Firmament, Unyielding
I jumped in the river and what did I see?
Black-eyed angels swam with me
A moon full of stars and astral cars
And all the figures I used to see
-Pyramid Song, Radiohead 2001
Getting the world to stop and take notice of something significant, to stop and look up in wonder is a herculean task. These ‘breaking the internet’ moments don’t happen often but on July 11th, 2022 the world collectively gasped as the images from the James Webb telescope caused everyone to stop, once again, and look upwards at the wonder and majesty of the cosmos.
In the following days, spectacular images of the furthest reaches of space were released. The cosmic cliffs of Carina Nebula red-brown smoke taking on the look of mountains and crowned in spike stars. The Southern Ring and a spectacular clarity and a new perspective to the White Dwarf couched in its center; or the white golden hues of the Stephan’s Quintet as the sweeping tails of gas spiral around the millions of young stars in its net.
Compared to the majesty of the cosmos, we are infinitesimally small and insignificant. This knowledge fills us with a terror and awe that has followed us since the beginning of history itself. When you look up into the sky at night, to see the twinkling stars staring back down at us unerringly, can you find the meaning in its inscrutable and haunting ‘music’ (“New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix”)?
Ancient Peoples sought to understand the world around them with the stars as their guides: finding the patterns in the moon’s movements causing tides or seasonal changes; a constellation or a particular group of stars would rise, and thus the yearly flood would occur. Or, perhaps, that rising constellation was simply a sign to plant. In Babylon, these patterns would become cause and effect and lend themselves to signs of all sorts. In China, these patterns discerned in the stars, would become the basis for philosophy, morality, the five elements, and even the concepts of Heaven and Earth. (Wikipedia, Astrology)
Nature was ruled by these patterns spinning above humanity’s head and the logic amounted to, that People were no different and they too, were ruled by the stars.The original omens seen by the Babylonians evolved with the influence of Egyptian Astrology with the result credited to Hermes Trismegistus, the potential amalgamation between the Egyptian God Thoth and Greek God Mercury. And, of course, the originator of Hermeticism and the Great Work. The twelve celestial houses that emerged here, were at their most basic function, to mark the hours as the Greek word horoskopos simply means ‘hour marker’ (Hellenistic Astrology). As the sky turned above, so attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, so below. (Hermes Trismegistus)
Other parts of the world, notably China, the Islamic Empires, and India would create elaborate systems to also mark time and give significance to it, this essay will focus on Hellinistic Astrology and its descendants. (Chinese Astrology)
Horoscopic astrology is born from “the idea that the placement of the planets at any given moment in time reflects the nature of that moment [and] can be analyzed using [a] chart and a variety of rules for interpreting the” omens ``that are derived. A horoscope isn’t just the sign you may know from the final page of a magazine or any number of websites and apps, however. A full horoscope takes your moment and location of birth and works out the exact position of the stars above our head at that moment and arrays this into a ‘chart’ to divine a person’s fate. These charts, even in modern astrology, take into account the positions of the Sun, Moon, the Planets, Aspects, and time of an event to divine potentialities. Today, this is ubiquitous. Simplistic horoscopes taking into account solely the position of the sun alone are present and can be readily found in magazines and in certain newspapers. Flip to the back pages and you’ll be presented with a page on these simplistic Horoscopes for the upcoming month. However, the actual depth of what a horoscope entails is intensely personal to individual people and is as diverse as the stars themselves.
In fact, during the Pandemic, horoscopes and horoscopic astrology gained new audiences on their smartphones or here, on YouTube. Competing apps, like The Pattern — created by former YouTuber Lisa Nova — launched in 2017 with algorithmically generated horoscopes based on these charts. In October 2021, The pattern had 15 million profiles. Competitor Co-Star, also a smartphone application, is far more technical and personalized to an individual’s chart. On YouTube, millions of videos promise to read your tarot and horoscope and to give the viewer potential answers.
Modern Science has split astrology from astronomy; but for quite a long, long time that which we saw burning in the night sky was well believed to have had a hand in all of our lives; a belief that some — more than 15 million people — hold to this day.
All of this to say, that “the stars command our fates,” (Amber Starlight)
Past FromSoftware games are fascinated with the horoscope in fairly subtle ways、 notably Echo Night 2: 眠りの支配者 (The Lord of Nightmares). In it, many of its puzzles involve the conjunction of the spheres to open the way with the Eye being synonymous with the Sun. Its occult basis for the red and blue stones, and the game of the Mysterious Man, revolves around the fate chosen and the fate followed by those in its thrall — such as the Red Haired Woman and the Protagonist. Only when the Red Haired Woman throws away her Fate voluntarily, totemic in the red-stone back into the chest of the Mysterious Man, does he deem the game closed and her able to finally pass on. The Mysterious Man, personification of the Sun, is himself a sort of Mephistopheles and is Faustian in his bargains.
Elden Ring is a game where Modern Science hasn’t divorced astrology from astronomy and are in fact one and the same and “All things can” and have been, “conjoined (Miriel).” The Cosmos above is intimidating, grand, and utterly merciless and its clockwork motions master the fates of those below its sparkling canopy. Elden Ring is a game where the forces of gravity and right ascension and declination hold equal sway to what can be divined from the constellations’ arrangement that herald the beginning or the end of fate. However, Elden Ring’s far away and Outer Gods from the stars are unknowable and incomprehensible and the horror lies in that these Outer Gods hold no love for us. When seeking the Outer Gods for counsel, one of the most horrible responses received is: Silence.
