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Hi all. Glad to see you all here after the previous thread.
As the title suggests, this is a continuation of my ongoing revisions of Marvel's Cosmics, this time tackling the tiering of the Omniversal Abstracts. After this one, I plan to make a Part 2.5, which will deal with fixing... everything else about the profiles. And after that one, I'll make a Part 3, aimed towards the mythological gods of the verse.
This one is quite a bit bigger than the previous one, and largely deals with outlining the current cosmology of the verse, so, lot's of in-verse stuff ahead. If you only really care about the tiers, type in "Der Tiers" on the search on page function to skip straight to that section, I guess.
The Cosmology
Now that Defenders: Beyond is out (And has been out for next to a year now), we finally have a lot more insight on the shape of Marvel's Cosmology, largely in relation to the realms outside of the omniverse, whose relationship to each other and to existence proper was left a bit vaguely-defined so far. As Al Ewing puts it:
This mapping of the Marvel Godhead, as it were, is primarily based on the Kabbalah, the system of Jewish Mysticism that's already been a central theme in previous works of his (Immortal Hulk coming to mind). More specifically, it terms all of the structures that are outside of the Marvel Omniverse as part of a domain known as the "Mystery," synonymous with what Al Ewing's Ultimates called "The Outside." Those realms are higher planes that lie above Eternity's being, as well as outside his influence. Furthermore, they, together with Eternity himself, are mapped to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the diagram of the emanations of the Absolute through which creation comes into being. Those emanations (Collectively known as Sefirot) are ten in number: Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod and Malkuth, and some of the associations we're explicitly told about in Defenders Beyond are:
Malkuth, the lowest of the Sefirot, is the Neutral Zone. It's the furthest edge of all things, the white space bordering everything. It exists beyond the Superflow and in the "outer omniverse" at the edge of the Outside. Though he initially thought it was just an alternate dimension, Blue Marvel eventually discovered that the sections of the Neutral Zone which he interacted with were just a part of a much larger "Exo-Space" that makes direct contact with the Outside.
So, Malkuth is basically the framework and outer boundary of the omniverse itself, which transcends the inner structure of existence and is on the same level as Eternity proper (With all the lower planes as such being fictional to it, as we've gone over in Part 1 of this thread).
Above Malkuth is Yesod, the domain of the Beyonders. It is an "incomprehensibly featureless" level from which even Eternity is seen as vanishing into insignificance, as well as the Engine Room of creation, where the Beyonders act as monitors of all existence from outside of it. It is above the entire narrative of the omniverse, as Loki encasing a Beyonder in a story is stated to be them trapping something infinite inside of finite boundaries. We, of course, know that the narrative encompasses the omniverse because of Loki: Agent of Asgard #17, where Loki could bypass the entire death and rebirth of the multiverse by just skipping to the next comic, which resulted in him arriving at the Sixth Cosmos and then into the Eighth. An act that was specifically not one of time travel, by the way, since there wasn't any time to go back into anymore.
The very name of the place is also something that informs us of its function. "Yesod" is the Hebrew word for "Foundation," which is to say that it's the basis upon which the cosmos rests. You could tie this to what Moridun says about the nature of reality. Namely that "all-that-is" is composed of five magical elements (Something that Eternity himself mentions as well) which are laid over a foundation, the world underfoot. That the four usual elements are "bound in the moon-dark" by a fifth one is very likely a reference to the planetary symbolism behind the Sefirot, in which Yesod corresponds to the moon, just as Malkuth is equated to the Earth.
In-between Malkuth and Yesod, though, there is another realm. This one the Defenders briefly travel through when they leave the Neutral Zone behind and arrive in a timeless, spaceless void outside of it, before the void itself flips on "an invisible axis," and they finally arrive in Yesod proper. This realm is most certainly the Far Shore, which is the furthest edge of being itself, where the First Firmament resided alongside the previous omniverses, and where things such as "Time," "Space" and "Self" don't exist, even the abstract, non-conventional forms of time and space that exist on the level of the Abstracts. The fact that the First Firmament resided there while being much larger than Eternity, as well as Challenger outliving the Seventh Cosmos by being imprisoned there (Compounded with it being described as "Outside all systems, old and new") make it fairly obvious that this place is beyond the omniverse, yet, it is still below the Mystery.
In terms of the Tree of Life, this would be the bottleneck connecting Malkuth and Yesod, so, not... quite one of the Sefirot, but more like the path between two of them.
Above Yesod is Tiferet, the White-Hot Room in which the Phoenix resides. It is an even higher space than the Beyond, and It is from where the Beyonders draw power for their Concordance Engines. While in it, The Beyonder himself admits that he's completely outclassed and that the Phoenix Force can obliterate him easily. It is here that the fires of creation, of becoming, are made, in reference to the idea that the Phoenix Force is the driving principle behind the Big Bang that creates the multiverse.
In S.W.O.R.D Vol. 2 #7, Doctor Doom also explains that the center of the Cosmos and the outside of the Cosmos are and have always been the same place–The Above-Place, the Mystery, the White-Hot Room. This being extremely consistent with (And most certainly an intentional reference to) Defenders Vol. 3 #3, where Dormammu says that, at the core of Eternity's being, there is a void of oceanic nothingness where all matter and all energy sleeps in a state of unmanifestation, and it is by "detonating" this cosmic heart that he rebirths all universes in his image.
So, in short, this realm is the root of the Big Bang and of the omniversal cycle, whose energies allow the death and renewal of the cosmoses, in a sense being the singularity out of which the multiverse sprouts. This being taken straight out of the Kabbalah, where Tiferet represents God's first utterance: "Let there be light."
The revelation that the Tiger God is the force opposite to the Phoenix Force also further contextualized plenty of things we were told about in Al Ewing's previous works, such as Avengers: No Road Home, where the Tiger God was placed as symbolizing all of the things of the darkness that humans feared, and which they banished to the "outer side" through the light of their own stories. The White-Hot Room, then, is that very light: The source of all myth-narratives that shape and create the Gods, and which stave-off humanity's fears. This, of course, tying into the symbolism of the campfire around which stories are told, and which acts to keep away the darkness, something deliberately invoked by one of the forms that the White-Hot Room takes in Defenders Beyond
Above the White-Hot-Room is Da'at, or the Abyss, the Land of Couldn't-Be-Shouldn't-Be, the furthest place from reality that there is. There really isn't much to talk about with regards to this plane because the name already says it all: This is the realm of impossibilities.
Most noteworthy about it, however, is that the Land of Couldn't-Be-Shouldn't-Be is just one aspect of Da'at, and the smaller one, at that. Above it, on a level where Couldn't-Be-Shouldn't-Be is seen as part of a comicbook, is the Land of Can-Be-Shall-Be where all possibilities exist, being the "mountaintop from which all visible," echoing The Ultimates, where the Queen of Nevers states that, from her location, she can see all. This realm, for the matter, is the reason for why the Beyonders are incapable of looking into the future, in spite of being existences that transcend the omniverse entirely: "What shall be" simply is something rooted in a much higher plane than their own. Given that one of them likewise mentions that they can predict what will happen, even if they can't truly see it, it seems that they can see the set of futures that may happen, but which one of them will happen is something outside the scope of their knowledge.
The presence of Da'at also gives us some insight into the relationships between the Sefirot, and, in this case, the relationship between Da'at and Tiferet. As the Queen of Nevers says, each "What if?" can potentially become "What is," and the force that allows for the transition between one and the other is the very flame of becoming that has its origin in the White-Hot Room. Note how Galactus even says that the Celestials reforged in that flame are coming directly from "the heart of the Mystery," in keeping with how the Phoenix Force states that Tiferet is the heart of all things, because it, among the Sefirot, is the sphere that corresponds to the heart of the human body.
This idea of primal, more fundamental realities from which lower ones are emanated in succession until the lowest world is born, of course, is central to the Kabbalah as a whole, as well as something that has been mentioned in Ghost Rider: Kushala, a mini-series published in 2021 that comments on the nature of the Sefirot, and has Doctor Doom describe Da'at as "The stone that causes the ripple. It is the point where all iterations originate. It is the dark of the universe where everything is a possibility. Through the Arbiter exists the realms of possibility. The Arbiter is the very stuff that we are made of... The concepts that become reality."
Frankly, not that this even needed clarifying at this point, but, conveniently, the same comic also states that the higher Sefirot are very specifically not higher-dimensional spaces, and that to refer to them as such is to fall into error, "like observing one side of a cube and calling it a square."
Above Da'at, then, is Kether, the House of Ideas. This is the apex of the Tree of Life, the pure unity of the divine, and in here only The One Above All resides. This is the birthplace of all that is, all that was, and all that may be, and is where infinite stories are born.
Even the House of Ideas, though, is at the bottom of something even greater. As Blue Marvel says, The One Above All is not truly the supreme power, he is just the highest power that is accessible to the intellect in any form, and beyond even the limit to all understanding that he represents, there are things even higher.
As TOAA himself says, the House of Ideas itself is simply "the place where the World of Action ends... and the World of Creation begins," this being a reference to how, in the Kabbalah, the emanations of the divine are divided in Four Worlds: Assiah (Action), Yetzirah (Formation), Beriah (Creation) and Atziluth (Emanation), with the Sefirot existing in all of these Four Worlds, in higher and lower forms that overlap and interact with and reflect each other (So for instance the Kether of a lower world may be just the Malkuth of a higher world). In this context, TOAA is simply the Kether of Assiah, while simultaneously being the Malkuth of Beriah (Just as the Neutral Zone is the Malkuth of Assiah).
This, by the way, was foreshadowed all the way back in Immortal Hulk #11, when the narration states that all of the Sefirot are emanations of "the divine." Including Kether, the House of Ideas.
In fact, there are arguably infinite layers of emanation beyond the House of Ideas. As Loki says at the start of the comic: No matter how big you are, there's always something bigger. Later on, the Queen of Nevers says that, although she journeys through the Mystery, she will never see it all, because the Mystery is infinite, which is immediately followed by Cloud stating that the Journey through the higher realms never ends, not even when you pass into the final door to the House of Ideas. Indeed, as we've already seen, even the House is just the start of that journey, and Blue Marvel questions if there can even be a final guiding hand behind everything, further implying that the regress of emanations is something that doesn't end at any specific point.
This notion of the ascension through the Mystery being neverending ties into the themes that Al Ewing likes to tackle in most of his works, and which he's expressed in a very recent interview about his upcoming book, Immortal Thor:
gizmodo.com
That is to say, since the Sefirot, the planes of the Mystery, are a manifestation of the hidden qualities and attributes of the divine (Evidenced also by how Ewing describes the journey through the Mystery in Defenders: Beyond as "a mapping of the Marvel Godhead"), then the fact that they go upwards forever is an expression of the infinite unknowability of God, which makes it so the journey to understand and map it out is one that will never end. Presumably, this is why the domain beyond Eternity is called "the Mystery," too. It is the mystery of God, which can keep being explored and unwrapped forever without ever touching the essence behind it all.
