Here There Be Monsters -- Sanctuary and the Queen of the Dead
Some thoughts about Sanctuary, with potential spoilers through mid season three, with many thanks to penknife, dbalthasar and tricksterquinn for their thoughtful contributions.
Here there be monsters. Enter the strange, frightening, and sometimes wonderous world of Sanctuary. Sanctuary is, first and foremost, a story about the underworld, and about the creatures that live within it, in a dark world beneath the surface of our own. Sometimes they literally live beneath, in subway tunnels or underground monster pens, and sometimes they seem to walk in the daylight but actually live in a parallel community that shares our sun but not our social institutions, an apt analogy for many kinds of difference that render people outlaws or denizens of a figurative underworld.
Over this strange underworld reigns the Queen of the Dead, Helen Magnus. Helen is a unique figure in modern media. Not only is she a queen, a female lead character over forty who has full agency in her own life and also has significant real world power, but she fully embodies the archetype of Persephone Descended, one of the most powerful female archetypes. Persephone Descended is the queen of dead, or as John Druitt might say, the queen of the damned, the ageless and beautiful ruler of the underworld whose justice and mercy are sought by those who enter into her realm, and whose mystery stands at the heart of all that surrounds her. In ancient times, the rites of Persephone were the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and descent to her realm is the heart of initiatory rites in many traditions.
That Helen is Persephone Descended becomes clear in the first episode of Sanctuary, Sanctuary for All, when Will, the male lead, first meets her. Will is an unusual archetype for the male lead -- the priest. It's very rare for the priest character to be front and center, rather than a supporting character, but it is the priest's journey that is Will's main plotline. Will is a psychologist. More specifically, he's a criminal psychologist, a profiler. His job is to metaphorically go into the underworld, to get into the minds of the worst criminals, sociopaths and serial killers, rapists and mass murderers. His job is to understand them, to virtually inhabit the dark places. And yet he's reached a plateau in his career. He can go no further as a guide without descending himself.
One night, a mysterious woman approaches him and offers to show him "things he cannot imagine." Initially hesitant, Will calls Helen back and she comes to get him in her big black car, passing through literal gates into the otherworld of the Sanctuary. There he is escorted through an underground maze replete with monsters and marvelous creatures, a world that is eerily beautiful and entirely strange, cut off from daylight and yet breathtakingly beautiful. He's escorted to the heart of the maze, Helen's office, which is "rich with the bounty of Hades' realm," filled with color and texture, antiques and artwork and blooming flowers. She offers him a job -- to come and work for her in the heart of the maze, to become a herald and a guide. This, of course, is the path of the initiate. The priest goes into the darkness and comes before Persephone's throne.
Will hesitates. If he does this, will he become lost to the realms above? Will he still be able to walk in the sun and have the trappings of ordinary life? Ultimately in the episode, he decides that he will because of the good that he can do for others, as well as the fulfillment he can personally know by becoming most fully the thing he is, a priest. He takes the job, and he and the viewer enter this world.
Over the course of the next seasons, Will's path continues to be explicit, including actually promising himself to the underworld goddess Kali in the episode of that name, taking on the lifelong promise of being one of her heralds, one of her mortal beloveds. Will makes this promise unreservedly, with priestly devotion, including a literal death and rebirth at her hands as she restarts his heart.
Interestingly enough Will, the priest, is the only major male character in the series who is not a monster. Sanctuary is, in part, inspired by Victorian science fiction and fantasy, including Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Pellucidar, and many others. One of the oft-analyzed facets of this body of literature is its sexual content -- men are monsters, and sex is corrupting. Sex is sublimated into the vampire's bite, into blood and into death, and women who are corrupted by men, and by sexual desire, become monsters themselves or are destroyed. Even good men can be trapped into this and risk becoming monsters themselves, like the young man in She, who is desired as consort by an immortal and powerful woman. Sex is death, blood is sexual, and desire is corruption.
In Sanctuary, men are indeed monsters, often quite literally. The first man Will meets is Bigfoot, who in the first episode is acting as Helen's butler. Beneath his monstrous appearance is a heart of gold, but at first Will is frightened by what appears to be a horrible creature going about Helen's house with a tea tray. Of course Helen is completely comfortable -- he is an old friend, and his appearance holds no horrors for her.
