Crack theories

[tardar-sauce]

...

...Well.

Shiemi's mom is divorced.

Izumo's mom has every reason to keep her maiden name because of the family lineage.

IT MATTERS NOT.

[Bittergeuse]

So I just read tardar's fic about Satan (it's awesome btw) and found this:
 

''What kind of name was ''Rin''? Those bastards ignored the name Satan had picked out for him''

I think Satan would have named him Salpsan, the name of a demon that is referred to as the ''Son of Satan'' in the Gospel of Bartholomew, a missing text from the New Testament, although the information about this is ridiculously scarce or might be fake and google isn't helping:

"The only 'direct' son of the devil, or (Satan), ever identified in the New Testament apocrypha, especially by name. His only appearance is found in the Questions of Bartholomew." "IV:58 -- "58 And I (Satan) awaked my son Salpsan and took him to counsel how I might deceive the man on whose account I was cast out of the heavens.""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Bartholomew
http://libraryoftheancients.proboards.com/thread/24/demons

[tardar-sauce]

*spits*

....Awesome? It's awesome? That part's awesome? Not silly? You just made my day! Thank you so much. I am crying tears of joy. You are my favorite person. T^T

Anyway, earthforge and I were recently having a conversation about this, and he brought up that Satan wouldn't have given Rin a more well-known mythological name since he's only 15 and the lore's a lot older. Salpsan sounds obscure enough to fit and Satan's never actually had a son before. So it sounds like a good bet to me!

(Even if Katou doesn't use that name, I will haha.)

[Bittergeuse]

Hell yeah i loved it. It seems pretty in-character, although we haven't seen him so much, I believe Satan isn't actually all serious and ominous like he appears on most fanfics. You just gotta remember the first and only time he popped up: He's bat***t insane he thinks everything is funny (unless it pisses him off), but he's still very murderous, cunning and merciless, like, well...the Joker. So you probably don't have to worry about him being silly sometimes.

Well, back on topic, Salpsan is very a obscure name and I don't think it will appear in the manga at all, but it makes a wonderful headcanon because Katou uses demonology books and parts of the bible for the story's mythology.

[MetallicArcher]

I was thinking about the whole thing of the stone that "Takes Life and Gives Life".

We will know for certain next chapter but...

Lucy said he would revive Satan. the Illuminati went all the way to the Inari Shrine to get that stone. Invested all that money in making the place more tourist to attract people. The whole Tamamo being possessed was clearly planned by them.

While I still think Tamamo was the host that collapsed after Lucy finishes his speech to declare war to the True Cross. I also think the Illuminati wanted the fox. It was killing two birds with one shot.

Using Tamamo (a very powerful miko going by what Mike said) as a vessel for Lucy and getting the fox to use it on Satan's revival.

 From what I have seen, the general consent is that Satan intended to break the Kurikara's blade in chapter 1. We know, from what Mephisto explained to Rin about demons hearts that this would have killed him.

Now, borrowing a little from a previous theory I had written on how Gehena and Assiah used to be one and Gehena is actually Stan's prison that he was kicked out to when he went rebellious against the rest of the kami. ( http://www.theblueknight.host-ed.me/forum/index.php/topic,54.msg8084.html#msg8084 ).

"Assiah" is written with the kanji for "material/physical world". So you'd guess Gehenna is the immaterial/spiritual world. Though "Gehenna" is written with the kanji for "nothingness world".

Maybe Gehena is the "Nothingness World" because demons were deprived of a physical body when they were kicked in there. Hence why demons need vessels.

Now, going back to Shinto tradition. There is this thing of revering your dead ancestors so they become protector kamis for your family.

Rezou's words about burning an human's soul imply such thing exist in the Ao no Exorcist universe.

We have seen ghosts, which are considered demons that posses air particles and have the personality of a person who passed away.

What if, Satan is considered "dead" but not "dead-dead" as when you kill a demon with black flames but "dead" as in that he lost his physical body.

Then, Mephisto's deal with Satan (the one he sent Amaimon to negotiate back in chapter 2 if I remember correctly) would have been that he convinced Satan to train Rin so his demon heart is on a level comparable to that of a Demon King, thus ensuring his body will be able to host Satan's power.

Going back to Izumo, they needed her to be able to perform kamioroshi. I don't think his was so she could become Lucy's host (Lucy could simply force the possession) but so she can extract the Kyubi from the stone and use it to revive Satan within Rin's body.

Why they need to wait? Maybe they need certain conditions... like an special alignment of Gehena and Assiah...

