The Shrine Handmaiden used to be a soldier alongside her beloved husband Hodrick. When their daughter – Sirris’ mother – perished in battle along with Sirris’ father, grief brought Hodrick to madness, thus founding the Mound Makers covenant. In return, the Handmaiden swore off violence and gifted her Estoc to Sirris, always hiding her pain for her lifetime husband’s fate behind an indifferent appearance.
This essay may be read on its own, but it is a follow-up to another essay which psychoanalyzes the figure of Holy Knight Hodrick, a character from Dark Souls 3. In this section, the method and purpose of Dark Souls analysis comes under investigation, catalyzed by other images from Hodrick’s environment.
Hodrick as meta-critique of Freudian psycho-interpretation
Dark Souls 3 is known for its skillful, self-reflexive commentary; this game is keenly aware of the subculture that surrounds it. That in mind, what are we to make of the relatively blatant symbolic suggestiveness of Hodrick and the Greatwood? Perhaps their on-the-nose imagery is a reaction to analysis of previous Dark Souls games: the castration narrative is often cited in symbolic interpretation of Dark Souls 1, and the birth canal-esque passage of Dark Souls 2’s tutorial area is a classic introduction for people that play around with interpreting Dark Souls psychologically. And surely those myths and images are semi-intentional, relevant, and illuminating, but they are by no means the place to stop. This lore video points out how the vertebrae shackles collected by Mound-Makers resemble inkblots, the old psychoanalytic tool etched into the cultural memory as an image of Freudianism. One “reads out” of the inkblot the contents of their own unconscious. The understanding of projection, and the compensatory nature of the unconscious was one of the most significant discoveries at the dawn of psychology. Dark Souls could symbolize the principle of this discovery in a number of ways, but it is very intentional with its images, so when it decides to show us an inkblot in particular, the historical context is helpful. It’s an old and simple technique, which traces only the broad strokes of the analysand’s complexes. Likewise, Hodrick, the Greatwood, and Mound-Makers provide the interpreter with the rudiments for symbolic exploration of Dark Soul environments.
Though this area is introductory, it is – like any part of the unconscious – inexhaustible in its depth and generous in its mutability. Consider the amorality of the Mound-Makers. Are they good or evil? Vicious or tender? Sustainers of maya or karmic accelerationists? There is so much room for the player to read into this allegiance a preferred moral perspective, at least partially determined by the general attitude the player keeps in regards to the slaughter of enemies. For the totally “unimmersed,” Dark Souls is a game and a game only, to be played, poked, prodded, to be mastered and speedran, and in that case of course any covenant is merely functional, there to surround and present a mechanic. For that player, the Mound-Makers are truly amoral. But for those who roleplay, who make at least some of their choices based on the imagined ethics of their avatar (despite extremely scarce moral responses from the game itself!), the issue is a little more complicated. Those who are simply in the habit of asking themselves, “Do I want to ally myself with this person’s values?” will not find an easy answer. On the surface, the covenant is abhorrently nihilistic, but a seasoned player may come away with a different take. So in this way the Mound-Makers, like the inkblot, are a measure of a player(/-character)’s feeling-involvement, which is itself born out of the player’s interpretational attitude.
When analyzing an object in a video game, always take into account the method by which it is encountered! Though the route to all this Freudian material in the Undead Settlement is a little arcane, it needs to be. The cryptic riddle about “Nana”, the obscure side-streets: these are there to make the player feel as though they are uncovering something secret. The obscurity is baked-in to make obvious that this material is repressed.
Though the riddle is strange, it is spoken aloud to the player, which is actually quite a telegraph by Dark Souls standards. The handiness of this secret is also metaphorically descriptive of this level of interpretation. If one stops at the purely Freudian: the mother, the father, the phallus, then they will project that schematic onto every available target. They will see reality as nothing more than a circus of oral fixations and castration dramas. If this stage of psychoanalysis is not passed through, it is nothing more than another cage to be carried around. It is the most rudimentary place to get stuck in the engagement with the unconscious.
