Introduction
“In Yharnam, they produce more blood than alcohol, as the former is more intoxicating.”
Bloodborne is not shy about embracing addiction themes as part of its eldritch Lovecraftian vibes. The “Old Blood” is explicitly said to be more intoxicating than alcohol, and the citizens of Yharnam pursue blood despite the insanity and gruesome decay it brings. The Old Blood as a substance and the Hunt as the chase for it form a good allegory on their own, but, to me, the really compelling aspect is in how heavily the game explores the notion of transcendence given how central that concept is to what we seek from the world outside our finite human selves.
Lovecraft
Like many prolific writers who suffered from a particularly severe case of bigotry, Lovecraft attempted to reconcile his deeply held contradictions through his work but becomes more interesting as an artifact of study himself.
Lovecraft was deeply passionate about science though he held no formal qualifications himself. Both his parents had experienced violent episodes that led to institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital, and he himself experienced a litany of both physical and mental health ailments while living through extreme poverty. These were debilitating enough that he never completed high school or attended college, but he still wrote to publish work about scientific topics in local newspapers. At one point he published his own independent periodical that reviewed astronomy while maintaining a home chemistry lab and telescope setup. His works sometimes go into great authentic detail when describing these labs, no doubt a reflection of his enthusiasm for actual laboratory work and analysis.
Unfortunately, a passion for science does not translate to anything resembling an approach free of predetermined biases and prejudices. Consider the following excerpt:
“…could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities.”
He’s not describing any creature out of his stories here. This is how he chose to describe Syrian and Italian immigrants he observed in New York. As for Chinatown,
“You can’t imagine the horror of being engulfed in a maelstrom of repulsive Orientals whose aberrant physiognomies & rat-like temperaments grate more & more on the sensibilities of an aesthetically impressionable person.”
And he did head-to-head comparisons too:
“There is here a grave and mighty problem beside which the negro problem is a jest—for in this case we have to deal not with childlike half-gorillas, but with yellow, soulless enemies whose repulsive carcasses house dangerous mental machines warped culturelessly in the single direction of material gain at any cost.”
Lovecraft’s revulsion here is pure in its irrationality. He simply does not like non-Anglo-Saxon people as an axiom of his worldview, so much so that even when he did like a non-Anglo-Saxon person, he would bend his reasoning in very unscientific ways. He was actually married to a Ukrainian-Jewish businesswoman and immigrant, Sonia Greene, for a brief two years, which he rationalized as an exception that proves the rule.
He would say Greene had shown assimilation to a superior Western culture was possible for lesser races that could sever a connection to their inferior heritage, even though Lovecraft was the one struggling financially, physically, mentally, and professionally. Greene was seven years older than him (he was 33 and had never been with a woman before) and almost took a maternal caretaking position to support him, which Lovecraft might have appreciated given how early he lost both his parents. After an economic downturn ruined Sonia’s fashion business, Lovecraft looked for work on the streets of New York, but he would regularly launch into racist tirades upon seeing immigrants on the street. He was not exactly a team player. Greene could no longer look past this prejudice and bitterness, and she left him.
So, despite Lovecraft’s love for science, absolute atheism, and strict materialism, he struggled immensely with intense emotions rooted in irrational aversions, and he tortured almost every instance of diversity into confirmation for his biases.
The “cosmic horror” he writes about is derived from the Others he was horrified about in his own life, directly provoking his imagination of what an otherworldy (literally, Other-worldly) entity behind the forces of change might look like. The protagonist of his story is often an educated and radical skeptic who leans on scientific processes and rationality to feel an order to the universe. The secondary antagonists are often a conspiratorial cult or secluded society who represent the agents of primitive degeneration walking on Earth. He was not subtle about using minorities, immigrants, and indigenous nations as inspiration for these agents.
It’s also noteworthy that Lovecraft strongly despised the Theosophist Society as one such pseudoscientific occult subculture, yet loved their mythology for world-building and borrowed heavily from their concepts. He wrote in letters that he too was building a mythological pantheon, but without the pretense of trying to start a religion. The opposite, in fact. He wanted to illustrate that the universe was indifferent to humans, that the “primitive” peoples worshipped the indifferent materialist forces while scientific skepticism reveals the harsh truth. Recall above that Lovecraft characterized Asians, and in particular Chinese ethnic groups, as ruthlessly efficient towards material pursuits as a result of lacking soul and culture. Totally unrelated to rationalizations about his own financial instability and reliance on a Jewish immigrant as a sugar mommy. After all, to him, he was just a temporarily embarrassed aristocrat who appreciated art and culture as human achievements, while the classless immigrants and minorities were ruining the community by pooling together capital earned from low-wage jobs to start businesses especially in underserved markets and communities. That script might sound a little painfully familiar.
