Madoka Magica and Faust

It is nigh-impossible to discuss Puella Magi Madoka Magica for long without bringing up Goethe's Faust. Quoted directly in the form of graffiti of the German text appearing on a wall in Episode 2, Goethe's retelling of the ancient legend of a man who made a deal with the devil heavily informs the entire series. A brief summary of Faust: Faust, an old man who is a wise sage but finds no joy in his life, makes a deal with the demon Mephistopheles to become young again and try living his life differently. Mephistopheles agrees to show Faust all the pleasures and joys of life he missed, but in return, if Faust ever experiences a moment of perfect happiness so great that he wishes to stop time and make it last forever, Faust will immediately die and go to Hell. The first part (published 1808, revised 1828) mostly follows Faust as he woos a young woman named Margarete (sometimes also known by the short form Gretchen). After he kills her brother, he leaves for a while to celebrate Walpurgisnacht, when German folklore says witches and demons have an orgy on Mt Brocken. He returns to find Gretchen is now mad and in prison, and she gave birth to his child but it was taken away. He tries to free her, but she is so delusional she cannot understand what is going on and he is forced to leave her behind as he flees the guards. (94) Part two (published 1832, the year of Goethe's death) is much stranger: Faust is now getting old again, a successful and wealthy man and a powerful sorcerer, and he has time-travel adventures, has an affair with Helen of Troy, and wins a war by bringing in an army of demons. At the end, he finally does something motivated solely by the good of another, instead of himself, and experiences a moment of perfect happiness. He dies, but because it was doing a good deed, he goes to judgment instead of immediately to Hell. Gretchen pleads with the Virgin Mary to let her guide him into Heaven, and Mary agrees. (95) References to Faust abound in the series. Beside the aforementioned graffiti, Faust quotes frequently appear as cryptograms inside the witches' barriers. More importantly, the story itself has many Faustian elements. Walpurgisnacht, for example, while it is referred to as an immensely powerful witch, appears to actually be an event involving many witches engaging in an orgy of destruction, just as in Faust. The witch's barriers are prisons created by overwriting reality with their own despair and madness, just like Gretchen experiences near the end of Faust's first part. A moment of perfect happiness leads directly to Hell for Faust, and this happens to multiple characters in the anime: Mami goes in moments from the blissful discovery that she has friends and allies to her brutal death; Kyoko's father is happy to have a congregation that listens to him, only to commit murder-suicide when he discovers how Kyoko made it happen; Sayaka experiences the happiness of knowing she has saved Kyousuke, only for that to turn out to be the beginning of her descent to despair and witchery. Even moreso, the story of Madoka Magica is arguably a retelling of Faust. Kyubey is clearly Mephistopheles; he first appears as a cute animal, and is soon revealed as a frightening, powerful predator who offers wishes in exchange for souls. Just as Mephistopheles wants Faust to experience a moment of happiness and then descend forever into Hell, Kyubey is preying on the emotional highs and lows of the magical girls, and wants the energy released when they descend into despair and become witches. Since Kyubey's primary target is Madoka, it might be tempting to see her as Faust, but that would be a mistake. The anime more readily compares her to Gretchen; her witch form is named Gretchen Kriemhilde, for example. Kyubey spends most of the anime trying and failing to get her to take the contract, before finally succeeding, just as Mephistopheles is frustrated in his first few attempts to corrupt Gretchen so that he can make her fall for Faust. Finally, Madoka's wish to guide magical girls away from being witches parallels Gretchen's wish to guide Faust into Heaven. Madoka also takes on a role as a savior and protector, similar to that taken in Faust by the Marian, divine principle of the Eternal Feminine, with which Gretchen is associated (96).If not Madoka, who is Faust? Homura is a fairly close match. Like Faust, she makes a bargain with the devil to turn back time and correct the mistakes she believes she has made. (More literally in Homura's case, but then again Faust eventually time-travels, too.) Her closeness to Madoka and desire to rescue her also reflect Faust's feelings for Gretchen, and her power to stop time may be a reference to the conditions of Faust's curse. Finally, like Faust she eventually learns that her attempt to turn back the clock has only made things worse. However, Madoka Magica also subverts Faust. In the end, Homura's wish is not a mistake but key to breaking the cycle, and Madoka/Gretchen appeals to Kyubey/Mephistopheles, not Mary or God, to gain the power to guide others to Heaven. That is because Madoka is neither a character from Faust nor a Christian figure at all. Her true role is as a character from another mythology entirely. Just as Madoka Magica presents a typically magical girl "false" veneer before pushing it aside to bring in the "true" form of the show, it also presents a Faustian, Christian surface reading that masks an underlying, essentially Buddhist story. Most immediately noticeably, one of the central tenets of Buddhism is that desire leads to suffering (97), and this is very much the case in Madoka Magica. All wishes lead ultimately to pain and despair; emotional highs are balanced by emotional lows. Another key Buddhist concept that the series addresses by name is karma. Karma is a very complex concept, and different sects view it very differently. Broadly, however, the Buddhist view can be very loosely summed up as cause and effect: action plants seeds which grow (maybe in this life, maybe in the next) into consequences. Good actions lead to good consequences and bad to bad, but either way, it has the effect of trapping you in the cycle of karma, because those consequences lead to further action which leads to more consequences (98). The magical girl happiness-despair cycle works in much the same way, dragging the magical girls steadily down to witch-hood. The weight of karma also binds people to a cycle of rebirth in Buddhist belief, forcing them to live over and over again, facing the burdens of the karma from past lives (99), much as Homura is trapped in the looping timelines illustrated in Episode 10. Enlightenment, the understanding of the true nature of the world, is the only way to escape this cycle of karma—and it is only on the last cycle that Madoka learns both of Homura's time travel (the cycle of rebirth) and precisely what the Incubators are doing (the nature of karma). Finally, Walpurgisnacht strongly resembles a lotus blossom (a symbol of enlightenment (100)) while at the same time the gear motif reflects the ever-grinding wheel of dharma (101). As noted earlier, Madoka resembles a figure from Buddhist mythology, the bodhisattva Kanon (Japanese) or Kuanyin (Chinese). Kanon was a young girl who nearly attained nirvana, but stopped just before she reached it. She transcended space and time to reach out to others and help them to Enlightenment, before finally ascending to nirvana herself. This helps explain the Virgin Mary connection, as well, as the similarity between Kanon and Mary is quite noticeable and frequently commented upon (102). Thus it is that after saving everyone across time and space as a bodhisattva, Madoka then crosses the threshold to the next level. She becomes a force of nature, an incarnation of hope, dissolving her consciousness, and attaining nirvana. Or that would be the plan, anyway. As we will see, she takes something of a detour along the way.

