Elden Ring: Notes on Philosophic Themes

Potency is intrinsically relative to act: part to whole, two and three fingers to a hand, life to beyond-itself in death. Miyazaki has contrived another myth concerning this interpenetration of one and many, same and different within a primordial state of actuality. Once again he depicts the degeneration of the cosmos as resulting from a finite agent’s attempt to universalize its own essence & subject perspective (to the exclusion of ontological difference, polyvalence).

The Greater Will (an outer god like Astel) universalizes his partial nature in the game's prehistory, establishing the ordered world preceding the shattering. His causality is exhibited by golden light, the ordered, branching multitude of the tree, to the exclusion of death, finality, the lunar principle (which, in the form of the rune of death, is given to Marika’s half brother, who is locked away). Marika is the vessel of the Will and her actions are hard to distinguish from its agency. She takes Godfrey as her first consort. The Will likely secured the cooperation of Marika by tempting her with the "universalization" of her own nature, its undue inflation: immortality.

The two fingers that are its emissary, in absence of their three missing counterparts, symbolize the partiality, false universality of the Greater Will's regime: it attempts to negate the relation of potency to act, part to whole. While it postures as universal, total, as the absolute, death, chaos etc. have no place.

But something is clearly missing. Two fingers are intrinsically relative to a hand. The Will is incapable of suppressing the differences of being extrinsic to its own universalized essence. These war against its order.

Thus various outer gods battle to replace the Greater Will's forgetfulness of being, reduce it to a counterfeit mode patterned after their subject-position: the Frenzied Flame (served by the Three Fingers) to universal chaos, the Formless Mother (served by Mogh) to a pulpy, fecund state of "accursed blood" and rot. There are others we are unfamiliar with.

Note this reduction of difference to sameness even precipitates the fall of Marika's kingdom at a microcosmic level: she abandons the banished Godfrey for a male version of herself, Radagon. Peace maintained by Radagon's marriage to Rennala (servant of the lunar god), a union of the solar and lunar principles, was shattered. One of Marika's incestuous children with her male counterpart was Melina who, resenting her lineage and servitude to the greater will, stole a shard of death from her uncle and attempted to kill herself. She was unsuccessful, merely rending her soul from body.

She was reborn as Rennala's daughter and set out to assassinate Marika's sons. After the death of Godwyn the Golden, the queen subsequently shatters the Elden Ring (in a fit of madness, presumably).

The moon god, who Ranni is the vessel for, seems to be benevolent for reintroducing death into the world again. Death is, from the vantage of creatures, the boundary of transcendence, the border between finitude and the all-encompassingness of polyvalence, the essential difference of the outside. Death is inconsistent with personal welfare, amounts to the differentiation of self into other. Thus the lunar god seems to possess no delineated, finite "image" to reduce difference to: it is a God of death's conveyance beyond the finite, of finality. Cosmic "castration" or homogenization is contrarily marked by the END of death: outward-orientation, self-transgression (a theme that likewise reoccurs in many of Miyazaki’s games: the hollow curse, the parasitical immortality of Sekiro’s monks). Thus Ranni's patron is a transcendent God: It resides outside the bounds of creaturely finitude, calls souls beyond the Elden Ring's hegemony and limits of any determinate nature. He is a God of inclusion, comprehension: the exemplar of all things, eminently containing them. Notes of Thomistic polyvalent being, Dugin's primordial chaos.

Likewise, in Ranni's person disparate or separated parts re-converge into primordial wholeness: the lineage of the solar principle/greater will with the lunar principle, soul with rent flesh. Melina dies, transcends her parentage and self to become Ranni; the inversion of Marika’s bourgeois self-perpetuation into Radagon. In her the inclusion of difference juxtaposed to Marika's effort to replace it with a self-same counterfeit.