Then came the questions. Virile beasts of the mind. Like birds soaring toward some distant place, like strange beasts who roar their wanting. Wanting purpose. Questions seek answers, but answers annihilate them. An answered question is no more. So, if we want to aid the life, do we provide answers, or something else? Perhaps the most vivid life of a question is merely to be asked. To be given anew that single chance to live or die in the mind. The chance to spread to new soils, to birth new questions, to grow and change with the winds of time, and one day to be delivered to eternity. Through answers, or through simply being forgotten. If the question “what is this about” lingers in your mind, I have given it an answer, and it may go on. If the question “why” roams those verdant grounds, let it be for now. Questions cannot lie forgotten for long.
Then, it began. After the beginning was an explosion, but it isn’t the beginning you are thinking of. Don’t all beginnings share something in common? A single cause from which radiates many effects. Each such effect acting as cause in turn. An explosion of growth, flourishing buds on the causal-tree. Many from one, reaching far, even to distant branches. Yet, as many florid words can describe, none can capture the totality. I am a mind. Perhaps, I have a mind. Perhaps the distinction doesn’t matter. A mind contains a tool, an engine, formed by and from the ever-churning chaos of the world. An island in the roiling waves. What is the purpose of the tool? To predict the past, and explain the future. To explain the past, and predict the future. Indeed, the flow of time itself is convoluted [1]. But here I see my faculties lacking. Desperately lacking. My stories cannot predict, my predictions can not explain, my understanding of cause and effect is brittle, and the chaos is ever-present, seeping into those darkened corners to devour what lay forgotten, forever obliterating what once lived there. Yet, I must hold fast to some hope. Despite the unbearable odds, the flawed human disposition, and the universality of that uncaring machination, I hope that a shard of reality can be discovered: some sliver of the beyond contained within the seamless boundaries of all the rest. This hope seems to fulfill something very precious, deep within the soul... something essential [2].
There is a story which I now tell. One among many, I carry on my journeys. It mingles and mixes with others, yet it preserves a character to it’s own. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, maybe in a dream [3].
An age no longer, we surmise. This story originates from a game, and this game originates in Japan. Perhaps, because it is a game, we may feel a deeper consideration if it’s story to be a waste of time. However, the questions continue to arise, and I cannot help but ask them. What can we make of this? Some have suggested that the reference to the “Ancients” implies a kind of progenitor race, a proud past people who ruled these lands with one set of characteristics or another. However, let us not forget the Japanese origins of this game, and consult a different translation of the original text [5]. “The age of ancients” may be taken more literally to mean “an ancient age”. This renders us free of the ownership of this age, which will be a critical tether to cut down the line. In this ancient age, the English tells us it is “unformed”, implying the converse “formed”, so we may imagine a process of formation, or perhaps creation. In a modern western cultural context, a process of creation evokes the imagery of a Judaeo-Christian God. Let us forget this connotation for now, and again consult the Japanese text: the world is still undivided, non-discrete, or in-distinguished.
Now, this world must be extremely uninteresting. As it is undivided, it cannot “contain” anything, right? For a single “thing” would divide the world into “that thing” and “not that thing”. Despite this, we are told it is shrouded by fog. Is fog not “a thing?”, a form, and so a division in the world. The age of ancients is divided into “fog” and “not fog”. Thus, we need to make a critical choice about this fog. Is the fog literally part of the world, thus rendering “undivided” a non-literal representation, or is the fog itself non-literal, preserving the in-division. If we make the first choice, we will end up regarding all of the Dark Souls world as a series of objects with no shared characteristics, purpose, or special regard for one another. This would fatally undermine the point of my analysis, and so, I offer you a choice. If you wish to reject the metaphorical role of fog, forcing it to be literal, you should stop reading and do something more valuable with your life. If you wish to accept the fog as a metaphor (for ‘the unknown’ or some such thing), keep reading.