Madoka Magica and entropy

One of the most prominent themes in Puella Magi Madoka Magica is decay. Entropy, obviously, is a form of decay, and thus the magical girls/witches are presented as a weapon against decay. However, there are other forms of decay at work: the city steadily degrades over the course of the series, from the bright clean spaces of Episode 1 to the crumbling ruins of Episode 12. Most notably, the mental states of the magical girls themselves decay. This is most pronounced with Sayaka's descent, but there's plenty of hints that the other magical girls suffer from severe depression, such as the fountain of what appears to be Prozac when Mami and Madoka have their heart-to-heart or the way Kyoko constantly eats her feelings. The entire point of the witch system is to get the magical girls to decay emotionally until they become witches; in a sense, all that Kyubey's system does is shift entropy from the physical decay of the universe into the emotional decay of the girls. This constant presence of decay ties neatly into the series' Buddhist roots. The first of the Four Noble Truths (the core philosophical tenets of Buddhism) is the inevitability of dukkha, which translates roughly to suffering. There are three kinds of dukkha: the ordinary, obvious dukkha of illness, aging, and death; the anxious dukkha brought about by trying to hold on to things that are subject to time and therefore constantly changing; and the underlying dukkha inherent in all material things as a product of their transience (108). This last corresponds more-or-less directly to entropy, the principle that all material things must inevitably wind down (109). This inevitability of decay sounds like it ought to be a source of despair, but there are solutions. The primary Buddhist solution is detachment—to escape from this world is to escape the karmic cycle of inevitable despair (110). This is the door Madoka, in her role as the bodhisattva Kanon, opened for the magical girls at the end of the series. But is it the only solution? Is there no way to be happy within this transient world? Western culture initially answers "no" as well. Christianity offers escape from this world to Heaven as its solution, with the added notion that at some future point God will destroy this world of suffering and replace it with a better one. However, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance a concept arose which gives an alternate path out of decay and despair: putrefaction. Putrefaction is an alchemical concept, an alternate term for fermentation, but it came to refer to the way in which death and rot bring forth life (111). Consider a rotting piece of fruit. It is revolting to human senses, black and ugly and foul-smelling, but it is also a riotous explosion of new life such as mold and maggots. These in turn serve as nourishment for "higher" forms of life, until ultimately even the most exalted creatures depend on rot for their existence. This is more than just the life cycle of biology, it is one of the most profound spiritual teachings of the alchemists: Death brings forth life. Rot and creation are one and the same. Decay is evolution. Or put another way, flowers bloom in cemeteries. One such flower is the red spider lily, a crown of which adorns Homura's witch form in Rebellion. Frequently a vivid red color, unlike most flowers it loses its leaves before blossoming; it is associated with loved ones separated by fate and death and frequently planted in cemeteries in Japan (112). The connection to Homura's pain, separated from her beloved Madoka, is quite obvious. However, the act of planting the flowers shows that one still acknowledges the lost loved one; love can endure where material existence has decayed away. Indeed, it is that love—originating in a destroyed universe—that brings Madoka back to Homura's illusory world. With her she brings two other beings, Charlotte and Sayaka. Both return out of duty and loyalty to Madoka, but later state additional motivations. Unsurprisingly, given that she has been obsessed with cheese throughout Rebellion, Charlotte comes back for cheese. Cheese is an excellent symbol of putrefaction, being a delicious and nourishing substance that is at the same time essentially rotting milk. Charlotte is not alone in her motivations for return; all three of Madoka and her servants have returned for something valuable that emerged from decay. In the case of Madoka, it is her relationship with Homura, which evolved over the course of multiple timelines in which Madoka decayed from a bright, cheerful magical girl to the largely passive figure of the timeline showcased in the series, while Homura decays from timidity to being completely shut off. Sayaka, on the other hand, comes for her relationship with Kyoko, a relationship rooted in Kyoko's attempts to reach Sayaka when the latter's mental state was decaying rapidly. The products of putrefaction, in other words, can be valuable. Decay is not an unmixed evil. What, then, to make of the fact that Madoka's perfect, decay-free nirvana necessarily contains no cheese, both because there is no way of making it and because Charlotte would have no reason to leave otherwise? In a world free of decay, free of putrefaction, none of the beauty and life created by rot can exist. Neither cheese nor fire-forged friendships exist in Madoka's realm, so it cannot be considered an adequate solution to the problem of decay. Only time and the likely inevitable sequels to Rebellion can tell if Homura's solution is any better.

