Affirming an Evil World: The Metaphysics of Berserk

Introduction 🔗

“The affirmation of all that is, and all that one is,”¹ now and forever. Thereby is meaning eternalized.

Weakness is not merely a moral failing but the metaphysical condition of being defined from below: shaped by appetite, fear, or external circumstance rather than governing from within. It is the refusal to behold and accept reality.

This is the precise mechanism through which evil enters the world. It has a semblance in the philosophical traditions this essay draws on, and is unsettlingly literal in Berserk. The Idea of Evil is not imposed on humanity from without; it is constituted by human weakness, the Vortex of Souls given negative form. To understand how that happens, and how it can be resisted, is this essay’s central task.

Kentaro Miura presents a world of seemingly unresolvable horror. An “evil god” born from human suffering orchestrates Causality itself so that pain becomes intelligible. There are no clear signs of paradise—only layers of hell, in this world and the next. Most readings of the story linger on the gore, trauma, and nihilistic undertones, but this essay ventures beyond.

This world could never be summarized by materialism or any single doctrine. Accept the great mysteries and explore the entire universe from within your world. That is the way of magic.

—Flora, B ch. 201

The manga is brimming with perennialist themes. This essay therefore analyzes its metaphysics through (Neo)platonic, Gnostic, and Vedantic lenses, while drawing on the broader principles of Magick and especially the contrast between the left- and right-hand paths of asceticism as a structural axis. Miura demonstrably engaged with real esoteric traditions (Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Alchemy, Yoga, and more). We will focus on their universal principles rather than intricate symbolic systems.

Berserk’s cosmology closely resembles that of Gnosticism, but it ultimately refuses the Gnostic solution: the divine spark extracted from the prison of matter into pure spirit. Miura’s answer is not transcendence but willed, immanent affirmation of what is: the unification of body, mind, and spirit within the crucible itself, which is the only place the work can be done.

Background 🔗

The Neoplatonic Idea of Evil 🔗

Plotinus defined the Good as that on which all existence depends: the source toward which all things aspire and from which all being emanates. The Good is without need, sufficient to itself, the measure of all things. Against this, he placed Evil as a structural opposite: absolute formlessness and absolute lack. Evil is the undetermined and the void of intrinsic quality, form and measure.² As Tolkien explained in his mythology, evil can only corrupt and diminish—never originate³—and this is precisely because, for Plotinus, Evil has no subsistence of its own. It ’exists’ only as that which the soul can turn toward or away from.

Between these poles Plotinus envisioned a spectrum. One is not Evil merely for failing to reach absolute goodness. The orientation is determinant: whether the soul turns toward the Intellectual-Principle and its light, or away from it toward formlessness of matter.⁴ Matter itself is not Evil in the way a vicious or malicious act is Evil; it is Evil in the sense of being the limiting principle, the substrate that receives form and quality from above but generating none of its own.

But mistaking matter for the whole of reality is to fall under the spell of darkness. This is not malevolence, but an equally dangerous ignorance of what is real.

Vice is the appetite that follows from this misdirection. Plotinus is precise: vice has no independent existence, it is parasitic on what it degrades. The soul genuinely suffers from it, and the space this hostile presence can occupy is proportionate to the soul’s own weakness and feebleness:

[T]he Vicious Soul is unstable, swept along from every ill to every other, quickly stirred by appetites, headlong to anger, as hasty to compromises, yielding at once to obscure imaginations, as weak, in fact, as the weakest thing made by man or nature, blown about by every breeze, burned away by every heat.

—Plotinus, Enn. I.8.14

Plotinus insists that this weakness originates not in the body, but in the soul’s failure to maintain its own form, due to external or internal pressure. Crucially, not all souls are determined to fall this way. Some are unaffected by vice, while others may overcome it, and master it. Such mastery is to overcome the bodily nature. In this essay, weakness denotes the soul’s tendency to be defined from below: by appetite, fear, external circumstance, or unmastered daemon. This is contrasted with the strength of governing from within through orientation toward form, measure, and the higher principles.

The Gnostic World 🔗

Gnosticism’s⁵ answer to the question of evil can be summarized as: evil is a product of ignorance, each human contains a divine spark that yearns to reunite with the True God, but remains trapped in the ignorant realm of the material universe, which is maintained by an ignorant creator.

The material world is a single dimension and realm, which is maintained and created by a subordinate craftsman (Demiurgos). Born from Wisdom’s (Sophia’s) misdirected yearning for divinity, the Demiurge is ignorant of the Monad above him.⁶

The universe, the domain of the Archons, is like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon is the earth.

—Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion⁷

Archons are subordinate powers which operate as enforcers of the Demiurge’s prison. They are of the same quality as angels, and might as well be to some, but they represent and support an ignorant power.⁷

Valentinianism, the most prominent Gnostic denomination, maintained that the Demiurge was an incompetent suzerain because of his ignorance, yet maintained that he fought against Satan’s influence. Other Gnostic sects held less charitable views, suggesting that the Demiurge was an actively evil overlord.⁸

Whether or not the warden is actively or passively evil, we must note that a prison is only a prison insofar as it can keep inmates, and not residents; if ignorance governs the Demiurge, its realm, and its subjects, how are the subjects really imprisoned?

The Gnostic anthropology distinguishes between the body/carnal (sarkikos), mind/animating (psychikos), and spirit (pneumatikos).⁹ The former two belong to cosmic powers, whereas the pneuma is a divine spark, trapped or fallen into matter (hyle), unconscious of itself. Its awakening follows knowledge (gnosis), hence the term Gnosticism.

The Tripartiate distinctions were thought of as dynamic orientations, rather than immutable, preordained categories.¹⁰ The lowest being the hylics, those under the spell of carnal illusion. The illusion dominates them to the point of satisfying only personal, bodily needs, and without regard for others—an experience which was likened to a nightmare:

As when one falls sound asleep and finds oneself in the midst of nightmares: running towards somewhere, powerless to get away while being pursued—in hand to hand combat—being beaten—falling from a great height […] sometimes too it seems that one is being murdered […] or killing one’s neighbors, with whose blood one is smeared.

—Valentinus, Gospel of Truth 29:8–25¹¹

If one manages to shift one’s identification from carnal state to one’s animate, rational nature, the unconsciousness will start to diminish. The psychic state is unstable: partly awakened, still susceptible to delusion, unconsciously drawn toward good but not yet free of demonic influence (false animating beliefs).¹⁰

The spiritual element is attained following mystical knowledge (gnosis) of God through directly experiencing his presence. The Truth must be understood on one’s own terms. What is liberated through gnosis is “the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown.”¹² As one’s self-realization unfolds, the final result is to know, and importantly to understand, God, for one is part of God.

The Kabbalah 🔗

Where Neoplatonism traces a hierarchy descending from the One and Gnosticism considers a critical divine event that creates a hostile material prison, the Kabbalah¹³ insists that emanation is a process within God, not away from Him. The supreme God, Ein-Sof, the infinite, is unknowable in itself, but reveals itself through the ten Sefirot, the divine dimensions through which God acts and through which man can ascend.¹⁴

This is not pantheism (as in Baruch Spinoza¹⁵), and the distinction is explained by Cordovero’s formulation: “God is all that exists, but not all that exists is God.” The Absolute is immanent everywhere yet identical with nothing in particular.¹⁶

The Kabbalistic account of evil has two complementary movements. The first is from the Zohar, and is structural, following the Neoplatonic framing of privation of form. Here, the Kelippot (“shells” or “husks”) is the terminal point of emanation where the light has spent itself into formlessness. They are the Sitra Ahra (“the other side”) that has no independent existence. The second movement, following Gikatilla, is positional: evil not as absence, but as displacement: “every act of God, when it is in the place accorded to it at creation, is good; but if it turns and leaves its place, it is evil.” The sitra ahra arises from Sefirot being severed from their proper relations. For example, Din (“divine judgment”) being separated from Ḥesed (“love”).¹⁷

Divine Hierarchy and Polytheism 🔗

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.

Ṛg-veda, Creation Hymn (Nāsadīya), 10.129.

What the Gnostics called Aeons,¹⁸ the Kabbalah understood as the Sefirot, Plotinus understood as the emanating hierarchy of the One,¹⁹ and the Vedic traditions as the gods subordinate to the supreme reality (para brahman) and the Absolute Truth (paraṁ satyam).²⁰ The Vedic tradition represents Para brahman’s three functional aspects by the Godhead (Trimūrti): Brahmā as creation, Śiva as alteration, and Viṣṇu as preservation. Depending on the Vedic tradition, Śiva or Viṣṇu are often identified as the Supreme Reality.²¹

In polytheism generally, the gods are metaphysical powers of nature that may affect a human or may be channeled through a human. The deities are at best indifferent, at worst treacherous, as depicted in the Eddas²² and the Classics.²³ The exact understandings of Traditional faith have lost to us;²⁴ our ancestors knew how to relate to divinity better than we can hope to.

How polytheism is understood in the modern world might well be materialism seeking scientific euhemerism and Petersonian fake-metaphorical beliefs.²⁵

Anthropomorphized forms of representing divinity fail in capturing the gods' true forms, rather, it shows how humans (due to epistemic limits) have chosen to understand them in order to properly relate to them. It means the gods are at once symbolic, but also more real than the form we depict them as. The gods must be understood as being literally real, not materially or metaphorically, but metaphysically. Reaching this understanding theoretically requires abstract thinking, and understanding the experience requires mysticism. Furthermore, each deity can have subordinate servants and avatars. One relevant example is the Goddess of Durgā, who protects the cosmic order from the threat of demons. Because of this duty, she has been compared to an avatar of Viṣṇu.²⁶

What Magic Is 🔗

Aleister Crowley defines the essence of magic as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”²⁷ This necessitates understanding oneself and one’s conditions, so that this understanding can be applied in action.

He explains why one should not underestimate one’s Will and ability to affect the world:

Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitations is based on experience of the past, and every step in his progress extends his empire. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or to what he may do.

—Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, theorem 12.

Crowley draws upon various occult traditions in his formulations. An important one is Tantrism, which presents two ascetic paths of relating to divinity. One is the right-hand path (RHP; dakṣiṇācāra), where one always experiences “someone above him,” even at the highest level of realization. The other is the left-hand path (LHP; vāmācāra), where “he becomes the ultimate Sovereign.”²⁸

Devotees on the RHP know how to align with the particular divine essence most intimately associated with the Absolute Truth. How they receive power from a god is likened to how “a boy might ask his father for pocket-money.”²⁹

The LHP practitioner follows his inner law (svadharma³⁰), transgressing norms and taboos in pursuit of sovereignty rather than union. Relating to deities on the LHP is still practiced, with Durgā embodying a “destructive aspect of liberation through the dark path.”³¹

Magic is not for weaklings seeking an escape from reality.³² Anyone who does not know himself or the world will fail at anything, in every way.

Body, Mind/Soul and Spirit 🔗

Body: the physical organism. It is the Saturnian principle of density individuation, and limitation: the alchemical “lead” that contains the potential for “gold.”³³ In Tantric terms this corresponds to the dense material body, the outermost and grossest form of manifestation, dominated by tamas: inertia, ignorance, and passivity.³⁴ Far from being inherently evil, it is the lowest level of integration³⁵ and the necessary site of the Great Work.³⁶

Mind/soul: the animating and organizing principle that gives the body its particular life. It encompasses sensation, imagination, emotion, and rational thought.³⁷ This is the subtle body that has vital and mental aspects,³⁴ and the domain of rajas: dynamism and outward action. In Berserk, it aligns with the Ego and the Od, the organized self that can be developed, corrupted, or lost.³⁸ The perennial correspondences include the Egyptian ka,³⁹ Taoist chi, Vedic prāṇa,⁴⁰ alchemical mercurial entity,⁴¹ Old Norse óðr,⁴² Platonic psyche.⁴³

Spirit: the transcendent principle that exceeds nature, corresponding to the Tantric causal body, the subtlest vehicle linked to the higher tattvas.³⁴ It is what Paul calls pneuma,⁹ what the Gnostics term the divine spark,⁴⁴ and what Evola describes as the solar or intellectual entity.⁴⁵ In Berserk, the spirit exists as a literal astral entity. While it assumes the form of the Ego, its stakes are pneumatic: corruption or preservation.⁴⁶

The term pneuma serves in Greek Gnosticism generally as the equivalent of the expressions for the spiritual “self,” for which Greek, unlike some oriental languages, lacked an indigenous word. In this function we find it also in the so-called Mithras Liturgy with adjectives like “holy” and “immortal,” contrasted with the psyche or the “human psychical power.” The alchemist Zosimos has “our luminous pneuma,” “the inner pneumatic man,” etc.

—Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, ch. 5b

The relationships between these three principles are decisive: the body without mind is dead matter. The mind without spirit (or rightly ordered eros) is alive but defined from below, conditioned by the guṇas and pulled by circumstance rather than governing from one’s inner measure.⁴⁷ The spirit without integration into mind and body is homeless, unable to act or experience the world. True power arises only when the three are unified under the solar principle, with eros as the orienting force.

The Orientation of the Soul 🔗

Eros plays a crucial mediating role in the relationship between these three principles. According to Plato (as interpreted by Byung-Chul Han), it governs and elevates all parts of the soul. Epithumia (appetitive desire), thumos (spiritedness or courage), and logos (reason) are thereby directed toward the beautiful and the Good rather than mere self-satisfaction or narcissistic mirroring. When eros degenerates into raw epithumia or is replaced by the drive for external validation, the soul loses its proper orientation and becomes defined from below:⁴⁸ the very condition Plotinus identifies as the root of vice and formlessness.⁴⁹

In Berserk, when the translation speaks of “soul,” it most often refers to the Ego: the organized self.⁴⁶ Only context (such as souls consigned to hell) clearly indicates the deeper pneumatic principle.⁵⁰ When the Beast of Darkness demands Guts’ “soul,” it demands the surrender of his Ego—the last bulwark against mental dissolution.⁵¹

The overlapping terminology across traditions (Greek psyche/pneuma, Latin anima/spiritus, Vedic prāṇa/ātman, Norse önd/óðr) reflects a shared intuition about the breath-like ethereal dimension of the human being. Berserk renders this distinction literal and visible, allowing us to see the consequences when the soul is oriented toward formlessness versus when it turns toward measure, beauty and particular bonds.

The Metaphysics of Berserk 🔗

Macrocosm and Microcosm 🔗

Entering into the world of Berserk, the previously discussed philosophical metaphors become literal.

The macrocosm is comprised of three realms of existence: the Physical World, the Astral World, and the Ideal world.⁵² All particulars stem from the Ideal World, which is the Platonic realm of ideas/forms,⁵³ though the implications are not explored. Each being possesses an ethereal body (pneuma given form) called the “Ego,” which pertains to each (human) being insofar as it can be realized. It is the seat of consciousness, the organized self that can be developed or corrupted.⁵⁴ Thus, while the Ego functions as mind, the stakes of its destiny are those of the Gnostic pneuma.

The Ego exists in the Astral World, a metaphysical dimension that overlaps with the Physical World,⁵² and is home to supernatural creatures.⁵⁵ The ethereal body may be damaged, but only by ethereal means.⁵⁶ Because the Ego is the seat housing one’s consciousness, if a magician departs it from their physical body during astral projection, it will be left in a trance.⁵⁷ During such departures or during distressed states in the physical world, the Ego may be lost to the powers from below, hence, it is essential to retain one’s concentration and volition.⁵⁸ Only those that do are able to interact with other Egos within the Astral World.⁵⁹

Another ethereal concept that appears in Berserk is the Od, referencing the Odic force—a hypothetical vitalist energy named after the Old Norse óðr.⁶⁰ The Od is the energy of the Ego: the quality and quantity of vital force available to a particular mind,⁶¹ or prāṇa, as it is known within the Kushan empire.⁶² The Od allows Egos to sense and experience each other,⁶³ and as the color of the ethereal body, it causes the Ego to gravitate toward Ods of the same nature.⁶⁴

The shallow stratum of the Astral World, known as the Interstice, can be accessed at particular places where it and the physical world overlap.⁶⁵ Descending down the astral planes, the world becomes increasingly surreal and the power of the astral entities increases.⁵² A particular lower place associated with creatures of dark od is the realm of Qlipoth.⁶⁶ The term is straight from the Kabbalah, where kelippot refers to the residues of emanation where the divine light has spent itself into formlessness, the substrate of evil.¹⁷ The implication for Berserk’s dark Ods is obvious.

Deeper still is the Abyss, which might be called heaven or hell.⁵² At its surface swirls the Vortex of Souls, the collective dissolution of Egos that have lost their organizing principle — minds without spirit, swept into formlessness.⁶⁷ It is described as a “great ocean of minds. A large evilness.”⁶⁸ This sense of evil is especially Neoplatonic, in that it is psychic matter that has fully identified with the lower and lost its solar center.

Astral Beings and Forces 🔗

The Idea of Evil 🔗

The Vortex of Souls connects to form an abstract entity deep within the Abyss—the Idea of Evil. It explains that it was created as a product of the collective human yearning for there to be a cause of the evil and suffering.⁶⁹

While the Idea of Evil had not Astral existence before man, the idea of the Idea of Evil existed in the World as a set of conditions that predated humanity. But crucially, it never became relevant to speak of before man was there to experience evil, thus bringing the idea into fruition. It is a cause of collective formless longing of the human unconscious (the Vortex of Souls), given a negative form; a void given shape only through what flows into it, which occurs literally. This aligns far closer with the Neoplatonic idea of Evil than the Christian moral one.

Its creation represents a common materialist argument as for the creation of religion from below: man needed reason for what he emotionally perceived as immoral;⁷⁰ there needed to be a cause. True or not, in Berserk, humanity’s inability to comprehend what evil is, has inadvertently bestowed literal demons upon them so that their suffering can make sense.

Despite thematic semblance with the Demiurge, the Idea of Evil is not a creator god. Instead it is radically immanent, having emerged from humanity rather than preceding it.

The Causality it administers is therefore derivative: a partial expression of the principle of necessity that governs all things, subordinate to the Absolute as the Demiurge is subordinate to the Monad. It did not create necessity; it became necessity’s instrument at the human level, because human weakness poured into the void that necessity requires.

Can the Idea of Evil be denied and transcended by a human? By humanity? The events of the story suggest that the collective shall be forever lost in their ignorance and formlessness.⁷¹ Human weakness creates its keeper, and to fulfill their wish, it serves as the metaphysical architect of their necessity.

Causality 🔗

This necessity is not deterministic fate in the literary sense, but the condition of being defined from below—the degree to which one’s actions originate in appetite and matter rather than in oneself.⁷² The Idea of Evil, as one of the lower planetary spheres in the Neoplatonic hierarchy, administers precisely this: a closed causal loop that the soul inside it cannot see the edges of.

The world is as moonlight reflected on the water’s surface. The moon’s light will not be extinguished. So long as the moon exists in the sky, moonlight will remain on the water, and this is a thing which already was. […] We who exist beyond the physical are still merely shadows on the water. […] Maybe you aren’t a shadow on the water, but instead, a fish that breaches the water’s surface.

—Skull Knight, B ch. 142

The moon stands for the Idea of Evil itself: a luminous but derivative principle. Its light on the water is the illusory yet persistent order governing human causality. Most beings remain passive shadows moved by this reflected light, reacting to other (phenomenological) shadows.⁷³ Breaching the surface marks the first act of genuine resistance: a shift from being determined from below to determining oneself from within. As Evola notes in his writings, the lunar principle is characteristically reflective, passive, and feminine in a cosmological sense, receiving light, but not generating it.⁷⁴ The true source is solar and self-sufficient: the Absolute (state of Being). The moon, like the Gnostic Demiurge, is an incomplete image of higher reality. It exerts genuine power over those below, yet remains subordinate.

