Musings on the story.

[ermis]

I’ll begin with some facts, provided by the game itself (reliable since they are shown to the player) and through dialogue (less reliable).

-Foster was actually reanimated, as we see in the end scene.

-“The flesh and the soul shall enter the palace through separate doors”. This appears to be explained in the game dialogue: “The apparatus translated Foster into a CaYa super symmetrical manifold. The corresponding mu-chiral field was capture in solid form — the cube. He really is in there. Still alive. And the Palace will re-manifest him”. The body is the cube with its mass and field and the soul is the manifold, which is a mathematical way of describing the physical effects of the cube and its field.

-The voices of eternity suggest that the Palace exists to make people understand that personal death still exists, but it does not matter. This evokes the ancient Greek mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries in particular, and freemasonry rites. The point of these was/is not to become immortal, but to show to the initiate that life itself is eternity and it is through being a manifestation of life that the individual becomes an individual in the first place. So, death is not a threat to individuality, but individuality only becomes possible through the cycle of life and death. In this way, a person has to fight herself (the echoes), which know only individuality, to discover that individuality is a product of nature and nature contains death. The meaning of the five voices is the element which fits the least with the idea that the Palace’s purpose was to grant immortality through technology to its creators and to any possible contestants who won the game, since the eternity the voices describe are phases in a person’s life, which means that the eternity intended is not a timeless existence as an AI, but the unending natural cycle of birth, growing up, getting old and dying.

What do these mean about the Palace and the ECHO universe?

1. Foster was reanimated, but he will at some point probably die. We do not know if the ancient Palace tech can make people younger. So, if Gramps was after immortality he was wrong. From London’s recollection of his actions, he would be very disappointed if he entered the Palace and got to the end. If the Palace was some sort of initiation about the meaning of life, Gramps with his emphasis on competition would not be able to understand what this whole adventure was about.

2. We still don’t know who created the Palace and why. Even if the Eleusinian mysteries interpretation is a valid one, it might have been indeed created by a recluse house as En suggests. Or it might be an uncapped AI.

3. If the Palace’s purpose was religious/philosophical initiation, then it would not make sense for a person to carry another as a cube; it would make sense to sacrifice (like in ancient times) themselves to become a cube and then to begin the journey through the Palace’s halls in something like an echo, a Palace-given body. As En realises in the end scene, the Palace was addressing her, not Foster. It was about her. Using echo-bodies would explain the presence if mirrors in the first few halls only. Their scarcity, but not total absence, suggests significance. The detection by the Palace of two souls in the room with the four slabs, Foster as cube and En, might explain the explosive malfunction which awakened the Palace. There is the possibility that people, just like En ultimately did, might have wanted to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of a sick/dying loved one, since we have seen that Foster was reanimated healed.

4. The clues the game gives us that the Palace can provide an initiation to a certain understanding of life, with the additional plot element of En’s newfound altruism, is explanation enough of the Palace’s function. What matters is that the Palace (and by extension the whole game) is as it is, not who made it and why.

[9214]

Thank you for sharing this. WRT ancient Greek mysteries: ECHO always reminded me of the Orpheus & Eurydice myth, albeit in reverse.

There's also an interesting analysis of the game thru the lens of Eastern traditions (+ my comment on it).

[ermis]

Originally posted by 9214:

Thank you for sharing this. WRT ancient Greek mysteries: ECHO always reminded me of the Orpheus & Eurydice myth, albeit in reverse.

There's also an interesting analysis of the game thru the lens of Eastern traditions (+ my comment on it).

Dear 9214, thank you for the links. The video and your comment are indeed insightful in revealing yet another angles of the game’s very rich symbolism. En’s achievement of transcendence in conjunction with the elements you highlight in the comment to the video and my understanding of the voices of eternity suggest that En’s exchange of herself for Foster’s sake might have transcended the Palace’s function as well. In western cultural terms, the introduction of the idea of self-sacrifice as means for salvation. If the Palace initiated the participants in the games in the terms of the Eleusinian mysteries its goal was to make the initiates serene and more ethical. En’s actions add another level of complexity in how the serenity and greater morality can be achieved.

In real history terms of the evolution of religious ideas, therefore, there appears to be a passing in the game (in western terms) from paganism or old testament kind of religion (as the video also says in relation to Gramps’ take of the lore) to christianity, and (in eastern terms) from hinduism to buddhism.