Homura and the Nutcracker

There is a recurring image throughout the Madoka Magica movies, one we have briefly mentioned before: a rather sweet tableau of two white chairs on a grassy hill, Madoka and Homura sitting side-byside in them. In the opening credits of the first two movies, they cuddle, sweet and adorable, and innocent. In the third movie, the image turns rapidly rather less sweet. As she goes through the process of becoming a witch at the climax of the second arc of Rebellion, Homura returns to the chair scene. But this time, Madoka stands and casts herself sideways off the chair, splattering into a pink stain on the grass while Homura reaches for her helplessly. Homura crouches beside her, eyes wide in shock and horror, while a crowd of tall, attenuated Homuras surround her, gazing down. And then the vast fist of a raging Homura smashes the crouching Homura, railing and weeping beside the remains of Madoka. Madoka is gone, her coherent identity replaced by a diffuse abstraction. Homura failed. Now Homura stands in judgment over Homura, and finds her wanting. Her rage and grief at last unleashed, she smashes her own identity to become an abstract and esoteric being herself: a witch. Just like Sayaka, and presumably every other witch before her, Homura's witch form is an endless cycle of self-flagellation, a psychodrama in which she acts out the events that brought her to despair and punishes herself for her failures. She tries to shoot herself, and the self she shoots becomes the Madoka she had to mercy-kill. She cannot die, does not deserve to die the way that Madoka did, because she has failed to save Madoka. Not only failed to save her; Homura is the reason Madoka is gone. Her looping through time empowered Madoka to become the Law of Cycles, which erased Madoka from reality. Her discussion of Madoka with Kyubey gave the Incubators the information they needed to construct the trap now closing on Madoka—and they used Homura to create that trap. Homura is Madoka's greatest liability. Homura's witch form is among the most literal. She has the peaked black hat, the prominent nose and chin —other than being a skeleton hundreds of feet tall, she looks rather like the standard Halloween costume of a witch. Homura knew about witches and where they come from, and yet she still failed to avoid that trap, even embraced it deliberately in a bid to foil Kyubey. Unlike Sayaka, who believed herself a knight and so still looked like one as a witch, Homura knows what she is choosing to become. Likewise, she is deliberately sacrificing herself, as she tells Kyubey: she trusts Mami and Kyoko to kill her. Thus her familiars lead her to the guillotine, the mechanism of her sacrifice and instrument of judgment for her crime. At the same time, she is surrounded by imagery related to the nutcracker. One type of her familiars is giant teeth with nutcracker jaws. Another resembles toy soldiers, but with their high fur hats resemble the traditional Christmas nutcracker as well (and in the original story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King," the nutcracker is immediately recognized as a soldier by the children (127)). An image of a grinning mouth clenching a walnut in its teeth appears when she first starts to realize that she is the witch in whose labyrinth the magical girls are trapped. And she loses half her head, leaving only the lower jaw—a mirror of the titular nutcracker of E.T.A. Hoffman's story and Tchaikovsky's famous ballet based on it, who lost his lower jaw. The doll-like appearance of many of her familiars (in particular, the ragdolls, named "Clara" in supplementary materials (128), the name of the main character in the ballet), the image of Homura and her familiars breaking out of a glass-fronted cabinet, and prominence of clockwork also recall the original story of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King," in which the Nutcracker led an army of toys from a cabinet against the Mouse King's armies summoned by the striking of a clock. At a basic level, the image of a nutcracker without a jaw is an image of uselessness, an object without purpose. There is a deeper resonance here, however, if one recalls the tale-within-a-tale of the origin of the nutcracker in Hoffman's story. The nutcracker was once the chosen