Kerrigan, Queen of Blades: Pop Culture Symbol of the Daemonic Feminine

This post is dedicated to my first magic teacher, my initiator, who claimed to have been initiated himself by a “goddess.” He wove pop culture into the very magic that he practiced and taught me, once telling me ominously, “The people at Wizards of the Coast know something.” Maybe they do, maybe they don’t; these days, people in all walks of life “know something,” so it’s feasible. Regardless, perceiving mythic meaning in pop culture is something I have built up into a habit. In what I’m considering developing into an entire category of its own, I present the following take on a “video game dark goddess” whose path mirrors my own in many ways. The post first appeared many moons ago in version 3 of the blog ‘Hermekate.’ I now happily add it to the World of Ruin category of posts that it helped inspire.

Note that I present the text in its original form, in which I described myself with the term “fanboy.” My perspective on this has changed in light of recent forays into my gender, most recently explored in the post Easy Come, Easy Go. A new post will be added soon that specifically explores Sarah Kerrigan in this light.

Introduction

Crazy as it sounds, SPOILERS for the games StarCraft and StarCraft II beyond this point.

StarCraft is a phenomenon unto itself. StarCraft is one of the examples Millenials and Gen Z point to when Boomers say things like, “It’s just a video game.” A multiplayer online (if you’re so inclined) real-time strategy game with a plot centering on the tumultuous relationship between three space-faring races, gameplay centers around on-the-spot resource management leveraged toward building an army and strategically defeating your opponents. Considered by some to be a modern evolution of chess, one of its hallmarks is the intricate game balance constructed around unit specialization and races that each operate on completely different gameplay paradigms, each one meticulously counterbalanced and complemented by the others. It is a thing of beauty that led the charge in birthing e-Sports as we know them. While most of the attention (and the commerce—is there a relationship there?) seems to go toward this multiplayer element of the game, the storyline of the single-player campaign is, quite simply, a treasure trove of mythic content that matches, in symbolic sophistication, the math-driven masterpiece that is the game engine. While competitive gameplay is intense (masters put in hundreds of moves per minute, faster than I can even follow on a video), I play video games to chill out and escape. I am glad Blizzard gives as much love to the dreamers like me as they do to the “Type-A gamers.” At any rate, by pulling out one character from the series (and, to a lesser extent, the Zerg race that she leads by the end), I hope to get my point across. Even so, I eat this stuff up, so I’d like to keep writing about it.

Sarah Kerrigan

Trying to decide where to start in relaying what I want to relay is tricky; like most genuine myths of antiquity, the symbolic elements of this story are so closely-knitted together that it’s difficult to get a “lasso” around the aspects that you want to focus on. Even if you manage to do that, the result is still going to be a bit like vivisection; don’t expect the heart you pull out to work the way it’s meant to once you’ve done it.

Okay, I lied, and I can see already that I’m getting too sentimental about this. It’s simple: I start at the beginning—Sarah’s beginning. Where I’m getting stuck is that this fanboy wants to do the character that he loves full justice, but he can’t because that’s beyond the scope of this post. As such, for the sake of focus and brevity, I’m going to grossly summarize her storyline with a preference for the details most pertinent to Kerrigan’s “Dark Goddess” mythic resonance.

First, background: In this story universe, Terrans (humans) have more or less united planet Earth and sent out colony ships to the Koprulu Sector of space. By the time Sarah Kerrigan is born, the system’s colonization is well underway and spans many planets.

As is common in a good Hero’s Heroine’s Journey, Sarah is already “special,” by virtue of an auspicious birth, having been born with psychic “gifts” that manifest in the accidental killing of her mother and “neural maiming” of her father (oops). She is born with a power she can’t control. As is customary in the Terran Confederacy, the discovery of Sarah’s abilities leads to her detainment, training, and conscription in the top-secret Ghost program that cranks out covert operatives trained to use their psychic abilities (and cloaking suits) in assassination and espionage. Eventually, Sarah breaks from the Confederacy and finds herself in league with Arcturus Mengsk and his Sons of Korhal, a rebellion against the Confederacy.

