Volcano Manor, Blasphemy, and Christian Nationalism
Nate Schmidt, Contributing Editor
What does blasphemy mean in a world abandoned by its gods? Come with me to Volcano Manor, and let’s see if we can uncover the heart of Elden Ring’s diabolical question.
In general, I appreciate the way Elden Ring fills otherwise beautiful settings with foreboding and danger. The scenic qualities of places like Liurnia of the Lakes and the capital of Leyndell give the game its unique mood of decaying melancholy. But sometimes, if you’re developing a game as forbidding as Elden Ring, you have to cut loose. Sometimes you need lava, snake gargoyles, and torture automatons. You need Volcano Manor—if you can even get there, past the soldiers devouring the bodies of their comrades on the field of battle, the horrible finger-spiders, and the giant troll that barfs madness juice all over you. Once you get past all those trials, the real depravity begins. It’s a scary, cruel, mean-hearted place full of some of the bleakest content in this oh-so-bleak game.
Volcano Manor is basically the answer to the question, “What if you took Yharnam from Bloodborne and dumped lava all over it?” I didn’t know that we needed to ask ourselves this question, but I’m sure glad somebody did. Take Bloodborne’s shadowy Dickensian spires, douse everything in boiling magma, then pack Elden Ring’s scariest enemies in one place, and you’re good to go. But allow me to take a moment to explain why this boiling anachronistic horror show is my favorite part of Elden Ring so far.
After taking this screenshot, my health bar did...not stay full for long.
First, Volcano Manor is an exercise in contradictions. Sure, the manor house itself is dimly lit and forbidding, and some asshole named Ghiza chases you around a table with his signature flesh-flaying wheel on a stick, but you still have to admire the decadence. The manor is austere and rococo at once, decked out with portraits and wardrobes and plush red carpets…and the occasional corpse, you know, just lying around. Lady Tanith and The Guy Who Stands Next to Lady Tanith invite you to rebel against the Golden Order and the Fingers, and of course you’re going to say yes; who trusts the Golden Order and the Fingers? Who trusts any authority figure in this game besides Turtle Pope? I certainly don’t. So you do whatever they tell you to, or you rebel against them and figure out another way into the rest of the manor, and then things change. Like YouTuber SmoughTown’s lore video about Rykard suggests, the surface of regal formality is only a veneer covering a blasted nightmare of decrepitude.
Once you get out of the manor house proper, there’s a church, because FromSoft games always have crumbling churches, and then you get to have another one of those big vista reveal moments that Elden Ring is so good at. This time, however, instead of glistening lakes, lush forests, and awe-inspiring cliffs, you get the bowels of Hell. A giant lavafall cascades into a basin of ruined buildings; spires glare ominously back at you, like they’re just daring you to take another step. And if you take that step, things get punishing.
This isn’t a guide, so I’m not going to give you the full rundown of where you might or might not go from here. I simply suggest you come prepared for the following: bad dogs, getting eaten alive by horrible abductor virgin robots, bad dogs again, getting stomped to death by a fire-breathing omenkiller, more bad dogs, stretchy snake guys with unblockable poison chompy attacks, snake guys with fire swords, snake guys with fire whips, horrifying albinauric monsters that chomp on your face, guys who throw black fire at you, lava slugs, a lava dragon, more abductor robots, blood pools, lava pools, poison bombs, and rides in tiny cages—all soundtracked by the desperate groans and screams of the damned. This nightmare takes place in perfect darkness or in the brimstone glow of lava flows. Maybe this is a place where the git gud vultures could swoop in and grab those pitiful morsels of clout they prize so highly, but my Volcano Manor play experience was more an opportunity to git bad: summon help as much as possible and run the hell away whenever necessary. Scary things lurk in the dark, and self-preservation is its own reward.
In other words, Volcano Manor is not compelling to me as a place to show off the gamebreaking FromSoft chops that I do not possess. Instead, I’m interested in Volcano Manor because of its gutwrenching environmental narrative. Volcano Manor symbolizes a particular type of real-world corruption: losing the content, but not the form, of religious devotion. Praetor Rykard’s zeal as an inquisitor was always terrifying and cruel, but it was nothing compared to the abomination that he would become once he turned to blasphemy—to worshiping himself.