That said, the "Godhead" of which the Mystery is a manifestation hasn't been formally introduced yet, so for the time being, no one scales to this, but, who knows.
TL;DR Marvel's meta-cosmology consists of six stacked realms, each transcending the previous one: The Neutral Zone (Malkuth), The Far Shore, The Beyond (Yesod), The White-Hot Room (Tiferet), Da'at and The House of Ideas (Kether). The relationship between them is as follows:
House of Ideas = The realm of pure oneness where only The One Above All exists, transcending all else. It is from here that infinite stories are born, but they are still only ideas, and have to go through several stages before they can become a world.
Da'at = The realm containing all possibility and impossibility. Here, God starts to consider ways in which his creation could be, as well as the ones in which it could not be.
White Hot-Room = The realm of the fires of creation, which forge the possibilities of Da'at into actuality. Here, God says "Let there be light," and the surge of energy that follows is the Big Bang thet gives birth to the cosmos.
Beyond = The foundation on which the world to come will rest. Here, the creative energies produced in the White-Hot Room are harnessed and start being organized and solidified into something concrete. Whereas the White-Hot Room precedes the birth of form, Yesod is the place in which the shape of creation is sketched out, beginning to exist in idea, but not in actuality.
The Far Shore = The pathway between The Neutral Zone and the Beyond, above space, time, life, death and self.
The Neutral Zone = The lowest world. The omniverse as a whole.
On the flip side of the Sefirot, though, there are other spheres. as per Immortal Hulk #11, those are called the Qlippoth, the Hebrew word for "Shell" or "Husk," which is meant to indicate that they are dark reflections of the Sefirot that stand devoid of the divinity of the Godhead, thus making them "empty" in nature. While the Sefirot are what lies over the omniverse, the Above-Place, the Qlippoth are what lies under it, the Below-Place, the concept of Hell and bedrock of everything. As such, the lower the Qlippoth is, the greater it is, instead of vice-versa.
The first of the Qlippoth that we are told about over the course of Al Ewing's work is Thaumiel, the dark reflection of Kether; whereas Kether is the pure oneness of the divine, Thaumiel is a state in which that oneness is split into contending forces, always in conflict with one another and refusing to be as one. This is the realm of The One Below All.
Later on, in Venom Vol. 5 #18, we're introduced to the Un-Beyond, the Qlippoth of Yesod and factory floor of creation, where the Onyx King, the cosmic counterpart to the Beyonders, does his work.
As said in the scans, though, the Un-Beyond itself is accessed by falling from yet another realm, that being Limbo, "the earth-plane's dark opposite." Given the overall context of the work, and the fact that the Un-Beyond is called "the next place" from Limbo, it would seem Limbo is supposed to be the Qlippoth of Malkuth, the Sefirah that corresponds to the Earth under the Tree of Life's planetary associations, which would thus make it the dark reflection of the Neutral Zone, and by extension of the omniverse as a whole. This, surprisingly, is scale that's not unheard of for Limbo: In the 2000s, it was already described as a realm that transcends all realities and all planes of existence, and interfaces with all of creation, as well as a plane where all times are one, and further back, in the 80's, it was beyond all concepts of time and space.
The Elasticity of Marvel
As is to be expected from a company that's been publishing stories since the 60's, Marvel's worldbuilding has met its fair handful of contradictions over the years. The presence of multiple writers, all working several years apart, leads to the existence of multiple visions that at times may conflict with each other, and that's quite simply in the nature of comicbook storytelling. With regards to its cosmology, in specific, Marvel has shockingly managed to remain mostly whole, but this is not to say that inconsistencies and contradictions do not exist at all in that area of the verse.
The chaotic nature of the verse, obviously, isn't something that the writers are unaware of, though, far from it. Throughout its history, there have been a number of references to it in the comics themselves, often when the writers feel like making some sort of metacommentary on the nature of Marvel Comics' setting, which invariably leads to some kind of in-universe justification for all the inconsistencies in it. In all such instances, the explanation boils down to one simple thing: Marvel's cosmology is not a fixed entity. It is fluid. Here, I'll go through some of the facts surrounding that, and expand on some things we've already accepted which lean on that direction.
For the first viewpoint under which the cosmology is malleable, I'll refer to this accepted thread, which had the following proposal:
So, in summary, TOAA is the gestalt entity that reunites all the writers, editors, artists and etc working on Marvel itself, perceiving the verse from a metafictional perspective. And from this perspective, the setting itself is freely alterable through their abode, the House of Ideas, from which infinite stories are born. As such, the inconsistent depictions of the cosmology are in fact canon, since all of it is subject to the authors' whims.
Defenders: Beyond gave us even more material confirming this view. In Issue #5, for instance, TOAA, in a faked bout of anger, sics a bunch of weird monsters on the Defenders, which Taaia then describes as "creatures of the pre-creation." If you take a look at said monsters, though, you'll notice that they are all characters from Tales to Astonish, the serial anthology of horror stories that Marvel was publishing before Fantastic Four #1, which is considered the very start of the Marvel Universe proper, was released in 1961. From this we see that, since The One Above All is the writers, their perspective of existence is from a narrative order, not a chronological one, and so to them "creation" was not the in-universe birth of the cosmos, but just the moment Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four in the 60's, with everything published before that being "pre-creation."
This perspective is also shown in the scans from the first section of this thread, where Loki, even after stating that time travel is impossible at the end of omniverse due to there being no time to go back into, still manages to go to past and future multiverses by simply skipping to the next comics. The fact that he arrived in the Sixth Multiverse as the "next" moment in the order of events despite leaving at the end of the Seventh Multiverse, once again, goes to show that the narrative order of events supersedes the in-universe chronological one, and takes precedence over it.
What all this means in practical terms is that Marvel's contradictions were decided to be cut off from each other, but TOAA nevertheless scaled above them by virtue of canonically being the source of all those different portrayals, since he writes all of them into existence from his metanarrative realm. Here, I'll take this a step further: I'd like to amend this proposal and argue that, under the vision Marvel's taken on the cosmology in recent years, this principle actually applies to more characters than TOAA alone. Rather, it applies to everything in the Mystery, actually.
To elaborate on that, I'll have to explain how exactly the process of creation works in Marvel: As we all know, the House of Ideas is the apex of the currently observable cosmology. It's the source of all that is, was, and may be, and from it, The One Above All creates all stories. What's important to note, however, is that this creation comes in stages. TOAA doesn't think a little and suddenly the omniverse comes into being; instead the stories that are born in the House of Ideas go through several phases before they are finally brought into proper existence. And explaining this process is where the Kabbalistic concepts that Al Ewing introduced come into play. As he himself says, the higher planes of the Mystery are a kind of "creation zone," the places where the birth of existence is still underway, and hasn't been completed yet.
www.comicsxf.com
Immortal Hulk #11 gives a description of the Tree of Life, stating that it is a map of the emanations of the divine, laying out creation as a whole. The term "emanation" being what informs us of the nature of this creation; the Absolute doesn't make things from nothing. Instead, it contains all of them as potentialities within itself, and radiates them outwards to bring them into proper form. In the Tree of Life's case, there are ten emanations in total, and they all culminate upon the final sphere of existence, Malkuth, the omniverse (Or more precisely the outer edge of it).
Malkuth being the endpoint in which the process of creation initated by The One Above All is finalized tell us a fairly important thing. Namely the fact that, regardless of what setting TOAA wants to bring into existence, once it is properly born, it will ultimately be within Malkuth. Like I said before, the higher planes of the Mystery are stages where the birth of existence isn't yet finished, and as such aren't proper existences so much as they are the hidden machinery that any kind of existence needs to be brought into fruition, to begin with.
We have loads of evidence for this being the case in Al Ewing's comics: For example, in Defenders Vol. 6 #4, Doctor Strange and a few others travel back to the time of the Third Cosmos, and Strange's introductory narration describes it as such: "It's said that the Third Cosmos was the first to be born from the multiversal cycle–“The first rebirth after cosmic all-death. We're so far back that Science and Magic haven't been invented yet. Even Narrative is just a twinkle in a future narrator's eye." Before that, the Defenders went to the Fourth Cosmos, of which is said: "This is an archetypal being–A form of primal avatar. Everything that exists was once a spark in the cosmic mind... An idea... And this... is a living idea. A highly dangerous one."
As well as "This primal reality is made of patterns. With my higher senses, I can feel the repeating cycles... Some laid down when the cosmos first began..."
So, in short: Each preceding cosmos is a primal, more basic reality than the succeeding ones. The Fourth Cosmos was the archetypal groundwork for the ones to follow, whose inhabitants were the models and blueprints of the characters we are familiar with in the Marvel Universe; they were still, as the narration says, just ideas inside of the cosmic mind. The Third Cosmos goes back even further, and is such a primordial world that "Narrative" is in its first sparks, and overall is still just a vague twinkling in the narrator's head.
All of that pretty firmly establishes that, one way or another, stories and narrative as phenomena only begin to exist relative to Malkuth, and in their conventional forms don't extend into the Outside above it. Indeed, in the 2000s, the omniverse was portrayed as a huge wall of comic panels, and much later, this exact scenery reappeared in Gwenpool Strikes Back, which presented us to the "Marvel Comics Continuity Abyss," whose nature is honestly pretty self-explanatory. In the last issue of Deadpool's Secret Secret Wars, Deadpool is also brought to a realm stated to be the foundation of Eternity, and the origin of every event in every universe, and in there he finally becomes certain that his existence is part of a comicbook, which again points towards Eternity being the point in which Marvel Comics as a fictional verse is born.
The realms of the Mystery, then, are planes beyond the limits of the comics' narrative and continuity. You've already seen the scan for this: It's in Defenders Beyond #2, where, as mentioned before, Loki uses their power as the God of Stories to imprison a Beyonder into a narrative arc, and this is described as the act of forcibly imposing finite boundaries and measures on something infinite, rendering it "caged." Thus meaning that story/narrative is something that the Beyonders naturally exist above, and which they see as "finite" and constraining in comparison to themselves, who are infinite.