Retrospectively, it’s a little amusing to see two different types of racist pseudosciences interact with each other. Lovecraft attempted to make self-aware and critical references to the Theosophists as a pseudoscientific occult group. Meanwhile, the Theosophists, particularly after his death, believed that Lovecraft was genuinely a medium receiving some kind of spiritual insight that his personal resistance and lack of training prevented him from interpreting correctly.
Transcendence
The core framework of transcending is nothing new. We can go back to Hesiod and the Dionysian Mysteries to see examples of this in Ancient Greece. Some of the oldest branches of Hinduism build on the premise that turning inwards and looking past the ego leads to a recognition of oneness with the world. The American transcendentalist movement with Thoreau and Emerson is often considered the first philosophical movement to have grown from American soil, and it’s no coincidence that it emerged out of dissatisfaction with “Western” industrialization and exoticism of the “Oriental” cultures. You can find a lot of interconnectedness and impermanence repeated in modern DBT techniques and Buddhist-inspired spiritual programs. Jungian psychoanalysts examine the archetypes surrounding transcendental experiences and operators. I certainly reference the concepts a lot in my ranting.
My notes about Talk to Me draws heavily on what Jung’s successors have said about substance use in youth subcultures that are driven by a desire for transcendental experiences to develop both their own identity and connections to a community. We know there must be more within this infinite universe than our finite sense show us, or at least our imagination can process the concept of infinity as something we lack. Yet, we are bound only to what our bodies allow in their limited form. To escape it and transcend or connect with something outside of ourselves, perhaps even greater than ourselves. Then, we want to share that transcendental experience in the hopes of deepening or heightening it through our connections with others.
Lovecraft’s work deals with a corruption of this concept of transcendence. As his protagonists seek to grow their insight into the truths of the world, their own sanity and ability to handle the universe are questioned. The creatures worshipped as gods in his stories come closer to an alien species that have incomprehensible rules and experiences of consciousness. Yet,he still ends up articulating a WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) moral psychology featuring original sin, predestination, indifference to prayer, nature as a corrupt foil to pure civilization, and suspicion of curiosity as temptation for forbidden knowledge. These are just expressed in terms of cosmic horror and incomprehensible entities that engage with us in our profane world rather than a philosophy of sacred divinity that set a universe in motion.
In stories like The Shadow over Innsmouth or The Rats in the Walls, original sin manifests through ancestral connections. In the former, a captain meets a mysterious tribe that maintains relations with an amphibious alien race and brings these aliens back for intermarriages under the promise of abundant wealth and immortality. Lovecraft is not just critical of a decline due to exchanges with exotic cultures, but also capitalism as a driving force behind the exchanges as a result of prioritizing profit over everything else, including cultural and racial purity maintained through strict segregation.
The second story is where many of Lovecraft’s contradictions come to a clash. The protagonist in this case is a stereotypical refined scholar and gentleman whose family curse reveals an original sin that tainted their descendants. He wrote the story just a couple years after his mother died in the same pyschiatric asylum his father also died in. I mentioned this contradiction earlier in the context of his marriage: despite claiming to be from a superior pinnacle of “Aryan” evolution, Lovecraft was experiencing the downfall of an old-money family in a rapidly changing community with new people and practices he didn’t recognize. We can see how this leaks into the protagonist’s journey as he explores an ancestral home revealing a history of imprisoning humans for perverse rituals that included cannabalism. A common notion in Lovecraft’s day was to project the qualities of individual organisms onto social organizations like family, ethnicites, and countries. In the same way an organism is born, matures, and dies, family bloodlines might have at one point peaked before degenerating into insanity and ill health as time went on. Perhaps Lovecraft thought it was good to be in something from the ground floor, but he came too late for that, at the end, when the best is over. His father’s commitment to a psychiatric institution was the result of neurosyphilis, which was highly stigmatized and assumed to cause degeneration in offspring. Lovecraft no doubt saw his own health issues as a type of original sin haunting his bloodline. Many scholars have argued that this also allowed him to deflect from taking accountability for himself if he was biologically predetermined to be more degenerate.