When we look out at the world, we see countless differences. Shapes, colours, objects, animals, plants, people, they all throng and shift at an immense churning boil. Those deep ponderers of our species gazed at this and began to wonder. Engaging the various creatures of the mind by asking questions which have touched each of us, even if only in passing. “Why is it all different?” “Why is it all the same?” Each has great potency, but only by grappling one in each hand can you move forward. There are many people, yet each is different in their specifics, yet, they all share common aspects. The same is true for any thing you choose to examine. They are all the same, yet, they are all different. Why do we see such patterns in nature? Why do ‘birds of a feather flock together’? Indeed, we may then ask not why we see such patterns, but how they grant us knowledge. How do we know that rotten meat is bad to eat, even when each individual piece of meat is different. So, we arrive at the broader scope: what is the nature of knowledge, how do we know things?
At the core of western philosophy are the writings of the Ancient Greeks. Plato, a paragon of these writings, found his direction in a form of discussion. He called it “the dialectic”, and he professed that this was the way to access truth, and to really know things. Knowledge, Plato describes, is often misunderstood. People think they know, but it is just their opinion. Thus, we can separate “true knowledge” and opinion. Plato says, opinion is gained from sense experience of the world, and cannot be trusted, for the world is ever-changing, and the senses deceive. How can we trust someone’s opinion about the overarching pattern of a thing when they have only seen some specific incarnation of that thing? Perhaps someone who ate rotten meat once and did not get sick, can we trust their opinion on rotten meat in general? So, Plato says, the world of change is not to be trusted to find true knowledge. Only by engaging a dialectic about the nature of the “form” of something can we access true knowledge. Thus, Plato’s “form” is the ideal underlying pattern of some thing, and glimpsing it is the source of true knowledge. Plato then goes on to extend this idea, creating his “theory of forms” where he describes the “world of forms” which is outside of time and space, and somehow influences the material reality (the world of change, in which we live) to in-form it’s shape, creating “a particular”. Thus, Plato tells us of “being” which refers to the unchanging forms, “becoming” which refers to the constant state of change where the world of particulars is shaped by the forms, and “non-being” which is the absence of form. So, if there can be an absence of forms, how do the forms come to be?
Since “something” in the world we know, the world of change, gains it’s identity by participating in a form, a world without forms must be composed of some kind of “primal matter” which can adopt any properties. Since this matter is unformed, it cannot be distinguished into separate “things”, “materials”, or “substances”. Thus, it must be uniform and posses the potential for all properties. This is precisely what the Japanese narration in the introductory line of the Dark Souls opening refers to the world as. So, we can have some confidence that the English “formless” and the Japanese “undivided” are in fact referring to the same thing, a kind of cosmological state of undifferentiated matter. This idea about the origins of the world is widespread throughout Earth cultures, mythologies, and traditions of thought, although the exact nature of this primal matter differs. Prior to Plato’s writings, the pre-socratic Greek philosophers debated about the origin of the world, and it’s base-substance or “principle”, separately suggesting it to be water, air, fire, and most pertinent to us “apiron” [6]. The latter, suggested by Anaximander, can be translated as “the unlimited”, however it can also be translated as “without boundary”. Anaximander proposed this substance was the eternal origin of all things. The things we see in the world are formed from aprion, and return back to it when they are destroyed. Anaximander noted that aprion generates the opposites which form the world, opposites such as “hot and cold” “wet and dry”. This is exceptionally relevant to the very next line of the Dark Souls opening, but we must continue to be sidetracked for one moment.
It is important to note the juxtaposition between Ancient Greek thought and a modern Japanese game. There are several important things to note here.
First, Ancient Greek philosophy is considered to form the bedrock of the western philosophical tradition, and anyone interested in the origins of western cultural thought will find themselves learning about it eventually.
Second, Dark Souls is explicitly influenced by western mythology, this is immediately from the imagery, and there is also a general opinion held in the “Souls-lore community” that:
It is somewhat of a truism in the lore community to point out that ... most of Miyazaki's games take western iconography and set them to a thematic narrative derived from his native culture, with its attendant Buddhist and Shinto themes.”[7]
Third, each of the concepts discussed thus far, the “form” of things, the relationship between “disparity” and “form”, and the “primal unformed matter” of the universe, all have strikingly similar counterparts in Daoist thought (discussed in the next paragraph). So we may ask “what is more likely” that the concepts displayed in Dark Souls are influenced by the lead writer’s interest in western thought, via the Ancient Greeks, or that they are influenced by the Daoist concepts transported to Japan via Zen Buddhism, or some mixture of both. You can choose your preferred origin story.
