Witch Time: The Symbolism of Bayonetta

The following is an excerpt from “Witch Time”, my book exploring the themes and symbolism of the first two Bayonetta games. If you’re interested in reading more, you can purchase the full book in the bookstore.

There are really no words to describe my delight the first time I played Bayonetta.

I’d seen it played before, but experiencing firsthand the campy, sexy, bad ass action was something else. It is such a smooth experience; more than Devil May Cry, Bayonetta made me feel like I was a powerful, tall, sexy ass kicker, throwing angels into the sun because I can. The concept is so unique, and there’s really nothing else in gaming like it. Sex is abundant in games; there’s tons of sexual content, sexfocused games, and titillating characters. But none like Bayonetta, whose sexuality comes across as something like burlesque, where other games feel like voyeuristic porn.

It’s also not the point. Bayonetta looks great, but more importantly, she is the most powerful being around, and she is living her best life, dressed fabulously and shopping for shoes with her girlfriendbestie. She’s a complete human being with a sense of humor, a moral compass, people she cares about, and a lot of magic power.

The game is pure fun. It’s not the deepest plot, and upon reflection there are parts of the series’ time bending storyline that don’t quite match up. It’s not the most important feature, it’s merely a setup todisplay just how wonderful she is as a heroine and a woman, through her dialogue, and her actions.The best part of Bayonetta is the gameplay, and the way Bayonetta’s character manifests in those portions of play. The chapters of the game are all impressive set pieces, with boss fights that feel pulledout of a cutscene or a film. It’s theatrical and impowering, and I’ve never played a game that pulled them off better. Kingdom Hearts has had plenty of over-the-top boss fights, but the feeling of interacting with something larger than life is often downplayed by quick time events and mandatory cutscenes. Bayonetta is nearly entirely interactive, and these theatrical fights become more impressive the further into the games you get.

It is a performance. It’s a dance put upon a stage where the moves are alternatively violent and seductive. It’s a music video where the star is putting her heel on her back up dancers’ neck, andaudience is cheering for more. It’s a burlesque, a drag show, a pole dance, where the viewer is overcome with the sheer talent and power and red-hot sensuality of the performer. Although the plot isn’t the main draw of the game, it’s not a half bad story either. Somewhat circular and illogical, as any game involving multiple realities and timelines must be, Bayonetta deals with larger-than-life themes in small, personal ways. It discusses a war between angels and demons while framing it through the lens of the little girl who lost her family because of it. The emotions the game is meant to convey are more important to the plot than the timeline of events or motivations of enemies, and that’s what makes a story stick in our hearts – how it makes us feel.

The greatest aspect of the story is how little it seems to get to Bayonetta. Angels are plotting and manipulating things behind the scenes and she never seems that bothered. It’s almost incidental for her to save the world; she just happened to want to kick angel ass, anyway. It’s the ultimate power play, for the heroine to save the world on a whim. The angels are constantly spouting their evil monologues andBayonetta barely pays attention. She interrupts them, tears them to pieces, blows them up after throwing a peeing angel statue on top of them. She’s disrespectful and irreverent because these angels don’t deserve her reverence or respect. They aren’t even worth her time. Father Balder, Jubelius, and Aesir, the final bosses of the games, receive more attention and focus, but they’re still torn down from the pedestal of ‘villain’ by the end. The game has no respect for anyone or anything. The big bads are transformed from dangerous world ending threats to panicking comic effects, complete with a mini game section where the player directs their flailing form into the sun or a dragon’s mouth. It’s absolutely ridiculous. The games invalidate the threat of the villains because nothing is sacred here.

Which is largely the point. The angels of the series believe they have the right to kill everyone and start fresh; they see themselves as higher, more valuable, than humans, witches, demons, even sages. Butbeneath their pretty armor and masks is the same pulsating ugly flesh of the demons. They’re no better than the rest of creation. Bayonetta pulls everyone and everything down off their pedestals, removes the veneer of respectability and steps back, gesturing at the audience to see how nothing is innately more sacred or important than anything else.

Sex is a major part of that. It’s not something sacred, it’s just sex. Our hang ups and societal repression are all consequences of the way we both demonize and romanticize the concept; Bayonetta says that’sstupid. In the same way, it’s stupid to romanticize and uplift angels just because they are angels. If angels are trying to destroy the world, then they suck, and we should kill them. No respect or love for God should overlook the actual reality of what is – that angels are doing evil, and evil must be stopped.Angels and demons are both metaphysical magic creatures, neither more holy nor good than the other. Sages and witches are both humans, capable of violence and selfishness as well as heroism. Nothingis innately good or evil.

Setting the stage for this wild, wacky video game is a bevy of mythological and religious references and overtones, that add to the absolute lack of respect for anything sacred. Bayonetta begins the game in a nun’s outfit – that is far too tight for a nun – and after leaping hand outstretched towards the light, starts to murder angels. She does so in the most disrespectful way, at one point lining them all up and lifting them over her head, thrusting her torso against them in a pseudo-sexual fashion. From the get-go, religious imagery is used to heighten the sense of the absurd, that is meant to press home the message that nothing is sacred, not even God, not even the game’s director, whose name appearson a tomb stone that Enzo pisses on.

A blend of Christianity, Norse mythology, and the general Eastern viewpoint of the creators makes for a unique experience, a world with Christian imagery and Western settings and props fused with an Eastern sensibility of balance, fate, and rebirth. The Lumen Sages dress like Christian clergy, the Umbra Witches in black colors and all-over coverage that pulls on nun imagery alongside the more occult witch imagery; and the existence of both, as part of a balance of dark and light, pulls on ancient ideas that have permeated Eastern cultures from the influence of Chinese philosophy, the Dao, the Yin, and Yang.

