“What is the point of our existence?”. Now, that is something that has been argued since the time of Socrates, and we are STILL not sure what the appropriate answer is as a species. Of course, scientists tell us that the universe began billions of years ago with a literal Big Bang, which populated the immense expanse of space with galaxies.
Sentient life forms arose on some of the planets in this cosmos when they matured under the “proper conditions,” with Planet Earth from the Sol system serving as an example. Priests describe a different story, one in which all life was created by one (or multiple) divine figures whose “benevolence” was responsible for our spirits and souls.
Krona the Maltusian, who ventured to gaze at the formation of the Multiverse and was banished for it, took the smart option out and blended these two conventional answers into a long-standing enigma that perplexed their fan base and characters for decades.
We finally obtained the answer to that elusive question in the form of Perpetua, the Mother of the Multiverse and the origin and end of all existence in it, after what felt like 5 lifetimes thanks to DC’s trigger-happy approach to rebooting their continuity. Who is this all-powerful being of creation, exactly?
How long has she been in Washington, D.C.? And why did she just appear during Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Metal Wars? In this video, Perpetua’s Origins – Explored, we will answer all of those questions and more.
When did Perpetua first appear in DC Comics?
Thanks to Dark Nights: Death Metal issue #7, we can confirm that Perpetua’s first official canonical appearance- besides her grand entrance at the end of Justice League Vol. 4 issue #8, of course- was all the way back in 1965! In Green Lantern Vol. 2 issue #40, we hear the story of Krona’s forbidden experiment for the first time. We did an entire video on Krona’s origins, powers, storylines, etc. so be sure to check that out, the link is in the description, but we’ll give you a Cliff Notes version of what the experiment was all about.
Krona was one of the leading scientists of the primordial Maltusian race; in fact, he was the first person to create devices capable of harnessing the powers of the Emotional Spectrum and was also the first guardian of the entities representing the 7 Emotions. But in his never-ending quest for knowledge, Krona ended up violating the one rule that was sacred to the Maltusian society; thou shalt not try to witness the birth of the Universe in any way, shape, or form.
We’ve paraphrased there, but the basic idea was that one could not create any device capable of witnessing the Big Bang at its conception. So of course, Krona built a device to witness the Big Bang at its conception, and to his absolute bafflement, he saw a gigantic hand instead, laying down the cosmic speck that would come to be known as the DC Universe.
But because Krona had messed with time on a scale unheard of before, and violated the sanctity of Maltusian customs while he was at it, he was dissipated into pure energy and cursed to roam the Multiverse as a disembodied existence; that’s right, it was believed that so grave was the impact of Krona’s heresy that it kick-started the expansion of a single universe into an infinite Multiverse.
Now, over the years, there were several people who were teased as the fabled Hand of Creation in DC Comics: The Presence, The Anti-Monitor, and The First Lantern were all teased as the beings whose Hand we glimpsed basically at the beginning of everything in DC.
But as we said at the beginning of this section, Dark Nights: Death Metal issue #7, the final issue of arguably the biggest crossover event in DC history, confirmed that this Hand had always belonged to Perpetua. So technically, the Mother of the Multiverse made her first canonical appearance in 1965; over 50 years before her name was even mentioned in DC Comics! But that’s the mystery of the fabled Hand solved; what exactly is the origin of Perpetua herself?
The Origins of Perpetua
The vast world that the creative minds of DC have created all owe their existence to an enigmatic pool of creation known to us as The Source of All Things; or simply, The Source. It has also been called The Presence by some writers at DC over the years, but that’s an entirely different story for an entirely different day. Do let us know if you want to hear it, down in the comments section.
But anyway, getting back to The Source, as its name implies, it is the literal Source of All Things; the cosmic well from which all of life itself is birthed, and at whose alter even gods would lay down their weapons in worship. The Source came into existence in the bottomless Void that was before life came into being, and so he created a race of primordial beings to plant the endless void with the seeds of life.
These super-celestial beings, also known as The Hands, were tasked with harnessing the Seven Forces of the Universe to create entire Multiverses that would be teeming with life. The Hands were effectively a giant, cosmic tool of creation. Their purpose was simple: they were born to create Multiverses to populate the greater Omniverse, observe it for a few billion years, and then give themselves over to their creation so it could reach the shores of the Source and be judged by the Judges of the Source in terms of their cosmic alignments.