Actually, the Illuminati wanting to use her to hurt Rin could be a good reason to refuse helping them.. *cough* shipping *cough * otp *cough*

[tardar-sauce]

On the part about Satan breaking Kurikara:

It is possible breaking it at that particular moment wouldn't have killed Rin. Satan was explicitly saying that he wanted to "free" Rin and help him reclaim his demonic nature. Not kill him. At the time, the sword was sheathed, meaning that Rin's heart was locked in Gehenna instead of in the sword. Only when Rin draws the sword does a gate to Gehenna open and the heart moves to the sword.

In other words:
Break the sword while drawn: Instant death.
Break the sword while sheathed: the binding on Rin's demon heart is destroyed and Rin becomes a normal half demon who can call on his demon heart at any time. His demon heart starts out in Gehenna though.

If Satan did mean to kill him, your theory makes perfect sense though. I am trying to make it make sense with some changes, because I like it.

Rin didn't seem to be instrumental to the Illuminati's Plans, but I only say that because Shima and Izumo didn't know about him, and Lucifer has made no real effort to kidnap him. (Shima may have been lying and knew the entire time, who knows?) Maybe it's just not time yet.

But the stone is definitely going to be used to revive Satan. Izumo will be used to host the fox and the fox will do it. That's not even close to crack, it's more like the logical conclusion from what we already know.

It also makes sense in that for a while Izumo was half-willing to help them. Now she's not. Because if your theory is true now she knows it would involve sacrificing Rin. Shipping/OTP or not, she has a crush on him and that's kind of obvious. Maybe she didn't know that he was the son of Satan, but she could have known that the Son of Satan existed and that his body would be used as Satan's vessel during the revival. (Same with Shima.)

The Illuminati could be waiting a year for Rin to mature as a host. Then they'd break the Kurikara. Here's my theory: instead of killing him, the Illuminati wants to be merciful and do it while the sword is sheathed, and maybe that would sever the connection between Rin's human body and his demon heart, and then Satan takes the human body for himself. The reason why they don't inform Rin is because Rin & Co. would have a lot of time to prepare a counter-plan.

After the revival succeeds. Rin becomes the same as another demon. Whatever happens to other demons in the new merged universe will happen to him too. He'd become a "kami" like the foxes right?

All of the non-kami (kin) demons were created by Satan. He is a god, so he could have created the 8 kings as lesser beings using clay, or a part of his body, or something else. He uses the skin of these 8 kings to go on and create all species of demon under his domain. Anyway, maybe after the worlds merge the "kin" demons would still need bodies too. And possession would be forced on a whole lotta things and it would kill a good portion of living things in Assiah. Or the host beings would just merge with the demon possessing them. It is possible that after the merging, demons/spirits could exist in Assiah as non-material spirits. They could float around, not really needing a body.

Let me add three of my crack theories on top of this:

1. Satan has the ability to strengthen the powers of any demon (as well as CHANGE their powers and inspire absolute loyalty in them). He needs to increase the power of the nine-tailed fox several-hundred-fold -and make a couple of tweaks to it- before she can merge Gehenna and Assiah together. He would come to Assiah first, alone, and then he'd do his thing on Izumo and the Fox. This is why he'd still need Rin's body even if demons won't need vessels in the new, merged world.

As to why this would make the world truly peaceful, well:

2. Satan's job, as the God of Gehenna, is to inspire loyalty and morality (or at least a very-alien-to-us demon brand of it) in his subjects, so Gehenna doesn't become more of a cesspool of death than it already is. Lucifer might also be depending on the power of human faith to mediate Satan and make him less batshit insane.

This can happen, because:

3. Humans have a special form of power that turns their faith (and perhaps imagination, by extension) into a magic that affects spirits and Gehenna in whatever way the user wants. This is why Arias and magic circles work, even though the texts that they are using are bastardizations of the original. The condition is that enough people must know of the faith and acknowledge it. So the Japanese Bible and the Sutras are powered by the fact that they're using a well known religion, and from the fact text is read/believed by a lot of people. Also, rather than the kamis imprisoning Satan, it was both the kamis and the humans working together who imprisoned him.

[MetallicArcher]

Lucifer did say Rin would have to take sides.

I guess Rin taking his time to think about sides imply he won't necessarily die if he helps Lucy. Because if helping Lucy equals dying I don't think he has much to think about.

An alternative:

Lucy said the original state is nothingness.

What if it's not so much about demons loosing their bodies but about humans and everything that now forms Assiah gaining them. In the Shinto foundation myth, the first gods come from chaos without shape then, Izanagi and Izanami create the land by removing the sea to form islands.

Following the this idea, maybe the kamis didn't kick the rebellious out and took their bodies away but rather "removed" the "nothingness" to extract the "material" and create Assiah.

[tardar-sauce]

Following the this idea, maybe the kamis didn't kick the rebellious out and took their bodies away but rather "removed" the "nothingness" to extract the "material" and create Assiah.

