Xenogears: some messy talk about Biblical quotes

[myaru]

This all started with with Milton, because Book 9 is about the fall of man, and you find quotes like ye shall be as gods, and-- of course I thought of the opening movie from Xenogears. (What else would I think of? Not the nature of sin, please.) Watching that reminded me of the other quote - I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev 22:12) - which everyone is so proud of finding and reporting to me for GA's references section.

They're not on the site because I didn't think they were worth making an entirely new section for. Biblical quotes are a different beast from names and places, in my opinion. With Judah or Sandalphon I can write a short paragraph on what it is in the game and what it is in mythology, and that's it. These have no place in the game the way the other stuff does.

Well, I can't say that. The Existence quotes the Revelations passage to Fei, I think. I'd have to look.

Anyway. They weren't worth talking about on GA because I think the inference is pretty clear: I am Alpha and Omega, judging from the way it's presented in the opening and by dialogue, can be attributed to the Existence. I guess that's Abel's meeting with him. Ye shall be as gods can be attributed to Deus. The former is said by god, the latter by the serpent. The one thing that is clear about the Existence and Deus in the game is that Deus is a false god, or a destroyer, and the Existence claims to be god as the characters would understand it.

I don't think you can follow this reference any further, because the WE is not trying to judge the world, though I suppose he wants to destroy Deus for pragmatic reasons - he/she/it wants to rejoin the rest of its essence. You have to step away from Revelations, which supplies the immediate tension of oh shit, apocalypse, and go to some mystic Jewish traditions, which I still think are the core of the game despite the surface conflicts between religions.

I think the Wave Existence = Shekinah, given the whole 'imprisoned in Zohar' problem. But that's another topic. I'm writing it to remind myself later.

So, like. All of this is to say that I've been trying to decide how to interpret you shall be as gods if I'm not going to read it as a straight up comparison between God and Satan. It's not referring to temptation, because Deus wasn't giving them a choice. Participation in 'becoming god' is only voluntary for Krelian, and everyone else is sucked in whether they like it or not. (It can be taken literally too. The fall of man to the planet surface, yeah.) And Krelian wasn't tempted - he was pissed off, and thought returning everything to god was a good idea because people suck. I CAN RELATE.

But there's also the Tree of Knowledge, which has a physical representation in the game in the form of the Razael supercomputer. In The Zohar (the book, not the one-eyed brick) there was an interesting image of the leaves of the Tree having spells and other things written on them that Enoch read, and as this is a source of god-like power, I think you can equate the technological Razael to it.

The problem here is equating the Tree of Knowledge to the Path of Sephirot, which kind of seems to happen in the game, but not really. That is, the path to god is twofold - one way to get there is via Razael, which Krelian chooses to use. He chooses knowledge, Fei chooses... life. Or action. I'm not sure, but I think in Kabbalah, if you equate the sephirot with anything, the path is tied up with the Tree of Life, not Knowledge. Maybe I'm oversimplifying that. This is only a problem because Takahashi's script screws with what I actually read. I mean, what it's saying is that there isn't only one path - that's the meaningful, didactic lesson in this story. The entire game pounds that into your head.

Fei merges and releases with Zohar, in Grahf's words. That's the goal. So he ascends the path, finds the Existence, and returns. That's the basic mystic journey. I really wish I liked Fei more if he's going to be the quintessential mystic of Xenogears. I used to think of Krelian that way, but he does something else. He uses the knowledge to transform himself - and I guess in that way he's parallel to Enoch, who is the real Mystic of mystics - but I'm not sure how I feel about this. If Razael = Knowledge, he commits the sin of taking from the tree, and so he is the fallen man, and Fei is the transcendent, spiritually. The latter is true, but is the former? Krelian's crime is the willful use of his knowledge to do terrible things. That's the essence of sin - but knowing isn't.

I'm not any closer to how I want to read that quote. The answer is: there's no clean parallel.

Also, analytic skill? None here.

It's been so long since I played that I have to rethink everything I thought back when I cared more. Damn. I think the problem I'm having has a lot to do with my last playthrough and my last reading of anything Kabbalah or religious were both in '05. Milton doesn't count. I need to find some theology on the fall.

Maybe I won't write those editorials.

Comments

[rfriel.livejournal.com]

The "Ye Shall Be As Gods" quote in the intro always confused me, because I don't see any clear parallel between the Eldridge disaster and the fall of man.

The problem is that Deus says it before the ship has crashed. After the ship has crashed, Deus needs to repair its biological parts, so it creates humans who will eventually become part of it, thus becoming "as gods" in some sense. But when it says "Ye Shall Be As Gods," it's not talking to the humans it created, it's talking to the Eldridge crew, all of whom except Abel are about to die--and it's not intending for the Eldridge to crash, it's intending to go to the "main planet." So I've always resigned myself to the interpretation that Deus' original plan involved the Eldridge crew "being as gods" on the main planet, in some literal/figurative sense, and that we can't go any further than that because both the game and PW keep Deus' original intent a mystery.

This is really unsatisfying, though, because (as you've said) the themes of temptation, forbidden knowledge, and fall into sin seem so relevant to the events of the main game, especially the antithesis/contrast between Fei and Krelian. But, err, how could Deus possibly be referring to those events when it presumably had no idea they would happen at the time it said the quote? I really don't know what the best interpretive choice is.