Note, also, how Loki forcing a story on a Beyonder is represented as said Beyonder becoming trapped between panels, which is absolutely an intentional choice of symbolism, given that, all throughout the issue, the Beyond has no panels, and the Beyonders are surrounded by the tubes of their Concordance Engines instead of the usual borders of the comic. Said Engines are, in the aforementioned scan with Loki, also drawn as extending beyond and outside of the panels alongside the white space of the Beyond itself. In the same issue, Kevin Brashear destroying the avatar of a rogue Beyonder and returning its essence to the Outside is described as him having removed the Beyonder in question from the continuity, which continues the trend of the Mystery lying in the metanarrative outside of the story proper.
We also see this in Ultimates, where the Queen of Nevers is often drawn as standing outside the panels of the comic (Same with the Celestials arriving from the Mystery), and once again in Loki: Agent of Asgard, where King Loki walking into the Outside is repeatedly shown as him slipping into the white space outside the comic's panels (#16 and #3, respectively, and in #17 we get further confirmation that this is indeed the Outside when Loki and Verity find him languishing in the void). After he absorbed the power of the Beyonders, Molecule Man also noted that his powers now extended to the narrative itself, indicating that the Ivory Kings' engineering of the multiverse likewise takes place on the meta level.
Given all of the material above, I think it's also absolutely fair to equate the Outside to Gwenpool's Gutterspace, which likewise is the white void outside of the comic's panels, which is unaffected by retcons and from which all of Marvel's continuity is accessible.
So, long story short, the different settings and cosmologies in Marvel, with regards to the regular storylines at least, canonically only exist on the level of the omniverse, and the higher planes in the Mystery take this a step further by being the machinery that brings the continuities containing these cosmologies into fruition in the first place, existing on a metanarrative level in the same vein as TOAA himself, and seeing Marvel's true nature as the piece of fiction that it is, whose continuity can be altered and monitored from outside. By analogy, this could be explained as follows:
Kether / TOAA / House of Ideas = The author and their first ideas for a story. At this stage, there is only the want to write something.
Chokmah to Yesod = The intermediary stages where the ins and outs of these ideas are hammered up before anything is put into paper.
Malkuth = The story proper. The start of the actual writing process.
Though, of course, that is not to say that Malkuth contains all possible cosmologies in simultaneity. It can contain any of them, but as far as we are aware, only one arrangement of the omniversal structure exists at a time. As an analogy, I guess it'd be comparable to a blank page: Obviously, a blank sheet of paper can hold whatever you want to draw at any given time, but if you already drew something and want to draw something else, you'll have to erase what you just drew first.
With this said, we then move on to a broader perspective on Marvel's fluid nature. For this one, we'll start by examining a fairly interesting comic issue, that being Fantastic Four Annual #26, released in 1993.
Here, Kubik and Kosmos start off pondering about the nature of the Celestials, most specifically their origin, which is considered the greatest mystery of the universe, and to try and find something resembling answers they directly enter the mindscape of a Celestial, where several holographic representations of the concepts and knowledge that it holds are shown to them.
To Kosmos' surprise, the Celestial's mind holds multiple different accounts of the race's origins, all of which contradict each other: First, it is suggested that the Celestials come from outside of the multiverse, possibly from the same realm as the Beyonders themselves. Another possibility given is then that Celestials are simply stars who reached the end of their life cycle, and that black hole singularities are the cocoons where they remain before being born. Yet another possible origin is that the Celestials are survivors from a previous universe, like Galactus is, and that Galactus himself is destined to become a Celestial one day. The last suggestion they see, then, is that Celestials are just manifestations of the evolutionary process itself, and as such are illusions with no intrinsic existence of their own.
Alongside all of that, they also see the birth of a Celestial as depicted in Thor Vol. 1 #424, where an entire galaxy composed entirely of biological matter was engulfed by an explosion of light which then compressed itself into a Celestial, having absorbed all the living material that rested in that region of space.
Faced with all these conflicting explanations, Kosmos naturally asks which one represented the true origin of the Celestials. In response to this, Kubik says that all of them and none of them did. As he explains: Reality is not a proposition that can only be "True" or "False." Its underlying structure is malleable, recursive, and exists as a field of infinite possibility where multiple contradictory truths can exist simultaneously. Ultimately, everything boils down to the interplay between will and potentiality; the intellect, by contemplating the unknowable, births new truths from the nonexistent (The "mosaic of infinite possibility" that Kubik mentions), and as such questions like the origin of the Celestials are ones that don't have absolute answers. Instead, all answers to them are true and false at the same time.
After hearing this, Kosmos then comes up with an explanation of her own: That the Celestials are a game that Eternity, the personification of all creation, plays with himself, that Eternity occasionally divides himself into discrete parts that wander the universe in order to attain greater self-knowledge. Kubik not only treats this possibility as valid, but also says it's the best answer he's ever heard.
To say that Marvel took this idea and kept it since forever would honestly be a massive understatement. A recurring thing in Al Ewing's work, for instance, is the idea that Gods are stories, created by the telltales of humanity that echo through history to shape reality from the beginning of time. Elsewhere, Gods are also stated to live in a world of stories used to explain the world to the ancients, every bit as true to them as science in the modern day is to us. Adding to that is the idea that mythologies and the sciences are all congruent with each other; to say that the world was born from a Cosmic Egg or from the dead body of a giant or from the Big Bang is to talk about the same thing from slightly different perspectives.
In Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #531 and #532, this topic comes up again. More specifically, we are told that the universe, all of existence, paradoxically came to be as a byproduct of the primordial question, of the need to understand oneself. Questions like "Who are we?", "Why are we here?" and "Why are we?" are what triggered the Big Bang that birthed all things. However, this primordial state of affairs was still too unstable, unable to congeal into anything where life could happen, because, although the question was asked, the asker still had absolutely no understanding of the question or its answers. As all living things gain an increasing understanding of themselves, though, the universe grows and develops itself, and when we fully understand ourselves, the cosmos will finally reach its final stage of evolution.
In New Avengers Vol. 4 #2, Maker repeats that exact same rhetoric: The basic conditions for the universe are a product of consciousness, and by expanding our minds, we are also expanding the universe itself. This expansion, of course, has to do not with physical size but with the structural development of existence. How did science come to be if mythology used to be literally true, for instance? The universe simply became more complex as consciousness developed, and so more intricate explanations for things started to arise.
The notion that all of reality is a byproduct of the mind contemplating the unknowable, and as such birthing answers for it based on various different viewpoints (Which can and will contradict each other), also has pretty clear ties to what Al Ewing comments about in the above-linked interview as well. That is, the fact that the basic nature of "God" or "the divine" is to be unknowable, and that the journey towards understanding it (And ourselves, too, relating to what the alien entity explains to Reed Richards) therefore is one that has no end, hence the realms of the Mystery ascending infinitely upwards: We may see increasingly primal masks and aspects of the Godhead, but never the face that's underneath them all.
So, did the multiverse start with Nemesis, the entity whose suicide gave birth to the Infinity Gems, for instance? Or did it start with the First Firmament? Both. And neither. Those are simply two different narratives that emerge from the infinite potentiality of the unknowable. True in the sense that they do indeed inform states of affairs that reality has gone through, from the perspective of beings in it, and false on the basis that the essence of the unknowable remains such even as the intellect continues to come up with answers for it. And as shown by the fact that one of the possible origins of the Celestials is that they came from outside of the multiverse, from the same realm as the Beyonders, not even the Mystery escapes from this fluidity.
Rectifying Some Things
Okay, so, the first thing I want to address is our idea that Eternity "ascended to the top of the Cosmic Hierarchy" when he was reborn as the Eighth Cosmos. To put it simply, this is flat-out wrong. As a matter of fact, according to the First Firmament, Eternity was weaker than what he used to be shortly after his rebirth, and hence easy to capture, despite containing the full set of structures (The Superflow, the Neutral Zone) that we currently use to reason that he must have risen in position.
The idea itself seems have come about as a way of rationalizing how the Living Tribunal was depicted as an inner function of Eternity in Al Ewing's Ultimates, which itself was only a perceived problem due to the much-proliferated view that the Living Tribunal is supposed to be the second strongest being in the cosmology after The One Above All himself. However, with the fuckton of layers between the multiverse and TOAA's realm that were recently introduced, it's become clear that this idea just does not hold any water anymore.
In fact, this bit of characterization with regards to the Living Tribunal was dropped as soon as Hickman's New Avengers showed the Beyonders murdering him. Worse, the Living Tribunal doesn't actually have anything that scales him above any version of the omniversal personification, to begin with, due to the fact that he is just the top of the cosmic hierarchy, which the Omniversal Eternity was never a part of to begin with. Every single time the hierarchy came up as a topic, the Universal Eternity was who was being portrayed as a member of it. To list a few occasions:
Thor Annual #14: Explicitly referring to the Eternity's universal fragment. Made ever-so-slightly worse by it being just Thor's perspective on the cosmic hierarchy. Him being described as "the highest authority in the multiverse" is also, of course, not something that contradicts the Omniversal Eternity being above him; Eternity is not in the omniverse, he is it.
Guardians of the Galaxy #47: Thoroughly contradicted by later material.
Silver Surfer Vol. 3 #31: Refers to Universal Eternity, seeing as Death here is treated as his counterpart, which is not the case with the True Eternity.
Thanos Annual #1: Nothing suggesting that this is the Omniversal Eternity, especially seeing as he's grouped alongside the same usual members of the Cosmic Hierarchy.
So, in short: The Living Tribunal and the Omniversal Eternity never even appear in the same room. Not once, in large part due to the sheer obscurity of the second character prior to Al Ewing putting him in the spotlight with his work in The Ultimates. As such, the latter is not really to be included in all of the statements relating to the former's primacy over the Abstracts. The salt on the wound gets even worse when taking into account Annihilation: Heralds of Galactus, which depicts the Living Tribunal as a part of the cosmos that was born after the Big Bang that gave birth to it.
As such, Eternity's two incarnations as the Seventh and Eighth Cosmoses should not be separate keys, plan and simple. There is just no difference between them. He was always above the Living Tribunal and not a part of the Cosmic Hierarchy at all.
The second character whose ratings need to be sorted out is Oblivion. At the moment, we treat him as the personification of literally everything that's outside of the omniverse. As what I've shown above demonstrates, though, that's... completely untenable now, seeing as there isn't just a single void beyond the multiverse, there are several, infinite, in fact, with even The One Above All being just a part of this hierarchy. With that in mind, Oblivion's standing in the cosmology should be looked at from a different angle.
Straightforward enough: When describing how he slipped into the Far Shore, the Shaper of Worlds states that he fell into Oblivion. Later on, Galactus also says that, if the First Firmament managed to successfully absorb Eternity into himself and as a result erase him, Oblivion would be the only victor in the end, something that Conner Sims alludes to, earlier on, when he says that the conflict is one between Existence and Oblivion. Inside and Outside. In Great Lakes Avengers #3, Oblivion also calls himself the end of creation, the nothing that watched the birth of everything, and in the very quote featured on his profile, describes himself as lying between death and rebirth. Given all of this, it would seem he's just the Far Shore, the nothingness immediately outside of the omniverse.
