Remember the Spirits: A Princess Mononoke Analysis
When I first saw Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” I remember being so completely mesmerized by the graphical ingenuity and the storytelling prowess of the creators, that I couldn’t spare a single ounce of my grey matter on processing what the film was actually about. Years have passed, and I feel like not much has changed — the film still leaves me quite speechless, yet I cannot but notice the immense curiosity it also provokes in me. What is this curiosity about? I’ve concluded that it’s mostly about the deeper stuff, the grander narrative which supports the environmental issues that the movie raises, and of course, the Japanese culture which provides the context for all of this.
I have to admit I am not very well versed in Japanese mythology, but if someone were to ask me to describe to them an episode of the misty history of the Land where the Sun Rises, I would probably retell them the initial scene of Princess Mononoke. What is this scene about? A young archer named Ashitaka[1] defends his village from a wild boar, manages to kill the boar, but ends up with a scar on his arm as a consequence of the battle. What makes this scene mystical is the fact that the boar is filled with worms, which seem to be giving him some supernatural, almost demonic power. Later on, we discover that the boar was, before becoming a demon, a kind of a god. We also discover that Ashitaka’s wound is mortal, but that it will, for some time, give him the same kind of demonic power that it gave to the boar.
The reason why I consider this state of affairs to be mythological is that the spiritual and the physical world are united, and no clear distinctions are to be made between them. The term mythological is, therefore, not to be taken in any derogatory context, but I use it simply to distinguish the initial state of affairs to that which we have in the end, which is a kind of a disenchanted, religious world. But lest I go ahead of myself, let us try to analyze the state of this mystical world of unison between the spiritual and the physical.
As we could see from the very start of the movie, the state of this union was already deteriorating when Ashitaka was fighting the boar. The demonic state of the boar itself was caused by a bullet — meaning that the boar was not only a boar but a boar god called Nago[2], a kind of being that unites the spirit and the animal, was hunted. The demonic state that this strife causes is extremely antagonistic, oozing with anguish and despair, and ruthless at its opposition. Ashitaka, being marked by this force, slays two samurai with such remarkable precision and fury that one of the characters comments “you fight like the one possessed”. From this we can see that the primeval world of unison between the two fundamental layers of reality was being torn from the very start of the movie — the audience is simply put in media res.
I would like now to juxtapose this view of the primeval world as given in Princess Mononoke, with the Christian or Western view, if we may call it so anymore at all. I could not but notice that the initial state of affairs in Princess Mononoke much resembles the events of the Book of Genesis where the fall of Man is described. Adam and Eve’s dwelling in paradise was also mystical, in as much as there was the unison between the physical and the spiritual world. Thus, the serpent was the devil and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil a simple fig, just like the boar is a god or spirit in Princess Mononoke. There is always a temptation to see these stories of the misty parts of history as apocryphal or simply symbolic, yet I maintain that they have to be more than that, for they alone had the power to stand as the foundation for religions of the world, but we’ll get back to this later. Finally, not unlike in the film, in Genesis, there is a fall, which is nothing else but the separation of the spiritual and the physical world. In fact, the fall of Man is the fall from God, the fall of the Flesh from the Spirit on an ontological level, and that is what produces the demonic as too.
In Princess Mononoke, this fall is ontological as well. Ashitaka, as a kind of Adam, being corrupted by the worms of decay, is fallen, and therefore cannot stay in his primeval village, which is a kind of Eden. So, he has to step into history and investigate the cause of his fall. The lethal wound is what drives him now — death is his only real problem. Once he sets on his journey, we see that the world around him is fallen as well, war, strife, and pilfering flourish and what does Ashitaka discover to be the cause of this fall? It’s greed.
What is the first thing that the fallen Man does? He starts building shelters and fences — he starts building civilization to protect himself from nature from which he now feels threatened. Just like in Genesis we read that God put enmity between the serpent and the human child, so do we see this enmity in Princess Mononoke. So, the balance and harmony are not lost only between humans themselves, as between Adam and Eve, who blamed each other for the fall, or between Ashitaka and Mononoke who are also irreparably alienated, but between humans and nature, and physical and spiritual as well — it is the complete schism of all the layers of reality.
The audience’s first encounter of the conflict between civilized Man and the primeval nature is the skirmish between the people from the industrial town of Ironworks governed by Lady Eboshi and the spirit-animal wolf gods accompanied by a human girl they raised called Mononoke. In this skirmish we see a tool of civilization — gunpowder, being extremely effective against the ancient mystical beings. In this scene, humans are only defending themselves, but it doesn’t take much longer into the film to see that this is a perpetual conflict fueled by human’s abuse of technology. Namely, because of greed and unceasing desire to return to the state of bliss, humans utilize technology in order to deify themselves and to do that they need to wage war on nature and take its resources. In the west, from Hermes Trismegistus’ Hermetic Corpus or Gilgamesh’s quest, to modern billionaires’ attempts to achieve immortality through nanotechnology, this is the story of alchemy.
In Princess Mononoke, when Ashitaka encounters the town of Ironworks for the first time, he learns that this is the place where “they melt sand into iron”. In other words, humans are transfiguring nature into a consumable substance, into the stuff of life that is pure matter. Ironworks is not the only example of this motif, another is Jigo, the emperor’s emissary who is hunting the chief of the primeval anima-animals, the mystical Deer god who is both life and death. The emperor of Japan also wants to extract the juice of immortality from nature, but it turns out that that will demand a pricey payment, the head of nature itself — the balance of life and death.
