I’ve been having fun working through Blasphemous en route to the sequel, which I’m now a short long ways into at time of starting finishing this draft.
It’s got a lot of fun background lore and so at some point I went and looked for a lore exploration video, finding the most viewed one was this one by Gingy. It felt so incomplete and half-baked that I was tempted to take a crack at it myself. And here we are.
Now, I’m definitely not going to do a comprehensive exploration of the lore of Blasphemous, instead I noticed an interesting parallel in merely thinking about the lore of Blasphemous, and that’s what we’re going to explore a little bit in that direction instead.
As with the dead retrospective draft I have on the Caligula Effect, I’ve already spent a lot of time thinking about this out loud on Twitter. A lot of those scattered thoughts are here in pieces, pared down to where I’ve thought about some of them the most. We’ll maybe do a follow-up if I have the same experience with the sequel.
Going to do a quick runthrough of the ground-level plot of the game, the setting and important characters you meet along the way, expect spoilers—this is your only warning.
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The game opens on a woman pounding her chest with an idol and muttering prayers. Spontaneously, the flat end of the idol becomes a sword, impaling the woman through the chest. She turns into a statue, and then some time later we see an unknown figure removing the sword. We’re given a brief explanation of the Miracle, a mysterious divine force capable of having a variety of effects on the guilty and sinful. Finally, we see our protagonist, the Penitent One in silence of the Brotherhood of the Silent Sorrow, seemingly resurrect on top of a pile of similarly dressed corpses along with the sword.
Blasphemous takes place in Cvstodia, a place seemingly held outside of time and space as a result of the Miracle (probably). The land is held in an endless sunset, filled with a variety of monstrous creatures and twisted humans, and overseen by an militant holy order known as the Mother based out of the Mother of Mothers of the Churches. It’s not clear what condition the lands outside of Cvstodia are in, if they exist at all.
The woman from the intro was subject to an effect of the Miracle, but the twist is that she was praying for it—for punishment to assuage her guilt. The idol became a sword known as the Mea Culpa and is our main weapon through all of the first game.
The game proper opens on a vista of the Father in the background (it’s unclear whether this is a depiction or if we’re seeing his actual remains)—the significance of which won’t be apparent to new players. As Deogracias explains:
The Knot of the Three Words. Here is where the First Miracle took place. One devout and tormented youngster asked the High Will of punishment. He placed a wooden log where he sat and prayed. He prayed hoping to be heard. He prayed for pain, so he could ease the guilt that sharply pierced his soul.
Then the Miracle manifested itself. It made roots grow and twist over his arms and legs, but not a cry nor a complaint came out from his mouth. Every inhabitant of this land bore witness to it, and all of them prayed before the besought eternal joy of that youngster. This triune tree that sprouted years after his death was named The Knot of the Three Words, for three are its twisted trunks, and three were the words spoken by that youngster before he died: My Great Guilt.
He became known as the Twisted One or the Father, and is our Jesus parallel to the High Wills’ holy spirit. He became worshipped ubiquitously, his guy-on-a-stick iconography is everywhere (including on the idol that became the Mea Culpa), and prisoners are executed with their limbs twisted around a wooden stake in a similar manner.
It’s not clear whether “every inhabitant of this land bore witness to it” is fully literal here, because four specific saints who go on to become the golden visages that hold the Holy Wounds are noted to have been direct witnesses to the First Miracle (though these may not be mutually exclusive).
Upon entering the Holy Line the Penitent One meets Deogracias, who describes himself as witness and narrator of the Miracle and he lays out your path: receive the Three Holy Wounds by completing the Three Humiliations in order to enter the Mother of Mothers of the Churches and seek the Cradle of Affliction.
Where things get kind of interestingly meta here—in a way that I kind of hope was intended—is pondering the nature of the Miracle, the Father, and the High Wills, because it’s not entirely clear whether these are three separate entities or aspects of a single entity. Now, there seems to be a concrete answer here that I’ll come back to, but it’s interesting to realize that this idea—are these three things all God or merely aspects of God—was an important problem for Christianity through the ages. One need merely skim the Wikipedia article on the Trinity to realize this something that a lot of time has been spent pondering.