The idea of a Trinity of Realities is an Eastern one, too. While Christianity has multiple realities, it doesn’t discuss them this way. Buddhism and Hinduism, however, have the Trailokya, meaning literally“three worlds” or “three spheres”. In the Buddhist sense, these are the three possible realms one can be reborn in: the worlds of desire, form, and formlessness. The soul can be reborn as a variety of things in the various realms, human, animal, or divine. The names of the realms may be Christian in Bayonetta, but the essence of them, the content, is clearly Eastern.

The Western references are meant to imply meaning and history and give extra context to characters, locations, and props from the story. But the way they behave and the roles these things play are heavilyEastern, from the way that magic manifests in the world, to the desires of the characters and the gods, they all reflect Japan far more than the European setting they are placed in.

It’s a different feeling compared to a game like Devil May Cry, which offers comparison to Bayonetta for half a dozen reasons. Playing DMC has always felt like a Japanese portrayal of Western culture andthemes – with Eastern influence, as is inevitable, but not like Bayonetta. In the same way that the Silent Hill series feels far more ‘Japanese’ in the fourth game than the first, Bayonetta feels far more like a game with a Japanese sensibility, dressed in Western clothing.

It’s a masterpiece of gaming, a title that everyone should try just to see how creative it is, to see how games can embody camp, sex, queerness, power, and femininity in ways that feel positive andcelebratory without putting off the standard audience. So many gaming titles take influence from the mainstream ideas of gender, sexuality, and performance, with both east and west depictingtheir standards of what a desirable and powerful person is. Few reach past the mainstream into counter culture, and when they do, its often to demonize and depict villainy. Kuja from Final Fantasy IX, multiplecharacters from Metal Gear, Ghirahim from The Legend of Zelda; Western examples include characters in Far Cry 3 and Red Dead Redemption. All include characters who go against sexual and gendernorms and are depicted as evil, and sadistic, their sexual desires depraved and violent.

Not Bayonetta. Not only does the game portray female sexuality in a powerful way, but it also depicts queer themes in a positive light. From her relationship with Jeanne, to the themes of camp, sexualfreedom, and queerness in the game in general, Bayonetta is positive about going against the societal norm to be true to yourself. It’s a message that’s needed more and more in the modern world, and ingames in particular, and it is absolutely refreshing to see done so well, and in such an entertaining format.

Even from the menu screen it’s clear this is a game with a lot of occult themes and imagery. The first game’s logo is a combo of Bayonetta’s name and a magic circle, with half a dozen symbols strewnacross it. The first is a crescent moon, the celestial body most associated with femininity, and the crescent itself can be tied to two phases of the moon, depending on which direction it faces.

Both versions appear in the two Bayonetta title screens. The right facing represents the waning moon, which fades into darkness before the rise of the new moon. The crescent facing left represents the waxing moon, leading to the full moon, the height of Bayonetta’s power. The change from waning to waxing implies what has occurred in the games. Bayonetta reached a dark point in the first game, having no memories, uncertain of her identity, forcibly transformed into the Left Eye by her father. In Bayonetta 2, the moon chances direction, as she’s rising in power, certain of herself and her past, heading towards her zenith and the height of her success.

The second symbol in her name is the letter ‘a’, made into a triangle with a line cutting down the center. The symbol appears in the Anatolian hieroglyphic system as the representation of ‘king’. It appearselsewhere in closer association with the moon, the symbol of Sin, ancient moon god of Sumeria.In the center of her name, the ‘o’ becomes a symbol with a line and a bar coming out of the base, and a cat pupil shaped dot in the center. The easiest connection to make is to Venus, the goddess of loveand sexuality. Her symbol was a mirror, the round circle and the line shaped handle, and the sign has come to represent the female gender in general.

This Venus symbol has a pupil shaped dot in the center, which could represent an eye, but the Venus with a dot is also similar to the symbol for the Sun Goddess. Though more often associated with themoon, Sun Goddesses weren’t unknown. The Bible even has some connections to the idea of womanhood and sunlight, in Revelations 12:1 : “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”. Bayonetta could easily be this woman, associated with both sun and moon, who brings about the apocalypse.

Behind the title from the first game sits the magic circle Bayonetta uses to enter Purgatorio. It seems to be a unique creation of the game. The center is an oval shape, similar to an eye, and on either side are two symmetrical circles, one red, one black. Two lines stretch from the eye, creating separate overlapping pieces. A larger circle of magical letters outlines the entire image.

It’s a magic circle, an idea with roots in ancient traditions, in which practitioners of magic create circular images to protect them during rituals. The circle keeps out spirits, protects the caster, and helpsto focus their energies for the spell. The two circles inside two separate pieces, each with their own color, brings to mind the Taijitu, or as it’s known in the West, the Yin Yang symbol.

A Taijitu can appear in a variety of ways, but central to the concept is a circle, sometimes a spiral, and the balance of black and white. It visually represents the ideas behind Daoism and other schools ofthought inspired by it: that everything is made of complimentary yet opposing forces, which are constantly changing and shifting, one into the other.

The balance between the Lumen Sages and Umbra Witches, each associated with the same elements and powers of the two sides of the Yin Yang, is clearly pulling upon these Daoist ideas. The world falls apart when the balance fails; the apocalypse nearly occurs twice because light and dark are out of sync.

Right from the start and the title screen, the game is telling us all about what we’re about to experience – a game about magic, powerful women, and the balance of the world, all through the prospective of the titular character, Bayonetta.

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