Character Analysis: Mythological Relationship of Griffith and Guts
Whether intentionally or not, Guts and Griffith’s relationship seems to be heavily rooted in one particular mythological theme, which further colors their attraction and antagonism to one another. I’ll quickly go through the mythos in the first half of the post, and then discuss in the second half how it relates to their relationship and also to Casca. I apologize in advance for all the nonsense that’s going to come out of this.
@bthump, here’s the analysis I promised to make a few weeks ago!
Proto-Indo-European mythology, whose traces are visible across cultures in entire Eurasia, shows a recurring conflict between two opposing principles. There’s a devouring chthonic creature on one side, a beast (most commonly, a snake or a wolf), and it’s associated with the lower world of matter. Then on the other side, there’s a hawk, a falcon, or an eagle: aerial, graceful, spiritual, and predatory, suggestive of celestial realms. Slavic mythology, which is an offshoot of Proto-Indo-European mythology, in particular, uses very often beast vs. hawk symbolism. In later dualistic interpretations, the spirit is good, the matter is vile, and the spirit triumphs over the matter. However, in older, naturalistic interpretations where this symbolism originated to begin with, spiritual and chthonic currents are eternally bound together, both necessary, both neutral, both caught in perpetual conflict. It could be that Berserk simply borrowed hawk/wolf dynamic from Ladyhawke (1985), however, Ladyhawke merely uses forms present in this myth, but not their underlying meaning. Berserk, on the other side, delved deep into it, and the driving force behind attraction and conflict of Griffith and Guts seems to have roots in it.
These two opposing mythical sides - hawk which stands for spirit, and beast which stands for matter - have different faces, different hypostases. Sometimes they are represented as archenemies always killing one another, sometimes as lovers always searching for each other, reflecting the idea that they cannot exist separated, yet almost whenever they combine, they inevitably hurt one another. Spirit suffers when it’s brought down to earth from its heights and entrapped in matter, and matter suffers when it is taken into the heights because it loses its roots, its relation to the chthonic earth. There’s always an imminent danger in combining them.
Mythologically, the joining of these two opposing principles is usually depicted as a marriage of sun and moon - which, especially in some later philosophies that were a continuation of the original mythical thought - is often depicted as an eclipse (Ladyhawke uses this theme too). It is a moment when the spiritual is touching upon the physical, and if the union is successful, a third element is produced out of the two, containing both and reconciling them. However, if something goes wrong during the union, the result is a disaster.
Old Slavic lore is chock-full of folk tales and legends that describe this event. There’s an attempted marriage of two persons - who are always the respective echoes of the mythical beast and hawk gods, or to be more precise, of their children, who are not enemies like their parents, but instead in love with each other. In the myth, the god, who comes from the realm of the beasts, is traveling from depths to heights (matter is rising to meet the spirit) to meet his to-be-bride. And the goddess, who lives in the heights and comes from the realm of the hawks, is also starting to lower (spirit lowering to meet matter), and they are supposed to meet midway. Yeah, it’s the “I want to be his equal” thing. On her way down, things usually get super dirty.
Their attempted wedding is immediately preceded or followed by a disaster, usually a massacre that leaves everyone present dead. This massacre is caused because, suddenly, instead of two lovers, we have three people involved. It’s usually one man torn between two women, one of whom is the bearer of the spiritual and the other of the material principle. Sometimes the person who massacres everyone is the jealous bride herself because she learns that there is “another woman”, and sometimes it’s the third person who doesn’t want to let the other two wed, usually a possessive mother. Metaphysically, what is happening here is that at the moment of conjunction, of spiritual and material realities trying to unite, that third element - which is supposed to be produced through their union - is already present. It’s a triangle now. Spirit, body, and soul are all present at once. Soul, which is always in the middle of the conflict, is being torn between spirit and matter, cleaving to them both, and as a result, someone always ends up being the third wheel. In other words: spirit and soul wed and unite, but they forget the body. Or body and soul unite, leaving the spirit out. This third left out element punishes the other two, having been left out, and everyone inevitably suffers. This legend is a fantastic psychological metaphor for the terrors that psyche undergoes when one of its aspects is suppressed and denied. This love triangle represents the body-soul-spirit dynamic, where the soul is torn between the other two. It’s an allegory on what happens when the soul chooses (or seems to choose) one side over the other, and then as a consequence and a punishment, matter castrates spirit, or spirit castrates matter. There are many variants of this legend across Slavic folklore. All of them always echo the original Proto-Indo-European mythological conflict, involving the spiritual hawk vs. chthonic beast god.