My strongest temptation for the longest time was to assume that the Miracle and the High Wills are separate entities, it makes so many of the game’s events make sense from the perspective that the Miracle is acting in opposition to the High Wills. It would fit so nicely for the Miracle to be a chaotic force driving the Penitent One to tear down the Mother, which seem to be the High Wills’ driven force of divine order.
However, there’s a good amount of circumstantial evidence confirming that the High Wills either are or are responsible for the Miracle. To piece this together we need to ask what forbidden information is being kept in the Library of Negated Words and the Sleeping Canvases. Our first clue is subtle and comes from the one painting in the Sleeping Canvases that talks to us:
My name being Jocinero, I was born of the moon and of the torment of a brave bull, and of myself, by the grace of High Wills, my holy brethren.
The most concrete answer is provided by the Apodictic Heart of Mea Culpa, given by the Fourth Visage, who is buried in an even-more-secret part of the Library of Negated Words:
Four was the number of the Father’s greatest devotees. Four who witnessed the first miracle. Four who prayed before the young man who twisted and contorted as his joints took root in the towering tree. Four who heard the three words uttered by the Father just before his last breath. Four who admired how the knotted tree, from which liquid gold flowed, grew. Four who were the witnesses to the first Miracle but only one of whom could see the Miracle itself. He saw its form, fate and origin: a divine trinity, the High Wills.
This raises a couple of questions that don’t have really satisfying answers. For instance: what’s the deal with Escribar? Escribar essentially turned his back on the Miracle and was punished for it, and yet was reborn as the Last Son of the Miracle and upon his defeat he enters the Dream as the Sentinel of the Eternal Procession. There’s maybe some sense in which this is all a torturous punishment but, he’s rewarded for his betrayal by being turned into the High Wills’ preeminent bodyguard? He doesn’t exactly seem like he’s having a bad time.
Speaking of the Eternal Procession, the High Wills drop a line indicating that it’s older than they are, begging all kinds of questions about what came first between the Dream (ie this setting’s afterlife1) or the High Wills.
Perhaps most importantly, why is the Miracle sustaining the Penitent One at all? You could make the case that it’s to cause Ending A, having the Penitent One first send Escribar to the Dream and then sacrificing himself on the Cradle of Affliction. This may suggest it’s possible the First Miracle either wasn’t the first or was only the first in a repeating cycle, as Ending A implies that the Penitent One seated on the Cradle of Affliction becomes the new hot Miracle thing to worship. But if so, why does the Miracle allow Ending B to happen, or rather how does Ending B happen—why does the Miracle suddenly stop resurrecting the Penitent One?
Similarly, why does Ending C happen? Certainly it’s possible that by the time the Penitent One enters the Dream it’s too late for the High Wills to do anything about it but we also need to believe all of the steps of Ending C happen without the Miracle knowing. This may not be that much of a stretch; when you speak with Perpetva she implies there’s some element of subversion going on:
A meeting behind the back of a Miracle, that ends up knowing all.
Is it still possible the Miracle and the High Wills are separate entities in a way that squares with the inverse being hidden, profane knowledge? One distant possibility is that there are multiple classes of Miracle. There’s a variety of manifestations that can be grouped by effect; whether they curse or bless, whether they occur spontaneously or have to be explicitly asked for, some are identified by recurring names like Sorrowful and Grievous. When the High Wills are destroyed we see several Miracles being undone, including the Father, the Mea Culpa, and the Penitent One(‘s immortality)—but both Deogracias and Crisanta seem unaffected.
This is probably unlikely though, teasing a look at Blasphemous 2’s lore: after the events of the first game the Miracle will have been missing completely for centuries.
Blasphemous is really good, and I strongly recommend it. I don’t think it quite reaches the height of Hollow Knight, which kind of remains the high king of these kinds of games, but it’s a solid experience and its strengths are in its stylistic choices and its worldbuilding.
Git it.
The Dream is frequently depicted as a barren desert except where you witness the Eternal Procession—a seemingly endless and endlessly marching parade of dead souls—in Ending C.