[myaru.livejournal.com]

If you're going to make a parallel with the Eldridge, it would be a fall through pride - for humanity in general, as a consequence of creating Deus. But that's not what the Genesis quote says, unless you reach far enough behind it to make the association with Satan's fall. It's a stretch. (And if you can't count on people to recognize Cain and Abel, why count on them to recognize the context of an actual quote?)

The only explanation I can think of is similar to what you said - that Deus had some plan for his return to the home planet that involved the crew or the passengers. The PW translations about Lost Jerusalem might say something about that, but I don't know. Perhaps he intended to use the passengers as organic material from the beginning? He might not have been finished. The thing you fight in the Eldridge is the decayed remnant of his original body, I always thought, and it looked like it was still in an embryonic state.

The significance may yet be in some mystic interpretation of the quote or event, but I can't think of anything.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

The only explanation I can think of is similar to what you said - that Deus had some plan for his return to the home planet that involved the crew or the passengers.

...I wrote a fanfic about that once. >_> It was before the PW translations existed, so I was left guessing about the context/meaning of some of the references in the opening movie. Basically the idea was that once it had become self-aware, it realized that the Wave Existence was a "god," and planned to merge with it and return to its home dimension, in a way that would take all the passengers and the ship too, by... converting them to pure energy, I guess. Shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I think I may have done that on purpose, given the number of nods to it in the game itself.

...but I never published it anywhere online because I fretted about not being able to get the writing "perfect" enough, and because without knowing what PW actually said, I couldn't be sure if my interpretation was totally wrong, even if it made for a good (better?) story idea. If any fandom really would tear you limb from limb for BEING WRONGGGG, it was that one, back in the day. Oh, Xenofandom. :p

[myaru.livejournal.com]

I wish you'd put that up. XD That's a really interesting idea, and nobody spends time on Deus or its possible consciousness. I can see why, since it'd be incredibly abstract, but still. Anybody who tackles that deserves praise.

Oh man, the nods to 2001 are even more blatant in Xenosaga. I hadn't seen the movie at the time I played Xenogears, so I didn't even notice them.

Fuck fandom. :P

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Done. http://amorpha.zensenbutai.com/genesis.html I uploaded it here because I actually forgot my FTP login for azusa.leamonde.net. *headdesk* What's TC's current contact info, so I can ask to have it reset?

...I cared so much about what fandom thought, even when I claimed I didn't. @_@ It's honestly kind of sad to think about now, because it kept me from posting or even trying to write quite a few things.

[myaru.livejournal.com]

Now I really wish you'd put that up. You gave Deus motivation. His actions are inexplicable in the game, and I don't remember what the PW said about them, but the birth of his awareness in your story makes it very human, whereas I always felt the official explanations were lacking.

I suppose you could argue Deus is the real reference to Hal, come to think of it. That's what your story made me think. The SOL9000 is such an obvious one that it distracts from more pertinent references like Miang, or, perhaps, even Deus.

Yeah, I did too. I still care somewhat about fandom opinion, even though I don't want to. With Xenogears though, it's like the culmination of years of canon nazi crap and insecurity over having the WRONG INFORMATION OMG and-- I guess that's the same thing.

Leamonde.net is still probably the best way to get a hold of him. If you still have an account you can PM him, or... huh, I don't think I have his email or AIM anymore.

[hyuga.livejournal.com]

I long since gave up on trying to read anything into anything in Xenogears. But just my $0.02 USD: I always assumed Deus was referring to using humans as parts. This works even before the crash, because Deus *was* partially disassembled/disabled, and was basically trying to take control of the entire Eldridge and incorporate it, people and all, into itself. In fact, from Deus' perspective it was a massive upgrade. What better to give itself more mobility than to make a massive spaceship a part of itself?

[myaru.livejournal.com]

Well, it's true there are some things that just don't line up and never will. There are parts of the dialogue and designer notes that convince me Takahashi did use certain symbols - they mesh too well to have been used ignorantly. That, I believe.

But as for his intent in naming the omnigears after the twelve tribes of Israel, who the hell knows? I've stopped trying to divine his intent with incomplete information. I'm taking it farther because I just like this kind of speculation. A lot of the stuff he did seems not to have any meaning anyway, but lit majors do nothing but assign meaning where it may or may not be, right? :D

But -- terraforming ftw? It would've been interesting if Deus intended to actually merge with the ship. Up above we talked about something similar. Deus doesn't appear to be a mature construct until Krelian takes over; maybe it created humans on the planet as parts because they were something it recognized from the colony ship. They could have been something else instead.

[exirehg.livejournal.com]

Maybe the designers put 'you shall be as gods' because it sounded -cool-. XD Leave it to me to have nothing informative or interesting to say.

It is kind of funny that when you start talking about Xenogears again after forever, I find that I just recently started replaying it. Been a long time since I've played it, excessively long since I've gotten to the end. The first few hours of disc 2 turns me off even when I don't want it to. Finally got Elly in my party, yay! Actually...unless I put an Ether Doubler on her, she's not that useful. Not to say she's Rico or anything. XD

I found the intriguing Biblical notes, hints, and references in the game to be fascinating. It influenced me so, so that I do similar things in my novel as well. Oddly enough I just created an Enoch character =p. Hoo boy, been forever since I went on LJ. Nice to see your still active and neurotic as usual. XD Kidding...mostly.