Did Miura know about all this? I don’t think so. It seems very unlikely. But he didn’t need to. He maybe knew about beast vs. hawk mythological conflict, or he simply borrowed the symbolism from the Ladyhawke movie. However, this myth merely personifies the human conflict present in almost all religions or philosophies. This theme is everywhere but in some less recognizable forms. Everyone eventually feels that it’s difficult for a soul (or psyche in our modern language) to be grounded in both spiritual and physical matters. It’s either inclined more to the spirit, or more to the physical reality, and if one goes all introspective and muses on this, one will inevitably be caught in this unfortunate love triangle of spirit-soul-body, where something is always being excluded at the expense of something else. I see Guts in this as a soul, torn between Casca and Griffith, between earthly and ethereal. So, Miura probably simply repeated the same tragedy that has been told throughout centuries in all cultures. Not because he knew these myths, but because these myths are imminent conclusions personified. They are just echoes of the age-old humanity’s struggle to understand itself that’s already embedded in the human psyche.
Now let’s look at Guts, Griffith, and Casca through the lens of this symbology. Those three are that tragic, messed up triangle of spirit, soul and body.
Guts is the soul, which is in a way always the center of the triangle because everything is perceived through it. He has substance, depth, but not a place in the world. At the beginning of manga, Guts is broken to the very core: he is essentially a man without a purpose, roaming and wandering, scattered. He doesn’t feel any higher call, he has no personal agenda, no personal wishes - he just exists and does things without knowing why he does them. Moreover, he is not just spiritually starving but physically as well, scarred by the trauma of what Donovan did to him. So, both his body and spirit have been butchered early on, leaving him with connection to none. But then he meets Griffith. And for the first time, Guts is fixated on something, there’s finally meaning, a purpose. He has something to fight for, something beyond himself. Griffith. Finally, a higher call.
Griffith very clearly personifies the spirit principle. He’s all mental, aerial, detached, calculating, not earthed. White-bluish appearance, pretty evocative of aerial heights. He follows a higher call, he is messianic, but like with all spirits, his “dream” is not earthed. It’s detached from matter, from physicality, from ordinary life. He sees none of this, none of it is genuinely important to him, nothing touches him - that is, until he meets Guts. Guts brings him down, he earths him for a moment, and for the first time, through his interaction with another being, he’s an actual human, he is involved. For the first time, he is personally caring about someone. He’s cared about things before, yes: about his fellow men, about the Hawks, but in a detached matter, from far away, from the top, in a way that doesn’t involve him. With Guts, he cares personally. Guts invades him psychically, he reaches him from the inside. This is a violation of spirit by the soul, something completely new and unfamiliar to Griffith, so impactful that he is utterly baffled and ultimately shattered by it. There’s always a danger when it comes to involving a spirit into human affairs. In the aforementioned myth, eagles were used as symbols of spirit not just because they are graceful, but because they are predatory and ferocious - meaning that there is an innate tendency to destroy matter, to kill what crawls on earth, to want to detach from it. Matter is not their territory, it baffles them. When they engage with matter, the impersonal heights are suddenly made intimate and personal. Detachment suddenly becomes attachment. This soul-spirit union, personified by Guts and Griffith’s relationship, where they both invade one another’s psyche, can either result in something beautifully sublime or something utterly disastrous. If Guts only realized that he already was Griffith’s equal, and if only Griffith realized that Guts never truly abandoned him, these two characters would have redeemed one another’s weaknesses. It was Guts who misunderstood it first, or at least first acted it out. Remember how in the legend the mythical characters were supposed to meet midway: one was supposed to climb up and the other to come down. There’s a saying in alchemical philosophy - which, by the way, is philosophically identical to these myths: earthly must be made spiritual, and spiritual must be made earthly, and only then the union can be successful. Curiously, Ladyhawke somehow also ended up using this theme, probably accidentally. So, there’s definitely something going on here.
After Guts overhears Griffith’s conversation with Charlotte about what being an equal means to him, Guts starts to think too low of himself, not being worthy of Griffith, not worthy of these sudden spiritual heights. After defeating Griffith in a duel and walking away from him, Guts says how he thinks Griffith is above all this, how this abandonment shouldn’t bother him because it’s just one of the many pebbles on the road.
You’re a soaring spirit, so what the fuck are you doing with a petty soul like me?