This is key. Helen is the Queen of the Damned. The creatures do not frighten her, not even the worst of them. She likes the strange and the twisted, is fascinated by the abnormal and the weird, loves the deadly and dangerous. She is just as much a denizen of the underworld as they are, for all that she appears beautiful rather than ugly, for all that she speaks "in the tongues of men." Death's Queen is accessible in a way many of the people of her realm are not, but she is not safe. She is a being of immense power, and can be as capricious and deadly as the rest.
It's not until the late first season episode Requiem that Will sees Helen's true shape when a parasitic entity affects her mind and releases her inhibitions. She's sharp and clever, singleminded and utterly self contained, with a bitter streak of anger that renders her cruel. Of course the entity is defeated and Helen restored to herself, to her daylight self that keeps this dark side under control. But it's there. Helen unplugged is a scary, scary thing -- the skeletal face of Death's Queen beneath Persephone's beauty. She is more than a match for any monsters she faces.
And here there be monsters. In the first episodes we also meet John Druitt, Helen's former fiancé and antagonist of the last century, a "tall, bald and gruesome" abnormal who is best known to history as Jack the Ripper. He's not a stage vampire, a handsome metaphor for defloration. He kills women for fun, as we see in his first appearance. Helen treats him with all due caution, and in the end of the episode gets the better of him, banishing him from her realm.
Not for good, of course. John becomes a major recurring character, and we learn more about their ancient history. They were first together in Victorian England, when she was a golden haired and trusting young woman and he an ardent and loyal young man, before they, with three of their friends, deliberately altered themselves forever, willingly and knowingly entering the underworld by injecting themselves with vampire blood. Like initiates, they first joined a group of like minded people "dedicated to exploring the boundaries of the physical world", and then deliberately stepped into the darkness forever, crossing borders that cannot be recrossed. This, of course, is one of the hallmarks both of initiation and of sexual awakening. Experiences cannot be erased. Innocence cannot be regained.
But, unlike the heroines of Victorian literature, Helen does not want to regain innocence or feel that she's lost something. What she has gained is wisdom and power, the treasures of Hades' realm. She has not become a victim but rather a queen. John was her initiator in several senses. Firstly, they were engaged and they conceived a child together, which is a fairly strong indicator of sexual intimacy, something which in itself would have marked her beyond the pale as a young unmarried woman of good family in the era. Secondly, his later misdeeds, the murders he committed and her discovery of that, scarred her and shook her faith to the core. As she says to him in an early episode, "you destroyed my heart." Persephone was indeed abducted in a metaphorical sense -- the golden haired girl went into the dark where she was ruined and left alone, left in the underworld by a man guilty of horrible crimes.
Yet he is by no means an unsympathetic figure. In the century in which Helen has become the Queen of the Dead he has become Hades. He says in an early episode "I am Death," which of course he is. In the oldest stories, Death is the consort of the Queen of the Underworld, Ereshkigal who Dwells Beneath. As the series progresses, John acts more and more as her consort. More than once he comes to her aid and physically protects her. Over and over he serves her goals and helps her against all comers, including physically transporting her (Hades' chariot?) to wherever she needs to go, and killing those at her word who have kidnapped and tortured their daughter. Near the end of second season it's revealed that he too has a parasitic creature that has taken up residence in his body, and that has pushed his worst nature to the fore for a century. Neither of them have any idea how to excise it from him, but it underscores their alikeness. He is not more monstrous than any other man, or indeed more monstrous than Helen. Both of them have the same capability for cruelty at the core, but different things have happened to them, a refreshing leap from the trope that women are innately kind and nonviolent, while men are monsters waiting to be unleashed!
John unleashed is indeed a dangerous thing, but there is never any sense that Helen truly fears him. Respects him, yes, and is properly wary of what he may do. But she is never his victim, even when in a fit of entity induced psychosis he attempts to kill her. Or perhaps to goad her into killing him? Which she does without compunction, tazeing him into cardiac arrest.
