Read Online Shadowhunters and Downworlders by Cassandra Clare - Free Book Online

magine that your best friend came to you one day, brimming with excitement because she’d met these super-awesome new friends who suggested she come live with them, follow a bunch of arcane and unquestionable laws, and cut ties with all her old friends because they’re incapable of understanding her new super-awesome life.
    If you’re a child of the ’80s like me, reared on a steady diet of Jonestown horror stories and trashy novels about brainwashed teens, you would immediately recognize the situation for what it was: Your best friend has joined a cult.
    If you’re not a child of the ’80s but not completely oblivious, you’d still clue in pretty quick: definitely a cult.
    Simon Lewis is far from oblivious.
    As he tells his best friend, Clary Fray, in
City of Ashes
, “The Shadowhunter thing—they’re like a cult.” Clary denies it, of course, because who wants to admit they’ve been suckered into a cult? But Simon’s got evidence: “Sure they are. Shadowhunting is their whole lives. And they look down on everyone else…They’re not friends with ordinary people, they don’t go to the same places, they don’t know the same jokes, they think they’re above us.” Simon may have a somewhat bizarre definition of cults—he could be describing a particularly snobbish bunch of cheerleaders—but you’ve got to admit he has a point. Like any good cultists, Shadowhunters forswear allegiance to anything that could interfere with their loyalty to the institution. (Remember Alec explaining in
City of Bones
why he wishes Clary would disappear: “[She’s] making Jace act like—like he isn’t one of us. Making him break his oath to the Clave, making him break the Law.”) They share an eccentric but ironclad belief system and hew to a code of behavior that allows for no deviation. And let’s not forget their utter ignorance of basicpop culture that could only result from spending a life in cultural isolation, willfully ignoring the outside world.
    Admittedly, these days the word “cult” has a mushy definition and is easily pinned on any group with a suitably wacky set of vaguely religious-seeming habits and beliefs. But the Shadowhunters’ odd fashion sense and demonology studies (a belief that doesn’t seem so wacky once demons start popping up everywhere to eat people alive) isn’t what raises Simon’s hackles. It is (or should be) the isolationist and absolutist nature of the Shadowhunters that strikes Simon as threateningly cult-like. He’s using the term as a loose stand-in for any group that dictates every major element of its members’ lives, that conflates obedience with morality, that replaces independent decision making with knee-jerk obeisance to a “higher” law, running itself like a miniature absolutist state. Call them a cult, call them a mini-dictatorship, call them a really,
really
intense fraternity, but there’s no question that the Shadowhunters are extremists, distrustful of outsiders, obsessed with obedience, and worshipful of the laws that govern every aspect of their behavior.
    And the supposedly rebellious Clary—along with her fellow teen Shadowhunters—welcomes this life and its mandates with open arms. (Yes, she seems to have little choice in the matter, given the whole life-in-danger, chased-by-demons, need-to-save-the-world situations she keeps ending up in, but as will be discussed later, there’s always a choice. She chooses to join up.) Not that the implications occur to her, or any of the other young Shadowhunters. In fact, Clary’s repulsed by the thought of anyone voluntarily signing up for that kind of draconian existence—at least in the abstract. Upon hearing the loyalty oath of Valentine’s Circle: “I hereby render unconditional obedience to the Circle and its principles”(
City of Bones
), she’s totally