatever the source, in fighting to retain that humanity, Simon proves that despite being a vampire, he isn’t a monster at all.

He proves that he’s a hero.