Daoist, or Taoist, thought has a critical role to play in my analysis of this story. It will come into play again later, but for now, we shall examine the counterparts to Anaximanders primal matter, dualities, and Plato's forms. In the most prominent text of Daoist though, the Dao De Jing, the narrator Laozi explains that the term “Dao” does not refer to a thing, but to an underlying principle of the universe. This is captured in the famous line “the Dao which is named is not the eternal Dao”. To give something a name is to give it a delineation, and the Dao is undelineable. From the Dao, countless “named things” emerge or manifest. Thus, the Dao is the generative process which underlies reality, from it countless forms emerge, and to it they return. We can clearly see the similarities with Anaximanders Apiron, and the “name” of such emerging things may be close in concept to Plato’s form. Indeed, the origins of Daoist thought are ancient, being written into the Dao De Jing within about 200 years of the writings of the pre-socratic Greek philosophers. However, in both cases, these written words emerge as the culmination from countless years of oral tradition and storytelling residing in the minds of their authors.
Now that we have set a sufficient background, what are we seeing here? The land is filled with grey crags. In the visual cinematic which accompanies the narration, we see these stone cliffs. Perhaps the fundamental element of this world is Earth, which would complete the Classic Greek four-elements alongside the pre-socratics, but I only suggest this in jest. We again encounter the “how can we have a formless world with stuff in it” issue, however I do not have good explanations for the crags or trees. If we consult the Japanese text: There was only grey crags, giant trees, and ancient dragons that did not rot/decay. If you will allow, I’d like to gloss over the crags and trees as “set-dressing” and instead focus on the thematic relevance of the dragons. Dragons play a critical role in the Dark Souls world, perhaps serving as a keystone in the “knights and dragons” fantasy iconography, but I believe they also serve major thematic roles. I shall quote from David Hinton’s commentary and translation of “The four Chinese Classics”[8] regarding the symbol of dragon:
“In the realm of ancient Chinese myth, earth’s generative natural process takes the awesome form of dragon ... dragon animates all things in the unending cycle of life and death and rebirth. As it embodies the process of change itself, dragon appears only to dissapear again, and so is in constant transformation.”
Now, we have an interesting contrast. Dark Souls has provided us a dragon, symbol for the unending cycle of nature, evoking the forever-shifting world of particulars and the movement of time itself, and has told us they are “everlasting”.
What does it mean to have “everlasting” change? It is clear from the visuals that the “age of ancients” is meant to be an unchanging, static, unliving world. This aligns with our interpretation of “formless” to refer to the ancient ideas about the origins of the world in a “primal matter”. Yet, perhaps, “unchanging” paired with “cycles of nature” is not a conflict at all. Change is only apparent by periods of stability, the dragon’s presence is only felt in contrast to it’s absence. If there was constant change, in every part of the world, ever-present, like TV-static it would become uniform and uninteresting. The constant change would become constant stability, the stability of non-stability. So, when Dark Souls tells us of these “dragons who do not decay”, it is also telling us they do not “grow”. They do not live, nor die. Rot, nor regenerate. Appear, nor disappear.
