Spyro 3: A Draconic Logos
Dragonsphere Report
Spyro 3, if it indeed has a message at all, has a much more subtle and occulted one than either of the previous two games in the trilogy. At first glance it is the most innocuous seeming of all of the games. However, this conceals incredible and brazen depths that I regret I am only partially able to uncover due to the subject matter not being within my normal wheelhouse. These seem theological, rather than psychological, as in the case of the first game, or economic as in the case of the second. I will at any rate endeavor to explore the matter to the fullest of my ability.
First the usual recap: Spyro 3 begins with the dragons asleep in a field filled with dragon eggs, which are brought to the dragon realm only once every 12 years. This reference to the Chinese Zodiac, alongside the reference in the title (Year of the Dragon), are best understood as a kind of diversionary tactic, similar to what Yoko Taro uses in the Drakengard/Nier series by naming his enemies after occult entities and philosophers: IE, it has no real significance except to divert the attention of people unworthy of contemplating the deeper significance of the games.
At any rate, asleep in a field with eggs, along comes Bianca, a rabbit. Operating under the direction of an evil sorceress, and with the help of "Rhynocs" (essentially just Rhinoceros furries), she steals all of the eggs and takes them to the opposite side of the world, from which we later learn that dragons either left a thousand years ago "to get some peace and quiet" or were banished from by the evil sorceress. Hunter, who has been living with Spyro since the events of Spyro 2*, joins Spyro in searching for the eggs on the other side of the world, in the Forgotten Realms. Spyro is aided by four creatures who he frees throughout the course of his adventures: A Kangaroo, a Bird, a Yeti, and a Monkey. In the end Spyro defeats the sorceress and her minions, with the exception of Bianca, who converts to Spyro's side after learning the sorceress only wanted immortality and not to restore magic to the forgotten realms via dragons (the source of all magic). Spyro utters some lamentations after Hunter runs off with Bianca*, and the baby dragons (including female baby dragons) are all happily returned to the dragon worlds.
There are, again, multiple levels of meaning on display here. To properly explain requires giving some background on the semiotics of some of the symbols in Spyro as well as theological history. First, Bianca and the Rhynocs: The obvious association of Bianca with the Easter Bunny, while apparently a throwaway joke, is in fact what immediately renders Spyro 3 a theological text. There has been a lot written about Easter's allegedly pagan roots. Most of this has been well-established as invalid. The Catholic church's willingness to "compete" with pagan holidays and customs is well known**, but the essential meaning of each holiday always remained Christian: indeed, there was never a time when a pagan holiday was truly appropriated by Catholicism in the sense that various atheists and new agers would like to claim.
However, the Easter bunny has some esoteric meanings both within the Christian milleu and outside of it that remain "alive", and thus very relevant to our interpretation of her appearance in Spyro 3. The most important and outstanding is her association with the Virgin Mary. This association came, oddly enough, through a reinterpretation of the alleged hermaphroditism of the hare as was believed in commonly by the Romans. The hare was thought to change its gender from month to month, and to be capable of reproducing without having sex. These associations with gender will prove to be very important in and of themselves later. The Rhynocs are also not accidental. The Rhinoceros is a common real world candidate for the biblical "unicorn", much as the whale is a common candidate for the "big fish" that swallowed Jonah. These sorts of de-literalizations of the bible (though the elements in question often hail from particular translation choices rather than anything grounded) simultaneously have a secular character while at the same time establishing the bible in closer to modern "consensus reality". This too is very important.
Needless to say, this further grounds Bianca (meaning "white" or "pure") as a candidate for the Virgin Mary, since virgin maidens are said to have the unique ability to tame the unicorn. Let us look also at what the bible has to say about unicorns.
"Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?"—Job 39:9–12
This passage comes from God's boast to Job when God reveals himself to him at the conclusion of his challenge. It establishes the unicorn as an animal over which God has the unique capacity to tame, which dovetails firmly with our interpretation. However, the Rhynocs are the enemy in the game. Let us then look at the other major quote about unicorns in the Bible and its context.