Soon, “xenomorphs” (Blizzard has a long and storied history of stealing or “paying homage” to various other pop culture, fantasy and sci-fi sources and this will remind certain people of Starship Troopers too) begin appearing throughout the colonized Terran worlds and are identified as “Zerg.” In the course of fomenting an open revolt on Antiga Prime, Kerrigan is sent to meet with sheriff James Raynor to investigate (this becomes important later, but I’m going to skip over huge swathes of lore to get to the point).

To make a long story short, through a series of missions, Mengsk, Raynor, and Kerrigan gain possession of a “psi emitter,” which mimics the psychic frequencies used by the Zerg to communicate among each other, weaponizing the Zerg by using the emitters as beacons to draw swarms of them to destroy entire worlds.

The culmination of all the Sons of Korhal’s efforts is to use one of these psi emitters on the Terran capital world of Tarsonis, overthrowing the dominant power structure. The mission is launched and it succeeds; Mengsk and Raynor escape the planet as it is overrun by billions of Zerg—but Mengsk chooses at the last moment to leave Sarah behind to her certain doom.

As this occurs, strange, golden alien craft appear in orbit and, with their advanced weaponry, incinerate Tarsonis, exterminating the Zerg. Now there are three: Enter the Protoss (we won’t be paying much attention to them in this post, however).

The Zerg

I need to spend some time discussing the Zerg themselves; since Sarah Kerrigan’s ascendancy to rulership of the Zerg swarm is the central theme of this modern myth, the nature of the Zerg becomes important. Kerrigan’s myth can’t be understood without first understanding the Zerg.

Now I’m rolling my eyes and you’ll see what I mean about “lassos,” because in order to really understand the Zerg (and, in turn, Kerrigan), you need to understand their creators, the Xel’Naga—who also created the aforementioned Protoss.

The Zerg evolved on the planet Zerus and were genetically gifted by the Xel’Naga with “purity of essence”—so, intentionally reconfigured, refined, and “elevated” in a scenario that smacks of Ancient Aliens lore. Once altered, their imperative changed entirely: The way of the Zerg is to seek out new, hardy, powerful species and assimilate them into the swarm. In terms of gameplay, every unit, from the ferocious Hydralisk to the awe-inspiring Ultralisk, represents some apex predator from some planetary system that has been assimilated and altered, their genetic traits brought into the ongoing genetic alchemy of the Zerg swarm.

A Zerg “base” begins with a hatchery that produces “creep,” a substrate similar to mold or a fungal mycelium. The “buildings” or “structures” of each base are like specialized “organs” that emerge on the creep; thus, a Zerg base is a living organism as well as a "hive cluster" coordinating Zerg units. The stuff of Zerg “warriors” is the stuff of bone and blade, tooth and claw. Every single individual in a Zerg colony, including its structures and its mobile units, begins as a Zerg larva and then “morphs;” it can morph into a drone, which is a worker that harvests resources; a drone, in turn, can settle down somewhere on the creep and morph into a structure that allows further specialization in Zerg units. Otherwise, the larva can morph into any number of fearsome creatures with various special abilities and tactical specialties. To look upon a Zerg base is to behold acid-spewing batlike wyrms, demonic insectoid hounds and spine-flinging serpentine horrors swarming around pulsating towers and gigantic, domelike growths—but amid the astounding array of variegated forms, there is only Zerg. In this sense, the Zerg are “shapeshifters.” A Zerg is not its form; “Zergness” is the essence that runs through it all. The largest and most fearsome products of Zerg biology all morph from the same protean larval form as the drones.

If no Zerg stands alone, but instead lives for the greater glory of the Swarm itself, what is it that drives their quest to assimilate and conquer? What gives the Swarm direction? Surely, there must be an organizing principle, for even in the wake of such beautifully chaotic brutality, the Zerg seem to be…”going somewhere.”

The Zerg are highly psychic. Zerg intelligence is distributed throughout the Swarm in a hierarchical structure. Individual units such as Hydralisks have survival and combat instincts, but are commanded on a higher order by Overlords that hover over the battlefield acting as both living “troop transports” and mobile “relay towers” for the command signals that come from Cerebrates. Cerebrates are essentially giant brains that serve as the only distinct individuals in the entire Swarm, though even their individuality and freedom of volition is limited. There are a handful of these “generals,” but the Swarm is truly controlled by the Overmind, a kind of “Demiurge” created by the Xel’Naga to carry the Zerg Swarm forth to its “telos.” So you have the Overmind itself, which essentially “is” the Swarm, but it delegates discrete control over segments of the Swarm to Cerebrates, which use Overlords to carry their commands to individuals. No Zerg individual is free of the Overmind’s control.