Caught in the whirlwind of such wild forces, Ashitaka displays, at these very early minutes of the film, a virtue that will prove to be the saving grace of the whole story — kindness. Ashitaka’s kindness to the wounded men of Ironworks is what gives him the ticket to enter the town, but not only that, kindness is also what makes him capable of being a mediator between nature and civilization, which is visually represented in the scene where he prevents Lady Eboshi and Mononoke from fighting each other. However, kindness is not exclusively reserved for Ashitaka in this story. Lady Eboshi is also extremely kind and benevolent as a ruler. While in Ironworks, Ashitaka learns that Lady Eboshi frees women from slavery and abuse and provides a safe space for leppers, yet, at the same time, he learns that it was her bullet that turned Nago into a demon. Couple that with Lady Eboshi’s lack of reluctance when it comes to helping Jigo in his quest to slay the Deer god, and we can conclude that Lady Eboshi’s kindness, unlike Ashitaka’s is exclusively applied to humans.
This kind of fragmented morality, or morality that’s not universal, but rather utilitarian, is the precondition for the politics of exploitation. In other words, Lady Eboshi is trying to separate moral reality onto the human realm where she is good and natural realm where she doesn’t have to be good, all in order to alleviate the pain of her conscience. In this way, Lady Eboshi is very reminiscent of one of Joseph Conrad’s characters like Kurtz from Heart of Darkness or Razumov from Under Western Eyes. These characters are distinctly marked by what Tony Tanner in his critique of Conrad calls moral solitude. This moral solitude or alienation is what comes as a consequence of greed and shrewdness which are a means of justification for waging war against other beings — the ones we arbitrarily decide are lower than us for our utilitarian purposes. That is why, in Genesis, the word arumim is used both for nakedness and shrewdness — for, after the fall, Adam and Eve realized that they were arumim (naked, shrewd) or morally alienated from each other, which wasn’t the case in the beginning when Adam sang “This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh”.
Be that as it may, after his stay in Ironworks, Ashitaka spends the rest of his time with Mononoke and her wolf family. The world of the forest is more in unison and less in schism, but that is why it is receding from the world, for the world is itself in schism. Princess Mononoke is herself a living representative of the primeval world of unison — she is, in a way, both human and animal. That she is still human we see from how she reacted when Ashitaka confessed that she was beautiful — at that moment she takes a step back and decides to spare his life, not so much because she was struck by the content of the compliment, but because she has been regarded, by a fellow human, perhaps for the first time ever, in a positive way. On the other hand, that she is a bit of a wolf as well, we see from how she feeds wounded Ashitaka — by chewing the food for him and nourishing him by her mouth, completely disregarding the romantic connotation of the kiss. Yet, precisely because she is a bit of both, just like the forest world which is a bit of spirit and matter mixed, she can’t survive in this world. The she-wolf goddess that accompanies her, Moro, says that she is neither wolf nor human, meaning she is a non-being, an impossible being in the schismatic world, hence the name Mononoke[3] (“an unknowable thing”).
Thus, we see in the climax of the film that the eerie and ancient nature of oversized animal gods loses to the cunning and civilized Man. But what is the consequence of this loss? The animal spirits don’t simply vanish from the world, on the contrary, they turn demonic. In the context of the story, it’s another boar-god, Okkoto[4], that runs into a demon. Not only is there an implication here that, after the fall, Man and nature turned hostile to each other, but also that fighting nature provokes something demonic in her, a kind of a vengeful force. This is certainly not a thought to be neglected, considering the level of natural hazards seems to be correlating with the level of contamination of nature.
In the end, we see that after the head of the Deer-God was decapitated, the demonic nightwalker arose in his place, in search of his head, which is the essence of both life and death. This is the ultimate judgment of greed and alchemy as morally evil, for nightwalker is an apocalyptic being destroying the whole world, just because the balance of nature, of life and death, was broken by the aforementioned faults of Man. Ultimately, Ashitaka and Mononoke return the head, which results in the salvation of the world, but also in the death of the spiritual as imminently present. Nature and civilization survive in a kind of a dialectic balance, but the spirit world, the magical and the enchanting qualities of reality as a whole are gone.
Surely, we could interpret this ending in many ways, but from the perspective of the ending, I see the whole tale as a myth on the birth of Shintoism. Japanese religion, which is so ingrained in their culture that the majority of the population practice it while simultaneously thinking of themselves as atheists, is, in a nutshell, the worship of ancestors and animal spirits. It is a religion primarily focused on balance, both between generations and between nature and humanity. But what do I mean by religion here? By religion, I mean keeping the memory of a transcendental event. The moment when the spiritual is gone from the world is the moment when the keeping of its memory begins. Whichever religion you investigate you will find this. To keep the memory of Mohamed’s tales the Koran was written[5]. “This is My body, given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” — Jesus said. And so on, you get the point.
I believe that the untold punch line of the film is that, as a mechanism that prevents us from straying into moral isolationism and utilitarian ethics, religion plays a key role in the process of preserving the human race. It is a ritualistic, communal remembrance of a transcendental and spiritual, which reveals to us the fact that every being in the world is connected. Some, like Christianity, are soteriological, so they offer a solution to the problem of alienation, others, like Shintoism, are simple reminders, yet it is the overall disregard to the realm of the religious thought, that makes us forgetful of the spiritual, for just like Ashitaka and Mononoke at the end of the film, we live in a disenchanted world as well.
[1] For further information, see https://screenrant.com/facts-princess-mononoke-japanese-fans-will-know/
[2] For further information, see https://ghibli.fandom.com/wiki/Nago
[3] For further information, see https://screenrant.com/facts-princess-mononoke-japanese-fans-will-know/
[4] For further information, see https://ghibli.fandom.com/wiki/Okkoto
[5] For further information, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Quran