The Sea of Stars
“…a torrent akin to the distant starry expanse, the place said to be the origin of glintstone… (Comet Azur)”
Water has always been an element of fascination with FromSoftware. Not only was King’s Field’s Seath, the White Dragon of Darkness aspected to the moon, he was also associated with flowing waters. His hidden temple, deep within the Island of Melenat, is the center of miraculous healing waters that also keeps its inhabitants imprisoned. It is this paradox that has rooted through the collective consciousness: what brings us life is also vast, unknowable, and deadly. Travel deep enough and even light can’t pierce its depths. Commenting on the work of Suzuki Koji, author of the Ring Cycle, Dark Water, and Promenade of the Gods, Randy Kennedy points out that in these works, “water becomes a source of their deepest fears. (Kennedy)” And in Dark Water, Suzuki counsels, “Any particularly intriguing thing you may come across on the beach is best left untouched — because it begins to tell its tale to you, as soon as you pick it up. (Kennedy)”
You might be wondering what this has to do with space. Just as water gave rise to life on Earth itself, the Sea of Stars gave rise to the Planets and the Lands Between our Tarnished stands and dies on. The true cradle of life, therefore, is the primeval currents of space.
Bloodborne (2015), released 12 years after Shadow Tower: Abyss, reintroduced FromSoftware’s interest in the cosmic. In that game, forbidden knowledge and human ambition to force evolution into a place of servitude destroyed civilizations as well as minds. Madman’s Knowledge and Great One’s Wisdom revealed the cosmos within. Arcane Spells like ‘Augur of Ebrietas’ and ‘Black Sky Eye’ call upon the power of the cosmos at the cost of our grip on our perceived reality. (“Augur of Ebrietas | Bloodborne Wiki”). The Cosmos depicted in Bloodborne was beautiful and terrible and ultimately uncaring of the primitive beings attempting to master forces outside of their ability. Though there was power to be gained, the weight of the mystery would break them.
Much akin to Primeval Sorcerers, Azur and Lusat and later Sellen.
While called Sorcerers (and perhaps even a Witch depending on points of view) the scholars of Raya Lucaria and most notably Sellen, are astrologers. In fact, the founder of magic itself was also an astrologer. Today, Sellen is found hunted, deemed apostate, and in hiding from the Raya Lucarian Conspectii given her adherence to Sorceries that are more closely aligned with the Cosmos rather than the two-faced entity represented by the Moon.
Sellen gushes that we are greater than we seem, that we are “fallen children of the stars” (Sorceress Sellen) and explains to the Tarnished that “Glintstone is the amber of the cosmos, golden amber contains the remnants of ancient life and houses its vitality, while Glintstone contains residual life. And thus, the vitality of the stars. It should not be forgotten that glintstone sorcery is the study of the stars and the life therein.” (Sorceress Sellen) For Sellen, this is an attempt to be brought back to prominence, and to have the Primeval Current, the ‘waters’ of the Sea of Stars be returned to the centerpiece of Raya Lucaria; believing Renala has brought them astray for her worship of the singular Moon and its mastery over the Tides. Her request is simple, to find the missing sorcerers Azur and Lusat so that together they may challenge the Carian Queen and Governess of the Academy.
What the Tarnished finds are the vacuous remains of the two brilliant sorcerers. One crowned in Verdite — itself an important stone in FromSoftware lore — and one crowned in an Alien Eye should establish the warning bells for what is to come. But, what is it that the pair saw that brought them to their current, vacuous state? Thankfully, the legacies each astrologer left us gives us clues:
Left to us by Azur, Comet Azur explains, “When Azur glimpsed into the primeval current, he saw darkness. He was left both bewitched and fearful of the abyss. (Comet Azur)” The vast and infinite black nothing of Space, is an utterly terrifying mystery. Distances and sizes of celestial objects are neigh unfathomable and to realize that so much of space is simply a gaping maw of nothing, not even an embodiment of the Greater Will, this drove Azur to nothingness.
What is a Comet shooting through the sky against the sheer infinite abyss? Just a flickering candle deep in the proverbial cave.
While Lusat’s glimpse into the cosmos was less terrifying, what he saw was too much for him to process, “When Lusat glimpsed into the primeval current, he beheld the final moments of a great star cluster, and upon seeing it, he too was broken.” (Stars of Ruin) Why would first-hand knowledge of the end of a Star Cluster bring about Lusat’s doom? Sellen suggests the primeval astrologer’s mistake: their study of stars is also the study of life.
Life is borne from the cold recesses and the toxic molecular clouds being compressed together in a war instigated by gravity. Even the Earth, the Lands Between, that the Tarnished trods is born from these movements of the stars and forces nearly beyond human comprehension. But, Lusat viewed doom and the death of the Star Cluster.
Star Clusters are, obviously, extremely large groups of stars formed in the molecular clouds of their corpses. There are two main types of star-clusters: globular and open clusters. Globular Star Clusters can number in the millions of stars, all gravitationally bound and are normally older. Open clusters on the other hand are younger stars and are only loosely bound together. They tend to peel off from one another due to the influence of the gravitational pull of molecular clouds. (“Star cluster”) (“Open cluster”)
In fact, our own sun, Sol, was a member of an Open Cluster of stars, called an Embedded Cluster, which are different simply because they are nurseries of extremely young stars wrapped in interstellar dust and gas. It’s also interesting to mention that all galaxies are star clusters but not all star clusters are galaxies and the difference is simple: size and black holes keep everything in line. Star Clusters are normally much smaller than their galaxial counterparts.
Star Clusters are, today, studied because they give astronomers a look into the history of the Universe — from the birth of stars, including our own, its life, and eventually its death. Deaths of Star Clusters happen soon after what is called its relaxation phase, the moment where it stops neither generating or using energy. From here, decline and death can take on two forms.