The third profile that has extremely glaring inaccuracies is The Beyonders. Now, the profile is generally pretty garbage, and much of the grievances I have with it are better suited for the upcoming Part 2.5 of these revisions, but one particular thing about it ought to be addressed now: Namely the "Beyonder Drones" key.
Yeah, so, to put it simply, that doesn't ******* exist. The weird robotic-looking Beyonders that fought Thor and Hyperion weren't "drones," they were Beyonders, full-stop. They were just briefly redesigned from New Avengers #32: Proof of that is how, one issue before that, the Beyonders who face Thor, Hyperion and Starbrand are shown to be the same grey alien-looking kind of Beyonder that killed the Living Tribunal and the rest of the Abstracts. In New Avengers #33, the artists stuck to that design even up to the scene where Doom destroys them, before Secret Wars 2015 dialed back to their original appearance.
It seems that, just like the Seventh Cosmos-Eighth Cosmos key split, this was an attempt to give rationale to a seemingly nonsensical low-end on the Beyonders' part, namely the fact one of them is apparently destroyed by Starbrand detonating his body, which is indeed kind of a really lame performance coming from one of the guys who killed the Living Tribunal, but it does have explanation: As said earlier on in the same issue, what the heroes are facing here are not the true forms of the Beyonders, but manifestations; solid states containing their incorporeal essences. In Defenders: Beyond, this topic comes back, with it being stated that, although their true forms are infinite, they can clothe themselves in matter to project a form that finite beings can comprehend.
This doesn't necessarily make them weaker, seeing as the Beyonder, for example, is still referred to as an omnipotent being even when in a physical form. That said, it does mean that they can freely decide how powerful they are (Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #7). This being actually something we've seen all the way back in Secret Wars II, where Beyonder's physical form was almost destroyed by a fall off a building because he didn't adjust it to endure the impact beforehand.
So, all-in-all, the "Beyonder Drones" key should be removed, and we should simply note that the tier of their physical manifestations varies according to their whims on the profile.
Der Tiers
So, as we've already established in the past thread, the hierarchy of transfinite numbers is an idea that exists in Marvel. Not only does it exist as an idea, but it also has practical application to reality: The highest forces in the universe are themselves higher cardinal infinities, as stated more than once.
Notice that, in the first scan, the "numbers greater than infinity" are mentioned in the plural, meaning that, from this scan alone, we can trace out a reference to, at minimum, aleph-2, since that is the second number larger than countable infinity (aleph-0). This is relevant to note because, as it were, once you get to the point where aleph-2 can be constructed as a number, the existence of the infinite higher alephs becomes a sort of domino effect, following from it by necessity. I figure I shouldn't have to say this outright, but you never know.
And so we get to the meat of the argument and I refer to Mighty Thor Vol. 1 #3 (2011), part of a storyline in which we are introduced to the Worldheart, or the Galactus Seed, a cosmic artifact dug out of the roots of Yggdrasil, described as "a geyser of light reflecting all of spacetime." More importantly, the Seed, as described by the Silver Surfer is "A superdense cosmic heart plucked from spacetime itself; An artifact of the Time-Before-Time. It is power–energy–beyond the boundaries that even language and mathematics can explain. It is the eternal soul of the All-God."
Neat statement, to be sure, and one that, given the above, would be High 1-A. Seeing as transfinite numbers have been mentioned in-verse and have been explicitly utilized to gauge the power of the Abstracts, the Worldheart being a reservoir of power so great that it's completely beyond what can be expressed through mathematics would mean that it exceeds any aleph. Things are still a bit hazy so far, though. What exactly is the Seed, and how does it fit in the cosmology?
Well, notice how the Silver Surfer says that it is an object "plucked from spacetime itself," and how the summary of the comic says it reflects all of time and space, both of which being descriptions that suggest it's tied to reality itself in some way. In Fantastic Four #600, Galactus confirms this, saying that "The seed is a celestial mistake. An aberration... Eternity seeking to correct something that is not flawed." So, the Galactus Seed is basically just a fragment of Eternity's substance.
Seeing as the Universal Eternity is himself described as transfinite and spoken of as equivalent to a mathematical higher infinity (Alongside the other Abstracts), the creation of the Seed cannot be attributed to him. Furthermore, the Seed is stated to be from "the Time-Before-Time," and to have birthed the universe as we know it (Thor Vol. 6 #32. 2023), and yet Eternity is nevertheless credited as its creator. This means that the origins of it are pretty clearly to be traced back to the Omniversal Eternity instead. Since it comes from him, Silver Surfer's statement about the Seed would apply to his nature as well.
This statement does not exist in isolation, as mathematics being encompassed by the full extent of the omniverse is already something that's been alluded to elsewhere in the verse. In Amazing Spider Man #22, we are told by Spider Man's wife's boyfriend that all of reality ultimately boils down to information, with mathematics being a part of that. More specifically, mathematics is simply the act of representing this fundamental information through symbols so it can be manipulated and expressed as a language. Taking what was already there and translating it into a code.
In Al Ewing's Ultimates, Maker makes an extremely similar statement: "It's all about information, you see. From the smallest quark to the tallest space god. It's all information...." In context, he mentioned that as part of his explanation of the Superflow, which is the the highest level of reality, between all universes, where ideas and categories come alive and take actual form (Those being the Abstracts that form the echelons of the Cosmic Hierarchy, in their highest forms). More, it is the place ideas come from, to begin with, the dreamspace of human potential.
Simultaneously, though, it also seems to be the mindscape/consciousness of Eternity himself. As shown at the very end of The Ultimates, when the Superflow is erased, Eternity no longer remembers what he is and enters a coma-like state, which is promptly reverted when the Superflow is restored, leading him to regain his memory. That this is the case may seem a bit strange, but it becomes understandable when taking into account the instances where Eternity's Universal counterparts were described as the collective consciousness of all life in a single universe, which would mean the true Eternity's consciousness is in turn the consciousness of all life in the omniverse.
This is important because, as established in the previous thread, all the contents of the omniverse are thoughts and dreams inside of Eternity's consciousness, and so the Superflow, being that very mindspace, is the backdrop in which those dreams and thoughts exist, and so the information in it is the information of all reality as well, with it being primary, while physical existence is secondary. This should be obvious, of course, since it is the realm where the primal concepts that govern the multiverse live (Helpful to note that these concepts are also explicitly platonic in nature in Ultimates #10, but then again the way the Abstracts are portrayed should've made that obvious too), but this angle helps clarify it further. This is to say that the Superflow isn't just "a" informational space, it is the space where all information is.
So, in summary, the Superflow is the transcendent space that acts as the source of all ideas, effectively the omniversal collective consciousness. It encompasses and stores all information, and thus all of mathematics (Since mathematics itself boils down to information as well, according to the scans above). Since mathematics is encompassed by it, naturally so would the hierarchy of transfinite numbers that it entails (Since its existence is mentioned in-verse). As such the Superflow would include every level of 1-A in itself. Obviously, Eternity encompasses and transcends the Superflow, so it's only natural that a piece of him (The Galactus Seed) holds more power than what can be described by mathematics.
As for the tier of the Superflow itself: Contrary to expectations, encompassing all cardinal infinities is High 1-A, not 1-A+. The reason for this being that the collection of all cardinal numbers is, itself, not a cardinal number, by Cantor's Paradox. This meaning that, though it includes every cardinal, the amount of cardinals there are in it is not able to be represented by any cardinal due to being "too big." So in that sense it is greater than an infinite (Very, very infinite, in fact) 1-A hierarchy. Eternity aside, characters who would receive scaling from the Superflow would be the Omniversal Abstracts, like the Living Tribunal, given that they personify fundamental inner workings of existence and as such function all throughout multiversal space.
Now: An attempt at a rebuttal to the above that I already anticipate revolves this scan, where Nightmask explains that, due to the destruction of all universes caused by the Incursions, the Superflow has "come undone." The logic here being that, if universes being destroyed overtime also results in the Superflow being destroyed, then surely it can't be infinitely above said universes.
Yeah, so, the scan is out of context, and largely an issue of the muddled terminology used by the comic. To clear things up, see these scans.
Basically, the thing is that "Superflow" is a term that can refer to two things: The informational dreamspace that lies between universes and the network of nodes allowing travel through this space that was constructed by the Builders. Recently, using the term to refer exclusively to the former is what's stuck, but in older comics, usage of it to refer to the latter was still relatively prominent. Regardless, though, as you can see by all the scans above, even the one that could potentially be used as a rebuttal, the dreamspace between universes still very much existed even as those universes were being destroyed by the Incursions. In fact, even at the tail-end of Time Runs Out, several issues after the Superflow is stated to have come undone, Nightmask could still travel between universes through the dreamspace. When they talk about the Superflow collapsing, they explicitly mean the breakdown of the network created by the Builders, not the dreamspace collapsing.
The next point has to do with information to be found in Silver Surfer Vol. 3 #140 and #141, respectively.
Those scans speak for themselves: The comic places Earth-616 as one part of an infinite hierarchy of universes contained by larger universes, which extends ad-infinitum. This is something that's alluded to in several other parts of Marvel history, namely here (Doctor Strange Vol. 1 #171), here (Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme. #88), here (Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #75), here (Thor Vol. 1 #292) and here (Defenders Vol. 3 #3)
With all of Earth-616 having been accepted as a Low 1-A structure, this is a 1-A+ structure, and, given it is transcended by the outer omniverse (And the planes above it), serves as additional support for a High 1-A rating.
Now, one important detail to note is that the cosmology described in DeMatteis' run of Silver Surfer includes the Microverse as a lower universe than the main 616 reality (Silver Surfer Vol. 3 #143). Indeed, the higher universe where the Surfer is in the above scans is its counterpart; what contains the universe (And several other universes), instead of being contained by it.
As anyone vaguely familiar with comics probably already knows, that's not been true in a long while, and the Microverse has been consistently defined as being a parallel universe that just so happens to be accessed through shrinking, not a universe contained within a larger universe. As such, the scans from Silver Surfer #140 and #141 belong to a separate arrangement of the omniversal structure than the usual one we see in Marvel Comics, though one that regardless would still be encompassed by the Neutral Zone and transcended by the Mystery. As such, Eternity and the realms of the Outside can scale to it just fine, still.
For an addendum on this part, see this post.
As the title suggests, this is a continuation of my ongoing revisions of Marvel's Cosmics, this time tackling the tiering of the Omniversal Abstracts. After this one, I plan to make a Part 2.5, which will deal with fixing... everything else about the profiles. And after that one, I'll make a Part 3, aimed towards the mythological gods of the verse.
