Sephiroth, Sefirot and the concept of the One
Let
us begin, then, by delving into some of the real-world religious and mystical
signification of the names and themes in FF7. However, this will require a bit
of patience on your part before we get to talking about the game itself.
As I
said at the beginning, this essay will argue that the target of FF7’s critique
is the cultural phenomenon of messianism. Ordinarily in an essay of this type,
one might begin by giving a dictionary definition of this concept, so that
everyone knows exactly what is being talked about. Dictionary.com defines
messianism as 1. ‘the belief in the coming of the Messiah, or a movement based
on this belief.’ Or 2. ‘the belief in a leader, cause, or ideology as a saviour
or deliverer.’[1]
Similarly, Britanica.com describes messianism as ‘applied to a variety of
“redeemers,”’ adding that ‘many movements with an eschatological or
utopian-revolutionary message have been termed messianic.’ Further, ‘Although
messianic movements have occurred throughout the world, they seem to be
especially characteristic of the Jewish and Christian traditions.’[2]
As this definition hints, the problem is that the word “Messianism” has
different significations depending on the religious or cultural context where
it is used. Even within certain religions, particularly Judaism, there are
different manifestations of this concept that look quite different to one
another, arising from different traditions of interpretation and religious
practice. In this essay, then I will argue that the writers of FF7 drew upon
religious sources to exemplify the phenomenon of messianism as it appears in
various contexts, both religious and secular. That is to say, FF7’s is
not focused on any one manifestation of messianism, even if it makes specifically
Kabbalistic references. Of course, I do not believe that Kazushige Nojima and
the others are seasoned religious scholars, and nor do I think the point of a
video game is to thrust this kind of learning down the throats of average
players. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the real-world sources of
inspiration behind the game’s story, and to use that to make sense of what its
real-world message might be.
Let’s
turn to the meaning behind the name “Sephiroth”. Sephiroth, as is widely known,
draws his name from the kabbalistic term “Sefirot”. The meaning of this
term is difficult to explain without first explaining some other basic concepts
of Kabbalah. Firstly, in Kabbalah, God is understood as an infinite being, existing
in a formless state, beyond the comprehension of mortal beings such as humans.
In this context, God is referred to as Ein Sof (or “En Sof”), a term
which means “without end”. [3]
Ein Sof is said to have no characteristics which can be meaningfully or
truthfully described, since the nature of these characteristics so far exceeds
the boundaries of human knowledge as to make all attempts at description incomplete,
and therefore false.[4]
Kabbalah’s conception of God would then count as an example of what is often
called “apophatic” or “negative theology” in religious thinking more generally.
This refers to the idea that God can only be known in terms of what he/she is
not (this idea in both Christian and Jewish thinking, may be traced back to the
Neo-Platonist philosopher Pseudo-Dionysus).[5]
If Ein Sof is transcendent or infinite, the Sefirot, by contrast,
represent the worldly emanations of Ein Sof which can be
understood by the human mind. These emanations of God are manifested in specific
instances of wisdom, understanding, kindness, glory, or other humanly
comprehensible “spiritual” attributes.[6]
These
“emanations” are typically visually represented as 10 points or nodes on a
diamond shaped pattern, often referred to as the tree of life. You have
probably seen this image represented on countless new-age self-help books and
death metal album covers. The term Sefirot, gathers together the
multitude of God’s emanations, the ten nodes on the tree of life, into a united
whole. This gathering together under one term is an important point to grasp. Sefirot
is a notoriously difficult word to translate into English: early Kabbalists
espoused many different meanings of the term including “text” “scribe”
“storytelling”.[7] However,
it is typically understood, in a more literal way, to mean something like
“count” or “enumeration”.[8]
The 10 Sefirot are thus the
finite, countable, and worldly manifestations of the infinite God; the word Sefirot
is the gathering together of these worldly manifestations into a single representation.