It’s also in this notion of original sin and ancestral decay that we see how Lovecraft, despite his atheism and materialism, craved something akin to transcendence, at least psychologically. He was an avid traveler even as he lacked funds, with a special appreciation for old colonial architecture. From the perspective of cosmic proportions nurtured by his passion for astronomy, he could see his own life’s tragedies and supposed degeneration as ultimately insignificant. In his imagination, this meant the freedom to explore the pantheon of eldritch entities and symbols he created for his stories. Engaging with cosmic insignificance and the awe of a mechanistic universe across literature and astronomy allowed him to experience something akin to the transcendence of the ego without a core religious or spiritual framework.
I’m reminded of a phrase from Hellraiser here: “the doors to the pleasures of Heaven or Hell, I didn’t care which.” Frank Cotton, the movie and source novel’s antagonist, finds that totally submitting to extreme hedonism has left him with nothing on Earth to pursue for fulfillment anymore. At some point he’s so desperate for a new experience to chase that he ends up unlocking an eternal torture from otherworldly beings who obliterate the distinction between pain and pleasure that parametrize the limits of human experience. Clive Barker, the creator, explicitly connects this mindset to addiction and consumerism. The Cenobites who answer Frank’s call mention that they are “demons to some, angels to others.” Recall how Lovecraft said that his eldritch creatures appeared as gods to the “primitive” humans, while others could see them as extra-terrestrial beings with frightening indifference to human affairs at best, and malicious sadism for personal amusement at worst.
Trickle-Down Economics
Bloodborne consistently weaves threads of ambivalence and ambiguity into the story beats surrounding transcendence, but notably inverts Lovecraft’s perspective as an elitist repulsed by those suffering in the lowest classes of society. The institutions of Yharnam are to blame in this story for the hubris of chasing transcendence through an appeal to eldritch entities. The residents who follow these institutions, be it from fear or faith, are led into a tragic nightmare in an arguably literal sense. The Victorian aesthetics of Yharnam invites comparisons to the historical intersections of healing, science, and religion through apothecaries, colleges, and churches.
From Software, the studio that made the game, uses environmental storytelling with extremely minimal narration, so rather than going through the game’s events, we might look at the lore chronologically.
The Great Ones are the eldritch entities of Bloodborne’s universe who mostly lived in a network of caverns underground. Millions of years before the city of Yharnam was built, an ancient civilization called the Pthumerians built a sophisticated civilization carved into these caverns. They resembled humans, but are a distinct species in the fashion of Theosophic Root Races. When the Pthumerians discovered the Great Ones slumbering in these caves, they started collecting what we later call the “Old Blood” from the bodies and secretions of these entities. Consuming it unlocked supernatural powers and conscious awareness of higher dimensions that could not have been ordinarily perceived through the finite limits of a mortal organic body.
The Old Blood became a critical part of the structure of Pthumerian civilization. A hierarchical caste system formed around the distribution of Old Blood, with the final ruler being Queen Yharnam after who the city we play in is named. Other layers of the caste involved ritual keepers who dedicated themselves to the collection, processing, and allocation of the Old Blood. There were also guardians for the Great Ones as they slept, which the player encounters should they go exploring in these underground ruins.
The Great Ones are not a monolith, however. They have complex motives and agendas that are far deeper than the typical Lovecraftian indifference to humans. And that’s actually more horrifying than apathy might be. It’s said that “Every Great One loses its child, and yearns for a surrogate.” In other words, the Great Ones are conscious and sympathetic to the humans who venerate them. Since the Great Ones are incapable of reproducing, they form relationships with humans to bear cosmic children. Oedon, a formless Great One who is known only through sound and presence of blood, chooses Queen Yharnam to bear his, named Mergo. This stands out starkly with Lovecraft’s framing of mating with alien races as a secret degeneration of the race under the surface of civilization; it is the aspiration of this advanced civilization to merge with otherworldly aliens. The Pthumerians celebrated the fusion of a royal bloodline with a cosmic one as a form of ascension. Unfortunately for the Pthumerians, mass consumption of the Old Blood did not actually lead to mass ascension but mass mutation. Rather than Lovecraft’s emphasis on original sin that haunts bloodlines, individual destinies were shaped by their contemporary relation to the Old Blood.