This one is quite a bit bigger than the previous one, and largely deals with outlining the current cosmology of the verse, so, lot's of in-verse stuff ahead. If you only really care about the tiers, type in "Der Tiers" on the search on page function to skip straight to that section, I guess.
The Cosmology
Now that Defenders: Beyond is out (And has been out for next to a year now), we finally have a lot more insight on the shape of Marvel's Cosmology, largely in relation to the realms outside of the omniverse, whose relationship to each other and to existence proper was left a bit vaguely-defined so far. As Al Ewing puts it:
This mapping of the Marvel Godhead, as it were, is primarily based on the Kabbalah, the system of Jewish Mysticism that's already been a central theme in previous works of his (Immortal Hulk coming to mind). More specifically, it terms all of the structures that are outside of the Marvel Omniverse as part of a domain known as the "Mystery," synonymous with what Al Ewing's Ultimates called "The Outside." Those realms are higher planes that lie above Eternity's being, as well as outside his influence. Furthermore, they, together with Eternity himself, are mapped to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the diagram of the emanations of the Absolute through which creation comes into being. Those emanations (Collectively known as Sefirot) are ten in number: Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod and Malkuth, and some of the associations we're explicitly told about in Defenders Beyond are:
Malkuth, the lowest of the Sefirot, is the Neutral Zone. It's the furthest edge of all things, the white space bordering everything. It exists beyond the Superflow and in the "outer omniverse" at the edge of the Outside. Though he initially thought it was just an alternate dimension, Blue Marvel eventually discovered that the sections of the Neutral Zone which he interacted with were just a part of a much larger "Exo-Space" that makes direct contact with the Outside.
So, Malkuth is basically the framework and outer boundary of the omniverse itself, which transcends the inner structure of existence and is on the same level as Eternity proper (With all the lower planes as such being fictional to it, as we've gone over in Part 1 of this thread).
Above Malkuth is Yesod, the domain of the Beyonders. It is an "incomprehensibly featureless" level from which even Eternity is seen as vanishing into insignificance, as well as the Engine Room of creation, where the Beyonders act as monitors of all existence from outside of it. It is above the entire narrative of the omniverse, as Loki encasing a Beyonder in a story is stated to be them trapping something infinite inside of finite boundaries. We, of course, know that the narrative encompasses the omniverse because of Loki: Agent of Asgard #17, where Loki could bypass the entire death and rebirth of the multiverse by just skipping to the next comic, which resulted in him arriving at the Sixth Cosmos and then into the Eighth. An act that was specifically not one of time travel, by the way, since there wasn't any time to go back into anymore.
The very name of the place is also something that informs us of its function. "Yesod" is the Hebrew word for "Foundation," which is to say that it's the basis upon which the cosmos rests. You could tie this to what Moridun says about the nature of reality. Namely that "all-that-is" is composed of five magical elements (Something that Eternity himself mentions as well) which are laid over a foundation, the world underfoot. That the four usual elements are "bound in the moon-dark" by a fifth one is very likely a reference to the planetary symbolism behind the Sefirot, in which Yesod corresponds to the moon, just as Malkuth is equated to the Earth.
In-between Malkuth and Yesod, though, there is another realm. This one the Defenders briefly travel through when they leave the Neutral Zone behind and arrive in a timeless, spaceless void outside of it, before the void itself flips on "an invisible axis," and they finally arrive in Yesod proper. This realm is most certainly the Far Shore, which is the furthest edge of being itself, where the First Firmament resided alongside the previous omniverses, and where things such as "Time," "Space" and "Self" don't exist, even the abstract, non-conventional forms of time and space that exist on the level of the Abstracts. The fact that the First Firmament resided there while being much larger than Eternity, as well as Challenger outliving the Seventh Cosmos by being imprisoned there (Compounded with it being described as "Outside all systems, old and new") make it fairly obvious that this place is beyond the omniverse, yet, it is still below the Mystery.
In terms of the Tree of Life, this would be the bottleneck connecting Malkuth and Yesod, so, not... quite one of the Sefirot, but more like the path between two of them.
Above Yesod is Tiferet, the White-Hot Room in which the Phoenix resides. It is an even higher space than the Beyond, and It is from where the Beyonders draw power for their Concordance Engines. While in it, The Beyonder himself admits that he's completely outclassed and that the Phoenix Force can obliterate him easily. It is here that the fires of creation, of becoming, are made, in reference to the idea that the Phoenix Force is the driving principle behind the Big Bang that creates the multiverse.
In S.W.O.R.D Vol. 2 #7, Doctor Doom also explains that the center of the Cosmos and the outside of the Cosmos are and have always been the same place–The Above-Place, the Mystery, the White-Hot Room. This being extremely consistent with (And most certainly an intentional reference to) Defenders Vol. 3 #3, where Dormammu says that, at the core of Eternity's being, there is a void of oceanic nothingness where all matter and all energy sleeps in a state of unmanifestation, and it is by "detonating" this cosmic heart that he rebirths all universes in his image.
So, in short, this realm is the root of the Big Bang and of the omniversal cycle, whose energies allow the death and renewal of the cosmoses, in a sense being the singularity out of which the multiverse sprouts. This being taken straight out of the Kabbalah, where Tiferet represents God's first utterance: "Let there be light."
The revelation that the Tiger God is the force opposite to the Phoenix Force also further contextualized plenty of things we were told about in Al Ewing's previous works, such as Avengers: No Road Home, where the Tiger God was placed as symbolizing all of the things of the darkness that humans feared, and which they banished to the "outer side" through the light of their own stories. The White-Hot Room, then, is that very light: The source of all myth-narratives that shape and create the Gods, and which stave-off humanity's fears. This, of course, tying into the symbolism of the campfire around which stories are told, and which acts to keep away the darkness, something deliberately invoked by one of the forms that the White-Hot Room takes in Defenders Beyond
Above the White-Hot-Room is Da'at, or the Abyss, the Land of Couldn't-Be-Shouldn't-Be, the furthest place from reality that there is. There really isn't much to talk about with regards to this plane because the name already says it all: This is the realm of impossibilities.
Most noteworthy about it, however, is that the Land of Couldn't-Be-Shouldn't-Be is just one aspect of Da'at, and the smaller one, at that. Above it, on a level where Couldn't-Be-Shouldn't-Be is seen as part of a comicbook, is the Land of Can-Be-Shall-Be where all possibilities exist, being the "mountaintop from which all visible," echoing The Ultimates, where the Queen of Nevers states that, from her location, she can see all. This realm, for the matter, is the reason for why the Beyonders are incapable of looking into the future, in spite of being existences that transcend the omniverse entirely: "What shall be" simply is something rooted in a much higher plane than their own. Given that one of them likewise mentions that they can predict what will happen, even if they can't truly see it, it seems that they can see the set of futures that may happen, but which one of them will happen is something outside the scope of their knowledge.
The presence of Da'at also gives us some insight into the relationships between the Sefirot, and, in this case, the relationship between Da'at and Tiferet. As the Queen of Nevers says, each "What if?" can potentially become "What is," and the force that allows for the transition between one and the other is the very flame of becoming that has its origin in the White-Hot Room. Note how Galactus even says that the Celestials reforged in that flame are coming directly from "the heart of the Mystery," in keeping with how the Phoenix Force states that Tiferet is the heart of all things, because it, among the Sefirot, is the sphere that corresponds to the heart of the human body.
This idea of primal, more fundamental realities from which lower ones are emanated in succession until the lowest world is born, of course, is central to the Kabbalah as a whole, as well as something that has been mentioned in Ghost Rider: Kushala, a mini-series published in 2021 that comments on the nature of the Sefirot, and has Doctor Doom describe Da'at as "The stone that causes the ripple. It is the point where all iterations originate. It is the dark of the universe where everything is a possibility. Through the Arbiter exists the realms of possibility. The Arbiter is the very stuff that we are made of... The concepts that become reality."
Frankly, not that this even needed clarifying at this point, but, conveniently, the same comic also states that the higher Sefirot are very specifically not higher-dimensional spaces, and that to refer to them as such is to fall into error, "like observing one side of a cube and calling it a square."
Above Da'at, then, is Kether, the House of Ideas. This is the apex of the Tree of Life, the pure unity of the divine, and in here only The One Above All resides. This is the birthplace of all that is, all that was, and all that may be, and is where infinite stories are born.
Even the House of Ideas, though, is at the bottom of something even greater. As Blue Marvel says, The One Above All is not truly the supreme power, he is just the highest power that is accessible to the intellect in any form, and beyond even the limit to all understanding that he represents, there are things even higher.
As TOAA himself says, the House of Ideas itself is simply "the place where the World of Action ends... and the World of Creation begins," this being a reference to how, in the Kabbalah, the emanations of the divine are divided in Four Worlds: Assiah (Action), Yetzirah (Formation), Beriah (Creation) and Atziluth (Emanation), with the Sefirot existing in all of these Four Worlds, in higher and lower forms that overlap and interact with and reflect each other (So for instance the Kether of a lower world may be just the Malkuth of a higher world). In this context, TOAA is simply the Kether of Assiah, while simultaneously being the Malkuth of Beriah (Just as the Neutral Zone is the Malkuth of Assiah).
This, by the way, was foreshadowed all the way back in Immortal Hulk #11, when the narration states that all of the Sefirot are emanations of "the divine." Including Kether, the House of Ideas.
In fact, there are arguably infinite layers of emanation beyond the House of Ideas. As Loki says at the start of the comic: No matter how big you are, there's always something bigger. Later on, the Queen of Nevers says that, although she journeys through the Mystery, she will never see it all, because the Mystery is infinite, which is immediately followed by Cloud stating that the Journey through the higher realms never ends, not even when you pass into the final door to the House of Ideas. Indeed, as we've already seen, even the House is just the start of that journey, and Blue Marvel questions if there can even be a final guiding hand behind everything, further implying that the regress of emanations is something that doesn't end at any specific point.
This notion of the ascension through the Mystery being neverending ties into the themes that Al Ewing likes to tackle in most of his works, and which he's expressed in a very recent interview about his upcoming book, Immortal Thor:
Al Ewing Reaches for Godhood With Immortal Thor
The acclaimed comics writer talks to io9 about his latest Marvel project.
gizmodo.com
That is to say, since the Sefirot, the planes of the Mystery, are a manifestation of the hidden qualities and attributes of the divine (Evidenced also by how Ewing describes the journey through the Mystery in Defenders: Beyond as "a mapping of the Marvel Godhead"), then the fact that they go upwards forever is an expression of the infinite unknowability of God, which makes it so the journey to understand and map it out is one that will never end. Presumably, this is why the domain beyond Eternity is called "the Mystery," too. It is the mystery of God, which can keep being explored and unwrapped forever without ever touching the essence behind it all.