But the game also has philosophical significance independent of related religious ideas. The symbolism is heavy, in every part of the game, even in the chapter titles. The first chapter after the cutscenes has an architectural theme which symbolises conception and birth. There are vast spaces, but also narrow corridors, passing from dark (the womb, but also non-existence) to the light (coming to the world). The colours are black and white. Day and night, existence and non-existence, coming to the world. But also opposition by others (the Palace and echoes), and the self (echoes do double work in this respect). The black and white also evoke how the world is, yin and yang, and admixture of good and evil. The echoes during this stage also develop, like embryos before they reach their fully functional form. The throne is the seat of a potent and commanding self.

The second chapter has a white theme. This is childhood and young adulthood. Purity. Endless potential in vast spaces, which takes form as the levels progress with the levels becoming more complex, as happens with people. Plunging in water is the purifying bath, a baptism for the games to actually begin. Death enters the picture late in the white levels. Not just because people can die in childhood, but because people begin to understand the cycle of life and its constraints better as their intellect acquires experience, and takes form. In philosophical terms, this might mean discovering what one wants to do in life, but also the first understanding of the biological cycle of sex and death.

The green chapters symbolise adult life. Adult enjoyments (ballroom, the lounge, the banquet), but also a deep descent to the practicalities of life (the stairs). The complexity of adult life includes enjoyments like music (pianos, harps) and the company of others. The man cages symbolise that adult life is full of constraints; physical, as one gets older, time constraints, like dedicating time to one’s job, and emotional constraints, like living with others which is not always easy. The spring’s green symbolises the achievement of one’s full potential. The bridges symbolise the passage from old age to beyond, to death.

Then comes death. Lethe, or oblivion. The self loses its potency; there are many thrones which need to be filled to open the door. Others are now desperately needed to do something. In actual life we call the way the dead affect the living tradition. The numerous thrones also highlight death as the great equaliser. The self still merits its thrones, but in this realm there are many thrones to be filled, not just one. In terms of the script, the loss of the cube symbolises the separation of body and soul (we don’t know if the Palace would take the cube anyway), and the fact that the echoes stop attacking signifies that En has come to terms with herself. Here the spaces appear vaster than anywhere in the game and there isn’t much light. The flowers have withered, and the fruit has spoiled, as it happens with offerings in actual graveyards.

The final chapter, Enlightenment, is exactly about that. Almost everything is covered in precious metal. The shiny precious metal is the common colour element between all of the Palace’s halls, and since the final stages are about reflection and enlightenment, the precious metal stands for the intellect, whereas the stone colour in every level stands for the flesh. It is the intellect (with its understanding and reasoning) rather than the soul (an animating principle, which also is the seat of things like pride and desires like Gramps’) which covers the flesh (stone) after death. This is the means of reunion of the self and thus of its transcendence. It is through intellect, also called the mind, that the five faces are different, but also one and the same. Just like the echoes. This reminds me of Plato and Aristotle. But also of contemporary philosophy from the 18th century onward: the products of the intellect are sometimes fresh fruit, and sometimes rotten. The labyrinthine stairs and corridors represent tedious thinking to arrive at the destination, the truth. The intellect leads also to tech and industry, which in turn leads to dehumanising forces of grotesque appearance and great power. The giant gold echoes.

It would appear, then, that the game is not just about the relationships between self and nature, self and world, and mind and body, but also about the relations between nature as life and the historical trajectory of humanity as persons and as a whole. Which is what led me to point 4 in my previous post: in technical philosophical jargon the Palace and the game as an artistic creation are their own explanation because of what they are (ontology). So, the explanation at the level of knowledge (epistemology, i.e. answers to the questions who created the Palace, why, and when; or whether the gold echoes in Enlighenment are malfunctions or intended part of the original Palace experience), are not of any additional value.

PS. The game also has strong themes of human nature (notice: NOT of AI nature) as being full only as a psychosomatic unity (unity of soul and body), in the way Abrahamic religions also stress with the idea of resurrection (which appears in the shape of Foster’s reanimation) and through the continuous combination of mind (precious metal, which does not rust) and body (stone material, the colour of which changes as the game progresses).