The guardians and enforcers who consumed massive amounts of blood gained immortality but still decayed, so the players fights them as emaciated skeletal figures. In particularly brutal instance, Pthumerians surgically altered giant guardians to replace their limbs with weapons, including cannons bolted into their spines. Others that sought pyromancy powers appear charred and ashen, as if slowly burned alive. Some seem to have succumbed to bloodlust, which leads to a beastly transformation that resembles something between a satyr and minotaur, and other Pthumerian creatures attack them in the dungeons. The ruling castes seem to have grown obese and doughy, working in tight groups to continue their blood-drunk euphoria.
Flora and fauna were impacted by exposure to the Old Blood too. Rats that ate rotting Pthumerian corpses grew giant and sprouted multiple eyes. Plants that sprouted from soil tainted with the Old Blood grew into sentient centipede-like creatures capable of channeling cosmic energy. Their giant watchdogs also transformed with flesh crystallizing into armor and blood boiling to the point of fire.
Blood also wasn’t the only thing driving madness and transformations. Another avenue to asenscion is found in Insight, representing the “eyes” spiritually and mentally within someone, though sometimes also displayed through the growth or implantation of physical eyes.
An enemy called “Labyrinth Sages” are Pthumerians whose pursuit of Insight rather than the Old Blood produces a different kind of madness. One might almost liken them to different addictive substances. They were part of an elite caste of religious scholars whose purpose was to discover and preserve the intellectual traditions of the Old Blood and Great Ones. Through excessive Insight, the Sages attempted to internalize information too overwhelming for a finite limited brain to process, and so they seem to have lost their senses except to continue attacking any threats. Some Sages wield the bodies of other Pthumerians as weapons, possibly as holy relics as in the case of a saint’s corpse, although some of them are still alive. These Sages appear to be constantly twitching, hyperaggressive, and
Surrogacy
The servants of Queen Yharnam become enemies called “Shadows of Yharnam”, and the Blood Rapture Rune that they drop has a description that reads:
“‘Blood Rapture’ is the raw euphoria of the warmth of blood. Restores HP with visceral attacks, one of the darker hunter techniques. This rune resonates with servants of the Queen, carrier of the Child of Blood, who yearn for their Queen’s blood with little hope of requitement. For them, they find solace in ‘Blood Rapture,’ that serves as a surrogate for their desires.”
The word “surrogate” appears again here, which is no coincidence. A recurring theme in the game is how often people are seeking a substitute for something they cannot have or do themselves.
The Great Ones seek human surrogates since they are doomed to lose any child after conception. The leaders of both the Pthumerians and Yharmanites seek the Old Blood for an evolution they cannot induce within themselves. There’s a symbiotic surrogacy in their dynamic as Great Ones grant surrogate pregnancies in exchange for the transformation seen as ascension. The Moon Presence, having lost a child before, treats Gehrman as a surrogate child which gives the main hub the appearance of a serene nursery with dolls, flowers, and books. The Great One named Kos loses her child as well, so she chooses a human scholar Rom to transform into a mindless premature Great One. Oedon is formless yet is still able to choose Queen Yharnam as a surrogate.
The servants of Queen Yharnam, as well as the later servants of another Queen Annalise, derive their purpose and connection through service to their ruler’s apparently divine and royal bloodline; in its absence, they seek euphoric sensations of blood to fill that lost purpose. The hunter Gehrman was once in love with his pupil Lady Maria, whose guilt for her actions as a hunter lead to her committing suicide, so he crafts a doll in her likeness that becomes animated by a Great One (referred to as The Moon Presence) as his caretaker.
Master Willem and his then-student Laurence, the leader of Byrgenwerth College and later-First Vicar of the Healing Church respectively, used to have a surrogate father-son dynamic. Willem believed insight through eyes was needed to perceive the true nature of reality, while Laurence believed ingesting the Old Blood was the way to understand it. Their split is characterized by Willem as a betrayal, as if Laurence was in line to succeed Willem and the philosophy of insight.
We know there must be more within this infinite universe than our finite sense show us, or at least our imagination can process the concept of infinity as something we lack. Yet, we are bound only to what our bodies allow in their limited form. To escape it and transcend or connect with something outside of ourselves, perhaps even greater than ourselves. Then, we want to share that transcendental experience in the hopes of furthering it through our connections with others.