The Armory of Symbols
What are we to make of the fact that the treasure of this area is the transposing kiln? This round thing, this simple, Arthurian symbol of the Self? It is both representative of the totality, and a totally profane and reductive simplification. I’ll explain what I mean by that.
On the one hand it is a true grail, because it has the capacity to turn the game’s hardest challenges into new tools. This is a fantastic life lesson, fundamental and perennially true. It is the pure gift of interpretation. It is said that the Buddha, in his realization that there is nothing outside of Nirvana, thereby saw that even the most torturous experiences of life, and the most unforgiving realms of Hell, were not apart from Nirvana, and that seeing them in this way thereby rectified this subjective experience of being in Hell. Once it was rephrased as Nirvana, it was always Nirvana, because all the suffering was born out of false views. Anyway, that is a very lofty height of interpretation, but one can see the boundlessness of the tool. That when the true cosmic appropriateness of an instance of suffering is groked, it is changed.
On the other hand, transposition is a cheap parlor trick. It changes the essence of a boss into a weapon. It really only does one thing. Some of these weapons are useful, and most are flashy. It is almost mandatory for these weapons and spells to have a unique gimmick. So most of the time they convey to the wielder some unique flavor, some specific characteristic to consider, but even collecting such interpretations as these is merely a “building a collection.” Pinning down butterflies into a glass case. It is really no different than stockpiling corpses as Hodrick does. This device encourages the player to keep fighting, collecting, stacking bodies, finding new and interesting ways to kill people.
And ultimately, the same is true of collecting symbolism. Stockpiling a collection of unused weapons is no more or less a perversion that keeping a catalogue of archetypes for its own sake. The psychological interpretation of Hodrick, the Greatwood, and their unsightly tableau is relatively simple and straight-forward because it is meant to provide the player-interpreter with an introduction to the technique. The “game” of symbolic analysis is pointless if you spend your time taking potshots.
Wheel of Fate
Understanding the symbolism of the Mother through the eyes of Hodrick may be relatively simple, but the Undead Settlement also provides us with a more complex and transpersonal variation of the birth motif, localized at the far edge of town, hidden in a valley below. There we find catacombs tunneled into the rock, reminding us of the community of villagers who labor all day burying their dead. The Great Mother is thereby invoked, in her role which deteriorates form, which composts. The bodies decay, return to the Earth, and nourish new life. We see the skeletons sprouting branches in this dank place.
Also in the catacombs there are the dual figures of Irina the saint and a statue of Velka, goddess of sin, both of whom sit abandoned. The juxtaposition of these two sacred feminine figures is symbolically dense and deserves its own essay, but I mention it here as an echo of Kristeva’s philosophy that we passed by earlier: that of the child’s necessary bifurcation of the Mother into sublime and abject.
Velka alone is highly useful here, amplifying the Great Mother motif to a vast and cosmic context. Velka is a notoriously elusive figure in Dark Souls: she is never seen, rarely spoken of, her motivations are unknown, her ontological status unconfirmed, her objects and attributes seem to contradict each other. Nevertheless she is a crucial if not essential force in the world, and her presence can be inferred for those with eyes to see.
The main Velkan element that should be addressed here is her association with Karma, which is perhaps her principle attribute. From the beginning of DS1, she is introduced as governess of ethics, law, and equity. She explicitly oversees sin, guilt, and retribution. What practices are promoted through this governance? Mechanically, there are primarily two: keeping track of invasion penalties (in DS1) and resetting the world. If you incur penalty as an invader, the Blades of the Dark Moon will find you and punish you. So Velka prolongs and complicates PvP dynamics.