"Draw near, O nations, to hear; O peoples, give heed! Let the earth hear, and all that fills it; the world, and all that comes from it. 2 For the Lord is enraged against all the nations, and furious against all their hoards; he has doomed them, has given them over for slaughter. 3 Their slain shall be cast out, and the stench of their corpses shall rise; the mountains shall flow with their blood. 4 All the host of heaven shall rot away, and the skies roll up like a scroll. All their host shall wither like a leaf withering on a vine, or fruit withering on a fig tree. 5 When my sword has drunk its fill in the heavens, lo, it will descend upon Edom, upon the people I have doomed to judgment. 6 The Lord has a sword; it is sated with blood, it is gorged with fat, with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams. For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah, a great slaughter in the land of Edom. And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with their bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness."—Isaiah 34:1-7
Isaiah is, fittingly enough, said by Christians to prophecy the coming of Jesus Christ, the messiah. However, it is worth noting that this interpretation is an imposition on the text via Christian hermeneutics. The Old Testament, when it is known as the Torah, is said to foretell the coming of a messiah, but the Jews are still waiting for this messiah. Interestingly, while Isaiah is all about God delivering righteous punishment to the nations, Edom in particular has special significance via Talmudic tradition. According to this tradition, Europeans are descended from Edomites via the Romans. The Edomites in turn are descended from Esau, the brother who lost his birthright in the old testament.
Given all of this, what is Spyro 3 saying, intentionally or unintentionally? Two additional key details: the main antagonist, the sorceress, is female, and the structure of Spyro 1, 2, and 3 taken together concern matters of the body (ie, psychological facticity), matters of the mind (economic and social systems), and matters of the spirit. This is deeply suggestive of gnostic symbolism. "Femaleness" in gnostic metaphysics is of course the essence of everything weak, material, corrupt, and faithless. Spyro 3, interestingly enough, introduces femaleness in three new places: the female sorceress, the female Bianca, and the female dragons.
It is hard to know what to make of Spyro being a dragon, or Elora being a Faun. Dragons in Christianity have, some apocrypha notwithstanding, normally been symbols of a will unchecked by any mortification of the flesh, or fundamentally out of tune with the natural world and God's will, fundamentally corrupted. Fauns of course have associations with the Romans, and goat people more generally with the Greeks. Thus Elora is in this context a natural stand in for paganism. In the second to last cutscene of the game, a pairing between Spyro and Elora is insinuated, and another pairing between Hunter and Bianca is well established.
Dragons in Spyro 3 are said to be the source of all magick. Of course, Christianity has two different major takes on magick. The first, the hermetic take, is that Christ was the first magician, and that all true, high magick subsequently owes itself to him. The second take of course is that magick is a trick played by Lucifer (generally hermeneutically interpreted as the devil) to lead souls away from God. Various divisions between magick and miracle, high and low magick and so forth play with or combine the two. Interestingly, Christ and Lucifer share a number of common links, first through both being known as the Morningstar, secondly through the Lapsit Exillis, a Jewel which was knocked from Lucifer's crown and which subsequently was carved into a bowl that became the Holy Grail itself. This is not infrequently read as a metaphor for the nature of pure intellect as self-serving and requiring temperance in order to allow its wielder to serve God and community.
Dragon wings are later revealed to grant immortality. So, in our video game with heavy Christian esoteric significance, dragons are both the source of all magick, and consuming their bodies grants immortality. But of course there was only one Christ, and in Spyro 3 there are many dragons. Additionally, Christ has a very tenuous (though not trivial) connection to the dragon via Poimandres, who in Hermetic lore is associated with the World Mind and the logos. Through the Prisca Theologia, Poimandres thus has a weak association with Christ. Very few have ever gone so far as to claim that Poimandres and Christ are equivalent or that they correspond in any robust sense. Poimandres is associated with reason as the logos, while Christ is associated with love as the logos, so there is some natural incongruity even despite heavily operationalized senses of both reason and love being in play.
So there is a lot going on here. So much so that I'm unable to really unpack more than a small fraction of it. It is clear to me that dragons in this context represent the community of Christian believers, of those restored as it were to the mystical body of Christ. This sort of formula is essentially Catholic but offers the easiest bridge between there being many dragons and only one Christ, and is well articulated in quotes such as these:
“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” - Unknown author
The conflation of the mystical body of Christ with the literal body of Christ found in Spyro 3 is strange and heterodox, and my religious education is too limited to really comment on it. But the association, by overreaching, thus becomes harder to deny rather than easier.
