by J.Z. Schafer, Anthony Linderman, and Perseus

This dewdrop world —
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet . . .

– Issa¹
‍

Demon Slayer is one of the best known, and best received, animes/mangas of all time. It appeared first as a manga (one of the top ten best selling), with some 200ish chapter installations, and then as an anime. The latter has achieved its own successes; so far, it has run six seasons, or arcs, and plans to end on a triad of films, released over the next few years. A movie was also released in place of a second season (it was later divided, and released as episodes as well); this film, Demon Slayer Mugen Train, is the highest grossing film to ever come out of Japan.

This essay attempts to articulate the symbolism of the story poetically and ekphrastically, as a dialogical rumination on the beauty of the tale and its characters. In its style and construction, it attempts to evoke and induce the spirit of the story, the vividness of its color, the flame and water of its profundity. The authors are three, and they have each chosen one of the elemental breathing styles in the show to base their language and approach upon (these appear, in the following, as headings). In this surprisingly deep and moving story, the authors believe to have found the living heart of the shonen anime genre, and more generally, a hint as to the cosmic origins of art itself. They have called this heart, Ontological Combat Mode. More broadly, this article is symbolically preoccupied with the relationship between trauma, hope, and beauty, which are key themes of the narrative. The authors attempt not to convince, but to evince, hopefully to help the reader fall in love. In consequence, of course, this trialogue is not meant to be read in isolation, but, if the reader will allow, in a similar manner to an appreciative commentary. The tone aimed for is doxological, the point being to enrich the experience of one who is encountering the tale, and to enable one more easily to see the crucified and resurrected Lord, draped in the garments of our language and our stories, pouring his life into the very things which gives us life and hope in our tenebrific age.

JZ, Stone Breathing First Form: Serpentine Bipolar

Most of our memories are bad memories; memories of injustice or ugliness. Whatever good memories we have tend to become with time like pitch, quicksand; we nostalgically inhabit them, we trace their scents recursively like deer downwind of themselves, until we are trapped in a familiar loop, wherein a wingéd, beautiful moment of our lives that was betimes surprising, is sucked of its nectar and manacled, as it were, in the talons of our expectation. 

Karl Friston, the most often cited cognitive scientist now living, tells us that our perceptual systems are built around recognizing events that don’t fit into our habitual worldview.² Evolutionary biologists claim that our attentional schemas have developed in order to recognize snakes. In both models, the world presents itself to us in our immaturity as a stranger, and moreover, a dangerous, sometimes poisonous stranger. Thus, the way that we see the world is inherently traumatized. In order to divest our vision of these deadening ossifications, in order to see the world as a gift, we must be washed in an unknowing, theophanic fire. The anime Demon Slayer is one such purgative fire: the story of the war that rages in every heart between the deep trauma that afflicts the center of our being, and the deeper beauty which created us and that weeps through our hearts like a spring of freshening myrrh.

Anthony, Sun Breathing First Form: Dance

Tanjiro Kamado was created by beauty. In the hidden, simple life of a rural charcoal burner, his whole personhood was nourished by the love of his family, the quiet of the forest, and his steadfast role as an older brother. For thirteen years, he rejoiced in filling that role, offering himself as a gift to his family through his strength and service to them. Yet just as he was blooming into the full flower of his manhood, almost everyone through whom the fragrance of beauty wafted into his life were cut down by the scythe of tragedy. 

Night had fallen in those breathless moments of horror in the bloodsoaked walls of what was once his home, and his innocence teetered on a precipice between consuming, monstrous despair, and the impossibly narrow path of preserving his virtue. This tenuous thread to life and light was preserved in the person of his only surviving sister. 

He is on the brink of losing her, too; not to death, but to a far worse fate, because she has been envenomed with the blood of the demon who slaughtered their family. One step is left before she is irrevocably initiated into demonic communion: devouring a human. 

Her plight wakens her brother from despair; he must preserve her from stepping into that fate. He disregards the fact that the injected blood of the infernal leech has changed her into a night creature, ravenous for human flesh. Feral, she doesn’t know her brother, and sets upon him tooth and claw, but, despite her altered visage and her superhuman strength, he knows her identity. She is Nezuko, his only family left. He is Tanjiro, her brother, and thus begins Demon Slayer. 