And then promptly restores him. Again, the Queen of the Dead gives literal rebirth, temporarily without the entity which he later invites back into his own body when it becomes clear that unrestrained by his intellect and judgment it will kill far more people than he ever has. By mid third season, which is where we are currently, John has very much taken up the role of consort. He and Helen stand back to back, literally explore dark underground hidden chambers together, and are united in purpose. Whether their relationship is once again becoming sexual is open to interpretation, but it is clearly intimate as at one point she lies down beside him sleeping with his arms around her.
However, John is not the only monster or man in Helen's life. Persephone Descended is also a goddess of sex and initiation, and one of the refreshing things about Sanctuary is that rather than a central male character surrounded by attractive females, the opposite is true. Helen has a bevy of interesting exes and would be lovers, including the Dionysian Nikola.
Nikola is one of the original group of friends who experimented with the vampire blood, and it did indeed render him a vampire. Like John, he is not safe. In the first episode in which he appears he kills a number of people in cold blood, and apparently tries to kill Helen, who doesn't hold it against him the next time she sees him, and instead treats him with affection and warmth. He's a genius with amazing and frightening powers, a quick and biting wit, and about seven tons of snark leavened with real dedication and loyalty to his friends when the chips are down. He also is characterized by a love of fine wine, which is suitably Dionysian. Wine is the blood of the vine, a strong metaphor for blood and life in many cultures, as well as the madness that drunkenness may bring. Nikola too is subject to madness. As he tells Helen in his first episode, "I swore a century ago not to feed on humans and I mean to keep that oath." But he is definitely subject to vampiric berserker rage, and when out of control is simply deadly. Not that Helen is afraid of him. She reacts to his vampiric rages with (usually) amused rebukes. When at one point Will objects to helping Nikola on the grounds that he always has an agenda, Helen replies, "That's what's so interesting about him!" with an insouciant smile.
Late in second season he lost his vampiric powers, replaced by the lesser power of magnetism, and he has spent most of third season coming and going from the Sanctuary. Dionysus enters and exits the underworld as he pleases, coming and going with his own brand of mystery. Nikola explicitly wants to be Helen's lover, and there is the implication that at some point in the past he has been, though he's not at the present. He is, however, her friend, and John's as well. In true Dionysian form, Nikola is very handsome. He does not appear monstrous unless provoked into showing his dark side.
There are other monster men as well, including this season's antagonist, Adam, a schizophrenic with literal Jekyll and Hyde sides, who traps Helen and beats her severely in what is probably the most harrowing sequence so far on the show. And yet she is angry rather than afraid. She does not beg or plead or act like his victim. She fights him. And when outclassed and injured uses her wiles to sweet talk him into letting his guard down so that she can escape. Helen always uses every weapon in her arsenal -- without apology. The Queen of the Damned is not the least bit sorry.
Sanctuary is replete with underworld descents. Early in season two, after tragedy has struck very close to home for Helen, there is an episode which is entirely a psychodrama in Helen's mind, a virtual apocalyptic world she's trapped in which mirrors her psyche. It's yet another underworld descent -- this time the descent of Inanna, in which the goddess is stripped and thrown into the dark and must face the creatures of the darkness without her raiment or her marks of office. And then is reborn. The episode ends with rebirth, with Helen standing in the light in her own office, returned and restored.
The current plotline is an underworld descent as well, an expedition into a mysterious underground world that is literally beneath our feet and filled with strange creatures. It too is ruled by a queen, but it is rotten, the Unseelie Court to Helen's Seelie Court. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, as all the major cast are now facing a literal death, with only the Consort and Dionysus still in play. Of course rebirth is the next step, but I am fascinated with how these very old and strong stories will be retold.
Helen Magnus is a character unlike any other on television -- Persephone Descended, one of the strongest female archetypes secure in her own power and a complete human being emotionally, intellectually and physically. In our society, we have very few queens, very few mature women over forty who are central to our stories and to their own, and who have complete agency with all that entails, dark and bright. Helen walks among monsters without fear. She deals with men without either dismissing aggression and sexuality or without seeing herself as a victim. Helen knows that the scariest monster in the underworld is the Queen of the Dead herself. And she's good with that.