That said, the "Godhead" of which the Mystery is a manifestation hasn't been formally introduced yet, so for the time being, no one scales to this, but, who knows.
TL;DR Marvel's meta-cosmology consists of six stacked realms, each transcending the previous one: The Neutral Zone (Malkuth), The Far Shore, The Beyond (Yesod), The White-Hot Room (Tiferet), Da'at and The House of Ideas (Kether). The relationship between them is as follows:
House of Ideas = The realm of pure oneness where only The One Above All exists, transcending all else. It is from here that infinite stories are born, but they are still only ideas, and have to go through several stages before they can become a world.
Da'at = The realm containing all possibility and impossibility. Here, God starts to consider ways in which his creation could be, as well as the ones in which it could not be.
White Hot-Room = The realm of the fires of creation, which forge the possibilities of Da'at into actuality. Here, God says "Let there be light," and the surge of energy that follows is the Big Bang thet gives birth to the cosmos.
Beyond = The foundation on which the world to come will rest. Here, the creative energies produced in the White-Hot Room are harnessed and start being organized and solidified into something concrete. Whereas the White-Hot Room precedes the birth of form, Yesod is the place in which the shape of creation is sketched out, beginning to exist in idea, but not in actuality.
The Far Shore = The pathway between The Neutral Zone and the Beyond, above space, time, life, death and self.
The Neutral Zone = The lowest world. The omniverse as a whole.
On the flip side of the Sefirot, though, there are other spheres. as per Immortal Hulk #11, those are called the Qlippoth, the Hebrew word for "Shell" or "Husk," which is meant to indicate that they are dark reflections of the Sefirot that stand devoid of the divinity of the Godhead, thus making them "empty" in nature. While the Sefirot are what lies over the omniverse, the Above-Place, the Qlippoth are what lies under it, the Below-Place, the concept of Hell and bedrock of everything. As such, the lower the Qlippoth is, the greater it is, instead of vice-versa.
The first of the Qlippoth that we are told about over the course of Al Ewing's work is Thaumiel, the dark reflection of Kether; whereas Kether is the pure oneness of the divine, Thaumiel is a state in which that oneness is split into contending forces, always in conflict with one another and refusing to be as one. This is the realm of The One Below All.
Later on, in Venom Vol. 5 #18, we're introduced to the Un-Beyond, the Qlippoth of Yesod and factory floor of creation, where the Onyx King, the cosmic counterpart to the Beyonders, does his work.
As said in the scans, though, the Un-Beyond itself is accessed by falling from yet another realm, that being Limbo, "the earth-plane's dark opposite." Given the overall context of the work, and the fact that the Un-Beyond is called "the next place" from Limbo, it would seem Limbo is supposed to be the Qlippoth of Malkuth, the Sefirah that corresponds to the Earth under the Tree of Life's planetary associations, which would thus make it the dark reflection of the Neutral Zone, and by extension of the omniverse as a whole. This, surprisingly, is scale that's not unheard of for Limbo: In the 2000s, it was already described as a realm that transcends all realities and all planes of existence, and interfaces with all of creation, as well as a plane where all times are one, and further back, in the 80's, it was beyond all concepts of time and space.
The Elasticity of Marvel
As is to be expected from a company that's been publishing stories since the 60's, Marvel's worldbuilding has met its fair handful of contradictions over the years. The presence of multiple writers, all working several years apart, leads to the existence of multiple visions that at times may conflict with each other, and that's quite simply in the nature of comicbook storytelling. With regards to its cosmology, in specific, Marvel has shockingly managed to remain mostly whole, but this is not to say that inconsistencies and contradictions do not exist at all in that area of the verse.
The chaotic nature of the verse, obviously, isn't something that the writers are unaware of, though, far from it. Throughout its history, there have been a number of references to it in the comics themselves, often when the writers feel like making some sort of metacommentary on the nature of Marvel Comics' setting, which invariably leads to some kind of in-universe justification for all the inconsistencies in it. In all such instances, the explanation boils down to one simple thing: Marvel's cosmology is not a fixed entity. It is fluid. Here, I'll go through some of the facts surrounding that, and expand on some things we've already accepted which lean on that direction.
For the first viewpoint under which the cosmology is malleable, I'll refer to this accepted thread, which had the following proposal:
So, in summary, TOAA is the gestalt entity that reunites all the writers, editors, artists and etc working on Marvel itself, perceiving the verse from a metafictional perspective. And from this perspective, the setting itself is freely alterable through their abode, the House of Ideas, from which infinite stories are born. As such, the inconsistent depictions of the cosmology are in fact canon, since all of it is subject to the authors' whims.
Defenders: Beyond gave us even more material confirming this view. In Issue #5, for instance, TOAA, in a faked bout of anger, sics a bunch of weird monsters on the Defenders, which Taaia then describes as "creatures of the pre-creation." If you take a look at said monsters, though, you'll notice that they are all characters from Tales to Astonish, the serial anthology of horror stories that Marvel was publishing before Fantastic Four #1, which is considered the very start of the Marvel Universe proper, was released in 1961. From this we see that, since The One Above All is the writers, their perspective of existence is from a narrative order, not a chronological one, and so to them "creation" was not the in-universe birth of the cosmos, but just the moment Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four in the 60's, with everything published before that being "pre-creation."
This perspective is also shown in the scans from the first section of this thread, where Loki, even after stating that time travel is impossible at the end of omniverse due to there being no time to go back into, still manages to go to past and future multiverses by simply skipping to the next comics. The fact that he arrived in the Sixth Multiverse as the "next" moment in the order of events despite leaving at the end of the Seventh Multiverse, once again, goes to show that the narrative order of events supersedes the in-universe chronological one, and takes precedence over it.
What all this means in practical terms is that Marvel's contradictions were decided to be cut off from each other, but TOAA nevertheless scaled above them by virtue of canonically being the source of all those different portrayals, since he writes all of them into existence from his metanarrative realm. Here, I'll take this a step further: I'd like to amend this proposal and argue that, under the vision Marvel's taken on the cosmology in recent years, this principle actually applies to more characters than TOAA alone. Rather, it applies to everything in the Mystery, actually.
To elaborate on that, I'll have to explain how exactly the process of creation works in Marvel: As we all know, the House of Ideas is the apex of the currently observable cosmology. It's the source of all that is, was, and may be, and from it, The One Above All creates all stories. What's important to note, however, is that this creation comes in stages. TOAA doesn't think a little and suddenly the omniverse comes into being; instead the stories that are born in the House of Ideas go through several phases before they are finally brought into proper existence. And explaining this process is where the Kabbalistic concepts that Al Ewing introduced come into play. As he himself says, the higher planes of the Mystery are a kind of "creation zone," the places where the birth of existence is still underway, and hasn't been completed yet.
Cosmic Is A State Of Being: An Interview With Al Ewing - COMICSXF
Al Ewing has become one of Marvel's resident experts in cosmic concepts & big ideas. He sits with us to explain the secrets of the universe.
www.comicsxf.com
Immortal Hulk #11 gives a description of the Tree of Life, stating that it is a map of the emanations of the divine, laying out creation as a whole. The term "emanation" being what informs us of the nature of this creation; the Absolute doesn't make things from nothing. Instead, it contains all of them as potentialities within itself, and radiates them outwards to bring them into proper form. In the Tree of Life's case, there are ten emanations in total, and they all culminate upon the final sphere of existence, Malkuth, the omniverse (Or more precisely the outer edge of it).
Malkuth being the endpoint in which the process of creation initated by The One Above All is finalized tell us a fairly important thing. Namely the fact that, regardless of what setting TOAA wants to bring into existence, once it is properly born, it will ultimately be within Malkuth. Like I said before, the higher planes of the Mystery are stages where the birth of existence isn't yet finished, and as such aren't proper existences so much as they are the hidden machinery that any kind of existence needs to be brought into fruition, to begin with.
We have loads of evidence for this being the case in Al Ewing's comics: For example, in Defenders Vol. 6 #4, Doctor Strange and a few others travel back to the time of the Third Cosmos, and Strange's introductory narration describes it as such: "It's said that the Third Cosmos was the first to be born from the multiversal cycle–“The first rebirth after cosmic all-death. We're so far back that Science and Magic haven't been invented yet. Even Narrative is just a twinkle in a future narrator's eye." Before that, the Defenders went to the Fourth Cosmos, of which is said: "This is an archetypal being–A form of primal avatar. Everything that exists was once a spark in the cosmic mind... An idea... And this... is a living idea. A highly dangerous one."
As well as "This primal reality is made of patterns. With my higher senses, I can feel the repeating cycles... Some laid down when the cosmos first began..."
So, in short: Each preceding cosmos is a primal, more basic reality than the succeeding ones. The Fourth Cosmos was the archetypal groundwork for the ones to follow, whose inhabitants were the models and blueprints of the characters we are familiar with in the Marvel Universe; they were still, as the narration says, just ideas inside of the cosmic mind. The Third Cosmos goes back even further, and is such a primordial world that "Narrative" is in its first sparks, and overall is still just a vague twinkling in the narrator's head.
All of that pretty firmly establishes that, one way or another, stories and narrative as phenomena only begin to exist relative to Malkuth, and in their conventional forms don't extend into the Outside above it. Indeed, in the 2000s, the omniverse was portrayed as a huge wall of comic panels, and much later, this exact scenery reappeared in Gwenpool Strikes Back, which presented us to the "Marvel Comics Continuity Abyss," whose nature is honestly pretty self-explanatory. In the last issue of Deadpool's Secret Secret Wars, Deadpool is also brought to a realm stated to be the foundation of Eternity, and the origin of every event in every universe, and in there he finally becomes certain that his existence is part of a comicbook, which again points towards Eternity being the point in which Marvel Comics as a fictional verse is born.
The realms of the Mystery, then, are planes beyond the limits of the comics' narrative and continuity. You've already seen the scan for this: It's in Defenders Beyond #2, where, as mentioned before, Loki uses their power as the God of Stories to imprison a Beyonder into a narrative arc, and this is described as the act of forcibly imposing finite boundaries and measures on something infinite, rendering it "caged." Thus meaning that story/narrative is something that the Beyonders naturally exist above, and which they see as "finite" and constraining in comparison to themselves, who are infinite.
