Bloodborne Lore Extra: The Mythology & Meanings of the Messengers, Part 2
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- Опубліковано 20 вер 2024
- As the psychopomps of Bloodborne, the Messengers perform a valuable service transporting the spirit of the player-character between worlds using the lamps and headstones of awakening. But why lamps? And why are the Messengers found within the Brain of Mensis and the Winter Lanterns? We gain insight into these mysteries in this episode.
Text is available here: docs.google.co...
References:
Ashikaga, Ensho. “The Festival for the Spirits of the Dead in Japan.” Western Folklore 9, no. 3 (1950): 217-28.
Bailey, James Blake. The Diary of a Resurrectionist, 1811-1812, to which are Added an Account of the Resurrection Men in London and a Short History of the Passing of the Anatomy Act. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1896.
www.gutenberg....
Behler, George K. “Grave Doubts: Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of Death.” Journal of British Studies 42, no. 2 (2003): 206-35.
Brooks, Anne Page. “Mizuko Kuyo.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 8, no. 3 (1981): 119-47.
Dittmar, Jenna M. and Piers D. Mitchell. “From Cradle to Grave Via the Dissection Room: The Role of Foetal and Infant Bodies in Anatomical Education from the Late 1700s to Early 1900s.” Journal of Anatomy 229, no. 6 (2016): 713-22.
MacDonald, Helen. “Procuring Corpses: The English Anatomy Inspectorate, 1842 to 1858.” Medical History 53, no. 3 (2009): 379-96.
Miyazaki, Fumiko and Duncan Williams. “The Intersection of the Local and Translocal at the Sacred Site: The Case of Osorezan in Tokugawa Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 28, no. 3 (2001): 399-440.
Tarazano, D. Lawrence. “People Feared Being Buried Alive So Much They Invented These Special Safety Coffins.” U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Smithsonian Magazine.
www.smithsonia...
“The History of the Cambion.” (2018)
writinginmargi...
Van Vleck, Richard. “Signals from the Grave: Early Patents for Detecting Life in Buried Persons.” American Artifacts 45 (1999).
www.americanart...
Additional Resources:
Last Protagonist and Aruki Mania. “Bloodborne Japanese Retranslation Guide.”
Bloodborne Japanese Retranslation Guide
Hunter’s Dream. “Bloodborne - Chime Maiden.”
• Bloodborne - Chime Maiden
#bloodborne
#lore
God, the detail FromSoft puts into everything is insane. Every little thing tells a story that has an equivalent in the real world. Pulling inspiration from all over the world. I wish I could be as remarkably creative as they are.
They are maniacs, but I hear the work ethic and environment at fromsoft studio is hard-core also so they put the work in
I'm so glad you're back. This is top, top stuff.
Damn dude I remember telling you my observation about grave bells on one of your original uploads and you got back to me saying that you would make a video about that. I never actually expected you to go through with it! Thanks for bringing these back man
Hey, I remember that! Great minds :) I had thought I'd make it into a Bite-Sized Bloodborne piece, but it ended up working better with the Messengers. Glad to see you back as well
Not video related, but it's Absolutely amazing to see you return. I hope you're doing well, and that whatever transpired to force you to step away has either been resolved, or is at least improving.
(Also hoping agony of effort returns but personal viewer greed aside it Is nice to see you back)
Wow, that's really thoughtful of you to say and very much appreciated. I had to step away and focus full-time on some important IRL stuff last year. I wasn't sure if that responsibility would last a few weeks or a few years, but it's no longer ongoing. I decided in February that I'd take up the lore hobby again as a result.
I plan to re-upload all my videos soon, maybe even this week. I wanted to make some very minor tweaks to a couple of them (mainly just adding a text overlay or edit to a few areas that I addressed/corrected in later videos). That's been the major delay in getting around to those. Thanks again for the warm welcome back.
I just discovered this channel via TA and... wow! Really well researched and clearly expressed through expert editing. A real joy to watch. Thank you for all your top tier work, these deserve more attention!
"Let us sit about, and speak feverishly. Chatting into the wee hours of new ideas, of the higher plane!" 🤺
Thanks for checking out the channel. I was really glad TA did some Bloodborne work. The Yharnam religion episode in particular was really interesting.
I think the lamps are also incense burners. Smells can cross planes like sounds of bells do. I haven't played BB in a while but there is an item that allows you to lose blood echoes and go back to the hunter's dream and its animation is the player character smelling something. Also smelling salts are known to wake people up from deep slumber. Sleep and death are closely related too.