As Chen explains, Globular Clusters experience a core collapse. Kinetic energy is then lost as stars migrate from the center to the outside and the remaining stars move to take up more volume. This increasing instability and a crowded environment of stars becomes a singularity or even collapses into a black hole. (Chen)
Open Clusters, however, face a more explosive fate. Kroupa, describes the O-Type Star, or the white hot star at the center of many of these types of clusters exploding and gravitationally shackling its constituent stars. These stars will move together and form what is called a stellar association such as what we see with Ursa Major. (Kroupa)
What does this mean for Lusat? When you believe the Stars are staid and eternal, almost conscious in the way that they weave fate for the people below, to see them die in such a violent explosion without, perhaps realizing, that life will spring from this death is terrifying. Death comes for everyone in the end, including the celestial heavens that spin around our heads. Knowing ourselves that our entire universe one day in a few Gyr will die in a heat death or our sun will eventually swallow us whole to leave no one to know we even existed, is just the sort of horror that perhaps dawned on Lusat. Seeing the embodiment of life being snuffed out, drove Lusat to his current stage of catatonia.
Know also that seeing these glimpses makes it real for the astrologer’s mind (Founding Rain of Stars), and with this knowledge being shared between Sellen and the two others, it is little wonder what happened to Sellen. Like Lusat and Azur, she is given knowledge that is too overwhelmingly incredible for her to understand. She, too, is irrevocably changed by the knowledge and becomes the core of the graven mass of magi that appears later. It is little wonder that they became a seed for a new star to transmogrify themselves into new life. Was the terror of oblivion represented in the nothingness of space or the finality of stars the impetus? What they saw became real after all and in space water naturally forms into spheres to occupy a shape with the least amount of surface area .
Sellen was proven right, but in striving to be right she also doomed and rebirthed herself.
Red Heavenly Violence
The eldest primeval sorcery, said to have been discovered by an ancient astrologer… Summons a dark cloud of stars overhead. Shortly after, the cloud will release a violent deluge of star rain…The glimpse of the primeval current that the astrologer saw became real, and the stars’ amber rained down on this land. (Founding Rain of Stars)
The Primeval Sorcerers gained glimpses of the truths behind celestial mysteries and the sheer force and overwhelming weight of those truths made them vacuous; much akin to Rom in Bloodborne. The normal sapience and human intelligence that they had was nothing in the face of these overwhelming truths and thus their knowledge and wisdom escaped them. This was also true of the ancient astrologer who first glimpsed the primeval current that runs just above our head.
In fact, this mirrors the Perseid meteor shower, first observed in AD 36. The Meteor Shower is a yearly event where debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet streaks across the night sky like rain drops falling in a storm. In reality, most of this debris is immolated in the Earth’s atmosphere but the observing astrologer who first witnessed this phenomena associated it with the closest touchstone he could find: rain. And, because seeing it wasn’t simply believing but birthing it into existence, it became the genesis for his legacy spell, The Founding Rain of Stars. (“Perseids”)
Seeing phenomena make it manifest into reality is an answer to the conundrum of ‘if a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound.’ For the Astrologer, seeing the phenomena of the meteor shower, beholding it, and perhaps even understanding it in some way made it real — a sound heard in the forest. From here that understanding, seeing it, birthed a power that can now be wielded.
However, this isn’t the only instance of meteor showers that occur in Elden Ring. The Lands Between are pockmarked and checked with the bones of dead stars as meteors become meteorites as they crash on earth. Down in the mines, many of the boss rooms are the sites of these meteor strikes.
The second act of the game is heralded by a meteor shower, as the stars are loosened from their gravitational bindings. Ancient craters are the calling card of ancient strikes from long ago. And yet, this death of fire also brought with it life: The Falling Star Beasts, all of them the still bucking flame of a falling star. It also gave rise to the Alabaster and Onyx Lords as they left their previous existences on their small, briefly lived, worlds. The Numen and the Void Born have also fallen from the skies and brought with them the terror of that which we cannot understand.
But this wasn’t the only celestial violence that the Lands Between were subjected to. Cosmic radiation lingered like an invisible fire that engulfed everything in its path. Without the words to accurately describe it, the people and Gods of the Lands Between knew the radiation sickness that fell on the victims — by what it did to them: Rot. Acute Radiation Poisoning is an invisible monster that stalks and hunts with thousands of invisible bullets that piece those unfortunate enough to be near. (Gessen) (Mazin)
The firefighters who responded to the Chernobyl disaster put this in stark relief. So irritated with ionizing radiation, it destroyed the firefighters DNA (“Acute radiation syndrome”) ending their body’s ability to repair itself and causing chromosomal abnormalities. From there, it was almost a matter of time. From the initial illness, the latent or ghost phase happens. Perhaps the cruelest, the victim’s body releases any reserve DNA stores to the body to try to stop what was happening to it. The Victim feels better, healthy even but this is only a brief window before the ability to replicate and replenish DNA stores has already been destroyed. From here, the body rots — and the victim is effectively alive within a dead body — a horror that should not be wished upon anyone. (“CDC Radiation Emergencies | Acute Radiation Syndrome: A Fact Sheet for Physicians”)(Gessen) (Mazin)
This is the true terror of the Rot — the irradiation caused by the constant meteor strikes this is the root cause of the rot upon Malenia and only because of her Godhood does she live as long as she does, but her body fails her bit by bit anyway evident as her arm as well as her legs have wasted away. Acute Radiation Syndrome is not a sickness that can be cured; despite the hope by the Gods and Miquella who tried to save Malenia. Once DNA is destroyed it cannot be re-manufactured. It was merely held at bay with a Gold Needle, an Elden Ring mirror to reality’s Bone Marrow Transplants that were attempting to keep a terrifying death at bay. (“CDC Radiation Emergencies | Acute Radiation Syndrome: A Fact Sheet for Physicians”) (Mazin)
The Shattered Eye
November 20, 2020 the Arecibo Telescope was decommissioned after years of neglect, decay, and the storms Maria and Isaias. Up until then, line feeds have snapped damaging its dome and then later a platform support gable also violently snapped and ripped a large gash in its dome. Steps were being taken to prevent a catastrophic failure of the dome but this wasn’t enough; the domino effect of its collapse was already in violent motion. By December 1st 2020, the main cables from Tower 4 failed and the telescope collapsed to the ground, broken and shattered. (“Arecibo Telescope”)
Destined Death comes for everyone and everything.