For you see, everything in the DC Omniverse tends to tilt towards two axioms: Justice and Doom. Most Multiverses were created keeping the former in mind; they were made to be pure representations of Justice, populated by life-forms that were mostly leaning towards goodness. That’s because they were created with Anti-Crisis Energy: one of the strongest and most positive forces out of the Seven Essential Forces of the Universe.
But there was one Multiverse whose creator defied her purpose and went the other way, both in terms of how long she was supposed to exist and the Forces that she harnessed to create her own Multiverse. Any guesses as to who this malevolent mistress of the Multiverse might be?
Kind of an obvious one, we’ll admit, but yes, that being was Perpetua; the Mother of the Multiverse that would eventually come to be populated by the heroes we know today as The Justice League. Perpetua was The Hand that created the DC Multiverse; it was her appendage that Krona witnessed through his forbidden creation.
But while most of her kind create their Multiverses with Anti-Crisis Energy, she chose to literally flip the scale and harness the Seven Hidden Forces of Creation, primarily Crisis Energy, to create a Multiverse that would be stuck in an eternal cycle of re-birth and doom; which in turn would ensure her continued existence, making her effectively as important as The Source in terms of the cosmic scale of balance.
Because The Hands are supposed to be transient and transitional beings; once their Multiverses are stable enough, they give themselves over to it so it can reach its “next level of evolution”. But Perpetua’s Multiverse was an anomaly, and so she hid it entirely from the purview of her kind and got to work on her plan to “protect her children.” She created her Multiverse with three essential forms of matter that inhabit all life-forms: positive matter, anti-matter, and dark matter. And to govern them, she gave birth to three sons, each with a specific divine mandate.
Perpetua’s Sons
The Multiverse is a vast, cosmic expanse that necessitates governance and for decades, DC fans were only aware of 2 of them: The Monitor and The Anti-Monitor. The Monitor seemed like a force of good and was seemingly tasked with overseeing the events of the Positive Matter Universe. The Anti-Monitor, aka the originator of Crisis Events in DC cannon, was seemingly tasked with overseeing the events of the Anti-Matter Universe that was a direct opposite to every facet of the Positive Realm it mirrored.
It was generally accepted that this was the order of things up until 2018 when Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo introduced the Dark Multiverse and turned our understanding of the DC continuity on its head once more. But thankfully, everything was explained in Justice League 2018’s issue #22, which explained the true origins of the Multiverse and the real identities of The Monitor and the Anti-Monitor: they were Perpetua’s sons, and they had a brother who went un-heard of until Carter Hall’s journey into the Dark Multiverse. In that issue, we find out that Perpetua gave birth to 3 sons and tasked each of them with the governance of the 3 realms of creation she had fashioned from the primary forms of matter found in the Multiverse. Let’s take a brief look at each of them, shall we?
Mar Novu/The Monitor
20 billion years ago, Perpetua created the Multiverse in a tripartite fashion, as we’ve mentioned already, and “gave birth” to 3 children in the Sixth Dimension, each of them attuned to the realms they were going to oversee. The Positive Matter Realm, she said, was a realm of joyous existence; “Firm and constant” she called it in her explanation of her sons’ purposes to them.
Mar Novu was tasked with ensuring it stayed that way. After giving The Monitor his name, the Mother of the Multiverse assigns him his role, saying, “You will Monitor the universes that rise into your world orrery. You will see to their development and prevent any crises that may arise between them.” And for billions of years of his own existence, Mar Novu carried out this exact task, traveling the myriad galaxies that populated his Multiversal realm and intervening in events that might escalate into what DC fans dread the most; a crisis.
He even fought a million-year-long battle with his own brother to ensure that the order of the universe was maintained, and both of them lost their lives in the end, but being Sixth Dimensional beings, they would re-form time and time again; and come into conflict with each other from time and time again, though it wasn’t always meant to be this way. Because Mar Novu’s brother was tasked with something else entirely upon his creation; and he went rogue when his purpose was stolen from him, which we’ll get to later in the video. For now, let’s talk about him, shall we?
Mobius/The Anti-Monitor
The Anti-Matter Realm was described by Perpetua as being “all-destroying and corrosive”, which really lines up well with the depictions of Qward we’ve seen over the decades. She tasked her son Mobius with being the exact opposite of his brother Mar Novu; where Mar Novu’s job was to oversee and assist in the development of life in the Positive Matter Realm, Mobius was meant to be a force of pure destruction. Perpetua told him, “And you, Mobius, shall be his opposite. An Anti-Monitor. You will guard the boundaries of creation, and keep them free of life.”
