God in the Flesh: Consumption, Pollution, and Transformation in Bloodborne and Sekiro
Part Two
Apparently holiness, magical virtue, taboo, or whatever we may call that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred or tabooed persons, is conceived by the primitive philosopher as a physical substance or fluid, with which the sacred man is charged just as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity; and exactly as the electricity in the jar can be discharged by contact with a good conductor, so the holiness or magical virtue in the man can be discharged… And in many cases apparently the insulation of the tabooed person is recommended as a precaution not merely for his own sake but for the sake of others; for since the virtue of holiness or taboo is, so to say, a powerful explosive which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in the interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever it comes into contact with.
Within the conventional fantasy world of Dark Souls, Miyazaki and the FromSoft team put their twist on a recognizable, heroic quest that felt familiar even if they complicated it in surprising ways. When they stepped outside Lordran to make Bloodborne and Sekiro, they accordingly moved into stranger thematic territory that questioned the nature of divinity and the beneficent powers thereof that were treated as settled fact before.
Bloodborne has by far the most obscure story of any of these games but I’ll do my best here. It takes place in Yharnam, a Victorian-era city of cobblestone streets and streetlamps, which prospered and then collapsed due to its reliance on Blood Ministration, a technique developed by the Healing Church that led to much of the population getting habitual blood transfusions. Imbibers of the blood would eventually transform into horrid beasts, spurring the formation of the Hunters, of whom the player character is the latest member, an order the would cull the scourge but were themselves dependent on blood and inevitably met the same fate.
What this special healing blood is or where it comes from is never quite specified but we can make some inferences. As the game progresses, we become aware of the presence of Great Ones in Yharnam, H.P Lovecraft-style eldritch horrors from beyond the cosmos that the human mind struggles to comprehend. There’s a system in the game called Insight, a stat that increases as we encounter sights beyond our mortal ken, a tracker of our seeing through to the truth of things or of our growing insanity, depending on one’s perspective. Penetrating to the innermost reaches of the Healing Church reveals that they keep a Great One—Ebrietas, Daughter of the Cosmos—confined there. Other factions like the scholars of Byrgenwerth and the villagers conducting the Mensis Ritual seem to be engaged in trying to create new Great Ones or Great One offspring. The healing blood certainly comes from somewhere in this web—either directly the blood of a Great One, or a child hybrid, or that of a woman who consumed it.
The Great Ones are not gods per se, but they occupy the same metaphorical space. But where gods are made in the image of man, the Great Ones not only far surpass humanity in scale and power but are fundamentally other, of a substance and nature incompatible with our fleshly frames. Like oil and water these essences don’t mix and can only yield corruption and decay.
The potential danger posed by spiritual and psychic energy was a major concern for superstitious societies, according to Frazer. In his long discussion of taboos, he begins by covering practices that protected divine personages from contamination and the sapping of their powers, then transitions into the ways these practices also functioned to protect the community. Far from being simply dangerous blasts of divine, “good” energy, they could be a force of pollution that would profane anything it came in contact with:
Thus in primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity observed by divine kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many respects with the rules observed by homicides, women in childbed, girls at puberty, and so on. To us these various classes of persons appear to differ totally in character and condition; some of them we should call holy, others we might pronounce unclean and polluted. But the savage makes no such moral distinction between them; the conceptions of holiness and pollution are not yet differentiated in his mind. To him the common feature of all these persons is that they are dangerous and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid.
A primary vector for this sort of spiritual dirtying is blood. Frazer lists many examples of societies that believed blood should never be shed upon the ground, for the place where it fell would be permanently profaned. Blood, as a primary lifeforce, is a particularly potent vehicle for supernatural energies of all kinds. In Bloodborne, one must obtain a password to open the way to Byrgenwerth college; it turns out to an adage of its leader, Master Willem: “Fear the old blood.”
Yet, as we learn from the description of an item that increases our Insight, Willem also sought to commune with the Great Ones, having the epiphany, “We are thinking on the basest of planes. What we need, are more eyes.” As we progress through the game, we can collect three sections of the umbilical cord of a Great One; consuming them increases our Insight and brings us closer to the nature of their being and unlocks the game’s true ending. The description for one reads in part, “Provost Willem sought the Cord in order to elevate his being and thoughts to those of a Great One, by lining his brain with eyes. The only choice, he knew, if man were to ever match Their greatness.” In the final area of the game, the Nightmare of Mensis, a great brain attacks the player from a distance with psychic damage, building up the Frenzy status. The brain can be found, confronted, and killed. It is the realization of what Willem dreamed of, though hardly as glorious. “The immense brain that Mensis retrieved from the nightmare was indeed lined with eyes on the inside, but they were of an evil sort, and the brain itself was terribly rotten.”
