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Bloodborne: Faith and Knowledge

“If you stare into the abyss, it will stare back at you” -Friedrich Nietzsche

I have always been a fan of the lovecraftian world of stories. Though I have never personally found them scary, stories like into the mountains of madness, call of cthulhu and shadow over innsmouth have always managed to portray a level of creativity in the use and forms of dread and terror, describing the unknowable in a way that I feel no one else has manage to replicate quite the same. No shame of course to any other cosmic horror authors or creatives out there, plenty of works exist with the same or maybe even higher quality. However it is the essence of Lovecraft, his hate and sorrow filled vision that gave his world the darkness it is so well known for today. Lovecraft was never a good person, he never pretended to be. He was born to misfortune, raised in an environment of insecurity and slowly sinking to poverty. He hated the world outside of the places he knew and lived in. And in this hate and despair, he wrote. He wrote about what he didn’t understand, about what scared him and about his own perceived insignificance in a universe that did not care about him. 

Now, take Lovecraft’s work and add to it a way for the story to be experienced personally in one of the most immersive (and difficult as hell) experiences of a lifetime. That is the objective that the people of “Fromsoft” asked themselves before making this game. 

Wikipedia summarizes this game: “Bloodborne is a 2015 action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 4. Bloodborne follows the player’s character, a Hunter, through the decrepit Gothic, Victorian-era–inspired city of Yharnam, whose inhabitants are afflicted with a blood-borne disease. Attempting to find the source of the plague, the player’s character unravels the city’s mysteries while fighting beasts and cosmic beings.”

The game is a game of darkness and what hides beneath, about faith and knowledge colliding, about blood and the price of healing. I think Vaatividya puts the themes of this game best in his video, when he says “With the discovery of beings greater than them, came a desire to ascend to godhood. To push humanity into its next state of evolution. The only question was, how? Blood? Or Insight?” 

Blood or Insight. Faith or knowledge.

I want you to imagine this. You live in a world where a church discovered a cure for all ailments, their so-called gift from the gods. I’m not talking about prayer or faith itself, but rather an elixir of life. You take it and all of a sudden all your pains and sickness are gone, disappearing in an instance. And the church decided to give it away for free, as long as you were a follower of their faith. How much would it grow? How powerful would it be? Let’s look at mega organizations like the catholic church. Even without “all curing powers”, how many followers it has. People yearn for faith, they yearn for something to believe in, something to bring meaning to their existence.  Imagine a world where they didn’t just preach their faith, but they had undeniable proof of the power in their belief. They had the elixir of life in the palms of their hands. 

Enter the healing church of Yharnam, founded by Master Laurance and his group of scholars from the Byrgenwerth after the discovery of the Pthumerian labyrinth deep below the city. Inside of these ruins they found lost knowledge, referred to as “The Truth” and they found ancient rituals of old blood that came from powerful beings called “The Great Ones”. These beings once populated the world in great numbers, however, once they ascended, very few of them were left behind. Remnants of worlds more powerful than what was left behind. Yet in the eyes of humanity, these remnants were beyond what the feeble human mind could comprehend or accomplish. In truth, when discovering this truth it must of all been taken directly to the college of Byrgenwerth, to be studied by Master Willem, since by this point in time Laurance was still an apprentice. Even so, a fire was lit inside of Laurance, a spark that slowly starting consuming him more and more until he couldn’t bare it anymore and decided to take this “truth” along with the knowledge of the rituals of blood with the desire to use it and elevate humanity to it’s “next evolutionary ascension.”

Master Willem saw this as a betrayal and after discussing with his now ex apprentice, his final words to him are a warning: “We are born of the blood, made men by the blood, undone by the blood; Fear the old blood.” And thus Laurance took off and founded the healing Church along with his group of ambitious apprentices, soon coming to be known as the “Choir of the church”. And where did the healing church find the so-called “truth” of the old blood? Through one of the Great Ones who remained behind after the ascension, Ebrietas. 