This was the state of the Zerg when they descended, quite intently, upon Tarsonis. Unbeknownst to Arcturus Mengsk, James Raynor, or Sarah Kerrigan, the true lure for the Zerg wasn’t the psi emitter; it was Sarah herself. They had come for her.

Queen of Blades

After escaping Tarsonis and leaving Kerrigan behind, Raynor is incensed with Arcturus Mengsk (Raynor and Kerrigan are a love interest from the start) for making the call, certain that Sarah is dead. In fact, the Zerg had come to Tarsonis specifically to collect her.

The Overmind is an interesting being; it is the iron will of the Zerg Swarm, commanding billions upon billions of biological organisms whose reach spans multiple worlds. Its intelligence is vast and it beholds much. It’s just self-aware enough to know that it is nothing but a pawn (to the Xel’Naga). It suffers in the agonizing position of commanding incalculable power in the world, but only within the scope of an even higher design. Despite this intelligence and power, the Overmind is simply not powerful enough to break free from that which controls it.

This is where the Zerg’s way of genetic assimilation comes into play: Kerrigan’s psionic power is immense; while psychism is a fact of life (albeit a rare one) in this story universe, Kerrigan’s power is so great that the relevant scientists had to come up with a whole new scale for measuring it. The Overmind can’t overcome the Xel’Naga’s control—but Kerrigan can.

A good half of the Zerg campaign in the first game centers around commanding Zerg to defend the chrysalis in which Sarah Kerrigan rests, undergoing a physical and psionic transformation into the Queen of Blades. While arguably a tad “more than human” to begin with, Sarah Kerrigan is unequivocally made into Something Else—a psionically powerful Zerg-human hybrid.

The Overmind’s only “escape” from its fate is unfortunate in that it demands another; the only way to set the Zerg free is for the Overmind itself to perish, and only Kerrigan is powerful enough to do the job. For this she was chosen, transfigured, and groomed, and she succeeds, which involves destroying the Overmind’s physical body amid plot twists that make the Protoss essential (and here we sever an aorta leading from the heart we’re examining into the rest of the StarCraft “body.”)

The story is not over; Blizzard had more money to make, and yes, there was more myth to weave, too. Kerrigan’s supremacy over the Zerg wasn’t secured with the destruction of the Overmind, for she next needed to eliminate the Cerebrates who had banded together and coalesced into a new “pseudo-Overmind.” There are intrigues and motivations involving both the Terrans and the Protoss within an over-arching framework that comes together with the Xel’Naga. For one, a regiment of Terrans from Earth’s United Earth Directorate rolls into the Koprulu Sector attempting to re-assert control over its colonies, and much shit hits the fan. In this middle part of the story, between her transformation into the Queen of Blades and her attainment of command and supremacy over the Zerg Swarm, Kerrigan is all but the villain of the story; the Overmind is certainly worse, but if Kerrigan wins, all that’s happened is that the Zerg change leaders, and the Zerg are a threat to the entire sector.

What will Kerrigan do with that power?

Along the way, she proves herself to be ruthless, deceitful, and appears to have an agenda. She may be the lesser of two evils, or she may be even worse still than the Overmind. Who knows what she wants, what motivates her, what a figure as singular as Kerrigan even desires? She couldn’t really be trusted. She was only aided because the Protoss and Terrans both needed something from her. She was a necessary evil, and the Protoss and Terrans had made a proverbial deal with the devil by working with her. At any rate, everyone works together to eliminate the Overmind, leaving Kerrigan in charge of the entire Swarm—which she quickly takes with her into the night, not to be heard from for some time.

In the absence of Kerrigan and the Zerg, the Sons of Korhal succeed in overthrowing the Terran Confederacy, and the Terran Dominion is installed in its place with Arcturus Mengsk as its Emperor.