In its heyday, the Arecibo Telescope captured popular imagination after featuring in feature-films like Contact and Goldeneye. Located in Puerto Rico, the Telescope looked into the stars discovering truths about the planetary bodies in the Primodial Current. It was the primary key in discovering the Comet Encke in 1980 as it was key in discovering pulsar psr B1257+21 in 1981. Further, it was the main source for the SETI and METI projects where it was instrumental in finding even more pulsars. (“Arecibo Telescope”)
A lot of these discoveries are due to the telescope’s design. A massive, 265m collecting dome below and a receiver suspended 150m above that, surrounded by its trademark triangular platform, and held aloft by three massive concrete towers. With everything set, the Arecibo Telescope was an effective eye into the Cosmos and able to understand the ebb and flow of the Primeval Current hidden in the skies above our head. (“Arecibo Telescope”)
It is this that the astrologers of Elden Ring would be most interested in. To see deep into the Primeval Current, into the Cosmos, and to divine the fate that the stars hold for all of us would bring with it greater understanding. Wouldn’t it? When a society understands that fate is held in the cosmic balance it would be only natural for a massive eye to be constructed to track and measure any changes that the cosmos would, until now, have hidden from the Astrologers of Raya Lucaria.
And so, they built a massive eye that would see into the furthest reaches of space.
Six massive towers were built in a constellation around what seems to be nothing but the sea. The strange cloud at the center of its array, gives away what was — or is — here. A massive telescope established by the Divine Empyrean to observe the sublunary systems and to divine what fate holds for them and those sworn to them. Like for so many other things, though, death comes for everything and everyone. The scholars of Raya Lucaria turned away from the Primeval Current in favor of their encroaching lunacy. The shattering destroyed this wonder of construction and scholarship — another symbol of a family splintered — closing this eye into the heavens forever as of this writing. The fact that the divine towers are similar in shape and scope to those that upheld the Arecibo Radio Telescope before its collapse, convinces me as to the true purpose.
It also gives us a clue as to why eyes are just so important to the world of Elden Ring.
Loss of the Voice
At the top of each of the arrayed towers, are the organic receivers, each now dead and fossilized at the top of each one: the Two Fingers. The Two Fingers, at the beginning of Elden Ring, are positioned as the omniscient and omnipresent metatron of the Greater Will. Faith is built around them and that faith is clung to like a life-raft as the Lands Between float in place. It is the Faith in the Two Fingers that puts stock in the Tarnished and initially gives the Tarnished purpose.
It is not everything that it pretends to be.
Each set of two fingers are, indeed, receivers — organic of course — but receivers of the sound of deep space. While Space is a vacuum, the gasses at Star and Galaxy Clusters are thus that sound can be ascertained. And it is this sound, this music, that the Two Fingers receive. (“See @NASAExoplanets’s Tweet on Twitter”)
The Two Fingers insist that what they pick up is the dictates of the Greater Will. But how can anyone be sure? And, as we move through the game the last set of Two Fingers, that seeks to guide our Tarnished and spoken for by Enia, loses faith itself. When everything that it believes about what the Greater Will’s wishes for turns out to not be the truth — and that the Tarnished are not welcomed with opened arms into the heart of the Erdtree, it abandons the world.
Enia tells us that it has departed, to find and speak with the Great Will, a quest that will require, “…thousands, if not tens of thousands, of moons must first pass. No matter for me. But you? How will you ever manage the wait… (Faress/ “Enia”)” This tells us one thing: that the Greater Will is extremely far away and in space, distance is measured in the speed of Light. Light Years measure distances on a galactic scale and though light seems instantaneous to us — turn on the light in the room you are in to see how quickly it fills — light takes quite a bit to reach us.
Light from the Sun, for instance, takes 8 minutes to reach the Earth from its starting position. The Virgo Cluster, the nearest galaxy cluster is 59 billion light years away. This is the mind-bogglingly long distances that Enia so poetically, and helpfully, tells the tarnished is the distance our Two Fingers must travel to speak with the Greater Will. It must travel to other stars or another galaxy to find the Greater Will. The Two Fingers may have been amongst humanity but it is still alien with an alien sense and in its terror and realization that what it believes is a lie, forgets that time is felt so much more keenly by people. (Light Year)
And thus, it has abandoned the Lands Between, its faithful, the very solar system, and the world to fend for itself much like the Greater Will has done, already.
Music of the Spheres
“God made the two great lights, the greater one to govern the day, and the lesser one to govern the night; and he made the stars.
God set them in the dome of the sky, to shed light upon the earth,
to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. God saw how good it was.” (Genesis 1:14–19, New American Bible)
June 22, 1633 Galileo Galilei was found guilty of heresy and sentenced to house imprisonment, where he would remain for the rest of his days by the Roman Catholic Inquisition (“Galileo affair”). His heresy? That the sun, the moon, and the stars did not revolve around Earth and that, instead, the Earth and the rest of the heavenly bodies revolve around the sun. This was a violation of what was written in scripture: Earth was the center of the Universe. Earth was created and everything was created in service to the earth.
The prevailing spiritual-scientific position until the Galilei Affair was an arrangement of the celestial heavens as a sort of onion.
No, not that one.
Or, perhaps an egg or Matryoshka doll. These were called the Heavenly Spheres as detailed in Genesis as a series of domes, firmament, or spheres. Earth with its sins, and flaws, were at the center. Mortality, it was so believed, was caused by ‘Original Sin’ — rooted in the acts of procreation and where there is birth there must also be death. Above the sphere of the Earth, was the Sublunary Sphere of the Moon; its changing face “was taken as a sign of the Mortality which entered the Earth as a result of the Fall of Man,” perpetrated by Adam and Eve. (“The Geocentric or Ptolemaic Notion of the Universe”) (“Original sin”).