The emphasis is therefore on struggle against the current, often yielding but marginal gains. Still, potential for the will to act exists within destiny:

God bestows upon us fate. But it is the children of men who choose it.

—Flora, B ch. 202

The parallels between past and present events within the story can be described as circular causality. Though, it is closer to the saying that history rhymes instead of repeats:

Karma is by no means a circle. Indeed, it is a spiral.

—Flora, B ch. 222⁷⁵

But everything lies not within the flows of this lower Causality. The Idea of Evil has neither claimed nor showed to orchestrate fate beyond the human domain. The sacrificial ceremonies require the subject to declare to sacrifice: fate must be sealed.⁷⁶ Guts refuses it⁷⁷ and survives.⁷⁸ It is evident that the system has edges, even if they are hidden.

The narrative device symbolizing and materializing the principle of necessity is the Beherit:

A Beherit is a highly spiritual object that governs even human fate… Perhaps an even greater existence sent it to the physical world. The object is nothing more than a stone, but the fate associated with it rests in the hands of its master who sent it. When the time is right, it will be in the hands of the person to whom it belongs. […] And it is certain to be at the very moment that the owner craves [the God Hand’s] power.

—Flora, B ch. 202

The Beherit is symbolic for the desire for worldly powers, but the powerlessness to manifest it. It is a classic Faustian bargain,⁷⁹ but where the sacrificed object is what one treasures the most, not directly one’s soul (Ego). It finds you at the moment of maximum desperation, which is the moment you are most completely defined from below, and offers power in exchange for surrendering what little form you had left.

The God Hand 🔗

The God Hand is a collective of five Astral creatures executing the Idea of Evil’s will, and thereby humanity’s,⁷⁸ possessing a name referencing to the idea of a transcendental hand of God that presides over human destiny.⁸⁰

Within the currents of Causality, a new member is elected every 216 years.⁸¹ The Eclipse is a transfiguration event, triggered by a fate-ordained Beherit opening a dimensional gate that links the Physical World and the deep Astral World. A sacrifice of the human(s) dearest to them becomes the essence through which they are reformed:⁸² As the physical body disintegrates, the Ego is transcendentally restructured into an Astral being immune to comprehension and beyond ordinary laws of nature.⁸³

As Astral creatures, they only exist in the Physical World as immanent forces: any place where negative human thoughts swirl in a large concentration. But every 1000 years when the concentration of negative thoughts reach a critical point, one of their ranks will reincarnate.⁸⁴

Nothing implies that the five positions of the God Hand have necessary roles beyond the instruction of “do as thou wilt” bestowed upon them by the Idea of Evil.⁸⁵ What unites their symbolic roles is carnal human traits: knowledge (Void), lust (Slan), disease or physical decay (Conrad), mental illness (Ubik), and longing (Femto).⁸⁶

Good and evil as known by man in Berserk is a matter of perspective, hence the God Hand are known to many as the Guardian Angels of Desire.⁸⁷ This extends to the blurring of distinctions regarding the Vortex of Souls being either heaven or hell,⁵² and between God and the Devil.⁸⁸ Biblically, the God Hand are devils. Gnostically, they resemble Archons: they supply humans with material desires, ensuring they remain bound to the Vortex of Souls indefinitely.

Apostles 🔗

The Apostles are the demonic followers of the God Hand. They can transform into horrid creatures, being described as “phantasmagoric warrior[s] capable of facing down one thousand men.”⁸⁹

Apostles are heresy to the world of man. Infernal reincarnations via dark arts of those with extreme ego and desire. They despise and are despised. They ridicule and are ridiculed. These twisted, resurrected monstrosities met death at the brink of karma.

—Paramarisha Sen’an’i Daiba, B ch. 301

Like their masters, candidates for Apostlehood are chosen by Causality through Beherits (though with less restrictions). Their transfiguration occurs at the point of maximum desperation.⁹⁰ This follows into their power, which they appear to gain proportionate to the intensity of their desire.⁹¹

When Apostles release their demonic form their new bodies are not arbitrary. They morph into the precise shape needed to enact their deepest, most possessive desires (in accordance with the Will of Evil). In this sense, Apostlehood is the literal externalization of the Ego’s dominant impulse. This is displacement in the Kabbalistic sense: not evil ex nihilo, but a genuine capacity in misalignment with the whole, and given a literal form.

It also aligns with the idea of the daemon, the older, non-Christian understanding of the term. Evola describes it:

When man is considered from a naturalistic point of view, the demon, could be defined as the deep force that originally produced consciousness in the finite form that is the body in which it lives during its residence in the visible world. This force eventually remains “behind” the individual, in the preconscious and in the subconscious dimensions, as the foundation of organic processes…

—Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, ch. 8

Those with a fitting of Apostlehood are those who cannot control their consciousness from the influence of their daemon. The Ego, overwhelmed by desire and weakness, allows the daemon to seize control and reshape the entire being. Beyond death, slain Apostles (and their victims) are sent to the Vortex of Souls,⁶⁷ fitting the Gnostic theme of an imprisoned realm. The Apostles bridge the Astral and Physical Worlds through their altered, desire-shaped bodies (in contrast to the purely Astral God Hand). This gives them unique immanence that allows special worldly phenomena to occur.⁹²

Neutral Elements 🔗

Besides the forces of evil, neutral and benevolent astral powers also exist. These are often elemental in nature. They are not “neutral” in the Christian amoral sense or in the capricious sense of polytheistic gods.⁹³ Rather, they embody a higher degree of cosmic order and stability, one that is not necessarily compatible with human will and well-being.

Their power may be so vast that they occupy their own Astral Domains.⁹⁴ Yet their worship has largely been eradicated by the Church of the Holy See.⁹⁵ Neutral elemental beings exist, as do clearly good ones such as fairies. The reason evil entities dominate the narrative is because they are the most immanent. Humanity’s collective negativity, fear, and desire continually feed and strengthen the lower astral powers, while positive or ordered forces receive far less reinforcement. Additionally, the astral creatures of the deeper domains have been referred to as Daimons, among which are transcended human Egos of heroes or magicians.⁹⁶

The Four Kings of the World 🔗

The Four Kings of the World (East-Wind, West-Water, North-Earth, South-Fire) are astral beings of the same lofty order as the God Hand, yet benevolent.⁹⁷ They govern the natural world from a higher stratum.

Unlike the Idea of Evil and its servants—whose presence is constantly reinforced by humanity’s lower appetites—the Four Kings support order and life but remain less immanent. They do not descend to grant wishes born of desperation. They become accessible primarily to those who actively commune with them through disciplined, RHP practice: alignment with form, harmony with nature, and acceptance of the great mysteries⁵² rather than cursing existence.

The Church of the Holy See preserves fragmented knowledge of them as the “four archangels”⁶⁶ and worships a supreme “God.”⁹⁸ It is possible this represents a distant, exoteric attempt to reach the true Absolute. Yet in practice, the Church and humanity at large frequently fail to distinguish higher ordering principles from lower ones.⁹⁹ This builds on the theme of humanity worshiping distorted images while genuine higher powers remain distant and unrecognized. Despite this, the lower astral forces cannot help to appear distinctly repulsive.¹⁰⁰

The Absolute 🔗

The Absolute (God, the One, the Monad, Ein-Sof, or the supreme reality) is never named directly but is implied by the cosmology.⁵² It exists beyond the World of Ideas and manifests deistically as the passive, underlying order of nature that sustains Ideal, Physical, and Astral realms, yet is not identical to any particular instance of its emanation.

Returning to the moon-and-water metaphor,¹⁰¹ if the Idea of Evil is the moon and Causality its reflected light on the water, the Absolute is the sun—the original, self-sufficient source. For a moon, too, is a mirror for the True light, which is thus mediated and diminished by lower principles. Likewise, the Idea of Evil is a derivative, lunar principle, a false image of the true Good (just as the Gnostic Demiurge is a false image of the Monad¹⁰²).

Even deep gnosis of this hierarchy alters little about the immanent human condition. The body and lower soul remain embedded in a realm where formlessness is actively enforced. In this sense, there is no paradise to escape to.¹⁰³ Salvation is won in battles waged with the proper orientation: turning toward form, measure, and particular bonds, and away from the void.

Human Power 🔗

Faith 🔗

Astral powers are only as strong as they are believed to be. The human collective faith and mental concentration, conscious or subconscious, is what bestows astral forms to ideas,¹⁰⁴ and what supplies them with power.⁸⁴ Evil forces are dominant because for humanity at large, negative emotions are stronger than positive ones, and because ignorance is the most prevalent conditioning mode of nature.

The very name of the Idea of Evil is in reference to this. Likewise does it explain Griffith’s reincarnation and invulnerability, and the diminishment of polytheistic gods following their repression by the Church of the Holy See.

Faith, when affirming reality as it is generates genuine power; faith that projects weakness onto external forces generates demons.

Weakness 🔗

Weakness means to be defined from below, letting the soul assume its shape from what it experiences rather than what it is. Above all it is a refusal to affirm reality, a perfectly human trait.

This existential surrender is the most evident by the Apostles who trade their humanity for demonic powers. They are the most defeated, faithless and weak.

[The Count:] No need to fight against fear and suffering. […] It’s a meaningless fight. […] Human is uncertainty.

[Puck:] You also used to be one weak human, right? You had enough power as a human to enact your vengeance. […] You accepted it for you to escape from your tormented heart, [to escape] from yourself.

—The Count; Puck, B pre-ch. 5-6

Mentality 🔗

Weakness in this sense is, in part, a infirm mentality: humanity’s inability to confront their demons has given them literal forms.

The thing about hatred… It’s the place where people who can’t look sorrow in the eye without waverin’ run off to.

