The Seclusion of Women: Ritual Without Society

Part Three

What became of the divine king’s female partner, the human goddess who shared his bed and transmitted his beneficent energies to the rest of nature, we cannot say.

FromSoft’s games are not immune to criticism. In addition to a difficulty level some would characterize as inaccessible and exclusionary, they skew masculine, with far more male characters than female. The women who do appear are often stiff and doll-like. The character who performs level-up duties in Bloodborne is a nameless living doll; the Firekeeper in Dark Souls 3 and Emma in Sekiro are living women but feel similar. Gwyn has a brood of children in Dark Souls but his wife goes unmentioned and unnamed; we meet his daughter Gwynevere but she turns out to be an illusion created by her sibling Gwyndolin; she left Lordran long ago. (Based on one bit of flavor text that says Gwyndolin was born a boy but raised as a girl, I take Gwyndolin to be trans. This detail, however, is not elaborated on.)

With the exception of Sekiro, there is no such thing as society in FromSoft’s games. Lordran is overrun with Hollows, Yharnam succumbed to the beast plague, and the events of Elden Ring take place in the aftermath of The Shattering, in which the titular object, the incarnation of the world’s order, was broken and demigods fought cataclysmic battles for its shards. These worlds are populated with lone wolves set on solitary and suicidal ends. 

For all the similarities we’re tracing between these games and The Golden Bough, these two lacks—women and society—create jarring incongruities and raise the question of how these stories can function thematically without them. 

While ideas like killing the god and transformation through pollution make good fodder for a single-player quest and provide a scaffolding for the logic of bosses channeling power to attain their final form, Frazer was unpacking practices that were rooted in living cultures. These superstitions supported daily life and livelihood. Killing the god sustained the world, yes, but much more important was his habitual role in calling the rains and making the crops grow. These customs emerged as the backbone of the social calendar, with communities gathering for festivals and feasts that also had a magical dimension like ensuring a good harvest. 

In fact, one of the aspects of The Golden Bough I find endlessly charming is how Frazer has to stretch his writing abilities to find formulations acceptable to his readers in 1890 to describe over and over events and practices that are catastrophically horny. Because primitive societies sought to influence nature through example and imitation, to provide nature with the reproductive energy it needed, Frazer catalogs numerous spring festivals and ceremonies dedicated to ensuring the fertility of the earth and animals. Humans provided the example by letting down inhibitions and propriety, running wild and pairing off in the woods. He documents the Roman Saturnalia and its Greek counterpart the Cronia along with northern European revels like May Day and Midsummer. Words like “outrageous,” licentious,” and “bacchanal” get a heavy workout. 

Frazer remarks at one point that “Men make gods and women worship them.” We can quibble with the claim but the upshot is that women and women’s roles in magic and religion are far more central to his inquiry than men. Killing the god might be a man’s job but birth and death are the domain of women. Priestesses were often married to their gods, like the Akkadian poet and high priestess of Ur, Enheduana. She was married to Nanna, the male moon god of the Sumerian pantheon, and was considered the earthly incarnation of his wife Ningal. Her hymns are addressed to Nanna’s daughter Inana, a goddess of chaos and change; she is more familiar to us in her later Babylonian incarnation Ishtar, whose priestesses, in Frazer’s telling, practiced sacred prostitution in the temple. 

This leaves us in an awkward place. If these games are invoking Frazer’s ideas, what does it mean that the primary participants are conspicuously missing? On the human level, women often function as the primary vector for both of the major themes explored in the previous two parts of this series: through pregnancy and childbirth women renew and regenerate the social world; but they are also frequently seen as unclean and polluting, epitomized in practices of confinement or banishment during menstruation, the blood being seen as a threat to the community. Women are consistently thought of as dualistic in a way men aren’t—sacred and profane, virgin and whore. 

By shifting these ideas from their natural home into a more abstract mode, Miyazaki succeeded in crafting stories that were more accessible and less psychosexual, but in doing so neglected half of humanity. With Elden Ring, he would finally correct this fault and devise, with George R.R. Martin’s help, a much richer and more varied set of female characters.