In one of his Bloodborne videos, Tarnished Archaeologist hinted that in a future episode, he would talk about how the true origins of the Hunters is when they abducted the child of blood. Perhaps that child was dissected at the memory altar?
Been Bin-Watching your videos from another channel but now that I know your back I am just gonna have to rewatch all the videos again!
Sweet, thanks for coming back!
Gehrman performing multiple eldritch dissections and sacrifices in some sort of fit of rage and misery in order to summon Moon Presence or any Great One that will listen... it almost reminds me of Frankenstein's Monster... or perhaps... Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (or perhaps Pinocchio in general?), which is certainly a great connection considering The Plain Doll.
7:14 In Buddhism/shinto monks often incorporate bells or a better example is a monk’s staff, which has metal rings on them that jingle. Many monks traveled on foot, and even tho it looks like a walking stick or staff, the rings jingle like bells to keep bad spirits away. Just like ceremonial bowls, Tibetan singing bowls and so forth-resonance is very important in protecting ‘good spirits/energy’ from ‘malevolence/bad spirits’.
There is a 1995 horror novel by Jonathan Aycliffe called The Matrix. It is a ghostly occult tale about a man in Edinburgh. Without spoiling too much, there are creatures in the book whose desceiption matches the Messengers almost 1 to 1. At night these creatures suck the life and energy out of their victims and leave strange marks behind. I highly recommend the book.
The altar in a Catholic church is also a sacrificial altar, as the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice re-presenting the sacrifice of Christ at Calvary
That's a damn good point right here.
Doesn't Gherman's dialogue change after killing the Orphan?
Also, instant sub, been watching all your videos one by one
I always got this really weird nightmare before christmas vibe with the messengers, especially the intro as they hover above you, they even have that claymation look and motion. Kinda look like some of the side characters designs too.
Re: Winter Lanterns (Initial stream of conciousness while watching this):
If the Brain of Mensis is the combined conciousness of the "stillborn" scholars (i.e. those who died "for real" - or came as close to "true death" as one can get in this weird world) - seems to me there are A LOT of graves in the Hunter's dream, and we only have Eileen, the player Hunter, and Djura as examples of those who "made it through" the hunt, one way or the other, without "dying".
Therefore - the twisted messengers of the Winter Lanterns are "stillborn Hunters" who got lost/died during the Hunt.
P.S. Its Mike Becker. Good to meet you. 🙂
Hey Mike---Yeah, the more I think about the Messengers, the more I think they're the humans that attempted to achieve godhood becoming Great Ones but failed. They're angels, in a sense, but not gods. Death and ascension are parallels in the game, and the whole goal of the scholarly figures is to be reborn on a higher plane of existence (a dream/nightmare afterlife) and as a higher life form (Great One/god). The Messengers seem to be the scholars who tried to be reborn as gods, but were "stillborn" and didn't achieve the goal. The PC becomes an infant Great One, in effect born anew in Childhood's Beginnings. But I think we have to assume we're the first and only **hunter** to achieve that. Other **scholars** might have achieved godhood, though, if Rom was indeed a Byrgenwerth scholar who became a Great One. The Mensis Scholars collectively became a rotten, malformed Great One.
Anyway, with all that throat clearing out of the way, I'd want something more concrete linking the Messengers to the hunters beyond the Doll's line saying the Messengers "worship and serve the hunters." It's certainly possible that some of the Messengers are dead hunters. I just wish we had a better idea of where the Messengers in the Hunter's Dream came from. Like, there's this one lone Messengers in the bath when we first get to the Dream. Is he supposed to be the spirit of some known character who died and failed to become a Great One? Or is it just a Messenger and nothing more? I've struggled with that one for a long time.
Agreed.
I generally operate on overarching themes/real-time considerations both heard and remembered/an "active" listening technique that leads to loosely associated, but sometimes (sometimes oftentimes) reasonable ideas (and more often than not, at the very least, ideas that somehow inspire the yet seen paths of arrival to better/more accurate and precise/if not "correct" ideas in the thoughts of those I, uh, participate with 🙂) - not unlike the improvisation of a jazz quartet or a rock band feeling the frequency of a given performance and somehow, almost impossibly, making magic by going "off script" (as it were) and arriving at the same idea/expression at the same time... That type of musical unity something that is both shared by those participating/playing, yet somehow separate in and of itself - the idea/expression, turning out, to just be sitting there, waiting in the immediate aether, all moments leading to it suggesting the simultaneous arrival was inevitable... Because it both made sense, and was right.