This effectively meant that Mobius’ role was to prevent the “light of creation” from escaping into the greater Omniverse, which made him the ultimate guarding force of the entire Multiverse. Mobius wasn’t always as Crisis-happy as he was during his first appearance in the Crises on Infinite Earths; in fact, he was an explorer and a seeker of knowledge.
Here’s a Marvelous Fact for you if you haven’t picked up on it yet; Mobius was the designer of the Mobius Chair, yes, that same Mobius Chair that gave the New God Metron his status as the All-Knowing, and briefly transformed Batman into a God of Knowledge himself; we have a video on that particular instance on our channel, feel free to check it out.
The Anti-Monitor was also the first person to come into contact with the full Anti-Life Equation, which turned him into the living embodiment of Anti-Life; though this did happen during one of his many re-births on the planet Qward, so its continuity relevance for the purposes of this video is dubious.
What is relevant, however, is the fact that Mobius was created as a being of destruction who was meant to protect the boundaries of Perpetua’s Multiverse, held the secrets of Anti-Life, and was the overseer of the Anti-Matter Realm that his mother had fashioned from her very Hand. In a way, he is also the opposite of his other brother, and Perpetua’s third, and arguably most-important son.
Alpheus/The World Forger
The first form of basic matter that Perpetua describes to her children in her explanation of the Multiverse is also the most-elusive form of matter in all of existence. She calls it “Dark Matter, rich with potential” and assigns her first son with the most difficult task out of the Cosmic Brothers Three. Perpetua addresses this first son of hers by giving him his name first and his duty second. She says, “I call you Alpheus.
I set you to work in the dark beneath creation. You will be a mighty World Forger, and populate all that is and will ever be.” And thus, his task was set; Alpheus would forever dwell in the realm of infinite possibilities that was the Dark Multiverse and fashion entire universes out of the hopes & fears of all life forms. The World Forger labored at the Forge of Worlds for billions of years, populating the Multiverse with life itself.
The process was a difficult one, and indeed, not all of his creations were as stable as others. So he fashioned a “pet of sorts” to devour his more unstable creations. That pet was none other than Barbatos; the dark Bat-God who kick-started the Metal Wars in the first place.
Check out the link in our description for more on this cosmic dragon. And thus the Cycle of Three was complete: Alpheus represented Birth in the virgin Multiverse, Mar Novu represented Life, and Mobius represented Death. Perpetua’s sons spent at least 5 billion years faithfully serving their mother, till the most positive and most perceptive one of them made all realize that the Multiverse their mother had created was, in fact, an abomination to the natural order of things.
Perpetua’s Defiance, Her Deadly Ambition, and the “Death of the Multiverse”
As soon as the Cosmic Brothers Three came into existence and were assigned their roles, Mar Novu expressed a query to their mother. The Monitor understood his part in the Grand Order, and that of his brothers, but he questioned the reasoning behind his Mother’s continued existence. He reasoned that with the creation of his brothers and himself, the system was complete, and he asked his mother this; “What role will you serve in the cosmos?” To which Perpetua replied, “I will see to it that you, and all my children, live.” 5 billion years later, Mar Novu realises the weight of the words his mother had spoken on that day.
After spending all that time traversing the Positive Matter Realm and observing life proliferate in it, he found 2 things that were peculiar. The first thing was a planet, unlike any he’d seen before. He approached his brother Alpheus to ask him about this anomalous existence known as Earth, but the World Forger conceded that it wasn’t a world of his creation. The 2nd was a fact he confronted his Mother with, alongside the mystery of the planet Earth.
Turns out, Mar Novu hadn’t restricted his wanderings to the Multiverse that his Mother had created; he ventured outside, into the greater Omniverse, and realised a terrifying truth about the nature of his Mother’s intended existence. There were no other beings of her classification anywhere to be found in the Omniverse, which could only mean one thing: Perpetua was supposed to die when the Multiverse became fairly stable, but she greedily kept on existing beyond her intended lifespan by harnessing the hidden Crisis energy to power her Multiverse.
he knew that once her cosmic peers and higher-ups realised what she’d done here, they’d come for everything she’d built. And so, she called upon Mar Novu to show her the greatest creations of her Multiverse but was disappointed to see what they’d come up with. There was great potential in her creation, she admitted that much at least, but there wasn’t one particular race that could lay claim to the mantle of being at the top of the cosmic food chain. So, Perpetua created her own Apex Predators.
