Do As Thou Wilt

"Do As Thou Wilt."

This is probably the most significant line in all of Miura's work (and by the way, taken from Aleister Crowley). 

Let me set the stage. The world is inhabited by "apostles", who are monsters. These are seen as the cause of tragedy and destruction in the setting, perceived as the source of evil from society and our hero; perpetrating terrible acts of carnage, sometimes hiding in their human form, and sometimes incarnating what they represent in gore displays of dark horror. They were once humans, who sacrificed what they loved most to the Godhand, a pantheon of gods, in order to gain power. And that's not irrelevant background or a simple edgy explanation. In our story, there was a prior event, the Eclipse, that gathered them in a scenery of religious and apocalyptic undertones. There, they were given a command. You would expect that a great plan would be revealed to sunk the world into darkness; something that explains why on earth are those apostles behaving the way they do, why they even exist in the form of monsters. But in the scene, when you are expecting the dark gods to tell their servants to do something specific, or at least to do evil, they are simply told to do their own will.

Monsters don't monster because they are monsters. They do because they were humans. The animalistic nature of crude violence intertwined with higher obsessions of the supposedly more elevated soul. The manga doesn't shy away from terrorific displays of gore perpetrated to people by other people. If not by the dark horror imaginary, the distinction between the two would actually be hard to make.

Evil is then - at least in the world of Berserk - created as a necessary perspective for the society that can't understand that so dreadful world is the creation of individuals "simply" doing their will (as explained in Berserk deleted chapter) and need it as an explanation. Such interconnected murder can't possibility be the emergent result of the decisions of normal people. So something is created in the unconscious collective experience, and that idea once created, fulfills itself in those that believe in it. The philosophy of the author is here clear: the result of unbidden will, when given to people with power to act on it, results in existentialist monsters. The solution however, is not necessarily to strip power from each power wielding actor, which is what Guts (the protagonist) is trying to do in the first arcs. You can't "correct" them because they are doing nothing fundamentally different from what humans are designed to do. Even the faithful ones, who are only doing it in more twisted ways or sublimating it as justice. 

It doesn't end here. Griffith, the biggest on the apostles and member of the Godhand, doesn't have a simple will in self-gratification, simple power and pleasures (as do the majority of them) but instead has a dream. The change in rhetoric is significant, and changes everything. You don't perceive him as a villain (at first) but as a hero instead. Then as a fallen hero. Then all hell breaks lose. He finally becomes a monster - if he wasn't to begin with - and not any monster, one of the god ones. He descends to the world reincarnated to, once again, to fulfill his dream of his own kingdom of prosperity and peace (doesn't matter how tall the stairway of corpses has to be). We know what he did, we know what he has done, what he has sacrificed, what he actually is, but the world doesn't. He tricks the world into believing he is the savior of a hell of his own creation. But the thing is, he actually is. Only him can rally the apostles into a cause, his kingdom. They stop chasing their immediate gain and join society, Griffiths kingdom, living with humans somehow peacefully for a bigger cause. And they don't do because they abandon their will, because they repent or change their nature, but because they see in the longer term that concession, that abiding to the will of a bigger tyrant, is the best way to fulfill their own. I can't stress this enough. It doesn't eliminate their existentialist-hedonistic pursue, just slightly lures them in a desired direction that is beneficial to all. That draws an incredible parallel to Adam Smith capitalism, in which are the egotistic wants and needs of the individuals the ones that drive society to a better state, and not some underlying idea or promise of utopia, if only given the proper structure to do so. Such a kingdom, with those abominations product of the innate desires of humanity coexisting peacefully with humans themselves, only can exist for as long as it remains a secret to the population. The lie of the benevolent tyrant can only exist (and be manifested as utopia) as long as it is believed, and the true nature of the dream, and of the forces that keep it together as a self-sustaining status-quo, forgotten. The existence of apostles, the memories of their destruction, and the eventual and inevitable slips of those entities in the form of unabridged destruction in what seemed a functional society based on justice and harmony, then need to be explained by the existence of the concept of evil as an isolated and extraneous concept; because the alternative, to admit that civilization is built on the blood of the innocent and that we are still (at least potentially) the monsters that cause suffering and carnage, is too heavy to bear.

In essence, that's Miura thesis. That we live in this world.

The ultimate fate of the story is yet to be determined (well, the same that in Berserk, because the author died). The narrative points to a cathartic absolute breakdown of civilization, but I think that's just storytelling. The result might as well be just fine; the original dreamer and it's creation eventually fading into legend, his kingdom eventually degrading and the whole story starting again each two hundred years, with new heroes, villains and wills. With the people that have lived that era, having outlived brutal suffering with having them followed a path to fulfillment, sense of progress and purpose under the wings of the hawk. The protagonist of the story is in a revenge quest against Griffith for all the terrible things he has done, justified only because they stood between him and his dream. In certain point, he could have lived more or less peacefully, retire in a garden (well, in this case it was a cave) but chose not to do so, losing everything after an eternal struggle against existence itself. At least for the moment. In that struggle, he more or less also finds meaning. In our world, society itself acts as Griffith, utopia or a state of permanent contentment being the dream that engulfs all dreams. But it doesn't have shinning armor. His persuasive power is not awe, and the dream itself and the way to accomplish it are not clear to it's unwilling participants, and often more a downhill path of less resistance towards... nowhere in particular. It doesn't engulf, it extinguishes, it twists, it replaces. That's a significant difference between Falconia and the real world.

This is not a defense of dictatorship (I think) just a realization that something is missing when the will of man are not catered towards something bigger they can feel, see. That the progress of individual existentialism produces greatness when aligned, suffering when suppressed or bent on vengeance, servitude when surrendered and monsters when exclusively self-serving.

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To those confused, this is part of a larger article named "Individual Existentialism 2" that I will almost certainly never finish. Nonetheless, this part also works as a standalone piece and also, I like it. So here it is. The picture may or may not be related to the essay.