Note, also, how Loki forcing a story on a Beyonder is represented as said Beyonder becoming trapped between panels, which is absolutely an intentional choice of symbolism, given that, all throughout the issue, the Beyond has no panels, and the Beyonders are surrounded by the tubes of their Concordance Engines instead of the usual borders of the comic. Said Engines are, in the aforementioned scan with Loki, also drawn as extending beyond and outside of the panels alongside the white space of the Beyond itself. In the same issue, Kevin Brashear destroying the avatar of a rogue Beyonder and returning its essence to the Outside is described as him having removed the Beyonder in question from the continuity, which continues the trend of the Mystery lying in the metanarrative outside of the story proper.
We also see this in Ultimates, where the Queen of Nevers is often drawn as standing outside the panels of the comic (Same with the Celestials arriving from the Mystery), and once again in Loki: Agent of Asgard, where King Loki walking into the Outside is repeatedly shown as him slipping into the white space outside the comic's panels (#16 and #3, respectively, and in #17 we get further confirmation that this is indeed the Outside when Loki and Verity find him languishing in the void). After he absorbed the power of the Beyonders, Molecule Man also noted that his powers now extended to the narrative itself, indicating that the Ivory Kings' engineering of the multiverse likewise takes place on the meta level.
Given all of the material above, I think it's also absolutely fair to equate the Outside to Gwenpool's Gutterspace, which likewise is the white void outside of the comic's panels, which is unaffected by retcons and from which all of Marvel's continuity is accessible.
So, long story short, the different settings and cosmologies in Marvel, with regards to the regular storylines at least, canonically only exist on the level of the omniverse, and the higher planes in the Mystery take this a step further by being the machinery that brings the continuities containing these cosmologies into fruition in the first place, existing on a metanarrative level in the same vein as TOAA himself, and seeing Marvel's true nature as the piece of fiction that it is, whose continuity can be altered and monitored from outside. By analogy, this could be explained as follows:
Kether / TOAA / House of Ideas = The author and their first ideas for a story. At this stage, there is only the want to write something.
Chokmah to Yesod = The intermediary stages where the ins and outs of these ideas are hammered up before anything is put into paper.
Malkuth = The story proper. The start of the actual writing process.
Though, of course, that is not to say that Malkuth contains all possible cosmologies in simultaneity. It can contain any of them, but as far as we are aware, only one arrangement of the omniversal structure exists at a time. As an analogy, I guess it'd be comparable to a blank page: Obviously, a blank sheet of paper can hold whatever you want to draw at any given time, but if you already drew something and want to draw something else, you'll have to erase what you just drew first.
With this said, we then move on to a broader perspective on Marvel's fluid nature. For this one, we'll start by examining a fairly interesting comic issue, that being Fantastic Four Annual #26, released in 1993.
Here, Kubik and Kosmos start off pondering about the nature of the Celestials, most specifically their origin, which is considered the greatest mystery of the universe, and to try and find something resembling answers they directly enter the mindscape of a Celestial, where several holographic representations of the concepts and knowledge that it holds are shown to them.
To Kosmos' surprise, the Celestial's mind holds multiple different accounts of the race's origins, all of which contradict each other: First, it is suggested that the Celestials come from outside of the multiverse, possibly from the same realm as the Beyonders themselves. Another possibility given is then that Celestials are simply stars who reached the end of their life cycle, and that black hole singularities are the cocoons where they remain before being born. Yet another possible origin is that the Celestials are survivors from a previous universe, like Galactus is, and that Galactus himself is destined to become a Celestial one day. The last suggestion they see, then, is that Celestials are just manifestations of the evolutionary process itself, and as such are illusions with no intrinsic existence of their own.
Alongside all of that, they also see the birth of a Celestial as depicted in Thor Vol. 1 #424, where an entire galaxy composed entirely of biological matter was engulfed by an explosion of light which then compressed itself into a Celestial, having absorbed all the living material that rested in that region of space.
Faced with all these conflicting explanations, Kosmos naturally asks which one represented the true origin of the Celestials. In response to this, Kubik says that all of them and none of them did. As he explains: Reality is not a proposition that can only be "True" or "False." Its underlying structure is malleable, recursive, and exists as a field of infinite possibility where multiple contradictory truths can exist simultaneously. Ultimately, everything boils down to the interplay between will and potentiality; the intellect, by contemplating the unknowable, births new truths from the nonexistent (The "mosaic of infinite possibility" that Kubik mentions), and as such questions like the origin of the Celestials are ones that don't have absolute answers. Instead, all answers to them are true and false at the same time.
After hearing this, Kosmos then comes up with an explanation of her own: That the Celestials are a game that Eternity, the personification of all creation, plays with himself, that Eternity occasionally divides himself into discrete parts that wander the universe in order to attain greater self-knowledge. Kubik not only treats this possibility as valid, but also says it's the best answer he's ever heard.
To say that Marvel took this idea and kept it since forever would honestly be a massive understatement. A recurring thing in Al Ewing's work, for instance, is the idea that Gods are stories, created by the telltales of humanity that echo through history to shape reality from the beginning of time. Elsewhere, Gods are also stated to live in a world of stories used to explain the world to the ancients, every bit as true to them as science in the modern day is to us. Adding to that is the idea that mythologies and the sciences are all congruent with each other; to say that the world was born from a Cosmic Egg or from the dead body of a giant or from the Big Bang is to talk about the same thing from slightly different perspectives.
In Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #531 and #532, this topic comes up again. More specifically, we are told that the universe, all of existence, paradoxically came to be as a byproduct of the primordial question, of the need to understand oneself. Questions like "Who are we?", "Why are we here?" and "Why are we?" are what triggered the Big Bang that birthed all things. However, this primordial state of affairs was still too unstable, unable to congeal into anything where life could happen, because, although the question was asked, the asker still had absolutely no understanding of the question or its answers. As all living things gain an increasing understanding of themselves, though, the universe grows and develops itself, and when we fully understand ourselves, the cosmos will finally reach its final stage of evolution.
In New Avengers Vol. 4 #2, Maker repeats that exact same rhetoric: The basic conditions for the universe are a product of consciousness, and by expanding our minds, we are also expanding the universe itself. This expansion, of course, has to do not with physical size but with the structural development of existence. How did science come to be if mythology used to be literally true, for instance? The universe simply became more complex as consciousness developed, and so more intricate explanations for things started to arise.
The notion that all of reality is a byproduct of the mind contemplating the unknowable, and as such birthing answers for it based on various different viewpoints (Which can and will contradict each other), also has pretty clear ties to what Al Ewing comments about in the above-linked interview as well. That is, the fact that the basic nature of "God" or "the divine" is to be unknowable, and that the journey towards understanding it (And ourselves, too, relating to what the alien entity explains to Reed Richards) therefore is one that has no end, hence the realms of the Mystery ascending infinitely upwards: We may see increasingly primal masks and aspects of the Godhead, but never the face that's underneath them all.
So, did the multiverse start with Nemesis, the entity whose suicide gave birth to the Infinity Gems, for instance? Or did it start with the First Firmament? Both. And neither. Those are simply two different narratives that emerge from the infinite potentiality of the unknowable. True in the sense that they do indeed inform states of affairs that reality has gone through, from the perspective of beings in it, and false on the basis that the essence of the unknowable remains such even as the intellect continues to come up with answers for it. And as shown by the fact that one of the possible origins of the Celestials is that they came from outside of the multiverse, from the same realm as the Beyonders, not even the Mystery escapes from this fluidity.
Rectifying Some Things
Okay, so, the first thing I want to address is our idea that Eternity "ascended to the top of the Cosmic Hierarchy" when he was reborn as the Eighth Cosmos. To put it simply, this is flat-out wrong. As a matter of fact, according to the First Firmament, Eternity was weaker than what he used to be shortly after his rebirth, and hence easy to capture, despite containing the full set of structures (The Superflow, the Neutral Zone) that we currently use to reason that he must have risen in position.
The idea itself seems have come about as a way of rationalizing how the Living Tribunal was depicted as an inner function of Eternity in Al Ewing's Ultimates, which itself was only a perceived problem due to the much-proliferated view that the Living Tribunal is supposed to be the second strongest being in the cosmology after The One Above All himself. However, with the fuckton of layers between the multiverse and TOAA's realm that were recently introduced, it's become clear that this idea just does not hold any water anymore.
In fact, this bit of characterization with regards to the Living Tribunal was dropped as soon as Hickman's New Avengers showed the Beyonders murdering him. Worse, the Living Tribunal doesn't actually have anything that scales him above any version of the omniversal personification, to begin with, due to the fact that he is just the top of the cosmic hierarchy, which the Omniversal Eternity was never a part of to begin with. Every single time the hierarchy came up as a topic, the Universal Eternity was who was being portrayed as a member of it. To list a few occasions:
Thor Annual #14: Explicitly referring to the Eternity's universal fragment. Made ever-so-slightly worse by it being just Thor's perspective on the cosmic hierarchy. Him being described as "the highest authority in the multiverse" is also, of course, not something that contradicts the Omniversal Eternity being above him; Eternity is not in the omniverse, he is it.
Guardians of the Galaxy #47: Thoroughly contradicted by later material.
Silver Surfer Vol. 3 #31: Refers to Universal Eternity, seeing as Death here is treated as his counterpart, which is not the case with the True Eternity.
Thanos Annual #1: Nothing suggesting that this is the Omniversal Eternity, especially seeing as he's grouped alongside the same usual members of the Cosmic Hierarchy.
So, in short: The Living Tribunal and the Omniversal Eternity never even appear in the same room. Not once, in large part due to the sheer obscurity of the second character prior to Al Ewing putting him in the spotlight with his work in The Ultimates. As such, the latter is not really to be included in all of the statements relating to the former's primacy over the Abstracts. The salt on the wound gets even worse when taking into account Annihilation: Heralds of Galactus, which depicts the Living Tribunal as a part of the cosmos that was born after the Big Bang that gave birth to it.
As such, Eternity's two incarnations as the Seventh and Eighth Cosmoses should not be separate keys, plan and simple. There is just no difference between them. He was always above the Living Tribunal and not a part of the Cosmic Hierarchy at all.
The second character whose ratings need to be sorted out is Oblivion. At the moment, we treat him as the personification of literally everything that's outside of the omniverse. As what I've shown above demonstrates, though, that's... completely untenable now, seeing as there isn't just a single void beyond the multiverse, there are several, infinite, in fact, with even The One Above All being just a part of this hierarchy. With that in mind, Oblivion's standing in the cosmology should be looked at from a different angle.