—Gotot, B ch. 129

This is especially true about the desperate creatures who turn into Apostles, but it affects all who are human. It has its biological functions, and thereby validity, but Miura’s sense is when hatred is defined from below.

The Gnostic Symptom 🔗

Knowledge is of no use to the weak: rather than transcending pain, the weak person sits self-satisfied with the “knowledge” that their situation is outside their power. The Gnostic worldview is itself a symptom of precisely the weakness it diagnoses in the hylics. The cause of suffering is projected onto a cosmic architect rather than recognized as one’s own construction—and one cannot rightly distinguish that worldview from the desire for it. The one who hates the world will seek a cause that justifies that hatred. The architecture of the material “prison” is a mental state that they themselves maintain.

This takes a specific form: a refusal of pain, and, in practice, a denial of the body in favor of spiritual escape. But consciousness and spirit cannot be experienced apart from the particular bodily life they inhabit. Form and essence are nevertheless meaningless without matter to be related to; denying one’s existence as particular matter is equal folly to claiming it holds no relation to form at all. The affirmation of life as it is requires neither masochistic indulgence in suffering nor its contemptuous rejection.¹⁰⁵ Just because one cannot be the Good does not justify contempt for the world as it is.

Even on its own terms, the Gnostic framework concedes that the material world is where the spirit is trained. But training requires the (alchemical) unity of body, mind, and spirit, not any in isolation. Without excellence in the crucible, one is not fit to speak of the nature of the path, let alone the destination. The Gnostic means of attainment differ little from those of any other serious tradition: those who are predominantly of matter, motivated by desire and blinded by ignorance, are incapable of it.

Beyond Good and Evil 🔗

Transcendental “moral law” lies as an impediment to understanding the truth of the world. Excessive moralizing causes evil to be repressed into the subconsciousness as a stigma, thereby exacerbating the symptoms. Humans contain what can be described as sin, but rather than identifying it as an amoral fact that may or may not be dangerous, it is automatically seen as shameful—furthering repression instead of taking responsibility.

When this occurs for humanity as a collective, and concentrates over time, the Idea of Evil gains power. And the demons become real so that they must be confronted. Of course evil exists, even in the religious sense of the Christians, but it must above all be understood before it is refused.

Magic 🔗

In Berserk, magic is literal—True Will and its misalignment are real forces with real consequences. The manipulation of spiritual forces through the Od, either to affect physical or astral creatures,¹⁰⁶ or to manifest spiritual beings from deeper astral planes into the Physical World,¹⁰⁷ follows the operative mechanics abstractly defined by Crowley.¹⁰⁸ Crucially, it is the same system of principles that allowed the Idea of Evil to come into fruition: the manifestation of power proceeding into the Astral World through collective thought, offering supplication and receiving assistance from beings.¹⁰⁴

The practice of magic is a potential all possess, though most are not capable, as previously established. Extensive training and asceticism are required,¹⁰⁹ and their essential lesson applies equally in Berserk: consciousness must be retained, or the practitioner risks being engulfed by what they encounter in the Astral World.¹¹⁰ The magician constructs a sanctuary within the mind rather than a church:

Magic… no—the “arcana of invocation”—is not about simply chanting mantras or meditating intently on your own wishes. It begins with recognizing and confronting the counterpart to whom you must impart your thoughts.

—Schierke, B ch. 210

The line between explicit and implicit magic blurs. Schierke works through conscious invocation and identification with elemental beings as per the RHP;¹¹¹ Guts channels it through his LHP darkness—his blade emboldened by the demons he has slain to inflict harm on powerful astral beings,⁵⁶ his rampant hatred condensing into the Beast of Darkness that communicates with him and strengthens his rage in battle.¹¹² Both are changes occurring in conformity with a will: one is governed, one is berserk.

The Idea of Evil’s instruction to Griffith—“do as thou wilt”⁶⁹—is a catastrophic directive aimed at an Ego defined from below. Only when one has undergone deconditioning is one fit to follow one’s own law.¹¹³ “Make your volition your pivot of power”¹¹⁴ presupposes that volition and appetite have already been separated. Griffith never achieves this.

These principles of power, weakness, and magic are embodied in the major characters, allowing us to study their distinct philosophical positions.

Characters as Philosophical Positions 🔗

Griffith 🔗

Characterization 🔗

Griffith embodies the idea of ambition and passionate desire. He presents himself as a willing martyr to the god named “dream.”¹¹⁵ He is the blessed king of longing,¹¹⁶ bound to be the king of the blind white sheep and the master of the black sheep with a burden of sins.¹¹⁷

But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

Matt. 6:23

Such is Griffith’s appearance: one who appears bright, but possessing the darkness that shall cover the world.¹¹⁸

There are no signs of bodily desire in him, only the passionate drive to obtain control and power to dominate the world and those in it.¹¹⁹ “I must obtain the things I desire.”¹²⁰ Nothing may overshadow his dream of obtaining his own kingdom. He declares that a true friend would be his equal,¹²¹ but there is no evidence to suggest that he ever wanted a true friend (it would’ve been incompatible with his true dream).¹²²

Golden Age: Obtaining a Castle 🔗

Martyrdom for a merciless god. What a waste. On the battlefield, the life of a common soldier isn’t worth a single piece of silver. In today’s world, most people’s lives are subject to the whims of a handful of nobility and royalty. Of course, even a king can’t live exactly as he pleases. We are all at the mercy of a great tide… fate, or whatever you wish to call it, and we all disappear in the end, our lives spent never even knowing who we were. In life, unrelated to one’s social standing or class as determined by man, there are some people who, by nature, are keys that set the world in motion. They are the true elite as dictated by the golden rule of the universe. That’s what I want to know!! What is my place in the world? Who am I? What am I capable of? What am I destined for?

—Griffith, B pre-ch. 8

Griffith’s idea of ascension has deeds and status as the mere steps, for his inner law is one that will transcend established laws and order all together.¹²³

Though not directly aware of the Astral machinations, he shows uncannily magical insight and abilities, however subtle: does he know about the nature of the world’s God;⁸⁸ can he identify signs fear as marks of his enemies;¹²⁴ is his luck that of the Devil;¹²⁵ and (especially) does his belief in his own ambition show semi-awareness of his destiny?¹²⁶

A Failed Dream 🔗

If there is a dream which takes one his whole life to find, there are also dreams which, like storms, devour tens of thousands of other dreams.

—Griffith, B ch. 6

Griffith’s immense presence radiates a special light that people flock to, the apt light for the infirm collective.⁷¹ This light is at once his Od, and the Od of his dream, both inseparable from each other. This is the aura of his destiny that makes him appear larger than life.¹²⁷ It appears to be the solar principle born of self-sufficiency, but Griffith’s inner alignment requires him to maintain his reflection through his followers. As much as it is initially comforting to behold his flame, it blinds people to the fact that he is an inferno that must swallow up everything to be the brightest. His will and his control must be absolute; all others subsumed. When his capabilities of enacting his will fails, everything comes crashing down.

This is a weakness of spirit. Griffith’s mental form (Ego) is highly organized, yet it lacks any solar center. He is the Narcissus myth made literal: a soul that becomes defined by its own image. The castle is symbolic of his Ego’s ambition, and he remains forever the child chasing it, consciously accepting any delusion that affirms and justifies the reflection.¹²⁸

The closest he comes to self-knowledge is the admission that he is what he is: absolutely ambitious, willing to sacrifice anything and anyone for his dream, shaped by circumstance yet deluded that he can master it.¹²⁹ Yet this clarity does not lead to transcendence or self-renunciation. Instead, it becomes his justification for his image.

Finding success validates the One through the Other. Thereby, the Other is robbed of otherness and degrades into a mirror of the One—a mirror affirming the latter’s image. […] Eros, in contrast, makes possible experience of the Other’s otherness, which leads the One out of a narcissistic inferno. It sets into motion freely willed self-renunciation, freely willed self-evacuation.

—Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros, “Melancholia”

When genuinely nurtured by Guts and Casca—the very people he sought to possess—his mirror cracks.¹³⁰ Instead of self-renunciation, he chooses the Eclipse: the ultimate narcissistic act, sacrificing the mirrors that affirmed him so he can become the sole image. His demonic transfiguration is triggered at his moment of ultimate desperation and weak desire, reconstituted by the life essence of his sacrificed comrades.⁸² His flame, his image, and his dream are absolute self-sufficiency twisted into its opposite. With his excellence and potential, it is especially tragic that Griffith as Femto is weakness dressed as apotheosis.

Femto, Lucifer 🔗

As one of the God Hand, Femto, the Wings of Darkness, possess the metaphysical powers to manifest his dream.⁶⁹ As he reincarnates back into the Physical World, he knows no equal, akin to someone in a story challenging the one who wrote it.¹³¹

[A] transcendental entity beyond physical reasoning! […] An enormous flow of Od that engulfs and charms people. A fortune so strong that no blade of the physical world can touch him. He appears to be human, but spiritually he cannot be called that. An existence that no one in the Physical World can rival alone. Surely he is the Absolute.

—Schierke, B ch. 202

His Luciferic aura (Od) is more potent than ever,¹³² and has an especially prominent effect on the twice-reincarnated Apostle, Ganishka:

[Ganishka:]

Life, the world, it’s all darkness. In the all-engulfing darkness you fear, you instill fear, you writhe and creep. Lightlessness that is life.

[Then, seeing Griffith’s/Femto’s light:]

Light. It’s blinding. It’s warm. But I can’t touch it. I’ll be burned.

[Griffith/Femto:]

You can see. Because he who bears light exists in the deepest shadow. And its within darkness that true light is discovered.

[Ganiska experiences a sense of being engulfed.]