Fire! The Japanese tells us “but at some point the first flame appeared”, reinforcing this stories role as a creation myth. The first flame fills many purposes. Narratively, it gives us an inciting incident. To the world, it allows something to happen, which was not possible before. These are essential, because we have not yet begun to “play” Dark Souls, and it would seem difficult to make a game out of an unchanging world. Perhaps we are hearing the call of that old question again. Why? Indeed, the fire came to be with no explicable cause. This allows us to relive another ancient problem, stated nicely by Plato’s premier student, often dubbed “the most influential thinker in all of western thought”, Aristotle. Aristotle develops a system to categorize the causes of things, notably defining the efficient cause to be something capable of producing the change or stability of a thing. In this sense, every “thing” requires an efficient cause, and each cause thus requires a cause itself. The water boils because heat came from the fire. Heat came from the fire because of the properties of burning wood. The properties of burning come from... the wood came from... and so on. Extrapolating this, Aristotle finds that there must be a “first cause”, something to set the whole chain in motion. This one special cause is the one which must occur without a cause of it’s own. The reason this is a problem is that if we accept it is possible for things to occur without cause, we have great difficulty explaining anything in the world, because it may well just be another case of “it just occurred, nothing caused it”. This problem is reflected in our first flame. What caused it? If nothing caused it, then the flame itself is the unmoved mover, or first uncaused cause, from which the rest may follow. Then, the Dark Souls world is one in which there is sometimes things that occur with no cause whatsoever.
If the world is completely undistinguished, such as it were the naked Dao, or the Apiron, it would be difficult to imagine anything “coming to be” inside of it. Let’s walk through the reasoning. If we used some Godlike powers to generate a fully-formed chair inside the quivering abyss, we immediately run into problems. What is a chair made of? Likely, wood, metal, and fabric. So, to create a chair, we must also create wood, metal, and fabric. “No problem” I hear you say, “we have Godlike powers, let’s just summon them”. But wait, to create wood, we need to create the material wood is made of, lignin, likewise with cellulose for the fabric, and iron or steel for the metal. What are these made of? Since you (my critic) are a modern person with an education, you may thing “molecules” or “atoms” or “elements”. However, each of these can only exist within a system of other components. Carbon cannot exist without hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, and boron. The bonds between the atoms require electrons, those atoms require protons, and those protons require quarks, and those quarks require... what exactly? If we create “ex-nihilo” we are required to create systems of things, not just things fully-formed. Do we create the laws of physics to sustain the molecules which form the chair? There is a quote from Carl Sagan which goes “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”.
How do we tackle this problem? We do not expect that Dark Souls creates and abides by a real-life physics system in order to create it’s ‘first flame’. Even if it does, it would just push the goalpost further along, and run into the same problems modern physics does at explaining the origins of the universe. Let us re-evaluate what we are asking here. Our medium is expressly storytelling, so we should try to avoid using more specialized forms of communication, such as mathematics. We cannot test our hypotheses, so we cannot do science. Indeed, we are largely walking through the reasoning of how you might come to the same ideas about the origins of things as the Dark Souls opening. So, given that, we can ask “what can we do to an unformed world, assuming we can do anything at all”.
As we saw earlier, creating a “thing” requires creating several systems of being to sustain it. So, we might expect that we should start by creating the systems. A system is a way of categorizing reality, so that we can observe separate components, and how these components interact. What, then, is the simplest way of “dividing” the infinite and undivided formless cosmos. Simple, create a point. Now, every single part of the cosmos has one “relationship” to that point, a distance. Is this 3D? Not likely, since we haven’t “formed” dimensionality yet. If it is 1D, however, there is no difference between everything, since it all exists within the point. No difference, no disparity, and so we haven’t divided anything yet. What if we create a dimension? If it is 2D, the cosmos can be represented as a line. Now, with our created point, each part of the cosmos has a separate distance from the point. However, the parts may have a separate distance, but not a unique distance, why? One part of the cosmos may be 10 whatever in distance from the point, but it shares that distance with another part in the opposite direction. This, on a number line, is positive and negative. We have created a mirror. If our undivided primal matter gains “properties” according to our created system, we give the same properties to both parts of primal matter which are 10 distance away from “the point”. So, having created dimensionality, distance, and a point, maybe we will create “asymmetry” in the cosmos. Allow the “mirror” to be broken. In physics, math is used for a much more robust and precise description of a similar concept. The origin of everything involves a “symmetry break”.