Here there be monsters. Enter the strange, frightening, and sometimes wonderous world of Sanctuary. Sanctuary is, first and foremost, a story about the underworld, and about the creatures that live within it, in a dark world beneath the surface of our own. Sometimes they literally live beneath, in subway tunnels or underground monster pens, and sometimes they seem to walk in the daylight but actually live in a parallel community that shares our sun but not our social institutions, an apt analogy for many kinds of difference that render people outlaws or denizens of a figurative underworld.
Over this strange underworld reigns the Queen of the Dead, Helen Magnus. Helen is a unique figure in modern media. Not only is she a queen, a female lead character over forty who has full agency in her own life and also has significant real world power, but she fully embodies the archetype of Persephone Descended, one of the most powerful female archetypes. Persephone Descended is the queen of dead, or as John Druitt might say, the queen of the damned, the ageless and beautiful ruler of the underworld whose justice and mercy are sought by those who enter into her realm, and whose mystery stands at the heart of all that surrounds her. In ancient times, the rites of Persephone were the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and descent to her realm is the heart of initiatory rites in many traditions.
That Helen is Persephone Descended becomes clear in the first episode of Sanctuary, Sanctuary for All, when Will, the male lead, first meets her. Will is an unusual archetype for the male lead -- the priest. It's very rare for the priest character to be front and center, rather than a supporting character, but it is the priest's journey that is Will's main plotline. Will is a psychologist. More specifically, he's a criminal psychologist, a profiler. His job is to metaphorically go into the underworld, to get into the minds of the worst criminals, sociopaths and serial killers, rapists and mass murderers. His job is to understand them, to virtually inhabit the dark places. And yet he's reached a plateau in his career. He can go no further as a guide without descending himself.
One night, a mysterious woman approaches him and offers to show him "things he cannot imagine." Initially hesitant, Will calls Helen back and she comes to get him in her big black car, passing through literal gates into the otherworld of the Sanctuary. There he is escorted through an underground maze replete with monsters and marvelous creatures, a world that is eerily beautiful and entirely strange, cut off from daylight and yet breathtakingly beautiful. He's escorted to the heart of the maze, Helen's office, which is "rich with the bounty of Hades' realm," filled with color and texture, antiques and artwork and blooming flowers. She offers him a job -- to come and work for her in the heart of the maze, to become a herald and a guide. This, of course, is the path of the initiate. The priest goes into the darkness and comes before Persephone's throne.
Will hesitates. If he does this, will he become lost to the realms above? Will he still be able to walk in the sun and have the trappings of ordinary life? Ultimately in the episode, he decides that he will because of the good that he can do for others, as well as the fulfillment he can personally know by becoming most fully the thing he is, a priest. He takes the job, and he and the viewer enter this world.
Over the course of the next seasons, Will's path continues to be explicit, including actually promising himself to the underworld goddess Kali in the episode of that name, taking on the lifelong promise of being one of her heralds, one of her mortal beloveds. Will makes this promise unreservedly, with priestly devotion, including a literal death and rebirth at her hands as she restarts his heart.
Interestingly enough Will, the priest, is the only major male character in the series who is not a monster. Sanctuary is, in part, inspired by Victorian science fiction and fantasy, including Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Pellucidar, and many others. One of the oft-analyzed facets of this body of literature is its sexual content -- men are monsters, and sex is corrupting. Sex is sublimated into the vampire's bite, into blood and into death, and women who are corrupted by men, and by sexual desire, become monsters themselves or are destroyed. Even good men can be trapped into this and risk becoming monsters themselves, like the young man in She, who is desired as consort by an immortal and powerful woman. Sex is death, blood is sexual, and desire is corruption.
In Sanctuary, men are indeed monsters, often quite literally. The first man Will meets is Bigfoot, who in the first episode is acting as Helen's butler. Beneath his monstrous appearance is a heart of gold, but at first Will is frightened by what appears to be a horrible creature going about Helen's house with a tea tray. Of course Helen is completely comfortable -- he is an old friend, and his appearance holds no horrors for her.