—Ganishka; Griffith/Femto, B ch. 302

Griffith has ascended within the lower septenary, beyond reason, but not beyond the necessity of the lower realms. Even if Causality flows in accordance with his will, he is still not unbound from the necessities of the Ideal World. He might look like the Absolute, but he is still moved like Matter. The Hawk of Light should be not taken literally, for he is the Hawk of Darkness.¹¹⁸

Guts 🔗

Characterization 🔗

Guts—born from a corpse,¹³³ forged in the blood of war,¹³⁴, and tempered through its fires. He is the eternal inhabitant of the crucible, the one closest to death, yet most desperately struggling against it in a world that offers no escape.¹³⁵

Having once strayed into the labyrinth of evils,
The wretched finds no way out…
She seeks to escape from the bitter chaos,
And knows not how she shall get through.

Naassene Psalm, Hippol. V.10.2¹³⁶

Guts symbolizes the soul’s struggle while still bound to matter, yet never fully fallen into it. As established, evil in the Plotinian sense is not primarily moral failure but formlessness—the absolute absence of the self-governing principle. Despite overwhelming trauma and cosmic malice, Guts never truly dissolves into that void. His life is the lived refusal to be defined from below.

Golden Age: The Self and the Sword 🔗

Guts enters the Band of the Hawk amid confusion, fear, and the struggle to survive. While Griffith possesses a burning conviction “in everything,”¹³⁷ Guts has only the sword in his hand and knows nothing besides swinging it; like the mercenary he is, he gives up the reason to external factors.¹³⁸

Gradually, companionship begins to give shape to his solitary strength.¹³⁹ Yet when protecting Casca, something deeper emerges. In the heat of battle he achieves a wordless, Dionysian clarity:¹⁴⁰

Right now, no time to think. All there is now, is how to cut, how to kill, that’s all. Even these thoughts will slip my mind in time, and then, only the beat of my heart still remains.

—Guts, B ch. 21

This mastery of the flesh through violent action becomes a form of ascetic trial; befitting of a vīra (heroic type) on the LHP. Through combat he discovers a truth more real than Griffith’s grand dream: the sword is an essential expression of his own will. Reflecting with Casca, he realizes that his flame is not merely fuel for another’s inferno.¹⁴¹ To become Griffith’s friend¹¹⁵ and more importantly to find himself, he must attain something of his own.¹³⁸

When he leaves the Band, Griffith’s dream begins to crack.¹⁴² For Guts, meaning is not found in a distant castle but in the immediate, particular act of wielding the sword according to his own will:

It feels like my own life for an instant is springing into the air before my eyes. […] I wield the sword—maybe it’s different from the dream Griffith talks about—but for no one else’s sake, without being swept up… This time it’s by my own will. Making my own sparks, even for an instant.

—Guts, B ch. 46-47

This is the birth of his particular affirmation. Never universal ambition, but a concrete, immanent assertion of self through steel and power.

Post-Eclipse: The Black Swordsman 🔗

The Eclipse inverts everything. Supernatural darkness invades Guts’ world, and trauma sinks into the depths of his Ego. Where Griffith chases a dream, Guts’ truth was always built from what he had and what he could endure. The Eclipse puts this to the ultimate test.

His journey becomes one of re-establishing solar dominance over the Saturnian beast within. It is neither Gnostic escape nor Plotinian ascent toward the universal, but stubborn, hermetic refusal to let matter (and the hatred it breeds) define him. The body is the site of the Great Work, and the grounds for the battle of passive identification, one that Guts can never surrender. Guts refuses to flee or to be a prisoner, for his reality is ruled from the only center he still controls: his bloodstained blade.

He commits acts that torment him,¹⁴³ standing at the edge of humanity,¹⁴⁴ yet his mission of vengeance maintains his form where the aimless dissolve; hatred becomes the temporary superstructure holding his sanity together—a dark but necessary flame.

The Beast of Darkness 🔗

The Beast is the living embodiment of Nietzsche’s abyss.¹⁴⁵ It is Guts’ mindless hatred given form, a Jungian shadow¹⁴⁶ born from the dark color of his Od.¹⁴⁷

Godot clearly warns him: revenge is a sword that rusts itself.¹⁴⁸ The greatest danger isn’t the external demons but losing himself to the Beast and destroying Casca in the process.¹⁴⁹

Guts’ gradual shift from pure retaliation toward restoration of his bond with Casca, is the proof that his life can have meaning. Hatred keeps him alive and fighting, but love (particular, vulnerable, self-renouncing) is what can pull him back from the brink.¹⁵⁰

Whoever does not love abides in death.

1 John 3:14

Durgā and the Berserker Armor 🔗

Guts is repeatedly associated with the “Prāṇa of Durgā.”¹⁵¹ The dark deity known as Durgā is the wrathful destroyer of demons and wickedness, protector of cosmic order through active force and transgression of established laws (a LHP). She is the perfect mythic counterpart to Guts. His Od, blended with that of the Berserker Armor, becomes a Durgic fury: causing destruction in service of creation and dharma, even as he appears monstrous to the world.¹⁵²

The Berserker Armor doesn’t grant power so much as it removes the body’s natural limits, allowing prāṇa and Will to push the vessel past its breaking point.¹⁵³ Guts willingly sacrifices himself again and again, fighting as a champion of Matter while refusing to be defined by it.

Resistance and Will 🔗

There’s no paradise Guts for to escape to.¹⁰³ His only necessity is defiant resistance. After internalizing Gotot’s lesson, his will narrows to what he can still affect: the present moment, his bonds, his blade. This is a stoicism forged in hell, and one that checks the lesser demons he faces.

Guts’ sheer persistence bends Causality. Even when astral beings declare his doom inevitable, he continues.¹⁵⁴ In doing so, he already improves the world. Along this brutal path he finds fleeting pockets of peace and beauty.¹⁵⁵

Flora affirms what Schierke initially doubts: Guts has already contested fate and survived.⁷⁸ His will is a small but persistent solar flame that refuses to be extinguished.

The horror in Berserk is never gratuitous. It is always framed against what was genuinely beautiful and real. The Eclipse devastates because the Band of the Hawk’s brotherhood was real. Darkness is only visible because light came first.¹⁵⁶

Magical Self-Realization 🔗

At the core of Guts’ remaining journey lies the magician’s task: maintaining consciousness amid darkness and realizing who he truly is. This has been a lasting deficiency in Guts, where Schierke’s guidance and the Moonlight Boy’s interventions literally depicts his consciousness awakening from a deep abyss.⁵⁸

A blade may swing despite its cracks, but eventually it will break. The sword in Guts’ hand kept his inner and outer order intact, yet it only ever kept the demons at bay rather than conquering them. He held mastery of the Physical and lower Astral regions, but Griffith had long since exceeded both. Upon encountering the Reincarnated Griffith within the secluded sanctuary of the Island of Elves, his sword can only shed a single strand of hair from Griffith’s head.¹⁵⁷ The instrument that carried his blunt will cannot reach what his enemy has become.

Guts realizes his lack and falls into despair. His eternal ontological question returns as his blade lies flat before him:

I never believed in anything. Nothing, nothing. Only. Only you…!! Only you…

—Guts, B ch. 370

The confession reveals what the sword always was: not a solar center but a substitute for one, the object through which Guts externalized his will rather than rooting it within himself. When that object fails, the interior structure it was propping up collapses with it. The Beast of Darkness snaps its chains, Guts’ Ego descends into a deep place, his body left vacant. “It was all for nothing…”¹⁵⁸

With magi by his side, the path forward remains open, though it cannot run through the sword. Because of the danger he poses to his surroundings, he is entombed in a Stupa, where Daiba forces upon Guts a profound contemplative trial:

[W]hat can be achieved in the dark? In darkness without sight, without sound. There is but one thing to do. There is naught to gate into… but the self.

—Daiba, B ch. 383

The chapter title Anādi Avidyā (Beginningless Ignorance)¹⁵⁹ names what is being confronted: not an enemy, not a demon, but the ignorance that preceded the sword, preceded the Beast, preceded everything Guts has ever fought with or against. Master of body and raw will, he now faces the stage that neither could reach: self-realization through direct confrontation with the mind in utter darkness. Whether he can internalize what the sword was substituting for, so that his will proceeds from himself rather than from the instrument, is the question Miura left open.¹⁶⁰

Casca 🔗

Characterization 🔗

How easy would it be if I could just make my heart feel the way I want it to?

—Casca, B ch. 45

Casca is alike Guts in that she had to grow up on her own terms. Where they differ is their sense of self: Guts carries a solar center, even as he sells his sword, whereas Casca has a lunar reflection as her core,¹⁶¹ of Griffith and of his image.

She is the sword who one day discovers she possesses a heart, but that heart does not beat in perfect synchrony with the dream she has devoted herself to. Her entire arc is one of painful awakening: from an extension of another’s will to a woman forced to confront her own desires, her own femininity, and the terrifying freedom of standing on unstable ground.

Golden Age: From Sword to Woman 🔗

Casca grows up believing that subjugation is her place in the natural hierarchy. Her first encounter with Griffith causes her to realize her will: rejecting a life of guilt and regret to become his sword,¹⁶² dreaming of being invaluable to him.¹⁶³

Her initial resentment toward Guts stems from him replacing her as Griffith’s sword. Yet, unlike Griffith, Guts actually fights for her. This contrast slowly transforms her during the Golden Age.¹⁶⁴

Judeau, acting as Miura’s mouthpiece, articulates the truth of her situation:

[F]or Casca, Griffith is truly special. [I]t’s more than love she feels for him. It’s more like worship. Yet despite her efforts, can she find happiness being a woman longing for a man she can’t ever have? If she loves him, shouldn’t she want to be held by him. Moreover, beside him is the woman [(Princess Charlotte)] he can’t afford to refuse in fulfilling his dream.

—Judaeu, B ch. 34

Casca eventually internalizes this on her own, thereby ending her dream. She recognizes that Griffith is not a god and that she is a woman. Her continued clinging to the defeated Band of the Hawk becomes the fruitless hope of a dream already foregone.¹⁶⁵

Femininity and Eros 🔗

Eros guides the soul, according to Plato. It holds sway over all its parts: pleasure-based desire (epithumia), spiritedness or courage (thumos), and reason (logos). […] Eros must not be confused with fleshly desire (epithumia). It stands above both desire and thumos. Eros makes thumos bring forth beautiful deeds.

—Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros, “The Politics of Eros”

At the center of Casca’s character is her femininity. She knows she is a woman, and gradually discovers what that means for her.¹⁶⁶ This is why her dream ultimately falls apart. Her Golden Age arc is the recovery of eros from narcissistic projection: her initial devotion to Griffith is a thumos-driven loyalty and idealization. With Guts, eros emerges as particular, embodied, self-renouncing love—the complete opposite of Griffith’s self-referential castle. Unlike Griffith, Guts fights for her without seeking to subsume her dream or use her as a mirror. He can reciprocate her emotions and become a worthy object of her devotion.¹⁶⁷

Her change in character and fluctuation between others is captured by the “liquid” nature ascribed to the feminine, which lacks an external principle of organization. This lies at the core of Casca’s earlier infirm selfhood. Her deepest desire is to devote herself to someone who truly needs her, to sacrifice and care for them; deep in her being is the need to express love.¹⁶⁸ This is arguably her true dream,¹⁶⁹ and for it, she is able to embrace vulnerability with Guts, which above all is a sign of strength for one who is reluctant to her womanhood.

Self-Identity and Indecision 🔗

Her sense of self remains hidden in Griffith’s shadow.¹⁷⁰ He showed her how to be autonomous, yet she still does not fully know who she is.¹⁶²

This indecisiveness of mind—rooted in insufficient self-realization—produces conflicting dreams and desires. It creates mental weakness: being defined by unconscious forces and external circumstances rather than governing from within. What this entails for one’s path in life and one’s relations is the driving tension of most the discussed dynamics between Casca, Guts, and Griffith.

This creates later tension: one cannot be both Griffith’s friend and his possession. She wishes to stand by someone’s side,¹⁷¹ but even after experiencing real love with Guts, nostalgia¹⁷² and loyalty¹⁷³ keep her tied to the broken Griffith.

Post-Eclipse: Ego in Pieces 🔗

Casca’s Ego was never properly organized during the Golden Age. This underlying infirmity makes her more susceptible than Guts to the Eclipse’s horrors. The overwhelming current shatters her Self into fragments.¹⁷⁴ Her organizing principle collapses along with her sanity because she is unable to affirm reality. From her perspective, she is unable to think or feel, “looking up from below the water’s surface,” only being grounded by the faint sense of her bond to Guts.¹⁷⁵

This doesn’t imply she is uniquely weak as the Eclipse would break most people (Guts does not handle the trauma in a much healthier way). Weakness exists on a spectrum. The supreme weakness lies in forfeiting will because of perceived limits.¹⁷⁶ Far from weak in combative skill or fortitude, Casca shows how incomprehensible horror can overwhelm those unable to resist it. Even broken, she retains bodily intuition: able to cut down mercenaries and wield a blade soon after.¹⁷⁷

When her sanity is partially restored, she completes her arc of indecision by firmly orienting to Guts, instead of being a mirror for Griffith’s narcissism.¹⁷⁵ Despite being unable to actualize —because of the lasting trauma from the Eclipse, and later by being kidnapped to Falconia—her true dream of devotion to Guts; her eros is finally free to direct her. Separated from him, she is above all desperate to return because of the pain she knows Guts will experience because of it.¹⁷⁸

Eros and Particular Love 🔗

As remarkable as Guts’ survival is, Casca occupies the same anomalous exception to the God Hand’s Causality. Her broken mind post-Eclipse and gradual recovery through particular love (not abstract gnosis) shows that eros is one of the forces capable of partially resisting the Vortex. For the feminine, it provides the organizing principle that refuses formlessness through relations to irreducible Others: her friends.

Her life is one of martyrdom to the feminine: a painful, repeated sacrifice of self on the altar of love, devotion, and vulnerability, in a world dictated by masculine will, ambition, and violence. The suffering she endures at the hands of incomprehensible Evil speaks for the silent voices.

Side Characters 🔗

Skull Knight: Limits of Gnosis 🔗

The Daimon⁹⁶ known as Skull Knight is heavily implied to be the ancient conquering emperor Gaiseric.¹⁷⁹ As the previous wearer of the Berserker armor, his astral transformation has placed him in a purgatorial existence—not swallowed by the formless Vortex of Souls, yet trapped in an endless, lost vengeance against the God Hand who caused his demise. He exists as a hermetically renewed yet deformed consciousness, bent on silent revenge.

He possesses profound knowledge of Causality and its Junction Points, where fate can be intercepted.¹⁸⁰ A prophet of doom, he foresees the flows of necessity and wields immense power, cleaving astral fabric with the Sword of Beherits in an attempt to entrap the God Hand in the Abyss.¹⁸¹

Yet his interventions repeatedly fail to alter the outcome in any meaningful way. He saves Guts and Casca from the Eclipse,¹⁸² allows them to participate in the imitation-Eclipse in Albion,¹⁸³ and fails to destroy Femto, inadvertently aiding his ascension.¹⁸⁴ While these events may ultimately serve a larger triumph over Causality through Guts and Casca, Skull Knight himself cannot actualize this freedom.

He knows the structure of necessity but operates within it. Skull Knight has insight into the laws of Causality and follows a RHP alignment with universal powers, yet he remains bound by them. His is gnosis without mastery: knowledge of the prison’s architecture that does not grant freedom from it.

His existence stands as both warning and promise for Guts: deeper knowledge and experience can elevate one far beyond ordinary humanity, but gnosis alone remains incomplete. Whether Guts can surpass Skull Knight’s limitations—achieving not only foresight but true mastery of destiny through affirmation of what is:—remains the open question.

Jill-Rosine: The Fantasy of Freedom 🔗

“Become yourself: an injunction addressed only to a few, and which to an even smaller number appears redundant.” One can see now how problematic is the very point that has hitherto seemed fixed: fidelity to oneself, the Absolute, autonomous law based on one’s own “being,” when it is formulated in general and abstract terms. At the moment when they are thrown back on their own naked will, trying to prove it to themselves with an absolute action, they collapse; they collapse precisely because they are divided beings, because they are deluded concerning their true nature and their real strength. Their freedom is turned against them and destroys them; they fail at the very point at which they should have reaffirmed themselves—in their depths they find nothing to sustain them and carry them forward.

—Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger, ch. 7

Traditional freedom is not the modern liberal delusion of “doing whatever you want.”¹⁸⁵ It is the difficult task of becoming what one is: an affirmation of reality rather than flight from it. Children, and those who remain spiritually childish, almost always choose the latter.

Rosine embodies this escape. Abused and yearning for a better world, she chooses the illusion of the Beherit and transforms into an Apostle, creating a fantasy realm of elves and eternal childhood.¹⁸⁶ Thus, she perpetuates the very illusion enabled her power.

Jill suffers from the same child abuse as her friend, but isn’t old or bold enough to run away. She gradually realizes how Rosine’s path has turned erroneous and demonic.¹⁸⁷ With no “home,” she flocks to Guts’ company, a seeming beacon in the dark. Guts, with his solar core, knows that Jill must light her own light:

Take a good look around us. A good hard look at the shadows. At the darkness around me. You said somewhere that’s not here. This is that somewhere. […] There’s no paradise for you to escape to. What you’ll find, what’s there, is just a battlefield.

—Guts, B ch. 117

The world becomes as one sees it: eyes of fear find only horror. This is the same mechanism that gave birth to the Idea of Evil: collective refusal to face sorrow and reality, projecting weakness outward until it manifests as literal demons.

After the illusion collapses, Jill chooses differently. She accepts the unstable ground, the lack of wings, and the battlefield of real life. She resolves to “try crying and shouting and biting [her] way through,” believing she might possess the power to change something—she declares: “I think I’m about to start my own battle.”¹⁸⁸

This is the standard available to anyone who refuses to define themselves from below: not heroic exceptionalism or great willpower, but the quiet resolve to crawl along the earth and fight one’s own battle. Jill’s decision is one of the most hopeful moments in Berserk.

Farnese: Strength Through Responsibility 🔗

Farnese’s journey begins in mania, exoteric religious ignorance, and deep-rooted fear of the world. Neglected by her family of nobles and overwhelmed by the nightly burnings of heretics, she seeks control through faith and sadistic authority.¹⁸⁹ Guts is an anomaly to this order, and believed to be the prophetic Hawk of Darkness that will usher forth a Dark Age.¹¹⁸ “The Black Swordsman’s existence affects our very faith.”¹⁹⁰

“I only have fear if I lose my faith” is her insightful confession as her worldview cracks.¹⁹¹ Exposed to true astral horror alongside Guts, she is forced to confront how small and powerless she truly is.¹⁹²

I’m… truly useless. […] Being exposed to terror every night made me realize how diminutive my existence is. […] However powerless, helpless, and clumsy, for the first time, I’m discovering myself.

—Farnese, B ch. 196

Where Jill resolves to crawl forward on her own terms, Farnese begins the harder work of becoming useful through responsibility to others. She resigns from comfort and blind faith, and eventually takes on the care of Casca.¹⁹³ Through repeated failures—most damningly, losing Casca in the forest¹⁹²—and the weight of her duty to protect, she gradually transforms. Guts does not hand her responsibilities she cannot yet bear until she proves herself,¹⁹⁴ for he knows people must find their inner strength. Unchecked weakness collapses inward and perpetrates harm out of failure. Farnese has the will to overcome her limits, and with Casca as her catalyst, she is forced to act and test her frail strength, until it eventually emerges. She experiences a semblance of bravery,¹⁹⁵ but cannot actualize it without a skill that makes her indispensable. To contribute and to protect, she commits to magical training under Schierke. Then, through her family’s influence, she sees an opportunity to provide her companions with resources only she can acquire.