What results? Of course, opposites. Once the symmetry is broken initially, the relationship of every particle of undivided cosmos gains a property ‘sign’ (or perhaps ‘charge’). This is like adding another dimension, and a whole cascade of inter-relationships occur. But since we added “asymmetry”, perhaps there is division within these inter-relationships too? Thus, all things may have a cause, and we may eventually see the human-interpretable disparities mentioned in the Dark Souls intro narration. Note, this is strikingly similar to Anaximanders initial assertions about Aprion, and the Daoist concept of Yin Yang emerging from the Dao. From the “undivided” must come “divisions”.
In the video which accompanies this intro narration, we see some “zombie-like” figures shambling toward the fire. These do seem to be the “They” regarded here, but let’s confirm with the Japanese literal translation again. “Then, some creatures, born from the darkness, were attracted to the fire, and found the soul of the lord.”
So, we have made it through the first part of the creation myth, which explains the origins of the universe and it’s properties. Now we arrive at our introduction, when “man” enters the story. The “They” we see on screen are quite “zombie-like” due to a story-element called “the curse”. In their basal form, this man is indistinguishable from animal. These creatures come from the dark, which evokes a classical element of human symbolism. In the commentary on “The Four Chinese Classics” Hinton explains that the paleolithic human experience of the generative force of nature was such that they created art of the human female form, vulvas, and an emphasis on fecundity[9]. Hinton suggests that this led to mankind's earliest spiritual practice, “the various forms of obeisance to a Great Mother who continually gives birth to all creation”. This is reflected explicitly in the Dao De Jing, where the Dao is referred to by names such as “mother of all beneath heaven”, “nurturing mother”, and “dark female-enigma”. This forms a beautiful contrast between our eastern/western motif, in that the eastern religious practices center around the dark feminine, and the western the light masculine.
What is a soul, and notably, a soul of a lord? Aristotle tells us that the soul is the “animating principle” of living things. If all living things have a soul, what distinguishes the soul of a lord? A lord is one who rules over others, and so a soul of a lord should grant the capability to rule over others. What is that capability? Rule is a specifically social idea, we would not describe a larger bear defeating a rival as “ruling over him”. A ruler is one who, through means of power, is able to unify the people on his behalf. Louis 14th of France famously said “I am the state”, by which he meant this. Ultimately, while people pursue their own ends, they also pursue his. There is no-one else in France who this is true for. Any one person may pursue the ends of themselves, their family, lover, etc, and so have many connections. But the pursuit which is most shared among people is that of the King, the Lord. Thus, the Soul of a Lord is not one which merely gives the strength to defeat rivals (this is also important), but it gives the strength to subsume the will of many, unify them into the singular will of the Lord, and so unite them as if a single mind. Perhaps, unite them as into a single soul. Is this not precisely what we do in Dark Souls? Defeat rivals to subsume their supporters (collected souls) into our own aims. Not with brute strength, but with the variety of tactics, attributes, and strategies that make up a thinking social mind.
The role of fire as the source for this power is not incidental, either. As Steady Hand McDuff says:
“From the start of time, flame allowed man to flourish. Even now, he devises new fiery arts.”
In the real world history of human beings, fire was a monumental innovation for our species. From the flames, we became able to cook food, extracting more nutrients than without. Extracting more nutrients meant we needed less time for the same calories. Thus, the flourishing began. With the gain in free time, humans began to experiment in the social realm, developing language, culture, and technology. The essential power of fire is that it transforms, chemically, what it encounters. The combustion reaction which forms fire is an exchange of molecular energy. This higher energy, once controlled, allows for the molecular transformation of other substances. Meat into cooked meat. Clay into pottery. Animal fat into tallow. With these technolgies, humans were able to access new forms of energy. The fires got larger and hotter. Woodlands cut and ferried in vast trade networks to stoke the furnaces. Eventually, new principles of energy were discovered. Indeed: he devises new fiery arts. Thus, fire is the symbol for the transformative power of collected energy. Not simply the stored chemical energy in wood or coal, nor transferred potential energy in wheels and generators. The transformative power also refers to the ability of such heights to attract and organize people, to unify the work of many hands in order to push forward the logistics networks of society.