Wrapped around the Sublunary sphere of the Moon, was the Sphere of the Sun followed by the Planets, the dome where the stars were placed and then the Empyrean. Merriam-Webster defines the word ‘empyrean’ in one of two ways: “the highest heaven consisting of fire and light, and the ultimate and truest heavenly paradise. (“Empyrean Definition & Meaning”)” In Summa Theological, St. Thomas Aquinas named the Empyrean the ‘Seventh Heaven’ a place known as one full of pure light and intellectualism, full of angels and brilliant splendor, the outermost and seventh of the celestial sphere.
... the spiritual glory began with the beginning of the world, in the blessedness of the angels, equality with whom is promised to the saints. It was fitting, then, that even from the beginning, there should be made some beginning of bodily glory in something corporeal, free at the very outset from the servitude of corruption and change, and wholly luminous, even as the whole bodily creation, after the Resurrection, is expected to be.
So, then, that heaven is called the empyrean, i.e. fiery, not from its heat, but from its brightness.
-St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Aquinas)
Which brings us, again, to Elden Ring. In fact, in Elden Ring we travel through all seven of Thomas Aquinas’ heavens. The Airy and Ethereal heavens of the Air map easily to Limgrave and Liurnia. The Olympian Heaven maps simply to Mt. Gelmir with the Fiery Heaven most likely aligning quite simply to the Altus Plateau. The Sidereal or Starry Heavens may mirror the Eternal Cities. While the Crystalline heaven, with its frozen waters, is very much akin to the MountainTop of the Giants.
Which leaves one last sphere. What easily maps to the Empyrean Sphere so detailed by Thomas Aquinas? In Elden Ring there are two competing areas vying for that title: the Haligtree of Miquella, particularly Elphael, and the inner world of the Elden Beast.
Before we continue along that line of thought, it might behoove us to talk a little bit about what Elden Ring has added to the definition of ‘Empyrean.’ In the words of Ranni, “Of the demigods, only I, Miquella, and Malenia could claim that title. Each of us was chosen by our own Two Fingers, as a candidate to succeed Queen Marika, to become the new god of the coming age. Which is when I received Blaidd. In the form of a vassal tailored for an Empyrean.” (Ranni) Empyrean in Elden Ring are Gods in Waiting; heirs of Queen Marika chosen not via normal means of succession — e.g., birth order — but by the Two Fingers. Who, as we’ve discussed are receivers for the missives of the Greater Will and the terrifying sound of Deep Space. Each of these Empyrean, able to reach the sublunary sphere of their namesake, are fated to become the puppets of the cosmos and to be guided by the would-be metatrons of the Two-Fingers and manipulated towards their own ends. This is in a touch of subversion, of the classical arrangement of the heavens. The Greater Will styles itself as God but in truth, it is simply the sapience of the Primeval Current and the Mica Spangled Abyss. The Empyrean are positioned above that and yet, the Godlings who claim the title are being positioned to be manipulated by the lower spheres.
While Malenia and Miquella sought to reject this fate in their own ways, in their quest to cure their respective curses and attempting to create a new, more egalitarian world, brilliant in its own way; Ranni rejected this irrevocably. She murdered her flesh, well and truly taking away a potential vessel from manipulation of the Greater Will via the Two Fingers and setting in motion a long, long revenge against the cosmos that not only betrayed her but betrayed her entire family.
No wonder Radahn sought the power of gravity, he sought to protect Ranni from the power of the Greater Will and the Two Fingers by arresting Destiny in itself and to protect her from herself by hiding the path she wished to take. “The stars alter the fate of the Carian royal family. And the fate of your mistress, Ranni. But long ago, General Radahn challenged the swirling constellations, and in a crushing victory, arrested their cycles. Now, he is the force that repulses the stars. If General Radahn were to die, the stars would resume their movement. And so, too, would Ranni’s destiny.” (Sorceress Sellen)
With their cycles — and thus fate — arrested, Radahn stopped the Two Fingers from working against Ranni but prevented Ranni from harming the Two Fingers. Jarren, a vassal of the Carians originally, led the festival not out of pity for the fallen general but so Ranni can carry on her labors, “And so, if General Radahn were defeated, the stars would once again resume their movement. As would Lady Ranni’s destiny. Perhaps, even, revealing the elusive path. That leads to Nokron. (Iji).”
In her act of defiance, Ranni reclaims her free will.
Without Fate
“If the stars command our fates, then amber-hued stars must command the fates of the gods. Such is the belief that inspired the use of these shards to prepare a most special draught.” Amber Starlight
Fate is commanded by the stars and the sapience of the cosmos for its own ends with no consent or willingness of those below. The stars and the celestial bodies claim dominance and weave in and out of houses, fall into retrograde and dictate the happenings of the world below. Time is marked by the passing of the stars and the omens they usher in seem all encompassing and inescapable for most. The Sorcerers of Elden Ring began as Astrologers — spiritual scientists — looking to divine the will and future of those held under its sway, like the Empyrean. However, there are those who have full free will, those who have no fate whatsoever.
People, like the Tarnished. There is a hint to the Tarnished’s fatelessness by Iiji as he could not see what was in our Fate. This is confirmed by the Tarnished’s inability to wield the Fingerslayer Blade, “Cannot be wielded by those without a fate, but is said to be able to harm the Greater Will and its vassals. (Fingerslayer Blade).” However, it can be wielded by Ranni, to break her threads of fate that bind her to a particular path — a path that she has summarily rejected. The Tarnished, is the outlier. Without a fate and without a destiny to bind them to a particular path, without the heavenly spheres dictating what will or will not happen, the Tarnished has the freedom to choose. It is what sets the Tarnished apart and offers them the ability of Lordship. It is that freedom to choose that is so coveted and why the Two Fingers attempt to manipulate the Tarnished. What they would decide is not written in the stars. This is what makes the Tarnished a potentate and dangerous, depending on points of view.