By doing something nobody but I could do, I wanted to be helpful to all of them. But I’m sure that was an excuse. I was unable to stay there at that fireside circle of light, given to me so unexpectedly. There was warmth, yet I could offer nothing in return. The warmer it got, the more I thought I might have a place there. But I couldn’t stay, and in my anxiety I ran back home. Here, where I’m accustomed. Cold and enclosed.

—Farnese, B ch. 254

Placed before nostalgic allure and familiar security, Farnese risks relapsing into the weakness she can afford when surrounded by comfort and answerable to no one but herself. The self-destructive logic runs deep: the stakes of returning are high precisely because she now knows what she would be losing—and part of her does not yet believe herself worthy of it. So she finds reasons why she doesn’t belong—because to stay would require believing she deserves it (which she will by the act alone). This is what the Buddhists identify as the danger of ‘home’:

The first major action on the ascetic path is indicated by the term pabbajjā, meaning literally “departure.” […] “Home is a prison, a dusty place. The life of a hermit is in the open. One cannot, by remaining at home, fulfill point by point the completely purified, completely illumined ascesis.”

—Julius Evola, The Doctrine of the Awakening, ch. 8

Home, as both location and state of mind, confines the free spirit. Yet Farnese has developed enough self-insight to recognize the trap, and when her friends extend their hands, she reaches back. She returns because she has a duty—to her companions, to Casca in particular, but above all to who she herself is. What she is good at is inseparable from what the company needs: her noble lineage offers perks, her spiritual sensitivity communes with nature where Schierke’s knowledge alone cannot suffice, and her care for Casca provides the particular human anchor that no magic can replace.¹⁹⁶ The traits that once expressed themselves as cruelty and hysteria enacted out of weakness now find their proper place. She does not overcome her nature, but she surely fulfills it. This is how she finds her place in the world’s hierarchy, and in doing so overcomes the worst form of weakness: not powerlessness, but the failure to discover what one is for, and to be unable to affirm it.

Nina-Luca: Dangers of the Inferiority Complex 🔗

Farnese’s growth only became possible after gaining self-awareness of herself as she was, and a better understanding of the world. Nina’s arc explores what happens when that awareness is absent.

A young woman who knows she is dying, Nina lives for the immediate, and her fear shapes her interactions with others. The semblance of love she feels for Joachim lacks eros, drowned instead in confused hylic appetite. She tries to have him murdered when he refuses the heretical orgies involving cannibalism, throws a stone at Luca’s forehead, and threatens to jump off a cliff rather than confronting her fault, retreating into self-pity instead.¹⁹⁷ These acts illustrate how weakness, when the soul is defined from below, leads to evil both in the ordinary moral sense and the Plotinian sense of formlessness: not deliberate malice, but being swept by forces beyond one’s control.

In Plotinian terms, hers is the viscous soul: not malicious, but swept along by appetite and dread, impressionable without a stable center, and yielding at once to obscure imaginations.¹⁹⁸ What she cannot do, precisely, is affirm reality as it is. So she looks sideways at the light that is Luca.

The inferiority complex follows directly from the established metaphysics. The soul that cannot lift itself registers the good it cannot attain as a reproach. Luca’s altruism is not taken for loving generosity, but as implied condescending superiority.¹⁹⁹ This is Nietzsche’s ressentiment at the individual level—the inversion of value driven by the inability to affirm one’s own.²⁰⁰ As Plotinus notes, vice is parasitic on what it degrades.²⁰¹ Nina’s hatred of Luca is inseparable from her hatred of herself. The Egg of the Perfect World, reflecting on its own analogous condition, spells it out:

[She] could never let go of the light. All she can do is look at her weak self… In order to maintain her shattered self-esteem, she hated herself, and hated following [Luca].

—The Egg of the Perfect World, B ch. 159

Nina’s dynamic with Luca is the individual microcosm of the collective mechanism that births the Idea of Evil—hatred born of unacknowledged weakness projected outward onto the good, generating inner demons in the same way humanity’s refusal of sorrow summons literal ones.

In contrast, Luca is a bright anomaly in Berserk. Lacking Guts’ force, Schierke’s training, or Farnese’s competence, she possesses the absolute refusal to be defined from below—expressed, in her case, through the receptive and devotional feminine mode rather than martial assertion.²⁰² She does not philosophize about her solar core; she simply governs from within because it is right.

This intuitive alignment with who she is gives her a clearer, more stable expression of that core than Guts achieves for much of the story, particularly after the Eclipse buries his own solar center. Where Guts must rediscover through sword and struggle that “knowing how to swing the sword” is his truest answer, Luca lives it directly through particular nurture, love, and generosity without regard for fruits: holding her small ring of prostitutes together and sacrificing herself for them amid horror,²⁰³ while unflinchingly facing darkness.²⁰⁴ Her grace stands in stark contrast to the masses at Albion whose collective refusal of sorrow reincarnates Griffith.²⁰⁵ The clearest expression is her response to Nina’s transgressions, captured by Nietzsche’s inversion of resentment:

If a friend should do you wrong, then say: ‘I forgive you what you did to me; but that you did it to yourself—how could I forgive that!’

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 2.3.²⁰⁶

Through Luca’s tough love and by observing the world’s horrors given form, Nina begins to see things as they are:

Being weak is a thing… most people hate, I know those kind of things… very clearly.

—Nina, B ch. 176

She recognizes that staying in Luca’s company risks relapse into hating her again. Instead, she chooses to accompany Joachim—weak like herself—believing they can grow together. Her genuine wish to become someone who forgives, who is without fear or falsity, who is able to laugh with her friends, already elevates her above the lost. By lighting this little light she disperses part of her own shadow. It marks a transition from hylic reactivity toward psychic self-awareness. Her life alongside Joachim is the particular battlefield she claims: everyday struggles faced directly, rather than praying for abstractions.

Rickert: Refusal of the Utopian Illusion 🔗

If Nina’s arc dramatized the microcosm of the weakness that births the Idea of Evil and Luca embodied its luminous inverse through particular, selfless devotion, then Rickert stands firm as the will that confronts the macrocosm of that same weakness made institutional. Like Luca, his excellence does not rest in martial prowess, though he acquitted himself honorably in cavalry skirmishes during the Hundred-Year War.²⁰⁷ Beneath an unassuming demeanor and a gentle nature and the inability to hate, lies a steadfast warrior soul, marked by profound shame of having survived the Eclipse while being unable to die alongside his comrades in the Band of the Hawks.²⁰⁸

Through his many talents²⁰⁹—most prominently a da Vinci-esque inventiveness²¹⁰—he is able to actualize his will once he discerns its proper relation. As the third (and in many ways most grounded) survivor of that fated company, Rickert bore a quiet but immense responsibility: he alone maintained the Hill of Swords, crafting grave markers for each of the fallen, even without knowing the truth of their demise.²¹¹ This is the most essential example, but not the only one of him caring deeply for his surviving bonds.²¹² He cannot grasp exactly the world Guts has been living in, but wishes to have shared his burden.²¹³ Guts is amazed at how Rickert accepts the reality,²¹¹ despite Rickert having encountered similar horrors just prior to the Eclipse.²¹⁴

Two years… plenty of time for a person to change. In the time I’ve gone on hating, Rickert’s done this: funerals to accept the death of his comrades. He found a new way to live, through that vigorous strength of his.

—Guts, B ch. 130

Rickert does not project his grief outward, nor does he need a cause for the evil he has witnessed. Without Guts’ full account of what the Eclipse was, without esoteric knowledge of the God Hand or the Idea of Evil, he has already done the one thing the Vortex of Souls feeds on the absence of: he has faced loss as it is, named each fallen comrade by name, and kept living. This is not stoic endurance or denial—it is the precise affirmation of reality that the essay’s entire metaphysical framework identifies as the inversion of weakness. Where collective grief projects outward and births demons, Rickert turns inward and builds a hill of swords.

What Rickert enacts privately at the Hill of Swords, Falconia demands he abandon at the scale of civilization. Griffith’s New World Order is the ultimate materialization of the Idea of Evil’s kingdom: a Demiurgic utopia built upon involuntary sacrifice. The capitol is visually and functionally stunning—gigantic architecture, sewage systems, orderly traffic, and a visible spirit of cooperation among the people.²⁰⁸ Apostles are given a place where they no longer need to prey on humans,²¹⁵ and the walls keep mythological monsters out. Even modern readers who know the bloody truth would still be tempted to accept this Faustian bargain.⁷⁹

But this is Griffith’s self-referential ambition externalized into an entire polity. It is beautiful, orderly, reflective—the lunar principle made manifest, never the true source. Humanity trades genuine (if painful) particular existence—real bonds, struggle, form, memory—for a collective appeasing, a delusion of peace. The Matter is ordered in Falconia, but it still lacks intrinsic Good. Suffering might be solved as a symptom, but under the illusion, people are bound to drift further from the Good. It is a carefully crafted illusion, built by the Craftsman’s instruments (Archons), and, ironically, it is a craftsman who rejects it. True sanctuary would be to orient oneself in alignment with the Intellectual-Principle and not toward a Reincarnated Lucifer who consumes Od and loyalty to sustain his dream.

The deception runs deeper still. A true hylic could never make this discovery by themselves. They have accepted the proposed solution to their woes, and as they could never address the root cause, they stand to hate those who would threaten the comfort of their illusion. Griffith even reveals the immortality of the soul as spectacle, while concealing its eternal destination.²¹⁶ People no longer have to reckon with death as final; they are free to cling to the dead indefinitely. Where the Hill of Swords insists on the reality of particular loss, Falconia offers the illusion of closure and continuity—the same reflective comfort Gotot warned against, now institutionalized and enforced by Apostles ready to kill anyone who questions it.²¹⁷ Anyone might sense it by following their instinct that something is too good to be true—but people lack the will to affirm it. Griffith’s self-aggrandizing utopia even makes the Apostle Zodd uneasy.¹⁷⁸ Rickert will have none of this—not for what it cost, and not for the truth Femto is hiding from his subjects.