Straightforward enough: When describing how he slipped into the Far Shore, the Shaper of Worlds states that he fell into Oblivion. Later on, Galactus also says that, if the First Firmament managed to successfully absorb Eternity into himself and as a result erase him, Oblivion would be the only victor in the end, something that Conner Sims alludes to, earlier on, when he says that the conflict is one between Existence and Oblivion. Inside and Outside. In Great Lakes Avengers #3, Oblivion also calls himself the end of creation, the nothing that watched the birth of everything, and in the very quote featured on his profile, describes himself as lying between death and rebirth. Given all of this, it would seem he's just the Far Shore, the nothingness immediately outside of the omniverse.
The third profile that has extremely glaring inaccuracies is The Beyonders. Now, the profile is generally pretty garbage, and much of the grievances I have with it are better suited for the upcoming Part 2.5 of these revisions, but one particular thing about it ought to be addressed now: Namely the "Beyonder Drones" key.
Yeah, so, to put it simply, that doesn't ******* exist. The weird robotic-looking Beyonders that fought Thor and Hyperion weren't "drones," they were Beyonders, full-stop. They were just briefly redesigned from New Avengers #32: Proof of that is how, one issue before that, the Beyonders who face Thor, Hyperion and Starbrand are shown to be the same grey alien-looking kind of Beyonder that killed the Living Tribunal and the rest of the Abstracts. In New Avengers #33, the artists stuck to that design even up to the scene where Doom destroys them, before Secret Wars 2015 dialed back to their original appearance.
It seems that, just like the Seventh Cosmos-Eighth Cosmos key split, this was an attempt to give rationale to a seemingly nonsensical low-end on the Beyonders' part, namely the fact one of them is apparently destroyed by Starbrand detonating his body, which is indeed kind of a really lame performance coming from one of the guys who killed the Living Tribunal, but it does have explanation: As said earlier on in the same issue, what the heroes are facing here are not the true forms of the Beyonders, but manifestations; solid states containing their incorporeal essences. In Defenders: Beyond, this topic comes back, with it being stated that, although their true forms are infinite, they can clothe themselves in matter to project a form that finite beings can comprehend.
This doesn't necessarily make them weaker, seeing as the Beyonder, for example, is still referred to as an omnipotent being even when in a physical form. That said, it does mean that they can freely decide how powerful they are (Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #7). This being actually something we've seen all the way back in Secret Wars II, where Beyonder's physical form was almost destroyed by a fall off a building because he didn't adjust it to endure the impact beforehand.
So, all-in-all, the "Beyonder Drones" key should be removed, and we should simply note that the tier of their physical manifestations varies according to their whims on the profile.
Der Tiers
So, as we've already established in the past thread, the hierarchy of transfinite numbers is an idea that exists in Marvel. Not only does it exist as an idea, but it also has practical application to reality: The highest forces in the universe are themselves higher cardinal infinities, as stated more than once.
Notice that, in the first scan, the "numbers greater than infinity" are mentioned in the plural, meaning that, from this scan alone, we can trace out a reference to, at minimum, aleph-2, since that is the second number larger than countable infinity (aleph-0). This is relevant to note because, as it were, once you get to the point where aleph-2 can be constructed as a number, the existence of the infinite higher alephs becomes a sort of domino effect, following from it by necessity. I figure I shouldn't have to say this outright, but you never know.
And so we get to the meat of the argument and I refer to Mighty Thor Vol. 1 #3 (2011), part of a storyline in which we are introduced to the Worldheart, or the Galactus Seed, a cosmic artifact dug out of the roots of Yggdrasil, described as "a geyser of light reflecting all of spacetime." More importantly, the Seed, as described by the Silver Surfer is "A superdense cosmic heart plucked from spacetime itself; An artifact of the Time-Before-Time. It is power–energy–beyond the boundaries that even language and mathematics can explain. It is the eternal soul of the All-God."
Neat statement, to be sure, and one that, given the above, would be High 1-A. Seeing as transfinite numbers have been mentioned in-verse and have been explicitly utilized to gauge the power of the Abstracts, the Worldheart being a reservoir of power so great that it's completely beyond what can be expressed through mathematics would mean that it exceeds any aleph. Things are still a bit hazy so far, though. What exactly is the Seed, and how does it fit in the cosmology?
Well, notice how the Silver Surfer says that it is an object "plucked from spacetime itself," and how the summary of the comic says it reflects all of time and space, both of which being descriptions that suggest it's tied to reality itself in some way. In Fantastic Four #600, Galactus confirms this, saying that "The seed is a celestial mistake. An aberration... Eternity seeking to correct something that is not flawed." So, the Galactus Seed is basically just a fragment of Eternity's substance.
Seeing as the Universal Eternity is himself described as transfinite and spoken of as equivalent to a mathematical higher infinity (Alongside the other Abstracts), the creation of the Seed cannot be attributed to him. Furthermore, the Seed is stated to be from "the Time-Before-Time," and to have birthed the universe as we know it (Thor Vol. 6 #32. 2023), and yet Eternity is nevertheless credited as its creator. This means that the origins of it are pretty clearly to be traced back to the Omniversal Eternity instead. Since it comes from him, Silver Surfer's statement about the Seed would apply to his nature as well.
This statement does not exist in isolation, as mathematics being encompassed by the full extent of the omniverse is already something that's been alluded to elsewhere in the verse. In Amazing Spider Man #22, we are told by Spider Man's wife's boyfriend that all of reality ultimately boils down to information, with mathematics being a part of that. More specifically, mathematics is simply the act of representing this fundamental information through symbols so it can be manipulated and expressed as a language. Taking what was already there and translating it into a code.
In Al Ewing's Ultimates, Maker makes an extremely similar statement: "It's all about information, you see. From the smallest quark to the tallest space god. It's all information...." In context, he mentioned that as part of his explanation of the Superflow, which is the the highest level of reality, between all universes, where ideas and categories come alive and take actual form (Those being the Abstracts that form the echelons of the Cosmic Hierarchy, in their highest forms). More, it is the place ideas come from, to begin with, the dreamspace of human potential.
Simultaneously, though, it also seems to be the mindscape/consciousness of Eternity himself. As shown at the very end of The Ultimates, when the Superflow is erased, Eternity no longer remembers what he is and enters a coma-like state, which is promptly reverted when the Superflow is restored, leading him to regain his memory. That this is the case may seem a bit strange, but it becomes understandable when taking into account the instances where Eternity's Universal counterparts were described as the collective consciousness of all life in a single universe, which would mean the true Eternity's consciousness is in turn the consciousness of all life in the omniverse.
This is important because, as established in the previous thread, all the contents of the omniverse are thoughts and dreams inside of Eternity's consciousness, and so the Superflow, being that very mindspace, is the backdrop in which those dreams and thoughts exist, and so the information in it is the information of all reality as well, with it being primary, while physical existence is secondary. This should be obvious, of course, since it is the realm where the primal concepts that govern the multiverse live (Helpful to note that these concepts are also explicitly platonic in nature in Ultimates #10, but then again the way the Abstracts are portrayed should've made that obvious too), but this angle helps clarify it further. This is to say that the Superflow isn't just "a" informational space, it is the space where all information is.
So, in summary, the Superflow is the transcendent space that acts as the source of all ideas, effectively the omniversal collective consciousness. It encompasses and stores all information, and thus all of mathematics (Since mathematics itself boils down to information as well, according to the scans above). Since mathematics is encompassed by it, naturally so would the hierarchy of transfinite numbers that it entails (Since its existence is mentioned in-verse). As such the Superflow would include every level of 1-A in itself. Obviously, Eternity encompasses and transcends the Superflow, so it's only natural that a piece of him (The Galactus Seed) holds more power than what can be described by mathematics.
As for the tier of the Superflow itself: Contrary to expectations, encompassing all cardinal infinities is High 1-A, not 1-A+. The reason for this being that the collection of all cardinal numbers is, itself, not a cardinal number, by Cantor's Paradox. This meaning that, though it includes every cardinal, the amount of cardinals there are in it is not able to be represented by any cardinal due to being "too big." So in that sense it is greater than an infinite (Very, very infinite, in fact) 1-A hierarchy. Eternity aside, characters who would receive scaling from the Superflow would be the Omniversal Abstracts, like the Living Tribunal, given that they personify fundamental inner workings of existence and as such function all throughout multiversal space.
Now: An attempt at a rebuttal to the above that I already anticipate revolves this scan, where Nightmask explains that, due to the destruction of all universes caused by the Incursions, the Superflow has "come undone." The logic here being that, if universes being destroyed overtime also results in the Superflow being destroyed, then surely it can't be infinitely above said universes.
Yeah, so, the scan is out of context, and largely an issue of the muddled terminology used by the comic. To clear things up, see these scans.
Basically, the thing is that "Superflow" is a term that can refer to two things: The informational dreamspace that lies between universes and the network of nodes allowing travel through this space that was constructed by the Builders. Recently, using the term to refer exclusively to the former is what's stuck, but in older comics, usage of it to refer to the latter was still relatively prominent. Regardless, though, as you can see by all the scans above, even the one that could potentially be used as a rebuttal, the dreamspace between universes still very much existed even as those universes were being destroyed by the Incursions. In fact, even at the tail-end of Time Runs Out, several issues after the Superflow is stated to have come undone, Nightmask could still travel between universes through the dreamspace. When they talk about the Superflow collapsing, they explicitly mean the breakdown of the network created by the Builders, not the dreamspace collapsing.
The next point has to do with information to be found in Silver Surfer Vol. 3 #140 and #141, respectively.
Those scans speak for themselves: The comic places Earth-616 as one part of an infinite hierarchy of universes contained by larger universes, which extends ad-infinitum. This is something that's alluded to in several other parts of Marvel history, namely here (Doctor Strange Vol. 1 #171), here (Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme. #88), here (Fantastic Four Vol. 1 #75), here (Thor Vol. 1 #292) and here (Defenders Vol. 3 #3)
With all of Earth-616 having been accepted as a Low 1-A structure, this is a 1-A+ structure, and, given it is transcended by the outer omniverse (And the planes above it), serves as additional support for a High 1-A rating.
Now, one important detail to note is that the cosmology described in DeMatteis' run of Silver Surfer includes the Microverse as a lower universe than the main 616 reality (Silver Surfer Vol. 3 #143). Indeed, the higher universe where the Surfer is in the above scans is its counterpart; what contains the universe (And several other universes), instead of being contained by it.
As anyone vaguely familiar with comics probably already knows, that's not been true in a long while, and the Microverse has been consistently defined as being a parallel universe that just so happens to be accessed through shrinking, not a universe contained within a larger universe. As such, the scans from Silver Surfer #140 and #141 belong to a separate arrangement of the omniversal structure than the usual one we see in Marvel Comics, though one that regardless would still be encompassed by the Neutral Zone and transcended by the Mystery. As such, Eternity and the realms of the Outside can scale to it just fine, still.
For an addendum on this part, see this post.
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