What of this talk of nightmares as places that can be ventured to and returned from? The line between the waking world and that of dreams is catastrophically blurred in Bloodborne. The player advances from one to the other with little notice. The home base area is called the Hunter’s Dream and appears to be a refuge for the Moon Presence, a Great One for whom the player has unwittingly been working the entire game. The Nightmare of Mensis is a dreamscape created to harbor the infant Great One Mergo; the game’s expansion pack area, the Hunter’s Nightmare, is the haven of the Orphan of Kos, another Great One child. Destroying these competing dreams is the Moon Presence’s desire, one we oblige.
Is the player “really” doing the things that occur in these dream worlds? If we follow Frazer, yes. What makes dreams so endlessly unsettling is what makes them impossible to convey to another person: logic can be inverted and identities superimposed in impossible ways, yet in the moment it strikes us with an undeniable reality—the situation was so wrong but it was nonetheless true. Likewise, Frazer remarks that it was common to hold that the soul left the body during sleep and really did the things experienced during dreams. Bloodborne makes this literal.
Whereas in Bloodborne characters are stumbling toward disaster through their naivete with regard to the forces they’re playing with, in Sekiro the problem of divine pollution is recognized. Put briefly, the player is the shinobi warrior guardian of Kuro, the Divine Heir who possesses the Dragon’s Heritage. His blood allows those who drink it to return from the dead, but invoking this power spreads a blight across the land. He’s kidnapped by the Ashina clan at the beginning of the game; when we catch up he tasks us not with his rescue but with “divine severance,” to break line of succession and let the power in his blood die with him.
Following his orders, the player eventually arrives at the Fountainhead Palace, the source of the Rejuvenating Waters that flow throughout the region and the home of the Divine Dragon whose tears we need to complete the severance ritual. The Rejuvenating Waters are shown to have corrupting influences under their healing powers and are teeming with microscopic, immortal centipede parasites that can take over the bodies of other creatures, including several late-game bosses.
The Ashinas wanted Kuro and the Dragon’s Heritage because their patriarch, Isshin, is dying. Isshin was a mighty warlord whose military campaigns united the region but time has caught up with him. Kuro’s blood is his grandson Genichiro’s last hope of keeping him alive. But Isshin is sanguine in the face of death and supports Kuro’s plan to sever the bloodline. After the player defeats Genichiro midway through the game to reach Kuro in Ashina castle, he disappears until the very end of the game. In the meantime, Isshin gives up the ghost. When Genichiro returns, he’s imbibed the sediment from the lakebed of the Rejuvenating Waters, making his body the source of terrible possibility.
He challenges the player again but goes down quickly. Out of options, he slits his own throat. His body slumps and out of it steps Isshin in his glorious youth, who challenges Sekiro for control of Kuro. Is this really Isshin or is this some some terrible homunculus? Either option is horrifying. If it truly is Isshin, Genichiro has ripped him from the afterlife and thrust him back into mortal being; his renewed will to power would mean that the serenity he showed in his senescence was not the result of enlightenment but merely a function of his old age and growing frailty. On the other hand, if he’s some sort of golem constituted of Genichiro’s blood and lakebed clay, with no relation to Isshin save his grandson’s memory, that would be an abomination, a soulless shell masquerading as a lord. No matter how you slice it, Genichiro transgressed beyond all sense and morality.
The themes are more muted in Sekiro than in Bloodborne but eating and drinking are explored again as a vector for corruption and transformation. Early in Sekiro the player can meet Pot Noble Harunaga, a strange figure hiding inside a pot who desires a special kind of carp scale. When asked why he answers, “Listen... I want to become a carp. A giant carp that will continue growing, and live a long, long life. A carp that never grows old.” There is just such a fish in the lake of the Fountainhead Palace. It’s hard to look at, with a Shark Tale-style human face and a mindless desire to eat the player. Whatever dream of transcendence Harunaga is nursing, he’s sorely mistaken. Like the pot he inhabits, his body is too fragile a vessel for the metamorphosis he hopes for.