The Golden Bough Aflame: Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and FromSoft’s Games of Pure Myth

Introduction to a five part series

He woke all night with the cold. He’d rise and mend back the fire and she was always watching him. When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed of blood and blood’s alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one. —Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

What is Dark Souls about? Unfortunately the 50,000 Youtube video explainers on precisely this topic have all been deleted so you’ll have to read this instead. For what looks at first glance like any other action RPG—medieval fantasy setting, big swords, skeleton enemies—the game, first released in 2011, inspired players to dig into every facet of its worldbuilding and lore, ultimately begetting a cottage industry of content creators dedicated to explaining the intricacies of its famously withholding storytelling. 

What could account for this level of attention? Certainly gamers love a puzzle but is it really enough to plop the player into a world without giving them a clear direction to run and to embed backstory in item descriptions to send the masses so deep down the rabbit hole? With each new release—the Victorian Gothic-inspired Bloodborne (2015), Dark Souls 3 (2017), feudal Japan-set Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), and Elden Ring (2022)—game director Hidetaka Miyazaki would repeat the same trick—limited exposition, punishing difficulty, grotesque bosses—with the same result: rave reviews from critics and fervent devotion from players. On the face of it these stories are standard video game fare: an unassuming hero takes up arms and grows stronger, facing down mightier and mightier foes until his quest is complete and his dominance is unquestionable. This is little different from The Legend of Zelda, from Final Fantasy, from Pokemon, even. 

FromSoft’s games differentiate themselves by operating in a mythic register that I long found hard to quite articulate. I drove my wife crazy endlessly trying to tell her how interesting the games are without being able to say anything concrete. But I have found the ur-text of FromSoft’s oeuvre, the book that locates and explicates the themes these games play with, that tries to understand the forces embedded deep in our customs, religions, and shared past that make these games about fire and darkness, blood and dreams, so resonant.

That book is The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer. First published in 1890 in two volumes and ultimately expanded into a 12-volume behemoth over the next 25 years, it is a seminal (and deeply flawed) comparative study of magic and religion that compiles beliefs and practices including pagan-rooted spring and harvest festivals in Europe, sacred prostitution in the Near East, theories of sympathetic magic, and global conceptions of taboos, among many other topics, to trace archetypal figures and ceremonies to their common roots. I am drawing from the Oxford “New Abridgement” from the 90s that runs a mere 800 pages.  

I cannot prove that Miyazaki has ever read The Golden Bough. The circumstantial evidence, however, is compelling. He studied social science in college, pivoting to video games at age 29; I don’t know his full course of study it’s plausible readings from the book could have been part of a comparative religion class. The games themselves speak to a strong interest in European art and history. Numerous weapons and pieces of armor are based on real-world examples, some of which are detailed here. The cathedral in Anor Londo is based on the Milan Cathedral and its multilevel spiral staircase is a recreation of that of the Chateau de Chambord, per an interview from the Dark Souls art book that no longer seems to be available online. Thematically as well the games demonstrate an engagement with the Western philosophic tradition, as, for example, the Dark Souls series enacts a cycle of recurrence closely following Nietzsche’s Eternal Return. It is striking how just about every theme he has explored in his work appears in the book, some centrally and some peripherally.

With Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion due out this Thursday, the time is right to take a trip back with Frazer to Lake Nemi in the Roman countryside to reflect on the profound influence of this century-old book on Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring. Over the next five days we’ll look cycles of decay and regeneration in Dark Souls 1 and 3, the thin line between the sacred and the profane in Bloodborne and Sekiro, and the relationship between trees and the soul in Elden Ring, along with lots else.