As of now, the Phantom Stranger has five known origins.
- 1) He’s a time traveler going home the slow way.
- 2) He’s an angel who was neutral during Lucifer’s rebellion.
- 3) He’s the Wandering Jew.
- 4) He’s a man who refused God’s Grace during a cataclysm and is now doomed to walk the earth turning men from sin one at a time.
- 5) He is Judas Iscariot and doomed to betray all those he works with.
The thing is all of these origins are true and the Stranger we see is and is not the man from all of these and perhaps countless others. This all revolves around number 1, the Time Traveler.
When the Time Traveler version went back in time to save the universe from being destroyed at its birth, he absorbed cosmic energy and became the Phantom Stranger, doomed to walk the slow path back to the end of time and start his own origin. But that energy didn’t just transform him. It linked him to every version of himself across all of space and time. Now, whenever one of his others becomes the Phantom Stranger, they are absorbed into him and become a part of him. When that Black Lantern pierced the Phantom Stranger it really did see everything and nothing. All those people are and are not the Phantom Stranger.
Note the ascension isn’t immediate. The person actually has to reach a high enough level to be considered the Phantom Stranger and become aware of their higher multi-universal existence.
This also explains the Phantom Stranger’s varying power levels. The more selves that join him the more powerful he is. And if a self hasn’t ascended high enough yet, they are on their own with only their innate power level.
, it posits that the multiple origins of this stranger are his way to obscure his true identity. That he allows people to believe they're all true so they all become true through a process of using mental truth to create literal truth. (As done through A Dream of Cats process.)And why would this be his goal? Because he wants to keep his true identity obscured so he will always be a stranger to do good on his own terms. Rather than be saddled with the truth of his identity by the forces of the cosmos.
So what was his original origin? Well, in Vertigo Visions: The Phantom Stranger, he meets with the demon Naamah, whose great crime was daring to love an angel. And she seemed to know the Stranger fairly intimately. That he betrayed her once in the past, and she's expecting him back. Reaching into jewish folklore, it was said she seduced the angel Shamdon to give birth to Asmodeus. So, it's possible that The Stranger's true name is Shamdon, and depending on what he did when under Naamah's influence, he decided to forsake his name out of shame. And now spends the time before judgment day wandering the earth doing good under other mysterious origins to work at being seen for his present rather than past actions.