To fully
grasp the significance of this, we must make the point that counting involves gathering
together discreet entities into a single representation, such as a number or a
symbol. For example, one can readily grasp that a picture of ten,
individual, red apples is far less efficient at representing the real apples
than the words “10 red apples”. The same is true of the Sefirot:
it is much easier to condense the information about the different emanations of
Ein Sof into a single word than it is to name all of them. This idea has
a long pedigree in Western philosophy, but also in Christian and Jewish
religious thinking, and can be traced back, in both cases, to the Aristotelian
doctrine of “hylomorphism” (and probably earlier, to Plato’s dialogue the
Timaeus).[9] Put
simply, hylomorphism designates the notion that all beings are composed,
not only of matter, but also of form. For the classical Greeks, the concept of form
was invoked to explain what causes objects to maintain their identity despite
physical changes to their component parts. Some of you reading may be familiar
with the Ship of Theseus – the philosophical conundrum that asks whether a ship
is the same ship (i.e. the same form) if it has all of its planks (its matter)
replaced. Returning to our number-example, we can think of the symbol “10”
as a singular form which gives shape to the many 1s which add up to the number
10. This form also contains qualities that are not to be found in the
matter which it gathers together: this is often what is meant by saying that
something is more than the sum of its parts. For example, even if 10 is
made of 1’s, the number 10 has various qualities that are not shared with the
number 1, such being divisible by 2 and 5. We might also think of the capacity
of a boat to carry large, heavy objects on water, even if its individual planks
could never do so. The hylomorphic doctrine assigns an active role to
form: it is form which acts upon the matter to give it shape and unity. In
relation to Kabbalah, we can understand the notion of Sefirot as
hylomorphic: the term Sefirot gives a singular representation, i.e. a form,
purpose and identity to the different spiritual powers that add up to the
tree of life.
The
hylomorphic theory is not just a philosophical idea, but also, historically, one
which has come to have a spiritual dimension attached to it. Even if one is not
aware of Aristotle, Plato or any of the medieval philosophers they inspired, most
of those raised within a Western cultural context can intuitively grasp the importance
of oneness or “The One” as a primordial harmony of things. Typically,
this oneness is understood as a pure point of origin at the beginning of time,
or the oneness of God’s creation before Adam and Eve’s fall from innocence in
the Bible, or perhaps, in new-age thinking, the sought-after oneness
that would return the world, and the self, to a state of perfect balance. But
we can also recognise here the cultural idea, common in the West, of a person
who is the One, whether that person be God, his human embodiment in the
guise of a messiah, or in a secularised idea of a person whose mission
it is to lead, save, or redeem, humanity. In this context, hylomorphism is
expressed in the idea of one person representing or somehow gathering together the
multitude of human beings and conferring upon that group a meaning, purpose
and form (“hyle”) that they would not otherwise have.
For
example, in Christianity (whose development was closely entwined with the
spread of Platonism and Aristotelianism), Christ is not “Christ” in isolation. Rather,
he is only who he is in so far as he represents a kind of spiritual containment
(or, to be more politic, inclusion) of his followers. This is at
least part of the significance of term Holy Spirit: for instance, in 1 John
4:12 it is written that ‘No one has ever seen God; but if we love one
another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. This
is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his
Spirit.’[10] This
idea of “the One” who gathers together the many, who gives them a shape and a
historical meaning, and who acts on their behalf to bring about a cosmically
pre-ordained destiny, is also common outside of the specifically Christian
context. We have already seen how this hylomorphic philosophy informs Kabbalah,
and we will see it again in connection with other secular forms of messianism.
It is this idea which, intentionally or not, the developers of FF7 have
invoked in naming the game’s main antagonist Sephiroth, i.e. “count”. In
what follows, we will try and make the connection between this Kabbalist
concept of Sefirot as counting or oneness, and Sephiroth’s character arc
in FF7s story – specifically the way he gives a negative form and meaning
to Cloud and the other protagonists.
Sephiroth’s
messianism, and the logic of sacrifice
Here,
we will begin to show how these hylomorphic concepts of messianism borrowed
from Kabbalistic (but also Christian sources) are exemplified in the game
through Sephiroth’s increasingly monomaniacal behaviour.