This is key. Helen is the Queen of the Damned. The creatures do not frighten her, not even the worst of them. She likes the strange and the twisted, is fascinated by the abnormal and the weird, loves the deadly and dangerous. She is just as much a denizen of the underworld as they are, for all that she appears beautiful rather than ugly, for all that she speaks "in the tongues of men." Death's Queen is accessible in a way many of the people of her realm are not, but she is not safe. She is a being of immense power, and can be as capricious and deadly as the rest.
It's not until the late first season episode Requiem that Will sees Helen's true shape when a parasitic entity affects her mind and releases her inhibitions. She's sharp and clever, singleminded and utterly self contained, with a bitter streak of anger that renders her cruel. Of course the entity is defeated and Helen restored to herself, to her daylight self that keeps this dark side under control. But it's there. Helen unplugged is a scary, scary thing -- the skeletal face of Death's Queen beneath Persephone's beauty. She is more than a match for any monsters she faces.
And here there be monsters. In the first episodes we also meet John Druitt, Helen's former fiancé and antagonist of the last century, a "tall, bald and gruesome" abnormal who is best known to history as Jack the Ripper. He's not a stage vampire, a handsome metaphor for defloration. He kills women for fun, as we see in his first appearance. Helen treats him with all due caution, and in the end of the episode gets the better of him, banishing him from her realm.
Not for good, of course. John becomes a major recurring character, and we learn more about their ancient history. They were first together in Victorian England, when she was a golden haired and trusting young woman and he an ardent and loyal young man, before they, with three of their friends, deliberately altered themselves forever, willingly and knowingly entering the underworld by injecting themselves with vampire blood. Like initiates, they first joined a group of like minded people "dedicated to exploring the boundaries of the physical world", and then deliberately stepped into the darkness forever, crossing borders that cannot be recrossed. This, of course, is one of the hallmarks both of initiation and of sexual awakening. Experiences cannot be erased. Innocence cannot be regained.
But, unlike the heroines of Victorian literature, Helen does not want to regain innocence or feel that she's lost something. What she has gained is wisdom and power, the treasures of Hades' realm. She has not become a victim but rather a queen. John was her initiator in several senses. Firstly, they were engaged and they conceived a child together, which is a fairly strong indicator of sexual intimacy, something which in itself would have marked her beyond the pale as a young unmarried woman of good family in the era. Secondly, his later misdeeds, the murders he committed and her discovery of that, scarred her and shook her faith to the core. As she says to him in an early episode, "you destroyed my heart." Persephone was indeed abducted in a metaphorical sense -- the golden haired girl went into the dark where she was ruined and left alone, left in the underworld by a man guilty of horrible crimes.
Yet he is by no means an unsympathetic figure. In the century in which Helen has become the Queen of the Dead he has become Hades. He says in an early episode "I am Death," which of course he is. In the oldest stories, Death is the consort of the Queen of the Underworld, Ereshkigal who Dwells Beneath. As the series progresses, John acts more and more as her consort. More than once he comes to her aid and physically protects her. Over and over he serves her goals and helps her against all comers, including physically transporting her (Hades' chariot?) to wherever she needs to go, and killing those at her word who have kidnapped and tortured their daughter. Near the end of second season it's revealed that he too has a parasitic creature that has taken up residence in his body, and that has pushed his worst nature to the fore for a century. Neither of them have any idea how to excise it from him, but it underscores their alikeness. He is not more monstrous than any other man, or indeed more monstrous than Helen. Both of them have the same capability for cruelty at the core, but different things have happened to them, a refreshing leap from the trope that women are innately kind and nonviolent, while men are monsters waiting to be unleashed!
John unleashed is indeed a dangerous thing, but there is never any sense that Helen truly fears him. Respects him, yes, and is properly wary of what he may do. But she is never his victim, even when in a fit of entity induced psychosis he attempts to kill her. Or perhaps to goad her into killing him? Which she does without compunction, tazeing him into cardiac arrest.