I was ashamed of myself that I couldn’t go with everyone to Windham to rescue you that day. I felt like I owed a debt for not getting to share in the fate of the others. For being unable to get mad like Guts, or take responsibility like him. For only being able to stand there and watch him go. But then, that hill of swords, the only one who made all their grave markers was me!

—Rickert, B ch. 337

Rickert has already paid his debt—not through vengeance or gnosis, but through the quiet, particular work of reverent remembrance. He speaks on behalf of the fallen.

If this city was built on top of my comrades’ bitter deaths, then I can’t live comfortably here, no matter how much of a utopia it is. […] Things you have now, things you’ve lost. People nearby, people gone far away. No matter what you choose, both regret and reluctance are going to follow you around.

— Rickert, B ch. 337

He holds no hatred of Griffith, seeks no esoteric knowledge of God, but he is true to who he is and to his comrades—and his will is iron. His hand is just as firm. With this, he smacks Griffith across the face—laying hands on the transcendental in a way Guts’ sword never could. The reason is embedded in the essay’s metaphysics: Guts fights with a hatred of the same misorientation that forged Griffith, and the lunar order absorbs what it recognizes. Rickert’s refusal is made of something else entirely—particular love, unconditioned by psychic bonds or cosmic grievance, proceeding from a self that was never defined by Griffith’s dream. What separates Rickert from Falconia’s willing inhabitants is not that he alone sees through the illusion, but that he alone has something the illusion cannot replace.

Remember the fallen, refuse comfort founded on lies, and build the future with loving hands. Rickert’s refusal is individual and, in the immediate material sense, futile—Falconia stands, Griffith soars higher, and the sinful black sheep serve their master. Whether the spiritually-organized few can resist not only in their private lives but against the institutional order that now governs the world is the question the story has not yet answered.

Resolution 🔗

The Axis of Weakness 🔗

Throughout the narrative, the soul’s inability to maintain form—to govern from within rather than be defined from below—generates suffering and evil at every scale. Individually, it expresses as the vicious soul swept by appetite and fear: it is present in Nina, but especially in the Apostles who trade their humanity for power at their moment of maximum desperation. At the level of communal bonds, misdirected collective longing produces a consuming storm: the Band of the Hawk orbiting Griffith’s blazing dream, the citizens of Albion focusing their dread onto a single scapegoat. At the scale of civilization, it becomes Falconia—the Demiurgic utopia built on involuntary sacrifice, beautiful and orderly, yet utterly false.

The Idea of Evil existed before man was fully sentient, yet it is not the cause of this mechanism but its terminal product. It does not precede human weakness; it is constituted by it—the Vortex of Souls given a negative form, a void shaped entirely by what flows into it. Humanity’s refusal to affirm reality as it is, to face sorrow without projecting it outward, builds its own keeper.

Suffering is the test that reveals this divergence. It can be romanticized or cursed, accepted as necessity or fled at first exposure, used to transform the self or to destroy it. The question is not whether or not one shall suffer—for one will—but whether the capacity to endure is built or surrendered. Guilt, grief, and fear, when they cannot be faced directly, produce an overwhelming psychic break that plunges one back into the ignorance of the carnal state—another current feeding the Vortex. Those who cannot look sorrow in the eye project it outward. Those who can, however imperfectly, retain form where others dissolve.

Learn how to suffer and you shall be able not to suffer.

Acts of John 95.16-96.42, New Testament Apocrypha II²¹⁸

The Hermetic Answer 🔗

The divergence between Griffith and Guts names the essay’s central philosophical claim. Griffith’s tragedy is that he cannot distinguish his True Will from his ego-driven ambition. Griffith appears to be the Absolute, but he is lunar to his core: every member of the Band of the Hawk was his mirror, then his very life essence; every body he has piled to reach his dream is inseparable from his sense of self. Guts, by contrast, repeatedly resists external definitions of his course, even when that resistance is inarticulate and brutal. His solar center is never absent, even as it is obscured by his inner darkness and that of the world.

Miura refuses the Gnostic solution. The Gnostic reads Berserk as a story of a divine spark trapped in a hostile material prison, yearning for extraction. But there is no paradise to escape to. The hermetic tradition—and this is Evola’s central point across his different works—insists that the gold is hidden in the lead and must be recovered there, not elsewhere. The body is not the prison; passive identification with the body is. The goal is unified existence: body, soul, and spirit made one, which is fuller of life than any of them separately. The body is the site of the Great Work, and to deny it in favor of spiritual escape is not transcendence but a more refined form of weakness—the refusal of the crucible in which the work can be completed.

We magi happen to possess—more than most people—knowledge of the many powers immanent to this world. But does that knowledge itself sometimes render us blind?

—Flora, B ch. 201

Those aware of higher modes of being are not safe in their knowledge if they cannot apply it through their own will. Skull Knight is the clearest demonstration: he possesses profound gnosis of Causality’s structure, reads its Junction Points with precision, and wields power that places him far beyond ordinary humanity—yet his interventions repeatedly fail to alter the outcome in any meaningful way. Knowledge of the prison’s architecture does not grant freedom from it. The spirit is not elsewhere. It is what emerges when the soul ceases to be defined from below and begins to govern from within.

The critique of the Gnostic reading runs deeper still. One cannot rightly distinguish the Gnostic worldview from the desire for it. The one who perceives the world as pure prison perceives it through the lens of his own weakness, and the architecture of that prison is a mental state he himself maintains. But consider what else is present in the world of Berserk, and in this one: particular bonds, the beauty of the natural world, the momentary peace Guts finds beside the ocean or at Flora’s hearth, the warmth of the fire Farnese cannot bring herself to leave. These are not illusions overlaid on a hostile substrate. They are evidence of the divine truth permeating the lower realm; the Good is immanent in matter, however obscured.

Evil is necessary, for there must be a contrary to good. […] The Nature of this Cosmos is, therefore, a blend […] what comes into it from God is good; evil is from ’the Ancient Kind’—a phrase which means the underlying Matter not yet brought to order by the Ideal-Form.

—Plotinus, Enn. I.8.6–7

If the world were wholly evil, we could not know the good. But we can, and we do. To perceive only the evil is to mistake a partial view for the whole, and that mistake originates in the perceiver. The refusal is therefore not only of the influence of formless evil, but of the entire idea that causality and archons hold one prisoner—for that idea is itself a product of the weakness that yearns for a hell so that it doesn’t have to accept reality.

What genuine mastery of causality looks like from the inside is something different entirely. The adept does not struggle against the current through brute opposition; he participates actively in the unfolding of fate, directed by a certainty of what must be and what he must be. As Evola renders Plotinus on the realized soul: nothing is undetermined, nothing is uncertain—the soul’s decision persists from the first moment, its judgment of things to come as firm as its vision of present things. To such an agent, action does not come from anything else. He needs neither argument nor memory, for he wills only what he must, and nothing else derives from him but what proceeds from the idea in himself.²¹⁹ This is the positive formulation of everything the essay has been building toward: not resistance to causality from without, but its mastery from within—which, as Evola states plainly, is the basis of prophetic knowledge.²¹⁹ Guts does not yet fully inhabit this; his solar center remains contested. But each act of particular affirmation—the sword wielded by his own will, his bonds to his companions maintained against berserkir dissolution—is a step toward it.

A Standard Available to Anyone 🔗

The power at hand is not heroic in the primary sense. The heroic path of the vīra, the LHP practitioner who transgresses established order in pursuit of sovereignty, is a particular calling that demands a particularly strong constitution. What is more broadly available is something prior to that: the fulfillment of one’s nature, the RHP alignment of one’s being with its proper place and function. This is dharma in its most essential sense—not a moral code imposed from without, but the affirmation of what one actually is, and the refusal to be defined as anything less.

Captain Roderick understands this practically: a ship cannot sail if the roles of its crew go unfulfilled.²²⁰ The criterion is not the magnitude of the role but the integrity with which it is held. One must discern what one is for, and affirm it under pressure—which is itself no small thing, given that the pressure of the world and of one’s own weakness runs constantly in the other direction.

Jill resolves to obtain it from a point of complete insignificance, with no wings, no magic, and no mentor—only the decision to crawl along the earth and fight her own battle. Luca arrives at it through sheer decency, governing from within because it is right, with no training and no martial prowess. Rickert masters it most quietly and completely: turning inward at the Hill of Swords, naming each fallen comrade, and keeping living—the precise affirmation of reality that the Vortex of Souls siphons on the absence of.

This is why Rickert can lay his hand on a literal god. He does not submit to fear or weakness, and so there is nothing in him for the lunar order to absorb. His refusal is made of something that Griffith’s causality does not recognize—particular love, unconditioned by psychic bonds or cosmic grievance, proceeding from a self that was never defined by Griffith’s dream.

Faithless is he who says farewell when the road darkens.

—J.R.R. Tolkien²²¹

Maintaining faith in a world engulfed in shadows is no easy feat. But the true faith is a light that shines in the darkness.²²² Were we to forsake our quest, our friends, and our particular bonds because of difficulty, we would truly be lost—not merely defeated, but dissolved, another current feeding the Vortex.

Miura’s Unfinished Ending 🔗

Miura left Berserk unfinished as he passed away. The work continues, or it stops. Guts has yet to resolve his ontological question; Casca’s recovery is incomplete; Griffith soars ever higher over a civilization that cannot distinguish between light and illusion. There is no transcendence to close the argument.

Yet this incompleteness enacts the thesis rather than opposing it. The story does not resolve into gnosis or apotheosis because Miura’s answer was never about resolution. It was about the orientation of the soul within the ongoing work: whether one turns toward form, measure, and particular bonds, or surrenders to the void that always awaits.

The world is not as dark as the weak would have you believe—because the light that makes the darkness visible is also real, and it is yours to affirm or abandon.