After
reading the books in the Shinra mansion during the Kalm flashback, Sephiroth
explains to Cloud:
This Planet originally belonged to
the Cetra. Cetra was [sic] a itinerant race. They would migrate in, settle the
Planet, then move on... At the end of their harsh, hard journey, they would
find the Promised Land and supreme happiness […] Long ago, disaster struck this
planet. Your ancestors escaped... They survived because they hid. The Planet
was saved by sacrificing the Cetra.[11]
Further, Sephiroth explains his own
connection to the Cetra as he (mistakenly) understands it at this point: The
Jenova Project wanted to produce people with the powers of the Ancients......
no, the Cetra. ...I am the one that was produced.’ Shortly afterwards, in the Nibelheim
reactor, Sephiroth explains ‘I am the chosen one. I have been chosen to be the
leader of this Planet.’ At this stage in Final Fantasy
7s story, Sephiroth’s messiah complex is not fully fleshed out. Yet we can
already see some important themes emerging in this dialogue and begin to
recognise their connection to the concept of Sefirot we described above.
Firstly,
we grasp Sephiroth’s sense of persecution – he identifies himself mistakenly as
a ‘Cetra’ (their name for themselves) rather than an Ancient, as is clear when
he corrects himself in the quote above. If Sephiroth is a Cetra, it seems to
follow that he is, in some sense, a victim of the historical ‘sacrifice’ that
he has described. The word ‘sacrifice’ is another interesting choice here in
the context of Sephiroth’s self-identification with the persecuted Cetra race.
This terminology and its context ought to remind us of the old meaning of the Biblical
term ‘holocaust’ (derived from French, Latin and Greek). In its earliest usage,
this term signified a religious, sacrificial offering, and only came to have
the modern meaning of massacre much later in the 1670’s. [12]
Sephiroth’s usage of the term ‘sacrifice’ here carries both of these meanings,
given that within the story of FF7, the Cetra are more or less extinct.
In other words, only through the mass, sacrificial killing, i.e. the holocaust
of the Cetra was the planet ‘saved’, according to Sephiroth. Just as a
religious sacrifice is typically something offered up in exchange for the gods’
good favour, so the Cetra were offered-up in exchange for the continued life of
the planet.
Secondly,
it becomes clear that this sense of persecution is linked in some way to
Sephiroth’s notion of being a special individual. Not only is he ‘the chosen
one’, but he has been chosen for this role by virtue of his membership of the
persecuted Cetra race: as he puts it ‘I have orders to take this planet back
from you stupid people for the Cetra.’ There is a paradox in this line of dialogue.
On the one hand Sephiroth professes his superiority as an individual by claiming
to be ‘the chosen one’, yet in the very next line, he places himself at the
service of an external power, stating he has ‘been chosen’ (i.e. by someone
else). One way to read this is that Sephiroth understands his legitimacy as
being conferred upon him by an entity greater than himself, namely the
collective will of the Cetra race: Sephiroth’s actions are supposedly done ‘for’
the Cetra at large, not just for himself or Jenova. Yet the opposite
interpretation is also strongly suggested to the player, namely that this
acknowledgement of a power greater than himself is a spurious appeal to an
absent authority, the Cetra, who cannot speak for themselves on account of
being (mostly) extinct.
Finally,
we also see that the concept of a cosmic destiny or eschatology plays a
significant role in Sephiroth’s thought process. By eschatology, I mean any
discourse which expresses ideas about the end of the world or history in terms
of a pre-ordained destiny. An eschatology can be religious, as in the Christian
notion of the salvation of the elect at judgement day, but it can also be
secular, as in communist, fascist or any other vision of an ideological utopia.
In FF7, the persecution and extinction of the Cetra was not simply a
neutral fact of history as far as Sephiroth is concerned. Rather, he
understands the Ancients as playing a part in an eschatology, in which the
reward for their harsh, earthly lives was to be given the ‘supreme happiness’
of a ‘promised land’. This, of course, reflects the real-world Jewish notion of
a chosen people or the Christian notion of being elect. But it
also reflects many different secular narratives that equate the grand destiny
of a nation, or of an ideology with a particular ethnic, social, or religious identity.
