| “ | There are many immortal monsters who roam this Earth. Ones that I have encountered and ones that I originally believed to have only existed through dreams. When I look at them I wonder, where they created out of the desire for immortality? Or to simply carve out the weakness that held them back? That is their humanity, even if it were a fraction of it. Their humanity is, to them, what reminded them of their frail and weakened former selves. They believe it is what truly limits them from creating the greatest of horrors across battlefields drowned in blood. And yet, there is this sense of longing. What this longing could be I cannot say for certain. Is it one of euphoria? Or death? | „ |
| ~ Abraham Van Helsing |
Professor Abraham Van Helsing was a dutch physician, lawyer, preacher and hunter who has much knowledge of vampires and many other creatures. Van Helsing is most famously known for having taken down the Romanian vampire king Dracula along with many other dangerous creatures of the night.
Overview
Van Helsing is revealed to be a descendant of one of the knights belonging to the Knights of the Round Table of whom Van Helsing decided to revive by continuing their legacy of extinguishing the forces of darkness. He was born a catholic, but later became a protestant and founded the Hellsing Organization, who continue to fight vampires and other monsters to this day, and would later be apart of the Dark Knight Initiative.
History
Background
Abraham was born into a Catholic Dutch family in the early 1700s. As he came into adulthood he married and settled down to start a family as he studied several fields of science, medicine, physics, and psychology. His family was wracked with tragedy when Van Helsing's only son passed away. The passing drove his wife mad to the point that she became dead to Abraham, yet his status as a devout Catholic prevented him from divorcing her. Abraham continued his academic studies to receive degrees and doctorates in several fields including medicine, philosophy, and scientific study.
In the course of his career, Van Helsing became a professor and took on students. Among these students is a John Seward who would one day become a doctor himself. During an incident involving a knife that had come into contact with gangrene, Van Helsing was cut and poisoned by it. Thinking quick, Seward sucked the poison out and saved Abraham, a favor he would not soon forget.
Saving an Empire
At some point, her crossed paths with Johanna Constantine as he was investigating the strange events concerning amalgamations between vampires and clockwork machinery. The two worked together for a time only to find out the root of the cause behind the Industrial Revolution was a cult known as the Church of the Broken God that worshipped an ancient deity known as Mekhane. With that discovery they also found that Delilah Copperspoon, the leader of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was using the power of the Broken Church in order to take the throne of the British Empire. Delilah herself was the illegitimate daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who felt cheated from her rightful place as the heir to the throne.
Copperspoon would use a device known as the Oraculum to harness the primordial power that lay within the otherworldly metal that made up Mekhane's body in a bid to perhaps use this energy to open a temporal gateway, and allowing her to alter reality where she becomes the ruler of the United Kingdom. Johanna and Abraham were soon joined by Haytham Kenway, a Ghost Rider, and after much trials and tribulations, they succeeded in defeating Delilah and dismantled the Church of the Broken God alongside the Golden Dawn.
The Last Romanov
Abraham was also said to have aided Vitali Romanov, a survivor of the House of Romanov whom were brutally murdered to bring down the imperial monarchy of Russian and end the Tsardom, in taking down the rising lycanthrope plague which was devastating most of Europe. However, this soon turned into a large web of conspiracy, threaded by vampires who infiltrated society, that both Abraham and Vitali would work together to solve and prevent the collapse of Western civilization alongside the aid of other confidants including Johanna Constantine, an ancestor of John Constantine. Abraham and Vitali's partnership also sparked the first technical collaboration of the Hellsing Organization and the Order of the Silver Cross before the two were ever established. At some point, Abraham and Johanna consorted only to end up separating but unbeknownst to Abraham, Johanna was pregnant with his child.
Dracula and Hellsing
Abraham was soon drawn to the activities of Dracula himself which resulted in the hunter and his compatriots from the Silver Lantern Club to initiate their grand battle against the vampire king. While otherworldly powerful, Dracula was shocked to see the tenacity and strength of humans, the very same beings he once regarded as inferior and mindless animals. His defeat at the hands of Abraham Van Helsing had Dracula's view took a drastic shift.
With his armies destroyed and his castles in ruin, Dracula was left with nothing and given a humiliating defeat at the hands of an ordinary human. However, rather than executing the Vampire King, Van Helsing instead took pity on the vampire and spared him, but on the condition that he would forever serve Van Helsing and his kin until the end of his days. Dracula accepted and made a blood oath to be in eternal servitude to Van Helsing and his bloodline. He became the Helsing family's ultimate weapon against the forces of darkness under the service of the Hellsing Organization which was founded by Abraham.
Legacy
When Van Helsing and Johanna separated she would end up raising their son Lucius Constantine on her own only to have another after she settled down and married another man. Lucius' descendants would be separate from the Constantine family, as the main family line ends with John Constantine and Lucius' line ends with Jonah Constantine who by birthright would come to inherit the Hellsing Organization after Integra Hellsing's death.
Integra initially wanted Shelby Penwood's grandson to lead the organization in her stead as she believed that hereditary leadership had run its course. It was only until she discovered the existence of Jonah Constantine that she gave the organization to him and with her blessing.