a.s.raiyan2003-4: If i only had a dollar for everytime in Souls, a group of people misunderstood something and screwed everything up.

tarille1043: A god made from corpses?

Dang, that's real Nito!

mateo0123: i feel the need to remark the humor in the fact that we've been doing exactly the same as the hornsent, taking things literally when there was no such need

themaniae4803: A little detail: The ones elevated to good persons/saints in the jar probably are mostly Hornsents, as the ghost we find begging to not being put there is a Hornsents. I fear the Shamans were literally just Glue for the Jars.

Thatoneveryspooquiguy: How are you handling yourself zullie? Remember that your life and effort DOES MATTER!

Please remember to take a break when necessary

gabrielach867: THe idea of the Living Jars in the Land of SHadow being this grotesque and horrific while those in the Lands Between being more noble and, for Jarburg at least, docile, is really thought provoking. And while it looks utterly hilarious and stupid, the Great Jar Helm being on a Marika statue quickly becomes morbid when you contemplate the lore. THANKS ZULLIE!!!

KonRoge11: I see the Jar torture as less a naïve approach to the divine and more a genuine act of cruelty with a more superficial kind of appeal to sanctity.

SleepyOcto: The translation of saint as good person, which is a secondary definition for the word in english even if its not commonly used, adds a bit of context to the companion jar talismans description "maybe they were made to be better than their insides" I thought that was just flavour text but no its literal.

daedalusstray1121: So Godrick the Grafted is self inflicting a form of the living jar treatment on himself to try and ascend probably. I can't believe I didn't piece it together when the DLC came out and I saw the process of the jars. I might be very late to that realization. I always thought he was just an oddball psycho.

freakhead1: the hornsent jar ritual is almost a mockery of the crucible, their hubris blinded them thorougly

the most important aspect of marika's ascent to godhood is that the hornset see it as a betrayal, just one term implies so much but without any clarity

DisorderlyFashion: The idea that Marika and Radagon were originally seperate beings also ignores the thematic links between the lore of Elden Ring and the deliberately used, underlining philosophy of alchemic practices. They make it clear that people are made up of different, often contradicting components and the sectret is to create harmony between these components: to bring about a "reunion" between them, which underlines both the overall plot of the first game and the character of Marika/Radagon.

ForumArcade: I hope you're all having a wonderful day.

ridori7376: I still wouldn't completely write off the "Jar Saint" theory, though. There's mentions in the lore about the flesh of shamans being able to merge harmoniously with that of others, which seems eerily similar to Godrick (a descendent of Marika, a shaman). So while yes, the jar ritual is probably still misguided, there seems to be more to it than just stuffing bodies in a jar all willy-nilly. And again, the gate of divinity itself also seems to be made out of bodies, so maybe they were onto something.

And it's still the most believable explanation for how Marika got access to the gate of divinity. Perhaps the Hornsent believed they succesfully created a "saint" in her, and allowed her to climb the steps and become a god. Maybe a God who would defeat their greatest enemy, the followers of the Fell God (which we know Marika did). This would explain why they refer to the crusade as a "betrayal". They fully believed Marika was on their side as they had "created" her, and were caught off guard when it turned out she was still mad about them gruesomly torturing and mutilating her people ( big shocker).

Until I'm provided a better explanation for how a regular shaman somehow managed to get past the heavily guarded Enir-Ilim in its prime and reach the gate of divinty all by herself this is still my personal headcanon.

proselyteethan: As to the blunt symbolism, it's again represented in the act of grafting. It seems that simply putting additional (or simply beneficial) limbs on to oneself through ritual art grants some innate power and allows them to function as naturally as one's own two hands. It clashes so well with what is an overall increasingly complex universe that sometimes all you have to do is staple a bunch of things to your skin to give yourself power lmao.