She discovered that the beings that populated planet Earth, which would be humanity, and those that populated the planet Mars, being the predecessors of Martian Manhunter, were the top greatest sentient life-forms that existed individually in her vast Multiverse. But they each lacked what the other had in abundance; for example, humans had a fiery passion for conflict whereas fire was lethal to the Martians and their society favoured cold, hard intellect over emotions.
So Perpetua bound both planets and life-forms together to create her personal army; and as we’ve referenced before, they were called the Apex Predators; an appropriate name in hindsight, given the fact that these absolute demons were bred for the sole purpose of winning. But if Perpetua had already fulfilled her purpose in life and was meant to pass away, why was she creating an army capable of taking on super-celestials like herself?
Well, the answer is the same as Mar Novu’s realisation before he confronted his mother for her treachery; she intended to keep her Multiverse in a constant state of Crisis to make it the strongest of all Multiverses in the Omniverse, then go on to conquer the rest and kill the Source and Its Judges if need be. When he confronted his Mother with this knowledge, she tried to tell him that all she did was for the sake of her children, but when she saw he wouldn’t budge from his moral position, she loosed her Apex Predators on him.
Around 200,000 years later, Mar Novu was able to gather his brothers and create a great Cosmic Tuning Fork that would send out a message to The Hands and alert them of Perpetua’s betrayal. They rendezvoused at the Promethean Galaxy on the furthest edge of their Multiverse and managed to send out a signal to the Judges of the Source just as Perpetua found them.
The Cosmic Brothers Three took a stand and were nearly overwhelmed before the Cosmic Raptor appeared before them and sealed Perpetua and her armies for her insolence. Because Perpetua is a Sixth Dimensional being, she’d simply reform if not utterly destroyed, so the Cosmic Raptor trapped her in the Totality and her Apex Predators in the newly-fashioned Source Wall, where the latter were transformed into Promethean Giants as hypertime progressed further and further.
Given the seriousness of the transgressions committed by Perpetua, the Judges of the Source declared that this Multiverse would be re-set, Earth & Mars as well as their inhabitants would be separated into individual species again, and that the Brothers Three would need to die and re-form in this new world that they will create. Alpheus accepts the circumstances for what they are and returns to his Forge, but Mobius is incensed. With the Source Wall’s creation, he has essentially lost his purpose for existence, and he squarely lays the blame on Mar Novu’s doorstep.
If only he hadn’t alerted the Judges, he’d still have a role to play, and their Mother would not have been imprisoned. He vows to make his own brother pay for this, even going so far as to saying that he will break his neck if he has to; and thus began the eternal rivalry between The Monitor and the Anti-Monitor.
The Multiverse that Perpetua had created with her Crisis Energies was set back on the right course with Anti-Crisis Energy and made anew; which basically means that the DC Multiverse we know today is an altered extension of its original, predatory state. And so, with the “death of the Multiverse”, it would take nearly 15 billion years for the Source Wall to break and for Perpetua to rise again.
How did Perpetua escape the Source Wall?
Although she had been trapped in a cosmic prison, Perpetua’s alignment with doom allowed her to influence the actions of those who shared her mutual interests. Chief amongst these people would be her “favourite son” Mobius, who would instigate the first Crisis Event in an attempt to re-write all of reality, and Krona the Maltusian, whose attempt to glimpse the beginning of all creation upset the natural order and caused infinite universes to start populating the Multiverse.
The actions of the Anti-Monitor during the Crises on Infinite Earths event did, indeed, re-shape the DC reality into a single-universe system for a few decades, but it also did something much more dangerous; it created a massive crack in the cosmic Source Wall, and from then onwards, Perpetua was able to influence beings beyond her direct flesh and blood and bestir them to Crisis. Over the course of several decades of publication, many events have led to the weakening of the Source Wall; most notably that one-time Superboy-Prime went off his hook and started pounding on the Wall itself, weakening it considerably more than anyone could’ve thought.