Resetting the world is an effect Velka provides that suggests forgiveness. If you aggro an NPC, and wish to get on good terms with them again, Velka allows that condition. In this way too, Velka is prolonging interpersonal relationships, but it is the relief of debt rather than the accruing of debt. Velka keeps the cycle going, she is like a keeper of the wheel that turns the age. In Dark Souls 1 a statue associated with Velka turns with the cranking of a wheel, in a room full of bonewheel skeletons. In Dark Souls 3, a similar statue turns with the cranking of a wheel in a room full of flies. In both cases, the wheel is hidden in a wet chamber behind an illusory wall. This suggests that behind the façade of the world, there is a primal place from which time is manipulated (though in this case it is but a single “tick” of the clock, an off-to-on switch which causes a fixed rotation).
Does Karma cause the rise and fall of the great ages? Is the distribution of karma the grease that turns the wheel of the world? It does seem to be that desire is what sustains the age of fire. Consider the enemies in the place where the wheel turns: bonewheels, who cling to their instruments of torture, to their suffering; flies, who bury themselves in a mountain of rotted food, a symbol of greed.
The skeletons who throw themselves into combat, and the flies which gorge on their rotting piles: either is a handy metaphor for Hodrick. His lust for the battlefield is another way of keeping himself stuck on the wheel of Samsara, collecting those shackles, representing the Velkan attachments of karma. Velka’s totem, the Raven, is found in flocks on a ravaged cliff in the settlement, among a wealth of corpses to be looted. The Raven is “associated with the fall of Spirit into that which is impure and enjoys carnage […] To raven is to plunder. This is what the word means. To have a ravenous appetite suggests greed and lust and insatiable desires.”(Valborg) Ravens keep the circus of suffering going!
Grist for the Mill
Velka is a bleak goddess, associated with “lifehunt”, the capacity to drain the essence of life, dreaded even by the gods. For this reason one of her attributes is the scythe, so she is something of a reaper figure. But we have seen she is also life-giver and sustainer, through her arbitrage of karma. This ambivalent nature is expressed by the Raven, which is a solar bird yet dyed deep black, who is cruel and enjoys carnage, yet in many myths is associated with the bringing of light and the creation of a new world.
The raven flies to and fro between the solar orb of eternal life and the dying eyes of man in time. He mercilessly pecks away at the delusions formed like veils over the cornea's shield until he penetrates to the darkness of the pupil's cavity and releases the invisible light within. (Valborg)
If the goal of Dark Souls is the realization of the Dark Soul -- the unique potential of the human being -- then perhaps Velka and her karmic processes are meant to midwife that birth as well. Could all the weight of karma, the pain of enduring a body, the cruelty of life’s entropic march … could it all be in service of birthing the Anthropos? It would explain why the Lords of Dark Souls are so antagonist to the Ashen One -- in Gnosticism and Buddhism the makers, the deities, are said to envy the actualized human being. And to be fair, the theme of surviving hardship and loss is central in Dark Souls’ reputation, and something to which countless players can attest, on practical or psychological levels (eg: “Dark Souls Helped Me Overcome Depression”).
Identity Riddles
I am the one who is disgraced and the great one.
Give heed to my poverty and my wealth.
Do not be arrogant to me when I am cast out upon the earth,
and you will find me in those that are to come.
And do not look upon me on the dung-heap
nor go and leave me cast out,
and you will find me in the kingdoms.
And do not look upon me when I am cast out among those who
are disgraced and in the least places,
nor laugh at me.
And do not cast me out among those who are slain in violence.
But I, I am compassionate and I am cruel.
Be on your guard!
Do not hate my obedience
and do not love my self-control.
In my weakness, do not forsake me,
and do not be afraid of my power.
-- excerpt from The Thunder, Perfect Intellect ca. 100-230
The abject Mother sits at the edge of the symbolic order, in fact it is her abjection that positions the boundaries of that order, yet it itself does not accept boundary. “Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (Kristeva 10), referring to birth and symbolized by the Hodrick and Greatwood scene, but beyond that it also refers to the Dark Souls creation myth: the archaism in that case being the undifferentiated fog of arch-trees and everlasting dragons in the Age of Ancients. For there to be matter and objects, psyche (dragons etc) must be born into time. Once psyche has materialized itself upon the wheel of time, it cannot exist in immediate, gestalt totality – it moves and changes, expressing its fullness over aeons through its becomings. But everything must be accounted for; Karma only brings what is due.