Is it any surprise that the Ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the Gods, is a myth that is far more ancient. The fire that Prometheus steals is a symbol for the essence of civilization. With fire comes energy, with energy comes time, with time comes organization, with organization comes more energy, and civilization grows. The archeological records of human skulls show that the domestication of fire in our distant ancestors coincided with a rapid change in brain size. With more energy and time, they could begin to solve more complex problems, and further their own survival. An evolutionary biologist named Judith P Judson has proposed a way to categorize the history of life on earth, into varying “epochs”, each of which is defined by the types of energy which living things can exploit: gochemical energy, sunlight, oxygen, flesh and fire [10]. We still live in the age of fire.
Now we are introduced to the cast of main targets for the Dark Souls game. I won’t expound on them further here.
The furtive pygmy is the progenitor of humans. Note that the other bearers of the lord souls are Gods/Godlike, however we might note that it is common in Asian mythologies for mortal beings to be able to attain a level of Godhood, so we do not need to dwell on the difference much longer. We will see this Pygmy again later.
Perfect, now that we have established the background symbolism for these concepts, we can see what this line might be getting at. The strength of lords may refer to the “organizational capacity” which is emergence from civilization, and the human ability to organize and utilize their environment. Some may think that this means “a godlike power”, but we should recall what we discussed earlier. Louis the 14th’s insight (I am the state), combined with one of CGPGrey’s “rules for rulers” (no man rules alone [11]), evokes this dichotomy well. The “strength” of the lords come from their aggregated souls, their capacity to organize, the strength of those working for their vision. And the dragons? Recall they are a classic symbol in eastern Mythology for “the natural forces/cycles of change” which Dark Souls inverts to form “an changless changing”, or eternal stagnation. Using the strength of Lords, they are able to overcome this stagnation of the world, and challenge the cycles of nature. Society explicitly challenges the cycles of nature. Rivers are dammed, old forests cut down, dry fields watered, hungry animals tended. The natural cycles would not have any of these occur. So we can re-interpret this line to say “with the organizational capacity and unity of vision inherent to the human social capacity, they challenged the unending cyclical natural process.” And what comes of it?
Oh, the beauty and horror of man. Our harnessed and refined energy pierces the earth, we build weapons of exploitation and war. We set the forests ablaze. We carry death close at hand, in our lungs and under our skin. Each of the actions performed by a Lord here can be seen as an effect of civilization.
Seath the Scaleless is a very interesting character. Precisely because he is the progenitor of “Soul Sorcery”, and is a betrayer of dragon-kind. Somehow, I feel that he is a symbol for the accumulated human knowledge, and the “magical” abilities granted by scientific progress. This will be a topic for another time, perhaps. Let us also note that the Japanese offers some insight into this line as well: “And, due to the betrayal of Seath, the white dragon with no scales, the ancient dragons were finally defeated.” We can see more clearly that Seath was probably “born” (if such a thing can be said of ancient dragons) without scales, presumably making him an abberation among dragonkind. The stone of their scales protects them, and I feel is somehow symbolic for the cruel indifference of nature toward mankind. So is Seath representative of an aspect of the natural cycles which, through chance, lacks the cruel indifference toward humans? In which case... what could it be? We should also note that the Japanese specifically uses “finally defeated”, which is a more precise rendition to our experience in Dark Souls, as we can find evidence, or even a direct meeting, with one of the few remaining ancient dragons. So, the forces of nature may be subjugated, but we should not forget that they exist.
So we are nearing the end of the intro, and the apocalyptic tone of the setting is made clear. We are living in the end of an age. This marks a central prophecy for the games story, but regarding my analysis, we will hold off discussing “the ages” as such. However, one important note from the translation, the “darkness” which remains after the fire fades uses a different word than the dark from which the creatures emerge (kurayami vs yami). This reminds us of the difference between “an absence of fire (disparity)” which was the world in it’s unformed state, and the world would presumably return to after the fire vanishes, and the dark from “light and dark”, the second half of the duality. This causes a slight wrinkle in the precise role of fire and the dark from which the creatures come. If the fire is referring to a metaphysical origin for all things via disparity, then humans must come from the “light and dark” darkness. However, if the fire is referring to an origin within the scope of human history (such as the harnessing of fire), then the dualities would more likely “appear” within the understanding of the human mind. If a human can use fire, they will gain understandings of it’s properties, and understand more about the nature of light and dark, which existed as part of the natural world before. In this case, humans originate in the “pre-fire” darkness, and the “dark” of their nature refers to the essential chaos of the primordial matter, not the reverse of light.