The sorceress, by stealing the eggs of the dragons, is literally trying to steal away the community of believers. That this dovetails with devouring them in order to gain immortality at the expense of their lives is deeply suggestive. From a gnostic perspective it would be easy to suppose that the sorceress thus represents the Catholic church, which through the symbolism we are uncovering would plainly here stand accused of attempting to make itself (as an institution) immortal at the expense of the eternal life of believers. I believe this reading is too narrow. Instead, I associate the sorceress with the devil, or even more broadly with any force that seeks to divide the Christian community against itself. The devil, though commonly depicted as male, is genderless in most textual and mythological sources, especially when equated to the fallen angel Lucifer, as angels are genderless. Indeed, the primary ending to the game involves the sorceress falling into a "lake of fire" (lava)***
The use of the dragon as a symbol for the messiah is also deeply Gnostic, although somewhat heterodox even within the context of Gnosticism. The Nag Hammadi scriptures have exactly one tenuous association of a dragon with God, made possible only by a twisted sort of hermeneutics: the serpent in The Testimony of Truth is portrayed in a positive light, and via conventional Christian association through Milton with Lucifer and consequently the Dragon of Revelations, the serpent thus becomes associated with the dragon. The dragon then becomes Christ through another turn:
'Again it is written (Nm 21:9), "He made a serpent of bronze (and) hung it upon a pole ... ... (1 line unrecoverable) ... which [...] for the one who will gaze upon this bronze serpent, none will destroy him, and the one who will believe in this bronze serpent will be saved." For this is Christ; those who believed in him have received life. Those who did not believe will die. '
Another such association, this one of the serpent directly with God, comes via Jewish mythology as recorded by The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall:
"Who art thou?" demands the Adam.
"I," the serpent answers, "am Satan who was stoned; I am the Adversary--the Lord who is against you, the one who pleads for your destruction before the Eternal Tribunal. I was your enemy upon the day that you were formed; I have led you into temptation; I have delivered you into the hands of evil; I have maligned you; I have striven ever to achieve your undoing. I am the guardian of the Tree of Knowledge and I have sworn that none whom I can lead astray shall partake of its fruits."
The Adam replies: "For uncounted ages have I been thy servant. In my ignorance I listened to thy words and they led me into paths of sorrow. Thou hast placed in my mind dreams of power, and when I struggled to realize those dreams they brought me naught but pain. Thou hast sowed in me the seeds of desire, and when I lusted after the things of the flesh agony was my only recompense. Thou hast sent me false prophets and false reasoning, and when I strove to grasp the magnitude of Truth I found thy laws were false and only dismay rewarded my strivings. I am done with thee forever, O artful Spirit! I have tired of thy world of illusions. No longer will I labor in thy vineyards of iniquity. Get thee behind me, rempter, and the host of thy temptations. There is no happiness, no peace, no good, no future in the doctrines of selfishness, hate, and passion preached by thee. All these things do I cast aside. Renounced is thy rule forever!"
And the serpent makes answer: "Behold, O Adam, the nature of thy Adversary!" The serpent disappears in a blinding sunburst of radiance and in its place stands an angel resplendent in shining, golden garments with great scarlet wings that spread from one corner of the heavens to the other. Dismayed and awestruck, the Adam falls before the divine creature. "I am the Lord who is against thee and thus accomplishes thy salvation, " continues the voice. "Thou hast hated me, but through the ages yet to be thou shalt bless me, for I have led thee our of the sphere of the Demiurgus; I have turned thee against the illusion of worldliness; I have weaned thee of desire; I have awakened in thy soul the immortality of which I myself partake. Follow me, O Adam, for I am the Way, the Life, and the Truth!"
Gnosticism, if we are being honest, was largely a grift: an attempt by opportunists to capitalize on the religious confusions of the time by engaging in syncretism in order to try and find formulas of power over their fellow men. But by the same token, Gnosticism was conversant with different philosophical traditions in a way that conventional Christianity was not.
The complexity of Spyro 3 hints at a similar syncretism, an engagement with multiple simultaneous religious and philosophical frameworks. If I were more familiar with the history of Christian thought, especially regarding the Prisca Theologia, I feel I would be better able to puzzle these mysteries out. Alas. When symbols converge in such a specific way, it is neither accidental nor impotent, though that does not always mean it was intended for a given reader. My background is chaos magick, which in turn effects my own hermeneutics: In my formula, Christ = Serpent = Devil = Baphomet = Pan. This in turn renders the body of Christ formula into a form of pantheism in which the totality of will constituting the world is softened by its total immersion in Christianity. You will sometimes find mad heretics on the internet and elsewhere talking about "Christ consciousness", which is itself a syncretic formula borrowing from the gnostic concept of gnosis and various Buddhist and Hindu concepts. I am not sure about the validity of any of these formulas, but they become readily apparent through different lenses and combinations.