Eclipses
“… Ohh great sun! Frigid sun of Sol! Surrender yourself to the eclipse! Grant life to the soulless bones!” — Spirit, Castle Sol
“The sun has not been swallowed. Our prayers are lacking/Your comrade remains soulless…” Spirit, Castle Sol
In the sixth century, war was waging between the Lydians and the Medians in modern day Türkiye. Allegedly, the spark that caused the war were the perceived violations of Hospitality and Propriety with a group of Sythians; though this is a story that modern historians look askance at. What is known is that the war went on for six, long years. (“About: Battle of the Eclipse”) (“Battle of the Eclipse”)
According to the writings of the Greek Historian Herodotus, Thales of Miletus, had foretold of a Solar Eclipse down to the very day. Initially, this warning was disregarded as the war between the Lydians and the Medians continued to wage. However, on May 28, 585 BC, the forecast was proven right and a Solar Eclipse occurred above the heads of the combatants. When the Solar Eclipse reached totality, the two warring sides laid down their arms and sought peace; afraid that they had angered the heavens. (“About: Battle of the Eclipse”) (“Battle of the Eclipse”) (Waxman)
Portents and Omens weren’t only seen in the stars themselves but also in the heavenly bodies that glide across the sky. Everything from the deaths of Kings to plagues, many attributed to Solar Eclipses. Of course, in modern astronomy, many know this to not be the case. An eclipse is simply that the moon has stepped between Earth and the Sun.
However, what if that wasn’t quite the case in Elden Ring. A game which attributes a sapience to the stars themselves and their terrible designs upon the world they look upon? The Moon itself is a central Janus like figure — showing one of its two faces to its chosen Princesses: the Full Moon, resplendent and enchanting in its silvery light to Renala, and The New Moon dark and mysterious and pregnant with mystery to Ranni. Once again, the Moon chooses its left and right hands in its war against the sun.
Once again, one is reminded that though the cosmos of Elden Ring follows a clockwork science, that there is a real consciousness behind its movements: unknowable and terrifying as it pushes along its mortal instruments.
Which brings us to Castle Sol and the link with the Empyrean Miquella. The inhabitants of Castle Sol, await the eclipse and even go so far as to use it as their standard. According to their heater shields, it is a symbol of the Wandering Mausoleums where soulless demigods slumber. (Eclipse Crescent Heater Shield). “In Sol, the sight of an eclipse inspires a dreadful awe, preventing an onlooker from averting his gaze” (Eclipse Shotel). In truth, looking directly upon a Sun in Totality is incredibly dangerous: causing permanent damage — even blindness — even after a few seconds of looking at the crown of the Sun around the moon because of the intensity of the visible and invisible radiation. Again, Elden Ring centers its fascination with sight or the lack thereof. From the artificial eye made to look into the cosmos or the eye of a person, to the eyes of Radagon and Marika being used as a talisman to offer power, to seers like Irina and Hyetta being, in truth, lacking sight themselves. In Castle Sol, likewise, many live with damaged eyesight; unable to see visible light but, perhaps, able to see something more like Hyetta and Irina are able to see. Self mutilation to be granted revelation, what they think they see is burned away by the Sun-Crowned-Moon they so honor.
Further, Castle Sol’s belief is that this visage of the Sun offers life to the Soulless Demigods sleeping in the Mausoleums. In a world where Death has been robbed from metaphysical reality, having an array of dead demi-gods, most of whom are concentrated around the ruins of Uhl, is extremely interesting. Do the inhabitants of Castle Sol understand that life is brought back to them via memory and remembrance? Or do the inhabitants of Castle Sol expect these demi-gods, these patrons, to walk out of their mausoleums and swear fealty to Empyrean Miquella, who the spirits name a Comrade?
Did Miquella wish to wait for the Solar Eclipse to unveil his Haligtree but due to reasons outside of Miquella’s control; failed? In the end, the Moon did not step in to avert the Sun’s gaze — the Patron of the Erdtree — long enough? The eclipse never happened; the Moon does not intercede and the Haligtree does not usurp the place of the Erdtree. Discovering the reason why these plans do not come to fruition reveals the horrible depths of obsession.
Side Note:
Those of Castle Sol prized a wicked Shotel, called the Eclipse Shotel: a very Eternal Cities looking weapon with spikes to evoke the photosphere, or crown, of the sun around the moon that can only be seen during Totality. A Shotel, in and of itself, is meant to reach around shields — like the moon in front of the sun, to harm the body — or sun — behind. Or to pull people from their horses, or, perhaps the Sun from its path across the sky.
Their Dark Materials
Like so many things in Elden Ring, Newton’s law of motion remains constant. While the Meteor Strikes that have visited the Lands Between are undoubtedly violent, they carry with them the seedbed of life and may have brought with it the precious metals, like gold, that prove so important to the narrative of Elden Ring. (Choi)
Western Alchemy, deriving from Hellenistic and Babylonian approaches to astronomy, sought to link the then known planetary and celestial bodies of the heavens with the known metals of the time. It went one step forward by ascribing dominion over these metals by the planets and because of this rulership, the days of the week as well. (“Domicile (astrology)”)
Silver, of course, was ascribed both to the Moon and Monday. While Gold was ruled by the Sun and thus, Sunday. Of further interest to the classical metals shown in Elden Ring. Mercury, the metal which rules the Eternal Cities, is also ruled by Wednesday and the Planet Mercury. Copper is ruled by the planet Venus — the brightest star in the sky — and also Friday. While Iron, a common metal associated with swords and the weapons of war, is associated with Mars and Tuesday. Interestingly, ancient astrologers linked the planets to the organs of the Human Body, with the Sun ruling the Heart and the Moon ruling the mind. This is interesting because the empty cavities trolls, many of the aristocracy, and even Marika-Radahn have in their abdomen in Elden Ring are missing organs ruled by Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Further why metals are linked to civilization in the Lands Between, and that which is rejected by the Ancient Worshipers.(“Classical planet”)
Amber is the only odd material out, as it were but is just as important as the classical metals. Like the Classical Metals that most likely were deposited by the meteor strikes, amber too shared this fate and is part and parcel to the violence doled out upon the Lands Between in the exact same way. As Amber is derived from the Erdtree, that arose from the cosmos, having landed like an acorn-meteor on the Lands between to grow and feed upon the Lands’ resources and dead.
