Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(22)

Valentine seems to find this notion absurd, especially given that Simon is a Downworlder. He laughs upon realizing that Simon choked on the name of God—the very idea that Simon, a “monster,” the Other, would still believe in and invoke God is ridiculous to him. He views Simon as a monster who doesn’t understand that he is one and then attempts to kill Simon for his Otherness even though Simon doesn’t behave as, associate with, or identify with other vampires. Valentine doesn’t care—his perception of the “impurity” of Simon’s blood (also a familiar anti-Semitic claim) is all that matters to him. But his attempt to purge Simon from the world backfires. When Jace saves Simon’s life by allowing him to drink Jace’s blood, it transforms him into a Daylighter who can’t be killed or harmed by sunlight the way every other vampire can. Simon becomes unique even among his new, acquired culture, Other even among his own adoptive kind, and it forces him into exile, like the first wanderer, Cain.





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?