one, described in what amounts to prophecy as the only one who could rescue a princess cursed by the Mouse Queen. He had to perform a complex ritual to save her, but just as he completed it, he tripped over the Mouse Queen, and so the curse fell on him instead. This is Homura, relaxing because she believed she had helped Madoka escape her fate, only to discover that she'd failed in the end because of the intervention of Kyubey. It is, in other words, yet another way to blame and punish herself. Yet the magical girls refuse to cooperate. They refuse to join Homura in judging herself. They refuse to hate her and refuse to kill her. Instead, they work to free her, break the labyrinth and the Incubators' trap so that Madoka can take her off to magical girl heaven. Despite her raving and her pleading, they insist on forgiving her. They reject Homura's judgment, and demand that she reject it as well. They want her to forgive herself and free herself. But Homura has been fighting Homura from the start of the movie. Throughout the first arc of the film, Homura seeks the mysterious and invisible tyrant who rules the seemingly happy world in which the magical girls find themselves, with the intent of destroying it. It is the discovery that she is that tyrant which leads her to call down a curse on herself and transform fully into a witch; all of this is part of her rebellion against herself. That rebellion has not ended by the end of the film. Homura describes herself as evil and embraces the role of the scantily clad, black-winged devil-woman. But what difference is there between saying "I am evil," and "I deserve to be punished?" This is simply another expression of her guilt, a new way of tormenting herself. She has elevated herself to a cosmic being, a demiurgic entity who appears to have near-unlimited powers over material reality and the people in it: she can rewrite Sayaka's memories, bring back the dead, construct an entire new history for Madoka's family in order to reverse the first episode. And yet she chooses to make a world where she is alone, isolated from the friendships she was starting to build with the other magical girls. She chooses to let Sayaka tell her off before the memory erasure. The only real emotion Homura shows in the new reality she created is panic, when Madoka threatens to reconnect with the Law of Cycles. When, in other words, Madoka nearly brings about the return of a cosmic entity of hope and forgiveness, capable of ending Homura's suffering. Above all, Homura cannot allow that; she must suffer for failing Madoka, making things worse for Madoka. She must preserve Madoka eternally in a state of innocence and safety, cut off from her potential, because protecting Madoka is Homura's only concept of "good"—and so her failure to do so is her only concept of "evil." It could have ended. If the other magical girls had simply killed her, she would be beyond further punishment, and her suffering would have ended. But they, in their cruel mercy, forced her to go on, forced her to find another way to keep protecting Madoka and punishing herself. She hates them for that, for failing to hate her as she hates herself. In her new world, she expresses her hatred by passiveaggressively mocking its targets. She breaks a teacup behind Mami, recalling her death fighting Charlotte. She taunts Sayaka as her memories decay, mimicking Sayaka's loss of self when she became a witch. She tricks Kyoko into wasting food. And, in the stinger, she throws herself off a cliff next to a white chair, mirroring Madoka tipping off it earlier. Her hatred for herself has not changed. All that has changed is that now she has the power to make the magical girls hate her, to position herself as their enemy in the hopes that they will finish the job. Ever since the movie aired, there has been debate over Homura's new status. Is she hero or villain? Here, then, is the answer to that question: Yes. Homura is both the villain of Rebellion and the hero battling that villain. And here, also, is the answer to that question: No. Homura is the villain's victim, whom the hero must rescue. Her witch's barrier expanded to encompass the universe. She is the entire story now.

Credits

The Very Soil: An Unauthorized Critical Study of Puella Magi Madoka Magica by Jed A. Blue