The originators of the modern nation state, Egypt’s pharaohs, used religion to cement their power and extend their rule. Over thousands of years, Egypt’s dynasties were represented as “... a single, unbroken succession of kings stretching back to … the moment of creation itself.” As Toby Wilkinson describes in The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt “... each subsequent ruler was the legitimate inheritor of a divinely sanctioned form of government.” The idea that a king was not only a representative of God, but the actual incarnation of God on Earth, is naturally a persuasive one, and has been employed to great success by states and their rulers ever since.
For most of modern history, however, the word of God doesn’t come firsthand. It is interpreted through priests and their associated rulers, translated variously over the centuries, printed on the glossy pages of pocket-sized holy books and shoved into motel room drawers. It is used to lend legitimacy to leaders who would like not to be questioned, who would like to be revered, on the basis of faith alone.
In FromSoftware’s Elden Ring, the Gods live among us and speak directly to us. They are our kings and our rulers. They reside in castles where, though it is by no means easy, we can reach them, touch them, challenge them, even take some of their power for ourselves.
Elden Ring takes place in the Lands Between. A territory under the rule of the Golden Order, exemplified by a massive golden tree, whose ethereal branches can be spied from every distant corner of the world. The Golden Order’s leader is the God Queen Marika who rules alongside her interchangeable consort. Across the lands are churches erected in her name, filled with statues dedicated to her divinity. The current chaotic state of the game, a fractured land divided among her warring demi-god children, is a direct result of her actions: principally, breaking apart the sacred Elden Ring in a fit of rage over the death of a child.
Some in this world are blessed by the Golden Order. Divinely blessed; to rule, to be numbered among the powerful. Others are forgotten, left to rot or die: the Tarnished. They might molder in tombs, or get thrown into the gauntlet of battle as cannon fodder to be crushed against barricades or burned by wicked sorcery. Many can be found deep within the caves marking the countryside, mining ore to be used as supplies for the unending wars on the surface. Others escort supply wagons as they are drawn across the land dragged by massive giants under thrall.
Your character is also Tarnished. You are resuscitated from death, plucked up by the Golden Order in its desperation to bring, well, order back to the Lands Between. The same Golden Order which had previously abandoned you and left you for dead, now whispers prophecy in your ear through its intermediaries. Puts you on a path toward redemption, possibly even sainthood. In the face of its stupendous power, how can we not be swayed to pick up the sword and throw our bodies into the terrible fray with all the rest?
There’s something raw and immediate about Elden Ring’s concrete depiction of Gods walking around next to mortals. It takes some of the loftier and more esoteric ideas of modern religion and grounds them, making them easier to understand. Its depiction of the world does away with the necessity for faith or extreme devoutness, since the existence of a higher power is undeniable. Holy war makes a lot more sense when God is standing at the front lines, riding his too-small horse as he smashes at the enemy with an otherworldly power. Self-sacrifice and seeking absolution serve a real purpose when they are demanded by God herself rather than a church and its mortal functionaires.
This grounded and direct relationship helps us understand some of the existential dilemmas that lie at the root of religion’s role in human history. The idea of God exists in some form to provide meaning, order. Religion rescues us from the groundlessness of human existence. But life remains brutal, random, often bereft of meaning or value. The answer then, from the faithful, is that God is brutal, random, and sometimes bereft of meaning or value.
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In Ted Chiang’s speculative science fiction story Hell is the Absence of God he explores the concept of Western religion in similarly literal ways. In the story, God is real, as are his angels who regularly descend from heaven to grant miracles seemingly at random. Their arrival, however, is itself a destructive act. Angelic visitations in Chiang’s story are akin to natural disasters. The angels themselves are pictured as flame or lightning-wreathed maelstroms who create destructive shockwaves as they arrive, while sites of frequent visitation are “ ... variously scarred by lava flows, gaping fissures, and impact craters.”
Each visitation leaves behind scores of the injured and dead. The protagonist of the story, Neil Fisk, loses his wife Sarah to one such visitation. He is expected by the world’s faithful to come to terms with his loss and move on, to renew his faith and loyalty to God so that he may rejoin Sarah in the heavenly afterlife. “Instead Neil became actively resentful of God. Sarah had been the greatest blessing of his life, and God had taken her away. Now he was expected to love Him for it?”
Religion has always used God’s temperamental favor as a way to explain the various injustices of everyday life. Famine and pestilence are punishments for not loving God enough. Good people taken too soon are now living with God in immortal bliss. The powerful and the well-off are simply the worthy recipients of God’s blessings. The allure of explaining the randomness of life, ascribing meaning to it, is arguably the central, driving purpose of the church.
In Chiang’s story, Neil eventually tries to embrace the religion that has taken so much from him: “Perhaps, he thought, it’d be better to live in a story where the righteous were rewarded and the sinners were punished, even if the criteria for righteousness and sinfulness eluded him, than to live in a reality where there was no justice at all.” But he is ultimately cast down to hell anyway. A reminder that order, divine or not, does not necessarily lead to justice, especially when you are not one of the lucky powerful.
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The surface promise of Elden Ring, and most of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls-adjacent games is that even the small and unworthy might, through sheer stubbornness, be let into the saintly gates along with the powerful. It mirrors the narrative of most religions: though God is Great and sainthood unattainable, even the lowest among us can be saved, if we were but to surrender our will and our futures in service of Him. And like other Souls games, Elden Ring allows players to question their place in this narrative.
Another character we meet, Ranni the Witch, though one of Marika’s children, rebels against the Golden Order’s rule. She rejects as unnatural the blessing of immortality that the Order provides and seeks instead: death; mortality; an ending with the promise of new beginnings. To follow her is to abandon heaven, to willingly embrace, if not hell, then a world without religion and the meaning it provides. In Chiang’s story, he describes a movement known as “humanists,” who reject God and his heaven and “… advocate that people act according to their own moral sense instead of being guided by the carrot and the stick.”
As your Tarnished wanders the tortured and spoiled earth, wracked by war and death, it’s hard not to see the wisdom behind this decision. Entering each arena against a literal God, massive in stature, hateful and dismissive, who smashes you into dust a hundred times before you can chip away the last of their armor and put an end to their infinite reign, it’s hard not to feel the illogic of your trespass. What value is a promise to live amongst them, when they themselves are unknowable, enigmatic, miserable and practically profane? How can you trust or put faith in an order which rejects so many more than it ever embraces? How can you trust that they may save you, when they don’t even seem capable of saving themselves?
Religion and spirituality are a complicated enterprise, and have as many approaches as there are people who believe. Elden Ring, and the series which precedes it, grapples specifically with the role religion plays in social ordering, in its connection to power and rule. There is simplicity to its narrative: Gods and Monarchs, fighting back against chaos, fighting to extend their rule, more for their own sake than humanity’s. But there is also nuance: exhibited by the player, the Tarnished. How do we relate and negotiate our place in this Order? How do we deal with a God who is real but does not care? How do we assign meaning, whether to the alluring promise of a bright and welcoming heaven, or to the wide open possibilities of a life of free will, naked and alone, in the cold, beckoning darkness.
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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Twitter @youmeyou.