Returning to the game, Sephiroth does not see himself as actively taking the
role of chosen one; rather, it is an obligation that has been placed upon him
and which he passively accepts, as he has been ‘chosen’ and given ‘orders’. In
short, Sephiroth’s messianism is a result of his understanding of history, of
the tragic role his people played in it, and in the notion of a cosmically-ordained
destiny (the attainment of the “promised land”) which it is his duty to bring
about. Once again, the obvious comparison here is with the Jewish notion of Israel
but could apply just as easily to the American concept of manifest destiny, or
any other real-world ideology in which God or capital-H History designates a
certain people as the chosen people, or any place as the promised
land.
Later
in the game Sephiroth explains how he intends to live-up to the role of chosen
one. Here it becomes clear that it is not enough for Sephiroth to be the
chosen one in the sense of being a special individual. Rather, he also intends
to become the One; that is to say, a hylomorphic, spiritual container of everything
that lives and exists. In the temple of the Ancients, he explains:
I am becoming one with the Planet
[…] All the spirit energy of this Planet. All its wisdom...knowledge... I will
meld with it all. I will become one with it... it will become one with me.
According
to FF7’s in-game lore, when any living being is born, it is imbued with spiritual
energy, which is bestowed upon them by the planet’s “lifestream”. Likewise, when
the same beings die, this spirit energy returns to the planet’s lifestream. The
lifestream then serves as a concrete representation for the games central theme
of “life”, as described by Hironobu Sakaguchi in contemporaneous interviews.[13]
In this piece of dialogue, what Sephiroth says mirrors the earlier quote from 1
John, which bears repeating here: ‘God lives in us and his love is made
complete in us. This is how we know that we live in
him and he in us’.[14]
Just as God is ‘in’ the Christians and the Christians are ‘in’ God, so
Sephiroth aims to become “one” with the lifestream, at the same time as making the
lifestream “one” with him. Nor is this comparison a merely a superficial parallel
between the syntax of 1 John 4:12 and FF7’s dialogue, as the intermingling of Sephiroth
and the lifestream is supposed to enable Sephiroth to inhabit the role of God,
just as the Christian God only ‘lives’, in some more or less metaphorical sense,
through the intermingling of his ‘Spirit’ and that of his believers. In the
temple of the Ancients, Aerith asks Sephiroth: ‘How do you intend to become one
with the Planet?’ Sephiroth replies:
It's
simple. Once the Planet is hurt, it gathers Spirit Energy to heal the injury.
The amount of energy gathered depends on the size of the injury. What would
happen if there was an injury that threatened the very life of the Planet?
Think how much energy would be gathered. Ha ha ha. And at the center of that
injury, will be me. All that boundless energy will be mine. By merging with all
the energy of the Planet, I will become a new life form, a new existence.
Melding with the Planet... I will cease to exist as I am now... Only to be
reborn as a 'God' to rule over every soul.
In
other words, by injuring the planet, and by absorbing the energy it gathers to
repair itself, Sephiroth will have gathered all of life into himself. At
this point in the game’s story, Sephiroth appears to have given up all pretence
of serving the chosen people (i.e. the Cetra), or anyone other than himself, ‘I'm
far superior to the Ancients. I became a traveler [sic] of the Lifestream and
gained the knowledge and wisdom of the Ancients. I also gained the knowledge
and wisdom of those after the extinction of the Ancients. And soon, I will
create the future.’ Yet, his messianism remains, in the sense that he still
regards himself as the One, or as the bringer of One-ness. If Sephiroth’s destiny is to be the chosen
one, he will achieve this by robbing life of its difference, variety, and
diversity, and making all other selves identical with his own self, imposing
his monolithic vision of the future upon them.
Once again, one may note the sacrificial logic of what Sephiroth says.