A honey hued stone, Amber is fossilized tree resin. As amber forms, it catches and holds life frozen in its grasp that also provides a startling record of the ecosystem of a tree. Resin oozes from the tree and while it progresses in rivulets down the bark of a tree, it imprisons life in its grasp. Many of those poor unfortunates trapped in Amber tombs, are ants. Ants hold a symbiotic(-parasitic?) relationship with trees and their resins. Dried bits of resin are used in their nests; as disinfecting properties to keep their nests clean. While it is also drunk, its antibiotic properties extending their lifespans.
This relationship is also featured in Elden Ring. Ants are prominent, especially closer to the roots of the tree that we come across. In fact, the ants could be modeled after Carpenter Ants or Green Tree Ants. Of course, and like so many things in Elden Ring, amber is both a life giving elixir and a source of death for the ants that live on the Erdtree. (“Wood ants collecting dried resin, with one trapped in the sticky resin”) Many people remember the importance of Amber from the film, Jurassic Park(1993). In it, the resurrection of dinosaurs hinged on extracting DNA from trapped insects like ants and mosquitos from the stone.
In antiquity, Amber was thought to have been created by the Sun and this is representative in its latin names for Amber, electrum and Greek, ‘ēlektron.’ According to the myths of antiquity, when the sun of Helios, Phaeton, was killed, he was mourned by his sisters. In their grief, his sisters became poplar trees and their tears were amber. (“Amber”)
Later, the word elektron gave rise to electricity because of the interesting property that Amber has: it is able to hold a static electric charge. (“Amber”)
In Elden Ring all of this makes sense from the cosmic origins of the Erdtree, to the importance of Amber, and even the sun ’s role in lightning and electricity so well known in Altus Plateau. In Elden Ring this is especially poetic as one might see the whole world as being trapped by amber — as everything and everyone are trapped in a deathless-limbo state, fossilized.
Eternal Cities
“A malformed star born in the flightless void far away. Once destroyed an Eternal City and took away their sky. A falling star of ill omen.” — Remembrance of the Naturalborn
Horror in Elden Ring is implied. The immediate terror of the moment has long, long past and is found by the Tarnished only in the history rendered in the silent screams of the people who are nothing more now than a fossilized chorus. The incandescent terror that visited the Eternal Cities, of its doom and fate have long since passed and left the cities only to the ants, the Nox, and Mercury Soldiers that have not beeen alieviated from its duties.
While the Eternal Cities, and what they attempted, with Mercury — trying to produce a Lord in an echo of how Alchemists attempted to derive Gold from the liquid metal– is interesting, though a touch outside of the scope of this essay. (“Mercury (element)”) But why would they commit this heresy and why would the choice to create a Lord bring about their ultimate fate?
“ Once upon a time, the stars of the night sky guided fate, and this is a recollection of those times.” — Celestial Dew
The Eternal Cities were, at one point, in the full view of the gaze of the cosmos overhead. As stated earlier, the stars were both the arbiters of fate and while the cosmos of Elden Ring follows real world science, the cosmos is also sapient and with a will of its own. The Eternal Cities being in view of the stars overhead, could have given a sense of comfort or disquiet to know that its activities are being viewed by the heavens and summarily judged. Their experimentation continued on, yielding the Puppets, Mimic Tears, Silver Tears, and the Larval Tears. Ultimately, their experimentation took them into high-treason, tokenized in the Fingerslayer Blade and its creation. For with the Fingerslayer Blade, the door would be opened to kill the sapience of the Cosmos.
And it is this experimentation with the creation of life and the transubstantiation of Mercury, that must have brought about the ire of the Cosmos down upon their heads. As mentioned earlier, in antiquity Saturn was the furthest planet discovered. Because of this, many considered Saturn to be the coldest of the celestial bodies. Once upon a time, however, Saturn went by another name: Cronus the God of the Harvest and its alchemical symbol — the combination of the Kappa Rho — is in reference to this fact. (Rubens et al.)
As the God of the Harvest, and identified with the Snake, Cronus was nearly always depicted with his Scythe or Sickle. However, because of his identification with the God of the Harvest, Cronus was also identified as the personification of time. Particularly its “destructive ravages of time which devoured all things, a concept that was illustrated when the Titan king ate the Olympian gods — the past consuming the future, the older generation suppressing the next generation (Rubens et al.).”
Taken further, Cronus is the Bringer of Old Age and the Death that looms just around the corner. A concept that is expanded upon in the tone poem, Saturn the Bringer of Old Age by Gustav Holst the fifth movement from his symphony The Planets.
Okay, you might be asking — what does all of this have to do with the doom of the Eternal Cities?
Astel.
Everything coalesces with Astel’s boss theme which heavily references Holst’s tone poem standing apart from the bombast of many of the other boss themes of Elden Ring. Astel, of the Void that broke the mind of Primeval Sorcerer Azur when he saw into that vast gaping maw of nothingness. The Naturalborn, that is rendered as a flying Abaddon on diaphanous dragonfly wings. It is a nightmare born of the planets, with a literal planetary body, that brings about the power and terror of the destruction of star-clusters and dying nebulae at its fingertips; its mandables forming dual scythes to harvest and to bring about an end.