There are telltale signs everywhere that Praetor Rykard, the shard-bearing proprietor of this establishment, was once responsible for some kind of Inquisition in the Lands Between. I got help puzzling this out from SmoughTown’s video, but even a more casual observer would note that there are a couple of pew-lined chapels scattered throughout the manor, including a church dominated by a statue of a colossal snake monster. It’s pretty easy to imagine how, in the days before the shattering of the Elden Ring, someone who fell afoul of church orthodoxy would find themselves snatched up by the abductor virgins—they grab you and stick you a into compartment where you get chewed on from inside—and dumped into one of those tiny hanging cages to perform the awful penance for heresy. Ghiza and his flesh-flaying wheel also presumably made for a stop on the harsh path to repentance, calling back to the Catholic Church’s use of torture during the Spanish Inquisition. FromSoft’s predilection for anti-establishment narratives is on full display here, in the machinations of a ruling religious order that was ruthless, vicious, and cruel.
Except, at some point, something inside Praetor Rykard cracked. His shard of the Elden Ring sure seems to have something to do with it, but one way or another, Rykard decided that the church would be even better if he was the god. That’s when he decided to team up/merge bodies with some horrible serpentine monster that lived in the volcano, figuring that between the two of them they would be better equipped to “devour the gods,” a phrase that serves as Rykard’s tagline. This is where all the snake stuff comes from: snake gargoyles, snake churches, snake soldiers with fire whips, and so forth.
In a way, I love this because it’s so corny and on the nose. A Lucifer-type figure, once a high-ranking church member, teams up with a serpent in a place full of fire and brimstone so he can become the lord of blasphemy who rules over a place of hellish torment. It’s FromSoft’s take on the biblical Satan story, and the Bloodborne-reminiscent architecture will remind savvy players of the similarly satanic fall of the Healing Church. It’s the video game incarnation of Ozzy’s shivery screams in “Black Sabbath,” or of Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast”—the era in metal when Satan was as likely to be a scary figure as a sympathetic one. Your mileage will probably vary on the game’s depiction of torture and violence, which can come across as needless edgelord shock-schlock, but Elden Ring is still one of a precious handful of games that let you kill both God and Satan. There’s a real Dante-meets-Roger-Corman pageantry to Volcano Manor’s angular passageways, and in many ways it’s endearing that when Elden Ring gives itself permission to go for more typical horror tropes, it goes hard, so hard it’s almost goofy.
However, even though we may be more likely to associate the inquisition with Catholicism, blasphemy in Elden Ring also looks a lot like it does in Protestant Christianity; the worst thing you can do to God (or the gods) is try to become one yourself. But underneath the bombast and the lava and the snake monster boss who tries to kill you with flying fire skulls, I actually think there’s something profound here that’s worth paying closer attention to. Elden Ring isn’t a particularly moral game—Gideon Ofnir, your guide to the Roundtable Hold, even tells you at one point, “We don’t really have a ‘code’ around here.” But when you lose the content, but not the form, of religious zealotry, you end up with…consumption. Rykard becomes a hideous snake beast that wants to consume everything, not just the gods, but also his own followers, whose still-writhing limbs garnish his signature Blasphemous Blade. If you return to the boss arena after killing Rykard, you find Lady Tanith noshing on the remains of Rykard’s corpse, hoping that consuming his leftover flesh will keep his blasphemous ambitions alive.
Snacktime in the Lord’s Chamber.
When I see this, I can’t help but think about the ways that the Christian Nationalist movement in the United States thrives on displacing religious ardor away from the numinous mysteries of divinity and onto charismatic blasphemers like the former president. Religious faith in and of itself is morally neutral; it becomes beautiful or terrifying depending upon how it is put into practice. The need to consume and consume, to feed yourself into the thing that you believe will make you powerful until you completely lose yourself in it—we’ve seen this play out in real time. The insurrection of January 6th and its persistence in an anti-democratic narrative about election “theft”—peddled by political pundits and pastors alike—is perhaps the most obvious case of this autophagic, self-eating tendency.
But this is actually happening all over the place, from the Southern Baptist Convention’s failures to take sexual abuse seriously, to the anti-choice movement’s need to police the bodies of others, to those who claim that gun violence is a matter of moral evil and godlessness, not policy reform. Rykard’s blasphemy symbolizes the corruption of religious faith into grotesque grasping at power for power’s sake, we’re all seeing firsthand how devastatingly easy it is to be eaten by the serpent.