StarCraft II picks up here with Kerrigan’s terrifying re-emergence with a vengeance. While she was away, she was working hard to refine and improve the Zerg, preparing them for the coming conflict—after all, she had come for revenge. Arcturus Mengsk would pay for betraying her, and it didn’t matter how many millions had to die in order for Kerrigan to get there. While Kerrigan’s Swarm and The Terran Dominion duke it out, James Raynor and his Raiders run interference, racing to assemble the pieces of an ancient Xel’Naga artifact with the power to stop Kerrigan’s bloodthirsty campaign, and even restore her to her human form. Ultimately, Raynor succeeds in assembling the artifact and using it to bring Sarah back into his arms, now human and “whole.”

Unfortunately, the plot has been way thicker this whole time than any of the players had fully realized; I mentioned the other race created by the Xel’Naga—the Protoss—and while explaining them in detail is beyond the scope of this post, it’s important to know that they represent a complement to the Zerg. We learn that some force is producing hybrid beings from combined Protoss and Zerg genetic material, a synthesis and culmination which results in beings of tremendous power. We come to find that the Xel’Naga themselves serve an unfathomably potent evil named Amon, a personification of the Void, who wants nothing less than to consume all of existence.

No sooner is she made human again and reunited with Jimmy to run off into the sunset than the two are separated when Mengsk and the Terran Dominion come after them. Jim is captured, and according to news reports, executed by Mengsk.

Living now for nothing short of vengeance, Kerrigan sets out on a quest to destroy Mengsk that eventually leads her back once more into control of the Swarm, and the entire Zerg campaign in the second game centers around building Kerrigan’s power to take on Arcturus Mengsk and the Terran Dominion. It is immensely satisfying and if you’re a hopeless romantic like me, a great love story (Jimmy lives).

At the end of the Zerg campaign of StarCraft II, the Terran Dominion is defeated and Kerrigan is restored to the height of her power, and then some; she has even more power than she ever did, but more importantly, she has also purified her soul. She got her vengeance, she’s opened her heart to love, and is no longer driven by either the wounds of her past or a thirst for blood. Meanwhile, Amon is creating Protoss/Zerg hybrids to destroy all of existence, and only Kerrigan is powerful enough to stop him.

Sarah Kerrigan, infamous Queen of Blades, the terror of the Koprulu Sector—villain, adversary, demoness—a beast that must be destroyed. Mother of monstrosities, her children are ferocious and terrible. Her reign of terror took more lives than the stars in the sky. Abomination!

And only such a dark, carnal, dangerous and potent force has the power to hold back the forces of cosmic stasis, represented by Amon. The “villain,” being the only figure mighty enough to prevail in the end, was the hero all along.

Reflection and Conclusion

I’m willing to make a bet that anyone well-versed in mythology, especially of a “sinister” sort, will already have spotted quite a few familiar symbols, patterns, and themes. Nonetheless, the rest of this post will be devoted to laying out the resonances that I see to modern myth—and more. Since I’m already close to 3,000 words deep, from here on out, I am going to assume a certain level of familiarity with general mythology.

The basic premise of this post is that the video game figure of Sarah Kerrigan can be viewed as a bona fide modern form of the Daemonic Feminine archetype. Let’s break down how the story and figure of Sarah Kerrigan resemble various mythic patterns:

As previously mentioned, the Overmind is a distinctly “Demiurgic” figure in the fully Gnostic sense. He’s a powerful, damn near omniscient, godlike entity running a “mind prison” over billions of supremely badass creatures who would each be a tour de force all their own if they could only think for themselves. If we go ahead and relate the Overmind to “God” or Yahweh, we can think of the Cerebrates as something like the Seraphim (hm, they even sound similar), the Overlords as something like the Powers, etc. The whole thing works just like a choir of angels.

Then you get Kerrigan, who is like Lilith in many ways. The Cerebrates can’t stand her because she has free will and won’t lay down for anyone (who does she think she is??) and nobody else trusts her because she’s too much like those creepy Zergs and their Cerebrate brain-lords and she might be bad like them. Tweak the perspective a bit, make the Zerg a stand-in for demons instead of angels (and, in fact, their homeworld after leaving Zerus is a volcanic hellscape called “Char”), with Kerrigan as their “mother?” Hello! To top it all off, many Zerg have a serpentine sensibility to their body shapes, and the base Zerg larva are, after all, little worms. The Zerg run on serpent power, baby.