And then promptly restores him. Again, the Queen of the Dead gives literal rebirth, temporarily without the entity which he later invites back into his own body when it becomes clear that unrestrained by his intellect and judgment it will kill far more people than he ever has. By mid third season, which is where we are currently, John has very much taken up the role of consort. He and Helen stand back to back, literally explore dark underground hidden chambers together, and are united in purpose. Whether their relationship is once again becoming sexual is open to interpretation, but it is clearly intimate as at one point she lies down beside him sleeping with his arms around her.
However, John is not the only monster or man in Helen's life. Persephone Descended is also a goddess of sex and initiation, and one of the refreshing things about Sanctuary is that rather than a central male character surrounded by attractive females, the opposite is true. Helen has a bevy of interesting exes and would be lovers, including the Dionysian Nikola.
Nikola is one of the original group of friends who experimented with the vampire blood, and it did indeed render him a vampire. Like John, he is not safe. In the first episode in which he appears he kills a number of people in cold blood, and apparently tries to kill Helen, who doesn't hold it against him the next time she sees him, and instead treats him with affection and warmth. He's a genius with amazing and frightening powers, a quick and biting wit, and about seven tons of snark leavened with real dedication and loyalty to his friends when the chips are down. He also is characterized by a love of fine wine, which is suitably Dionysian. Wine is the blood of the vine, a strong metaphor for blood and life in many cultures, as well as the madness that drunkenness may bring. Nikola too is subject to madness. As he tells Helen in his first episode, "I swore a century ago not to feed on humans and I mean to keep that oath." But he is definitely subject to vampiric berserker rage, and when out of control is simply deadly. Not that Helen is afraid of him. She reacts to his vampiric rages with (usually) amused rebukes. When at one point Will objects to helping Nikola on the grounds that he always has an agenda, Helen replies, "That's what's so interesting about him!" with an insouciant smile.
Late in second season he lost his vampiric powers, replaced by the lesser power of magnetism, and he has spent most of third season coming and going from the Sanctuary. Dionysus enters and exits the underworld as he pleases, coming and going with his own brand of mystery. Nikola explicitly wants to be Helen's lover, and there is the implication that at some point in the past he has been, though he's not at the present. He is, however, her friend, and John's as well. In true Dionysian form, Nikola is very handsome. He does not appear monstrous unless provoked into showing his dark side.
There are other monster men as well, including this season's antagonist, Adam, a schizophrenic with literal Jekyll and Hyde sides, who traps Helen and beats her severely in what is probably the most harrowing sequence so far on the show. And yet she is angry rather than afraid. She does not beg or plead or act like his victim. She fights him. And when outclassed and injured uses her wiles to sweet talk him into letting his guard down so that she can escape. Helen always uses every weapon in her arsenal -- without apology. The Queen of the Damned is not the least bit sorry.
Sanctuary is replete with underworld descents. Early in season two, after tragedy has struck very close to home for Helen, there is an episode which is entirely a psychodrama in Helen's mind, a virtual apocalyptic world she's trapped in which mirrors her psyche. It's yet another underworld descent -- this time the descent of Inanna, in which the goddess is stripped and thrown into the dark and must face the creatures of the darkness without her raiment or her marks of office. And then is reborn. The episode ends with rebirth, with Helen standing in the light in her own office, returned and restored.
The current plotline is an underworld descent as well, an expedition into a mysterious underground world that is literally beneath our feet and filled with strange creatures. It too is ruled by a queen, but it is rotten, the Unseelie Court to Helen's Seelie Court. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, as all the major cast are now facing a literal death, with only the Consort and Dionysus still in play. Of course rebirth is the next step, but I am fascinated with how these very old and strong stories will be retold.
Helen Magnus is a character unlike any other on television -- Persephone Descended, one of the strongest female archetypes secure in her own power and a complete human being emotionally, intellectually and physically. In our society, we have very few queens, very few mature women over forty who are central to our stories and to their own, and who have complete agency with all that entails, dark and bright. Helen walks among monsters without fear. She deals with men without either dismissing aggression and sexuality or without seeing herself as a victim. Helen knows that the scariest monster in the underworld is the Queen of the Dead herself. And she's good with that.