Despair is the tone here. What is the darksign? It is a symbol etched in flesh which says “this one will come back after they die”. This makes them undead. The undead slowly loses their humanity. The Dark Souls 2 intro expounds on the concept a little more, saying “The symbol of the curse. An augur of darkness. Your past. Your future. Your very light. None will have meaning, and you won't even care. By then, you'll be something other than human. A thing that feeds on souls. A Hollow.” This contains an essential clue for us, meaninglessness. There is a state of total despair, where someone has become overwhelmed by meaninglessness, that they become “something other than human”. In this state, they feed upon the souls of others.
What is the essential nature of man? In Dark Souls, the game explicitly tells us “the dark”. However, it tells us that the “dark sign” is a symbol for the curse, which drives the humanity out of it’s victims. Characters in the game tell us to avoid this path. Larentius of the great swamp says “Be safe, friend. Don't you dare go Hollow.”, and the blacksmith Andre of Astora tells us “Don't get yourself killed. Neither of us want to see you go Hollow.” So how does one fight against hollowing? This is a central question in all of the Dark Souls games. The game mechanics make an effort to reflect this, in Dark Souls, you lose some in-game representation of your characters “humanity” when you die, but there is no in-game mechanic to reflect fully “going hollow”. We see throughout the world, enemies and characters fully consumed by the curse, becoming the soul-hungering monsters described. Can our player-character become such a thing? What would that look like?
The archetypical hollow enemy is a beast which knows only consumption, violence, and death. Yet, it is the quest of our character to consume the souls of enemies in an increasing battle, sowing violence and murder throughout the world. What makes us different? The essential difference is that quest. As the player-character, we have a goal. So, meta-textually, if we lose our goal, our guiding purpose for being, we may become such a hollow. This, may be the “very light” referenced in the Dark Souls 2 opening, the light of purpose. This purpose is prophesied in the final lines of the intro cinematic.
So, ultimately the questions around the Dark Souls worldbuilding are formed. “What is the purpose of being”. This question lies at the heart of the philosophical roots in the Dark Souls world. For the western, here exemplified by Plato, explanation is the following.
1) The Form is the true nature of reality
2) Shaping reality in accordance with the forms is good
3) Thus, the purpose of man is to better understand the forms and learn to shape reality in their image
Yet, the central crux of Miyazaki’s writing lies around the intersection of east and west. We have seen how the idea of the formless primal matter of the world are reflected in western Apiron and eastern Dao. The idea that dualities emerge from this state by Anaxagoras, Yin Yang, and in an interesting way, modern physics. So what is the eastern answer to the nature of truth, and can we derive a purpose for being from this, in the same way we can from Plato?
The essential state of these two traditions of thought is well described in the translator introduction to “religion and nothingness” by Keiji Nishitani:
Eastern paintings do not aim at the expression of the real form of things; and even if they do portray the form of things, they do not portray the things themselves; by means of them they express the soul, but the soul is nothing other than the formless world. On the surface of the canvas the blank space dominate. These blank spaces are wholly different from the backgrounds of western paintings. Instead the blank spaces are expressed by the form of the things portrayed.
In some ways we may recall the famous words of Kitarō Nishida:
In contradiction to western culture which considers form as existence and formation as good, the urge to see the form of the formless, and hear the sound of the soundless, lies at the foundation of eastern culture.
So, we can say, in western though, the Truth is in the form of things instead of their chaotic manifestation in the world, and the formation is good, thus the purpose shall be to pursue the form and it’s formation. However, in eastern thought, the Truth is contained in the chaotic manifestation itself, and so the desire to pursue the meaning inside this chaos “to see the form of the formless” is the purpose which is derived.