This scene is not just Guts abandoning Griffith. It’s the soul - stripped of confidence before a soaring spirit - abandoning it because it thinks it cannot catch up to it - although, in a way, it already did. That’s the tragedy. The soul wants so desperately to bond with the spirit, but it thinks it can’t. Guts thinks he will never be Griffith’s equal, at least not in his current condition. And then he abandons him. As a reaction, Griffith, the spirit, loses all ties to the one thing that earthed him, that plunged him into the realm of the personal, and made his spirit more humane: Guts, the soul. It’s really the ultimate irony that Guts never abandoned Griffith, or the heights and the meaning that Griffith came to embody for him. He was bloody loyal to it all along. But Griffith doesn’t know this. All he knows is the sudden sensation that he is being left behind. From his perspective, the spirit just got ditched by the soul, and right before Eclipse, the soul (Guts) chose body (Casca) over spirit (Griffith). That’s what Griffith sees.
Which brings us to Casca: the perfect tragic image of the body, of physicality. When she joins the Band of the Hawks, she abandons her womanhood in a way, she cuts off her hair, goes seemingly insensitive and brute. All these actions and traumas are representative of the terrors of having a body, and one’s responses to it, attempts to deny it because she was born a fragile woman in a cruel man’s world. On a positive side, it is Casca who saves Guts from his own physical trauma, who teaches him the ways of the body he long denied. It is Casca who provides a sense of belonging for a while, who gives him a taste of normal life. However, she only reaches a part of him. The other part responds to spirit only, to Griffith. For Guts, Casca was that fleeting semblance of a normal, earthly life that needs to be protected (I won’t go into whether this was out of genuine romantic love) and Griffith was that higher call, what set him aflame both intellectually and emotionally.
To me, the fact that Casca had to spend chapters and chapters in a mentally vegetative state, being reduced to a body without any substance, is absolutely genial. It’s kind of a sleeping beauty scenario in one of its atypical interpretations, where the protagonist - the principle of the body - sleeps throughout the whole story, while the soul (the prince) is out there fighting the dragons. The body is first to be destroyed, left behind when there’s a conflict of soul-spirit-body. It’s the first to take damage because it is the frailest of all three, because there’s an inherent tendency of spirit to hate the body as the body steals the soul from it. The soul can always dissociate from the body and exist in a somewhat detached state, where it can even bond with the spirit, but the body will always be dead and dormant without the soul. So, metaphysically, the concept of the body is perhaps the most tragic one. It always takes the blame for everything. Spirit is eternal, but the body is what limits the existence in space in time, and thus castrates the spirit.
Griffith’s rape of Casca could in a way be a reflection of this. In Griffith lingers a terrifying, dangerous interplay and clashing of body and spirit. He sold his body for his dream. He prioritizes ethereal over physical, the fate of the collective over fate of the individual. In his scenario, body entraps the infinite spirit in a finite, confined space, suffocating it. After sleeping with Charlotte, he personally experiences this in the dungeon where he was tortured and disfigured, by which his spirit was reduced to a rotting body. His disfiguration is the triumph of the material over spirit in him. Suddenly, he’s no longer a soaring hawk and his wings are cut off. It’s an outright spiritual fall for him, and he takes it terribly. In Greek mythology, mortal encounter with the divine is often represented as rape, madness or dismemberment (gosh, I fucking love Greeks for this) because it shatters the psyche. It terrorizes it. For Griffith, this mythical transition, the descent from ethereal to earthly was disastrous to his state of mind. When Griffith rapes Casca, it’s not just a revenge against Guts - it’s spirit raping the body, getting back at it, while the soul watches and suffers. Just previously in the dungeon, it was body that violated spirit in his case. It’s as if the rape of Casca parallels Griffith’s very own disfiguration, which is also a violation of sorts. By raping Casca, Griffith is essentially saying something like: I no longer need you, now I’m above you.
Because he is so traumatized of terrors of losing Guts - meaning, losing soul - and as a consequence, being “reduced” to something earthly and trivial and ordinary (without Guts, nothing makes sense to him anymore), he needs to be free of it. Of both body and soul. He needs to be freed from his attachment to Guts and freed from this earthliness. When he becomes Femto, he’s finally pure of spirit, a god. Man, I hope it bites him in the ass. He needs to be brought down from his godly heights, and forced to experience the terrors of emotions he cut off. The revenge has to be full psychological.