SlipperyPeteClassic: I like the theory that all living things carry a life force/crucible energy/whatever you want to call it. Even after death, a corpse still has residual life energy left in it. The purpose of the Divine Gate and part of Marika's Godhood ritual is to extract the life energy from a massive amount of corpses at once, and that massive amount of energy is what gives her the power of a god. Similar to what the roots of the Erdtree do in each catacombs, except she's taking that energy into herself instead of it being redistributed to create another life. When a body looks dried up or fossilized, like a lot of corpses we find throughout the game, that is when it has become fully depleted of any life energy.

Floodsye: Love Fromsoft for being able to speak on the human condition through surreal worlds. Despite the visually distinct universes they build, separate from reality, they manage to weave the dark sides of humanity. Sort of putting a mirror to our species via dark fantasy.

And Elden Ring has so much of it. From the dangers of blind faith, the brutality and ultimate futility of war to the horrors of genocide and the explicit danger of giving in to prejudice and fear over reason to the absurdity of unscientific experimentation in pursuit of godlike power and the dark road that can lead down.

The devs are obviously well versed in psychology and human history and it lends the games this eerie realism that is absent from many other titles.

pokgeila: The saint idea can be furthered, since you see mostly living jars and jar people in the jails(For the criminals) in the land of shadows. I think there was a ghost NPC in one that was crying out that he'll be a good person if he doesn't get shoved into a jar. The shaman and criminals would be melded together into a new being that essentially is free of sin and resembles the melding of the crucible.

user-zp8kj2cl9g: Love me some Zullie lore.

Also the bodies at the Divine gate seemed to have suffered a process of Calcification, a very important and pivotal step in the Magnum Opus in the Alchemical tradition.

lox.168: It's sad that Marika couldn't come to terms with accepting death as a natural order in the world of Elden Ring, and after she shattered the Elden Ring, her fear of being trapped in a “jar” come true , to remain a vessel, imprisoned by the ideas of the Greater Will.

Funchunks: The interpretation of yoki hito (善き人) as "good person" fits with Japanese grammar, but it's also an archaic term for a person of high rank, like "the fine folk". I think the implication is that the plan for jar saints was always to promote them to the highest ranks of their society, to make superior godlike beings, not just reform them morally. I still favor the interpretation of Marika as a jar saint, and her children being either entirely or in part made from the other people added to the jar, as shaman-Marika attempted to rid herself of them (possibly finally succeeding by escaping as Ranni), which explains why they were full of curses and tended to be composite beings like Miquella/Trina. Horned Grandam's complaint of Marika being a "wanton strumpet" suggest that they particularly intended them to be celibate, so as not to alter the carefully planned mixture of their components in the process of bearing children.

technist5246: One thing that I feel tends to get left out, is how similar in practice the God-devouring Serpent (or any other snake for that matter) to a Living Jar.

If a snake is to consume a shaman, its insides and all of snake's other victims will be melded into one. Thus snake becomes an innards vessel. Think of God-devouring Serpent, a snake skin filled with animated human flesh, and so are the jars. And so I think was the snake skin near the Bonny Village.

Cjelex: I believe that Marika was held in some high regard by the Hornsent before her crusade against them. For one there's the vandalized Marika statues in the realm of shadow that seems to depict her at a time before she cut her braid, the earliest depiction we see of her. Another thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that while we know that Enir-Ilim was sacred to the Hornsent and that they built it, something I noticed is that in the trailer when Marika is at the Divine Gate it looks fresh, the blood is still wet and red, while when we get to it the bodies are dried out and pale. I believe that Marika was the one who had the Hornsent build the Gate, and she used their bodies the same way they used the jars, to empower her ascent to godhood.

Scarwing: I like to think the end product of the horn-sent jars was the gate of divinity, but that alone did not make a God. Marika did...something to use the gate to reach out to the Greater Will, or at least the Elden Beast, and convince it to grant her Godhood. It was only afterwards did she realize what she got herself into, and started plotting to escape godhood.

This division of self between "I have achieved the Godhood I sought" and "I am still trapped" produced the separation between Radagon and Marika.

Jun 02 2025

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