How does this factor in to Dark Souls? The famously difficult gameplay, the punishing loss of souls and humanity upon death, and the ceaseless resurrection. These share narrative and real-world counterparts. Difficulty is unavoidable, in life as in the game. If souls represent the collected individual “animating principles” which are subsumed to your purpose, the friends, allies, defeated enemies, resources, nutrients, then losing them means a disillusionment of those collected. Loss of friends, abandonment, betrayal, isolation, hunger, poverty. These are all conditions when “the world turns it’s back on you”, when you lose it all. This great suffering, repeated through time, is certain to cause someone to begin to lose their humanity. Memory is affected by trauma and isolation, and with no-one to tell your story, it becomes difficult to maintain your grip on what it means to be human. Then, we should try to avoid going hollow. Because a beast which feeds on souls is only animated by a desire to consume, to use people, animals, systems, and the world around them. Use them all in an ultimately purposeless quest.
What is the final outcome for our character in Dark Souls, who is staving off this dire state by sheer force of will? What happens to someone who maintains their humanity despite all the suffering of the world, loss after crushing loss? In the end, Dark Souls offers the player a choice. You may sacrifice yourself to extend the age of fire, extend the purposefulness of Gwyn’s empire, or you may abandon it, and step into the dark. These choices are ultimately the same, for the fire of an age is always fading, and creatures born from the dark are drawn to the flame, seeking the souls of Lords. So, we reach the final essential elements for the setting of Dark Souls.
Miyazaki is known for blending western iconography with eastern thematic narratives. However, the distinction between “philosophy” “literature” and “religion” fades away as you reach further back into western narratives, and the distinction is never made clearly in eastern ones. So, the subject of our analysis is “storytelling”, and we can observe the point in which West and East share a common past. In ancient, primordial human stories, who’s origins are buried deep in the oral tradition before writing, we glimpse common elements of those who were later recorded. The unformed churning chaos which makes up the primordial matter of the world, from which known things take shape. The essential dualities which emerge, demonstrating the dualistic relationship of pattern-seeking abilities across humanity. The thief of fire, who inherits a godlike power and enables the development of civilization. These elements only begin to diverge when differing schools of thought are formed, chasing after the question “what is my purpose?”. Philosophies always chase truth, but which components of the world are “true” forms a coherent East vs West split. In the western tradition, Platonic thought establishes, and Aristotelian refines the basic idea: the truth is in the ideal forms, and the chaotic world may only glimpse it. Christianity goes on to inherent Aristotelian thought, with the “prime mover” or “form of forms” or “form of the good” making an easy spot for the role of the Abrahamic God. In the eastern tradition, the truth is in the chaos of the world, and the ideal forms are merely glimpses. This is refined by themes in Daoism and Hinduism, later Buddhism carries these ideas to Japan. So, when the question remains “what is my purpose”, the western tradition says “to glimpse and pursue the true form of things, creating good by the pursuit of the form”, the eastern tradition says “to glimpse and pursue the true emptiness of things, creating insight by pursuit of the absence of form”, and Dark Souls says “whichever you choose, do not fall into meaninglessness and let the yourself become a monster. Retain meaning in the pursuit of light, or the pursuit of dark. Recruit the souls of others without consuming them. Seek an inner purpose, and hold on to what you find. If light proves empty, seek dark. If dark proves empty, seek light. Above all, don’t go hollow.”
1. Dark Souls 1: Solaire ↩
2. Dark Souls 2: Cale the Cartographer ↩
3. Dark Souls 2: Opening ↩
4. Dark Souls 1: Opening ↩
5. https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/mmu042/a_direct_translation_and_analysis_of_the_japanese/ ↩
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Socratic_philosophy ↩
7. https://youtu.be/GVlOCP3U2ec?t=1274 ↩
8. The four Chinese classics: Tao te ching, analects, chuang tzu, mencius. Catapult, 2013. ↩
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11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs ↩