Who is Pralaya

Due to the recent death battle I've seen numerous people express confusion as to the character of Pralaya. So I waned to make this quick blog explaining the character of Pralaya. Pralaya is an obscure DC character only appearing in a total of 3 issues at the end of the "The Amber of the Moment" arc of the 2011 Justice League Dark series, Issues 38-40. As such there isn't too much content on her, and she's actually relatively simple, with the most confusing part coming from the fact that many DC charaters near the top are actually connected to each other. DC's higher tier characters are all conceptual or metafictional entities, and so their connection can often be similarly conceptual, as parts of the same being.

During this arc the Justice League Dark are exiled across time. As they try to return, they reach a place called the Heart of Chronos, the source of all time in all dimensions. However cracks begin to form in the Heart of Chronos and darkness seeps in from the timeless reality beyond, along with wretched time gremlins

These beings, composed of darkness deeper than eternity

are revealed to actually be thoughtforms, living thoughts from a greater entity

These time-gremlins are the embodied thoughts of the ocean of non-existence that birthed them

Earlier the Justice League Dark began to notice a guiding awareness to the darkness seeping in

However after Zatanna, Nightmare Nurse, and Madame Xanadu manage to stop the time-gremlins by freezing time across the multiverse, Pralaya reveals herself. She says she is beyond the title of goddess, and that what they see is only a projection, for her true self would destroy their minds

Twice it is stated Pralaya is the void before creator and creation, unformed void, God's unconcious, the sleep of Brahma, she is that which all things come from and all things return too

Here she gives a very similar description, she is the darkness preceding the light of creation, the sleep even God falls into,  a nothingness from which the multiverse is born and falls to again

and is called the embodiment of cosmic oblivion

So Basic Facts about Pralaya:

• The humanoid figure is NOT Pralaya, it's a projection as her true self would destroy the mind of those viewing her
• Pralaya is the sea of nothingness, the darkness before creation. Everything eventually falls to the cosmic sleep including all creation and the creator
• She is God's Unconcious and the Sleep of Brahma

How does she relate to the other big-name DC characters?

So this is where things get kinda complex because I have to explain all the other supreme type entities DC has made.

The Presence:

So there's the Presence, who is essentially the DC version of the Judeo-Christian God. He created the angels and assigned them their roles

He is the creator of all creation and is considered stronger than any other things

He is described as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent

However his image is shaped by the minds of all

People seem to see this as a conceptual limit of the Presence but it seems to me a philosophical point. In the penultimate issue of the Spectre volume 3, the Spectre finds the Presence seems to be evil and is cruelly eating his angels as a quotation is shown about slaying Buddha when you find him metaphorically killing your false image of the transcendent

The Spectre kills the Presence, only to realize what he actually did was kill his perception of God. All our belief can't create or unmake God

All the Gods of the Godsphere percieve the Creator differently but they are all different perceptions of the same

The Presence resides in the void beyond creation beyond any thought.

The Source:

The Source is a metaphysical infinite energy residing outside creation. In the beginning there was neither form nor purpose. This was the first world where in resided the all and the beyond-all, the Source of all things

The Presence is used as a stand-in for the Judeo-Christian God, while the Source is used as a stand-in for neo-pagan and new-age ideas of the universal uniting energy. 

The Source is responsible for the Godwave that created all the Gods and all superpowers, which is why it's the main focus for the New Gods

The Source is often metaphorically viewed as imagination, the source of comic book characters and events.

The Source created entities called the Hands which created the various multiverses in DC one of which called Perpetua went rogue

This page also has the Presence being identified with the Source

I say this because it seems a lot of people still deny this fact despite all the implications. When Cronus tried to usurp the power of the Presence he felt the Source's Godwave

When Spectre sought the Presence, he entered the Source and was shown briefly the true nature of God, of being all

The Source is sensed beyond the gates of Heaven

The Overvoid/Monitor-Mind 

Outside creation is the final reality transcending thought and imagination, an empty void

This void has a mind, the legendary Primal Monitor, from which all other Monitors are derived

The Monitors represent the more metafictional side of DC Comics. The Primal Monitor is stated in interviews to be the blank canvas, the page upon which all creation, DC Comics, is made.

The Presence is the Overvoid

in the Synnar account we see the void come into awareness, and it is the Presence

There was more recently a callback to Final Crisis replicating the Primal Monitor origin story explictly saying its the Light

The Source is also the Primal Monitor

There's also numerous word of god statements including a general interview about Final Crisis talking about the Primal Monitor's conception that state that God, the Source, and the Void are all one

The Great Evil Beast:

GEB is not the same as the above, but is highly connected. When the Presence shone the light of creation, the darkness that was displaced became the Great Evil Beast. It existed before the light without a name and when it beheld the light it understood itself in opposition

So how they do they all fit together:

To my understanding, in-universe how it goes is this. There was an infinite void called the Overvoid, the beyond all other voids and dimensions, time and space. This void had a mind pervading it called the Primal Monitor.

This mind was initially unaware and so was filled with darkness, the unconscious. This unconscious was the unconscious mind of God, the sleep of Brahma, Pralaya.

In the darkness of the unconcious mind there were thoughts and with the motion of those thoughts energy, the primordial first energy, which imagined things...the Source. This was the first world, the Source by itself.

This chaotic imaginings of this mind eventually dream into being awareness of it's self. This awareness was the first perception, the great Monitor-Mind percieving itself, the first perception of God, God's own perception beginning the Presence.

The Presence illuminated with its light, the coming to awareness, its light filling the void, or in other words awareness filling the mind. As it did so, the light displaced part of the orignal darkness, Pralaya. This darkness that was displaced became the otherplace, the dark multiverse, the Great Evil Beast.

That's my understanding of how they all fit together. The actual creation account from there is very complex: you've got the Lucifer/Michael stuff, the Synnar stuff, the Final Crisis account, and the Perpetua stuff all of which are complex and hard to reconcile and that's just the major creation accounts. I may try to account for all DC's creation accounts in another blog.