This is something of a digression though. Let us return to those elements we have left unaddressed and uncapitalized upon.
First, the conjunction of Bianca, the sorceress, and the Rhynocs reads as commentary on European Christianity in particular. Just what is being said is impossible for me to discern, however, the nature of games is such that the Rhynocs and the Sorceress stand defeated at the end of Spyro 3. They stand defeated by Spyro, whose side Bianca defects to before the end of the game, as indeed is symbolically necessary. Regardless of what is being said, it has the character of prophecy, and is deeply suggestive of a radical shift in the nature and practice of Christianity in Europe.
The second coming of Christ is located somewhere in here as well, as indeed it must be: Spyro 3 is eschatological, as is revealed by the sorceress falling into a lake of fire and the dragons all being rescued and hatching throughout the course of the game. I will not go so far as to say that Spyro himself is Christ, however, he seems to represent the active element of the Christian community at bare minimum. This second coming of Christ, through the syncretism with Jewish mythology and Gnostic symbolism, must be assumed to simultaneously fulfil the requirements of Jewish theology of their own messiah.
This collection of themes should not be surprising at all to any perennialist. Over time, the true meaning of teachings are forgotten, society moves on, and a new prophet is needed to restore meaning to things. Since Christ was the last prophet, subsequent prophets can only also be Christ. Perennialism is indeed the secret meaning of the dragons hatching every 12 years, as well as the dragons being banished from the forgotten realms approximately 1000 years ago (a number that, applied to the real world, maps reasonably closely to the persecution of the Cathars, the last major group with gnostic elements in Christian history). Remember that Spyro claimed that the dragons left of their own accord to "get some peace and quiet", while Bianca claims they were banished by the sorceress. In either case, since the dragons constitute the true community of Christians in this interpretation, the implications are fairly obvious+
Lastly, the associations involved in the pairings between Bianca and Hunter as well as Spyro and Elora. Hunter represents the closest thing in the world to nothing, so Bianca's elopement with him can only possibly mean anything about Bianca. It seems to mean, quite simply, that Bianca ceases to be a virgin. That is probably a good thing. The virginity of Mary served a purpose in establishing the divinity of Christ. To remain an eternal virgin is a genuinely terrible fate by most reckonings. Meanwhile, Elora, freed of her representational schema from the previous game, now mostly seems to represent paganism. A marriage between Christianity and Paganism is of course incoherent; but then it is Elora who insinuates herself up to Spyro, who shows no interest, for reasons that should be abundantly clear to anyone who has payed attention to either the games or my reviews thus far. But nevertheless, it is a cordial sort of relationship, more cordial than has traditionally existed between believing communities: one in which the two can watch fireworks together to celebrate the end of a major mutual threat.
Taken altogether, both as a game and as a game trilogy, Spyro is filled with incredible depth of meaning. I could keep expounding on it, of course, but at a certain point the intelligent and educated must be assumed to understand, and the rest must be assumed not to benefit.
*It is worth noting that it is Hunter who returns to Spyro's world with Spyro rather than Elora. Hunter, who is male, and is returning to a world that is notionally about maleness. That Hunter later runs off with a character symbolically associated with hermaphroditism is a wonderful and subtle joke and affirmation simultaneously.
** “This little tree, a young child of the forest, shall be your holy tree tonight. It is the wood of peace… It is the sign of an endless life, for its leaves are ever green. See how it points upward to heaven. Let this be called the tree of the Christ-child; gather about it, not in the wild wood, but in your own homes; there it will shelter no deeds of blood, but loving gifts and rites of kindness.” St. Boniface
This gives the typical example.
***The primary ending to the game, which will naturally be accessed by the vast majority of players, has the sorceress fall into the lava. Of course, she is seen to extend a hand out of the lava, suggesting her survival, but this could simply refer to perennialism, a need to redefeat her periodically. The secondary ending however, accessible only to the elite player who completes every aspect of the game, has her fall into a lake of water, suggesting baptism, hence giving Spyro 3 a universalist character: even the character who represents the principle of evil itself is purged of that metaphysical evil.
+ "I adjusted avalars portals to take me to the dragon worlds but somehow I ended up here. Maybe my coordinate tables are out of date.
Yeah, by a thousand years.
That would explain why the book was so cheap"
in this context becomes a dig at The Bible. The Cathars read the Bible, of course; this was one of the things Catholic authorities hated about them so much; so we must assume that another, perhaps new gnostic syncretism is being put forward by Spyro 3.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report