The mystery of how psyche is refined by its extension into matter will likely stay with us until the “end” of time. But with common sense we can suppose that the condition of duration allows things to be taken apart and put back together, and that at least in our mundane lives that process frequently brings about some freshness in the object. But neither the meaning nor mechanics of the larger karmic process can be groked, just as Velka and the Mother are archetypes who inherently escape the fixidity of signification. The ultimate force of taking things apart, entropy – symbolized again by the raven and its desecration of corpses – is something that has been deeply culturally villainized, and it usually takes a second to stop and consider how the diffusion of matter engenders the condition for new forms to grow.
[Ravens] tell of the renewal of the world in terms of the past which is yet to be. The unwanted Truth is told and its insatiable desire to express itself may produce terror and loathing in one who is not prepared to give up all to its insistent glare.
This is keeping with Kristeva’s view of the abject as the eruption of the Real into consciousness. Aside from their role in pecking open an aperture of light, crows have another specific job in the renewal of the world, as described in a number of myths: measuring the size and extent of that world, flying in “progressively longer intervals in order to estimate and report on the increasing size of the emerging earth.” The extremes of incarnation, the edges beyond which dwells the abject, are scoped out in order to create the blueprint; the raven brings knowledge of the schematics.
Interpreting by Attention
And what about our own schematics? We’ve thrown away our tools – the colorful cast of characters transposed into weapons of interpretation – but perhaps it’s time to pick them up again. We cast them off because we didn’t want to fix the Dark Souls myth through explanation. Archetypes cannot be superimposed, prefab, onto a tableaux of psychological symbols. Interpretation is rather the act of elaboration: flying, as the raven does, around and around a widening and changing arena, reporting back continually new understandings of what is appropriate.
The meaning of a game is determined by what a player thinks and feels while they play it. What decisions they make, what their attention lingers on. The game is the inkblot. There are special times when the game insists upon a subject, like a film: for instance, when the crank is turned and the Velka statue rotates. But such a sequence has a different meaning in games than it does in film, because of its context: it anchors a player to a single necessary and unchanging action in the context of a world that is typically responding to their decisions with nigh-unrepeatable novelty. The fixedness of the cinematic exposes the malleability of the rest of the game. “Velka” is an approximation, an aggregate; she is not the same goddess in each playthrough, the scope and the flavor of her influence is always changing – but it is always reflecting the actions of the player.
So how then, can we arrive at a judgment regarding Hodrick? We can’t, because again, each player’s experience of him is different. Earlier I implied that Hodrick is clinging to the world, out of horror and alienation in regards to the Mother figure, and that his killing spree is only building his attachments, keeping him fixed to the wheel of incarnation. So what is the difference between his wild manslaughter, and Velka’s own penchant for carnage and lifedrain? Only the intent:
The transformation of relationship can come about through a genuine understanding of the difference between murder and sacrifice. Both kill or suppress energy, but the motives behind them are quite different. Murder is rooted in ego needs for power and domination. Sacrifice is rooted in the ego’s surrender to the guidance of the Self in order to transform destructive, although perhaps comfortable, energy patterns into the creative flow of life. (Woodman 33)
But see, it is only the inner experience of the act that has authority. In my view, Hodrick’s actions are clearly ego-driven, but another player with different exposure to this character could come away with a different impression. And the archetype speaks through the individual encounter itself, not through lore videos, essays, or any other metatext. This is a crucial function of video games that bears repeating and is rarely addressed. Games commonly use the act of killing as a metaphor for the transformation of relationship (the very notion of EXP hinges on that). The unconscious is receptive to these mutations regardless, but the nature of the effect is dependent on the conscious attitude of the player.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Columbia University Press, 1980.
Layton, Bentley, ed. The Gnostic Scriptures. Yale University Press, 1995.
Valborg, Helen. The Raven. Theosophy Trust, 2013.
Woodman, Marion. The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women. Inner City Books, 1990.