In many religions, the process of spiritual growth is believed to be one that
involves sacrifice, whether that be literal offerings to the gods (as in the
medieval meaning of the term ‘holocaust’), the sacrifice of wealth or personal
possessions (as in the case of “tithes” paid by Christians or Islamic “Zakat”),
or even sacrifice of personal attributes, attachments or attitudes (as when Saint
Paul ‘put away childish things’ in 1 Corinthians 13:11).[15]
[16]In
order to become the One, Sephiorth intends to sacrifice the lives of all
living beings on the planet – a ‘holocaust’ in the more modern sense. To put it
in the biblical terminology of Corinthians, life, in all its chaotic variety,
is a mere ‘childish thing’ which Sephiroth intends to ‘put away’, in order to ‘become
a new life form, a new existence.’
Sephiroth’s
hylomorphic vision of a perfect world comes at a cost, then. The player, but
also the game’s main protagonists are given a glimpse of this sacrificial logic
in action a few scenes earlier, as Sephiroth kills the enemy operative, Tseng.
Sephiroth consoles his victim and attempts to justify his actions ‘The
way......lies here. Only death awaits you all. But do
not fear. For it is through death that a new spirit energy is born. Soon, you
will live again as a part of me. This scene
does not merely show someone simply being killed, but is framed as a religious
spectacle, as is clear from the fact that the death-scene is projected on a
large, magical screen to the game’s protagonists, from the fact that the
killing takes place in the inner sanctum of a temple, and even from the fact
that Sephiroth feels the need to explain, or rather, impose an interpretation
of his actions upon his audience in hieratic gestures and rhetoric. Moreover,
we are shown that Tseng’s life is worth something to the people around
him, and that his ‘sacrifice’ is a heavy price to pay. Immediately before Tseng
is killed, we see him developing a romantic attachment with his colleague Elena:
Elena: Be careful, Tseng.
Tseng: Yeah... Hey Elena, how
'bout dinner after this job's over?
Elena: Th...Thank you very much.
If I may be excused...
Aerith
is also shown upset when the party find Tseng lying all-but dead near the
opening of the temple, and explains her connection with him to the player’s
party, ‘Tseng's with our enemy, the Turks, but I've known him since we were
little... There's not a lot of people I can say that about. In fact, there are
probably only a handful of people in the world who really know me.’ Within FF7’s
story, it is not enough to show that Sephiroth’s perverse sacrifice involves
ending the lives of many people. Rather, we, as players, must see that the
sacrifices are worth something to the people involved, otherwise they are not really
sacrifices. All of these contextual clues (i.e. the framing of the
sacrifice as a spectacle, the religious setting, the dialogue) make it clear
that Sephiroth is not simply murdering Tseng, but sacrificing him to the ‘new
God’ that he himself intends to become. Within the story that FF7’s
authors present, what is most disgraceful about Sephiroth’s behaviour – but
also about messianism more generally in the real world – is not simply that
people are killed in its name, but that terrible sacrifices are done on behalf
of people who have not asked for them.[17]
But
it goes even further. The writers of FF7 are subtle here to show Sephiroth
doing what real-world ideologues and self-appointed moral guardians often do,
namely, to sanctify their vengeful motivations with virtuous language. Thus,
Sephiroth even forgets that his revenge is a revenge. As we saw in the
temple of the ancients, Sephiroth presents his scheme almost as though he were
doing the human race a favour, by allowing them to join with him as their “God”:
‘do not fear. For it is through death that a new spirit energy is born. Soon,
you will live again as a part of me.’ Returning,
once again to the comparison we made between 1 John and Sephiroth’s
megalomaniacal declarations, we can see a subtle commentary on the way that
many real-world ideologies and religions frame their beliefs and actions in
terms of a universalised love, in which often oppressive actions are
justified in terms of a greater benefit (doing a favour) to humanity. The
concept of agape, as understood within Christianity is useful to grasp,
here, insofar as it is central to many of the religious and non-religious
messianisms that have emerged in the history of the West. The Greek term agape
is typically translated as love, but the Greek term, as used in a
Christian context is more specific, and refers to a sacrificial love between
the individual, the human race and God.[18]
As 1 John 4:8 puts it, ‘he that loveth
not knoweth not God; for God is love’.[19]
To be in God and to have God in oneself is to love one’s neighbour. Sephiroth’s
attempt to engulf the entire human race within himself as their new god is
simply a sci-fi fantasy representation of this idea of messianic agape.