All THAT said - lol - some concrete in game indicator would be the key.
@@TheHi-NoteFunClub-BeatsByMikeinteresting take, friend! ❤
Great series but I do think you glossed over what, on my playthrough, was the most noticeable instance of bells appearing. The Church Wardens in the Cathedral Ward wear bells around their neck and can ring them to induce frenzy. How would you accommodate that within your wider point about the role of bells in traversing dimensions?
On the topic of Hunter's Dream and its origin; if, as you said, it has a similar origin as the other nightmares in the game, what if the one who was dissected was Maria?
It's just something off the top of my head and not well thought through, but we know Maria hailed from Cainhurst. What if later on, after joining the hunters under Gehrman, Maria was expecting a child and this piqued the interest of the Healing Church, as she was a Vileblood. Maybe they wanted to study the child, which Maria would naturally be against. I'm not sure what would happen next. The most probable option seems they would wait until she gave birth. But Maria knew that bringing the child would mean its eventual death at the hands of the Healing Church's surgeons anyway, so, what if, she decided to miscarry the child, to not let it suffer.
After the Church found out what happened, they may have still attempted to recover unborn child, which would have been a surgical removal, or a "dissection" in a sense, similar to how the children were removed after death from their mothers in the other two nightmares. In this theory, Maria didn't survive, which is why we find her hair ornament in the shop in the waking world, along with presumably her clothes, which she could've worn while she was expecting. We can also find the Doll praying at a gravestone we use to enter the Hunter's Nightmare. It's too small to be Maria's grave, so perhaps it could be her child's, after the Church was done with the unborn child and Gehrman buried it out of respect. Alternatively, it could be buried where the stump with the Messengers is in the Hunter's Dream and the gravestone really does belong to Maria.
Whether this all happened under Gehrman or his approval I'm not sure. I definitely don't think he was the one who performed it. He may have agreed initially, as long as Maria would be alive after the matter, but he'd definitely be against it after she miscarried the child. The church would still go ahead without Gehrman anyway. After she died, he would be overcome with grief, maybe even go mad for a time, which would explain why he made a lifelike replica of Maria in the form of the Doll. Out of regret and sorrow, blaming himself for aggreeing with the experiment and for not being able to save her.
We know the baby they took from cos is the one in the college you can see and hit in an open cage. Also, if you slay orphan before you get mergo, you stop the nightmares Germane have. The doll says he sleeps soundly.
About the Winter Lanterns, instead of being mothers, could they be nurses? From the Research hall? Maria consoled the patients, so she might have worn an attire similar to the actual nurses of the hall when she did that. This would explain the similar clothing between the Doll and WLs.
And the messengers are then drawn to the lantern nurses because of their sins - that is, being accomplices in the horrors of the hall.
The alter in the workshop was a child they stole to call the moon presence and when moon asked for baby, Laurence said okay take germane I'll be back with another and put germ in a moon pocket dimension till he gets a baby.
"The" (main/real) Bloodborne, could be the dead/killed infant born by/with Yharnam's magical blood(then called vileblood), who died in the waking world (Yharnam stone could be a prove of it) and grow up in anothe other dimension /plane of existence (the dream, or the nightmare anyway). Becoming what we then recognize as "the Moon Presence", living in the dream and maybe cursing men with the beast side(as vengeance in comparison for the brutality of their orginal sin) as she/he/it has done with their "father"/predecessor Pthumerians for their sin of killing this baby.
So, maybe he/she/it was the real bloodborne, born from the blood (as also Annalise is trying to emulate with the same Yharnam's magical blood) , and mergo was the other Yharnam's child granted by Odeon.
But in this case, what we have to investigate is the relationship between these brothers(and maybe the whole "family"), it's strange, as one led you to kill the other in cyclic nights that anyhow return to slaughter humans.
Even take into consideration the name of the Hunter's dream: would it not have also been the dream of the surgeons to understand life before birth?
So how does this play into the Pthumerians having loads of decor and statues in the image of the messengers?
I'm not entirely sure. To some extent, I think their presence in the labyrinth is to underscore that the Messengers are (or at least represent) spirits of dead children, specifically stillborn children. The Pthumerians, I believe, simply represent the dead. They're found in a place called the "Tomb of the Gods." Their name, phonetically in Japanese, is likely pronounced as "tomb-arians" as if they're "tomb people." They represent dead bodies. In that regard, having statues of Messengers in the tomb seems appropriate.
Lets gooo !! 👌