Sure. But how would that change things?

[MetallicArcher]

It's kind of only make thing smore complicated:

So, they "revive Satan" into Rin's body. Satan finishes the Gehena Gate and it's used to "sink" the "material" into the "nothingness" again.

[tardar-sauce]

What happens to humanity?

[MetallicArcher]

We become souls!!!

Also, about this:

3. Humans have a special form of power that turns their faith (and perhaps imagination, by extension) into a magic that affect spirits and Gehenna in whatever way the user wants. The condition is that enough people must know of the faith and acknowlege it.

I imagine something like in the Monogatari Series.

There all supernatural things are called "oddities". Oddities exist because humans believe in them, what humans believe about oddities also determines their powers. If very few people believe in an oddity, then their set of ideas about it will define it even more.

[tardar-sauce]

I was going to go with something similar with that idea...(human faith creates demons and more faith/belief equals more power). But that doesn't really seem to be the case here. No one except the people who have seen Satan's blue flames know that he's blue-flamey. Angels/God would exist. And Kuro would have ceased to exist.

[MetallicArcher]

Yeah...Let's drop that one...

Or (there is always an Or)...

Belief isn't fundamental for the existence of a demon in the divided world, but it was in the original unified world. That's what's up with all the deal of "Illumination", Lucy needs a world of people who love daddy.

[tardar-sauce]

I'll help you flesh out your "Or". Why not?

So in other words, Gehenna and Assiah were be split at a time when animal deities existed, cat siths existed, all non-kin demons existed, and Satan existed. The 8 kings had not been born yet, as it was just Satan sealed away. And all demons now are descended from those original kamis or from Satan.

Ucchushma once said that angels/demons/myou-ou were names that humans invented for the same creatures. He could mean that these creatures were technically all demons, and that the split between worlds happened before the Abrahamic religions were a thing (Satan adopted the name from them because he liked it.) But he could also mean that humans did the naming as they created the new kamis, and the Judeochristian god is just another kami/high-class demon. So, for the record, would be any gods that predated the Judeochristan one (Egyptian/Mesopotamian/Mycenean&Greek&Roman....). While that would be cool, I don't see characters like that appearing in AnE.

Either way, all supernatural creatures "invented" by humans after that split never came to be. They either remained fiction, were descendents of kamis, or were beings from Gehenna and descended from Satan's children.

We DO know that this split predates Norse Mythology since "Loki" is really Samael. Wikipedia says Norse mythology originated around the 9th century AD, Judaism around the 10th-5th centuries BC, Mycenian around 15th century BC, and Mesopotamian/Egyptian way before those three. Anthropologists believe that "religion" in its most basic form (burials and the recognition of a soul) goes back to the Neanderthals. The first "religious" structure was the Gobleki Tepe, built around 10,000 years ago. No one knows what it was made for.

If humans were moved into Assiah, where did the entire geologic history of the planet come from? What, besides humans, was moved to the "Material world"? If "Gehenna" was the original world everything just falls apart regarding how the Assiah was created. (Our planet DOES have a very long history and evidence of said history, after all. And the history of our planet predates humanity.) WHY we don't see any evidence of demons, assuming the geological history of Assiah is actually Gehenna's geological history? If Assiah is the original world and Gehenna is the branch world, then it is a lot easier to say "the power of humanity and the kamis created a separate universe that they could throw Satan into. As a result, all spiritual things and any evidence of them were thrown into this separate universe."

You could ALSO say that the Assiah and Gehenna split happened looooooong before humans. During Earth's formation actually. Human souls, which are actually demons, were booted out of Gehenna by Satan for being generally annoying with their hive-mind reality warping powers. In the process, humans lost their ability to reality warp EXCEPT on creatures from Gehenna. These demons ingrained themselves into Neanderthals and suddenly "Homo Sapiens" exist. It stops being anything like a possession and starts being a different creature in Assiah after "Homo Sapiens" start breeding with the Neanderthals and each other.

Now. How that relates back into Lucifer's plan, I don't know! Maybe it's just better to drop the entire idea, and go back to "Assiah is the original. Kamis banish Satan to a dimensional prison."

[MetallicArcher]

That is brilliant, but sorry, I couldn't resist...

The first "religious" structure was the Gobleki Tepe, built around 10,000 years ago. No one knows what it was made for.

If humans were moved into Assiah, where did the entire geologic history of the planet come from? What, besides humans, was moved to the "Material world"? (...) WHY we don't see any evidence of demons, assuming the geological history of Assiah is actually Gehenna's geological history?

(...)

"Assiah is the original. Kamis banish Satan to a dimensional prison."

No, really, when you wrote the "None know what it was made for." my mind went "Plot twist: demons are actually aliens from another dimension!"