Sephiroth expresses his love for Tseng, Aerith, Cloud and the rest of the human
race by sacrificing them.
FF7’s
story here seems to rehearse Nietzsche’s condemnation of Christ in Beyond
Good and Evil. This particular passage bears quoting at length:
It is
possible that underneath the holy fable and disguise of Jesus’ life there lies
concealed one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge about
love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and desirous heart, never sated by
any human love; demanding love, to be loved and nothing else, with
hardness with insanity, with terrible eruptions against those who denied him
love; the story of a poor fellow, unsated and insatiable in love, who had to
invent hell in order to send to it those who did not want to love him
- and who finally, having gained
knowledge about human love, had to invent a god who is all love, all ability
to love – who has mercy on human love because it is so utterly wretched and
unknowing. Anyone who feels that way, who knows this about love – seeks
death.[20]
Sephiroth’s
desire to murder the entire human race in order to have them in him (and
vice versa) is a dramatization of this destructive, all-embracing demand for love.
His explicitly stated desire to do Tseng and everyone a massive solid is
the flip-side of an unacknowledged vengefulness, a vengefulness that is not
even allowed to recognise itself as such. Much as Christ, according to Nietzsche, ‘invents
a god who is all love’ in order to satisfy his own ‘insane’ and ‘explosive’
demands, so Sephiroth’s personal wrath disappears behind the new god’s
impersonal beneficence. The scene we witness during the Kalm flashback, as the town
is vividly and memorably burnt to the ground, is the ice-cold ‘hell’ (Nibelheim)
that is inflicted upon Cloud; the biblically-reminiscent falling star summoned
towards the end of the game is Sephiroth’s last judgement upon the human race (see
Revelation 6:12-14 - ‘lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became
black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;).[21]
Sephiroth’s sacrifice of unwilling
victims to attain the promised land, and to become the One, the new God, can
thus be seen as a metaphor for the sacrificial, ascetic logic that is at play
in real-world messianisms. His mercurial demeanour and his mock-biblical
rhetoric dramatizes the tendency of messianic figures, religions and ideologies
to hide cruel, violent and destructive intentions behind noble sounding words
like love.
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/messianism
- accessed 16/09/2023
[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/eschatology/Messianism#ref846793
accessed 16/09/2023
[3] https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5746-en-sof
accessed 16/09/2023
[4] Ibid.
[5] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-dionysius-areopagite/
accessed 16/09/2023
[6] https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13387-sefirot-the-ten
accessed 16/09/2023
[7] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/harvard-theological-review/article/spheres-sefirot-and-the-imaginal-astronomical-discourse-of-classical-kabbalah/6406AC47AA34ACAFCA9E9F99823AF630
accessed 16/09/2023
[8] https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13387-sefirot-the-ten
accessed 16/09/2023
[9] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/
“2. Prime Matter” accessed 16/09/2023
[10] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John%204&version=NIV
accessed 16/09/2023
[11]
All quotes from the script of FF7 I have taken from https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_script
[12] https://www.etymonline.com/word/holocaust
(accessed 16/09/2023)
[13] “Interview
with Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series and producer
of Final Fantasy VII.” From PlayStation Underground #2, 1997.
Accessed at http://www.ff7citadel.com/press/int_sakaguchi.shtml
16/09/2023.
[14]
See note 10
[15] I
prefer the KJV here of this verse, as it is the one most commonly heard. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+corinthians+13%3A11&version=KJV
accessed 16/09/2023
[18] https://www.britannica.com/topic/agape
(accessed 16/09/2023)
[19]
Again, I prefer the KJV here for elegance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John%204%3A8&version=KJV
accessed 16/09/2023
[20]
Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche trans & ed Walter Kaufmann (Modern Library 2000) section
269, p.410
[21] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=revelation+6%3A12&version=KJV
(accessed 16/09/2023)
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