Master Willem an his students
Laurance, the first vicar and founder of the healing church

Here we see a story of gods and monsters, often being the same. We see the story of the founding of a church who offered holy salvation through rituals of blood. People were flocking from so many parts of the world to see what it was that the healing church could offer, that most never really stopped to think, how? And that right there was the first flaw of faith. A lot of the times, faith is blind and does not allow us to see where these “miracles” come from or the price that we have to pay for them. In the healing church, it wasn’t evident at first. Still, as the people from Old Yharnam would come to realize, the price of blood is a very heavy burden and it will eventually burn you down. Master Willem was right when he said “we are undone by the blood.” as men grew corrupted by the blood of the great one, becoming beasts who would mindlessly ravish and kill. Old Yharman would suffer the worst of it, being closed away and burned. The first great victim of the healing church who by this point had created two other branches of the church, the doctors and the hunters, more famously among them were the first true hunter, Gherman who we meet in “the hunter’s dream”, and Ludwig, the first hunter of the church who we meet and fight in “the hunter’s nightmare.” In a way, two different extremes, yet both traps in hells of their own choosing. 

Master Willem was right about the blood, in fact, when he discovered of the use that Laurance was giving it, he felt betrayed. His adage “Fear the Old Blood” was something he lived by and to see his students not just experimenting with the old blood, but using it as the foundation of their new church must have been unforgivable in his eyes. Yet for all his caution, was his result of using knowledge and insight any better? 

Master Willem studied the old ones and the truth of the Pthumerians for a very long time and it is believed that in this time he came in contact with a different Great one, Rom the vacuous spider. An ironic name, for when you look at the definition of vacuous, merriam-webster defines it as “marked by lack of ideas or intelligence”. So here we had probably one of the most influential and knowledgeable people of Yharnam, in contact with a spider marked by his lack of intelligence. Yet it was around this time that Willem and those who remained at Byrgenwerth started changing and transforming. Much like their counterparts of the healing church, the great ones had an effect on the college. Instead of beasts, however, they started to transform into bug like beings, with many eyes to see. You see, it had been revealed to Master Willem that through insight could they fully understand those above them and ascend humanity. 

Yet knowledge has a price too. And perhaps one greater than the usage of blood. You see, when you use blood, you turn into a beast. Mindless, dangerous, unaware. But when insight is your drug? Knowledge of the forbidden, of the unseen? Then perhaps it is better to remain ignorant after all. You see, in game, after you beat Rom, the red moon, symbolizing true insight and revealing that which could not be seen, shows you what was hiding behind the veil of the world. Lesser great ones overrun the cityscape of Yharnam, disturbing in image and even more so when you realize that before your eyes were opened, they were the ones causing the abnormalities through the world. Even more disturbing however, are two facts. In game, if you come to a high enough level of insight before you reach the fight with Rom, or if you beat the game and start over with however many levels of insight you had, as long as it’s enough, you realize that they have always been there. Your eyes were just not opened to the truth. Even more disturbing is that when you go to the nightmare of Memsis, you realize that all your insight makes madness rise faster that it ever did with low levels of it. In a manner of speaking, too much insight and knowledge will open your mind so much that it will drive you to madness. An ocean of knowing, reduced to a drip, for the minds of humans were not made for such an awakening of the senses. 

Where does that leave us? Is humanity doomed to fail no matter the choice that we make? Cursed if we follow our faith and cursed if we seek knowledge? No, and I think we can find the best answer in one of the endings of the game, often considered the true ending. 

You see, we as the hunter have traveled and seen the consequences of leaning too much onto one side or the other. Laurence paid the price, along with the church, by having most of their followers and population become infected beasts. Willem paid the price by becoming overwhelmed with the insight that he so desired, led astray by that vacuous spider. We as the player walk a very thin line between, using the blood of the church to heal ourselves along the way while using insight to call upon the runes of the great old ones to help us get stronger as we advance the story. And by the end, after you have done the necessary steps to not only defeat the dream, but the moon presence who created the dream, you ascend, and along with your ascension comes the next evolutionary step of humanity to a greater understanding. So, perhaps that’s what it is all about, not one or the other, but both faith and knowledge used as tools to achieve our greater purpose. 

Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t checked Vaatividya’s video on this topic before, I strongly recommend you do. I’ve left a link down below in the references. 

Good Hunting and remember “Fear the Old Blood.”

References: 

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Vacuous definition & meaning. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved November 7, 2022, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vacuous

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jrgoriginal

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