Astel’s judgment to the Eternal Cities was simple: it took away their sky and in so doing killed a great many of its inhabitants in one terrible, determined flash. With the Eternal Cities banished from the sight of the Cosmos, the Eternal Cities were also cut off from Fate and cut off from the grace and guidance that the cosmos would have given it.
If the Eternal Cities wished to murder its cosmic tyrants, then they would be set adrift and harvested towards a better purpose.
The Crumbling Tempest
A star in the constellation Draco goes supernova and collapses, the gravitational forces crush what is left and its corpse becomes a neutron star. This is the start of the book Dragon’s Egg, by Robert L. Forward which details the discovery of this neutron star and the rise and rapid, at least by a human’s reckoning, advancement of the Cheela.
Like the neutron star in Dragon’s Egg, a neutron star is formed from the collapse of a supermassive star of 10 to 25 solar masses though it can be more depending on metal deposits. As we might recall from high-school science class, mass — like the curse of undeath — doesn’t just go away or is created. For a collapsing supermassive star, it is compressed by insane gravitational forces that — like a vacuum bag — compresses all of that mass into something much, much smaller. Heat no longer is emitted and these neutron stars may cool overtime. As the neutron star collapses, the speed at which it spins increases to a mind-boggling rate; turning like a top as it speeds towards oblivion. (“Neutron star”)
On Earth, astronomers are able to detect neutron stars from the electromagnetic radiation they emit, pulsing in releases that are uniform and constant. At the magnetic poles, it is believed by modern astrologers that electrostatic fields build up and are emitted in what looks, from the outside, like a fountain. The jetting curvature radiation creates polarization in the neutron star and eventually leads to the star’s annihilation. (“Neutron star”)
Elden Ring centers a neutron star as part and parcel of its finale and where the Death Rune has come to dwell. It’s fitting and it brings back the cosmic horror that threads its way through the game front and center. The present-origin and the present-annihilation are one and the same — time is a simple mobius strip or an ouroboros where death begets life and life begets death: the lesson that the Ancient Spirits try to impart. When Lusat saw the primeval current, he viewed the eternal now. Death, the destined rune, has come to rest at the altar of eternal annihilation.
Crumbling Farum Azula was once a massive civilization that spanned out over the whole of Limgrave and the Weeping peninsula. The shattered remains of its civilization litter over the landscape and are difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. When a player steps out into the first Step verus when CFA’s final position is later revealed, shows just how large CFA must have been. It is a place that is in the midst of eternal collapse, time is frozen and compressed upon itself.
It is a neutron star.
Farum Azula, the Neutron Star, spins with such ferocity that it influences the environment far beneath; twisting the ocean beneath it into a whirlpool. At its center is a storm twisting like a spear. Its emissions spew thousands of feet into the air in a very similar manner to the radiation emitted by neutron stars. In fact, the startling parallels continue if we consider the direction that Farum Azula spins as well as its eternally flying court dragons, representative of stars caught in the neutron star’s thrall, are leashed to. The largest star of all, Placidusax asleep in the eye of the storm, laden with gold and metals and compressed from five heads to two is a reflection of the treads of gold that can be seen in the sheared rock faces and grounds. At the center of the storm, at the center of the curvature radiation jetting out from Crumbling Farum Azula, is the Dragonlord itself. The largest, oldest, and once most powerful Dragon-Star in the Lands Between. The beating heart of the neutron star of Crumbling Farum Azula is caught in a state of eternal-annihilation, its time has come.
No wonder it is only accessible after unleashing the fire of the Giant’s Forge, ushering in the death of Melina as her purpose was always to lead us to open the way to Death itself.
Since it is the home and prison of death it is also a place many of the beasts have returned to, to rest in that which they have lost. This is a place of the dead with the tombs of beasts are interred and protected by naught but skeletons. Crumbling Farum Azula, caught in eternal-annihilation: what better place for the Rune of Destined Death to reside than a place that is both the crumbling corpse of a star as well as the corpse of a civilization?
And yet, until death is released from the finger’s grasp, Crumbling Farum Azula is frozen, preventing its inevitable collapse into a black hole.
Closing Thoughts
Do the stars above our heads, the old dead light of many stars, hold the key to our futures? Man has always looked up to the stars and saw patterns that affected them. The sun rises and falls, the moon moves through its phases, the seasons come and go. Beyond fate, the Stars have always marked time and its passage and because of this, the stars have marked birth and mortality — the times before and since.
In Elden Ring, the Stars command, dictate, and claim dominion over The Lands Between. Their active participation in the world and construction of The Golden Order through their leal vassals answers this question vehemently. Not only are the stars gatekeepers of fate, but also have a sapience that the Tarnished couldn’t even begin to understand, though there are many who believe — and are proven false — that they can.
This, however, reveals the cosmic horror that threads through Elden Ring like the threads of gold that shoot through the shorn rock faces of Crumbling Farum Azula. Free Will is merely a daydream. Only through drastic measures can those with fates escape that fate, and do something else. Radahn attempted to conquer gravity and thus stop the stars from moving, but in so doing ground everything to a halt; all the while his entire spirit was being consumed by cosmic radiation. Ranni, not only caused her brother’s death but also murdered own flesh; setting her on a path in direct opposition to the fate bequeathed to her by the stars.
Cosmic Forces have rendered violence upon the land for millennia. Through that violence it may have brought life but also, it brought with it the methods of the Lands destruction. Attempts to understand the yawning void, the nothingness, or the explosive collapse towards annihilation so present in the primeval current — the life and death that represents — breaks the minds of men truly unprepared for that knowledge.
Horror lies in our ultimate powerlessness; and the motions of that which is just above our heads is that horror incarnate.
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Special Thanks:
Assaulter Bob (Word Editor)
Maeglin A., (Word Editor)
Members of the Colloquium.