Speaking of serpent power, another myth that comes to mind here is that of Kali; in fact, the first inspiration of this post was to frame Kerrigan as a “modern Kali” until I thought about it and realized it went way deeper than that. Here again you have a woman with terrifying power and the serpentine symbolism comes into play once more. Kerrigan’s sector-wide rampage can be compared to Kali’s overzealous slaughter in the battle against Ravana and his forces of evil. Like Kali, Kerrigan (that K, amirite?) has a “consort” in Jim Raynor, whose partnership is the only thing that has ever stopped her dead in her angry little tracks. Of course, much of this resonance applies to our friend Sekhmet, who hails from Egypt.

We can transfer much of this essential material in turn to Inanna. As StarCraft is marketed, let’s face it, Kerrigan has been sexually fetishized, I’m gonna call that out (does a Goddess capable of galactic conquest need to modify her genome so that she grows an exoskeleton in the shape of stiletto heels? I didn’t think so). She’s a lusty figure who certainly reminds us of all aspects of carnality, from blood and slaughter to sexy times. She’s also a master of war, and Jimmy isn’t so bad at that himself (he knows how to have a Ba’al, is what I’m trying to say).

Zooming out from one-to-one mythic comparisons, we can look at the overall arc of Kerrigan’s story in terms of a Heroine’s Journey, as well as a metaphor for esoteric Initiation.

Kerrigan begins her story as (more or less) a human, but one with auspicious potential. The very thing that makes her special casts a shadow over her life as her psychic abilities, gone out of control, kill her mother. On a personal level, this amounts to what could move in the direction of an Initiatory crisis. She is separated from society and trained accordingly so that her skills can be sharpened and honed. Once she’s put to use in such a way, she experiences internal conflict, which she resolves by breaking out of her constraints and joining a rebellion. She has learned something of herself and knew her actions were not in line with her principles. Doing what she feels is right and aligning herself with allies, she experiences love and then betrayal. She is now totally separated from humanity, captured by the Zerg. Encased in a chrysalis, her very body and mind are altered.

When she emerges, she is no longer human, even at a genetic level. This is transmutation. In analogy to Initiation, perhaps this is like the Attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation; you are far more than human, in league with something greater and growing ever closer, but you’re still wrapped up in a lot of human shit, and the strain you’re now under is incredible; but this state has been conferred upon you that you might Do Some Work.

Out Kerrigan goes to win her sovereignty in a battle to vanquish the Overmind (which we can view in Initiatory terms as something like any human system of control, be it political, religious, economic—or, perhaps, as the personal ego, or any egregore, for that matter), which she manages to do. This initial victory is false; it gives her enough encouragement to go on, but defeating a demiurge isn’t easy. Once it’s dealt with, you have to move down the hierarchy breaking up the “hangers on” who can’t let go of the old order even once it’s already gone. It is a fierce and trying stage. It goes on and on.

With this supreme attainment achieved, what does she do now? She has all this power, a whole new world of possibility in front of her, and a brand new set of eyes, but she is still the same person inside. Her most prominent immediate passion immediately takes hold by default, and this new vaunted power of hers is dragged down to the level of a pissing contest. She is a “baby Goddess” learning to carry herself. She can’t do it alone. Only an outside force strong enough to offer sufficient resistance (Jimmy, his Raiders and their new snazzy Xel’Naga artifact) can give her pause for thought, and they do. She is stopped in her tracks, “purified” and returned to her human state. She has an opportunity, now, to walk away with all the hard-won lessons and wisdom, and go live a happy life with Jimmy. This, however, she does not do.

She was human, and then she was a Goddess, and she tasted power overwhelming. It got the best of her. She got carried away. Now, however, something needed to be done, something bigger than her. For the sake of the world and everyone she loved, she had to take that power on again, but use it wisely and according to the wisdom she had gained through all her struggles. This, in esoteric terms, is her complete and full apotheosis.

I don’t think I’m reading too much into this. As if all of the above weren’t a pretty compelling case on its own, very clear signs are scattered all throughout the game that the creators know their mythology. In StarCraft II, Kerrigan tools around the Koprulu Sector in a living “ship” named the Leviathan. In StarCraft, each Cerebrate governs a different Zerg Brood, and the names of the broods are: Tiamat, Baelrog, Fenris, Garm, Jormungand, and Surtur.

Maybe it’s all a coincidence.

Opening trailer for StarCraft II; "those who have eyes" will see Hagalaz opening proceedings, and Thurisaz descending to the earth, among other things...