Alex Luthor and Darkseid’s Machiavellian machinations further stripped off the layers of protection from the Source Wall, and it finally cracked open when Barbatos invaded the Positive Matter Realm with his Dark Knights and had a Multiverse-shaking battle with Justice League Prime. The League was armed with Element X- the pure metal of creation- and managed to defeat the ancient, cosmic dragon in spectacular fashion; but their actions cracked the Source Wall wide open, and it set Perpetua free.
Though she still lay dormant, it wouldn’t stay that way for too long; Lex Luthor had picked up on the signs of the existence of Perpetua and the “first Multiverse”. He had realized what mankind had been back then and wished to restore it to its “former glory” with the help of the Mother of the Multiverse herself. And so, using the Seven Hidden Forces of the Universe, he brought Perpetua back to life, and she immediately set about “fixing her creation” by starting the Doom War, and becoming heavily involved in the Metal Wars later on.
What makes Perpetua a god-like entity?
If everything we’ve said to you so far hasn’t convinced you that Perpetua is one of the most-powerful divine beings in DC history, then maybe this will help. When Lex Luthor’s Legion of Doom finds Perpetua’s dormant body, they preserve it within a regenerative tank and set about gathering the Seven Hidden Forces of the Universe to “bring her back online.” Only with all 7 forces will she be fully awakened.
But after taking in only 5 of the 7 Hidden Forces, Perpetua’s physical form starts regaining the memory of what it used to be; a creator-goddess of the very Multiverse that the Legion of Doom stepped foot on. They watched in awe, as entire galaxies started taking form in her periphery, even as her mind lay unconscious. Still not convinced? Well, after she was restored to full strength, the first thing she did was visit the universe that contained Earth 19.
She could tell that this universe was aligned towards justice still, despite having doom at its core; so she simply decided to purge it from existence as if she were swatting an annoying fly dead. Need more? Okay, how about the fact that while the Justice League was executing their own version of a time heist during the events of Justice League 2018 issues #31-39, she hurled an entire version of Earth from a different universe at Starman who was on Earth-Prime at the moment, effectively breaking the veil between universes and hurling a planet onto someone as if it were a baseball.
Perpetua has the power to literally shape reality according to her will, as evidenced by the fact that she is a member of The Hands, and can harness the powers of both the Seven Forces of the Universe as well as the Seven Hidden Forces of the Cosmos. That makes her the strongest character in the DC history- period. She was able to split the soul of Princess Chay-Ara into 2 reincarnations, convert Brainiac into her personal throne with a wave of her arm, and transform Lex Luthor into her finest creation giving us what is perhaps the most-terrifying version of the iconic Superman villain: Apex Lex Luthor.
Anything she does sends ripples of destruction across hyper-time, and the fact that she draws on Crisis energy for all of this makes her that much more dangerous and god-like. Perpetua is truly a divine existence in every sense of the phrase within DC cannon, and frankly, we’re not even sure if there is anyone who could have ever matched her power, even amongst her own kind, if it hadn’t been for her reliance on Crisis energy to fuel her immense capabilities.
Marvelous Verdict
As you might know if you’ve been a long-time fan of the channel, Perpetua eventually faced her downfall at the hands of the wily Batman Who Laughs towards the end of Dark Nights: Death Metal. Things might have gone very differently had she not been tempted to align with this bestial existence of a person, but then that’s the entire point of her story. Perpetua was, for most of her unsealed lifetime, obsessed with creating the Apex Predators that would be capable of taking on anything that the Omniverse could throw at them, including the Source.
The problem is, the Batman Who Laughs was the perfect embodiment of her mantra of “only winning matters”, and the fact that he was the one who eventually killed her and usurped her position for a brief period of time speaks volumes of the irony of her own existence. Perpetua had wanted for her children to become the cream of the omniversal crop by becoming alphas, not realizing that she herself was becoming a beta in turn. Perpetua’s story is significant not just for all the canonical clarity it provided us- though that is a major reason why we absolutely love her character. The Mother of the Multiverse faced the fate that was decided upon for her, regardless of how she got there.
The fact that it was a creation of her own, that was so like her she didn’t even bother to check his loyalties first, that killed her in the first place is a giant cosmic red flag to all other Hands of her kind; have ambition, yes, but do not grow overzealous in your pursuit of it. For if you do, you might find yourself killed by it, and that is the ultimate price that we can inevitably pay; the price of our own hubris.