Perseus, Water Breathing First Form: Water Surface Slash

The tale of Demon Slayer is really the unfurling of this specific moment; Tanjiro died alongside his family in the beginning — it’s easy to miss this subtle, essential framing because we are used to encountering this kind of ultimate sacrifice of potential at the end of a long story. In a way, we meet Tanjiro and Nezuko at the conclusion of their narrative; nevertheless, Demon Slayer takes place not as an epilogue or an afterthought, but as an eschatological vision unfolding through a dreaming body. Tanjiro chooses to die to the world in every meaningful sense of the phrase. We are psychosomatic beings, soul and body; we often can’t tell where soul begins and body ends and vice versa. Tanjiro’s body, though he still lives, has become a relic of a former age. This reorientation of priority, of preserving, “secreting forth” the soul, catalyzes an instant childlike maturity; it is an honourable old age defined as a spotless life. The wages of sin are death: the world bears a debt of gratitude to Tanjiro when he accepts the consequences of Nezuko’s sin and death, rather than re-enacting the fall of Adam by condemning Eve. When you give hospitality to another in your heart, it’s a meeting of opposites, and it is supposed to be painful, for it signifies a permanent change. What is old passes away and is transposed into the future by thanksgiving. We only keep what we are thankful for, and through thanksgiving we gain the strength to live with integrity. Tanjiro’s voluntary death passes him through the river Jordan; he lives in a vision of peace that integrates rather than cloudily escapes from the rutted violence of the world, yet his experience is a perpetual effortless ancestral flow. Every meeting opens his life to be shared with others in a small and tender process that is a continuation of his initial commitment. His strength comes from this tenderness: a subversive touch of love that draws us toward our telos (end, purpose). Men and the demonized are reoriented away from bitterly holding onto their own life as they know it, to wanting to die for the sake of the secret fragility of the transcendently beautiful. The purpose of health is to die well. The death of Tanjiro and Nezuko’s family provides them with a new ground of being and the nutrients required to sustain and nourish their walk that forsakes the world — which is at once a vision quest to redeem the true world. They are taking the supreme risk of profoundly and compassionately aligning their personhood with its fate; not stripping the soil, but cultivating its goodness. They exalt their family by not burying their inheritance, but in letting the small seed die, investing thereby in a mansion that has a place for the whole story in an unseen democracy of the dead.³

Anthony, Sun Breathing Second Form: Clear Blue Sky 

Tanjiro immediately begins to tame his afflicted sister, but time is short, because in the wake of the demon comes a slayer. He is a master swordsman of the Water Breathing forms and he is sworn to destroy all demons of the world. According to the strict rules of the Demon Slayer Corps, no exception can be made for Nezuko. So in the midst of the wood, untrained, undaunted, Tanjiro charges the Water Master with nothing but a hatchet to defend his demonized sister.

What fire burns in the heart of this fourteen year old? The loss of his family might have opened him downwards, to an infernal hatred of all creatures. Yet, the survival of one his sisters, that small miracle, opened him upwards to a valiant love that might encompass her even after this frightening metamorphosis. Some fire from on high, then, which has its fane in the breast of this young charcoal-burner, has breadth enough to include all creatures, demons and humans alike.

Of course, the master he would choose and love above all others in the Demon Slayer Corps must be Kyojiro Rengoku, the Flame Hashira (hashira means “pillar” in Japanese). The two men are alike in their being driven, not by a traumatic loss, but a familial love. Most members of the Corps are consumed by hatred, remorse, and guilt, and channel these dark feelings into their just but blindly prosecuted campaign against the demons. In that way, though human, they have a demonic hunger for vengeance and destruction. Rengoku and Tanjiro, however, carry in their hearts the profound responsibility of one whom God has suffered to see something of His beauty; their hearts are conflagrations of remembered loveliness, and the memory of their dear ones irradiates their being with a purpose which they know in wordless certitude will survive the threshing-halls of death.

JZ, Stone Breathing Second Form: Upper Smash

Tanjiro and Rengoku are human hearths, sarcological lanterns for the precious flames of living memories. Moments and memories wherein not only what they are, and what the world is, but what God has proposed they both might be, is revealed to them: and these are not the rags of transience, but garments like to those which Rilke saw:

It isn’t the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor — from breast to knees —
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.⁴

These are the moments that created them, and in a mysterious way, they are eternal, kairos, though they took place in the normal course of time, chronos. Here be the footprints that God burns into the turf ruled by a leaden suzerain. There is a ladder in the pits of their hearts, whereon the spirits of their blessed ancestors ascend and descend. Their garments are a fiery diaphanous armor; and though this fire burns as a “perfect hatred” in Tanjiro and Rengoku, it does not gnaw like the world-serpent at the tree of their hearts. Their hatred and their rage are perfect like the keen edge of a katana; it is the hatred Christ commends, when he says that one who would come after him must hate father and mother. Indeed, these are the “seraphic integuments” that one who has died to the world can wear. And like the wings of the seraphim, this suit of armor is a limpid epidermis, a visual skin wrought into adamant, that in one moment protects the eye from excess of light, and in the other protects the source of that light. Furled within them, one is somehow both naked and impervious to all assault. These golden memories are smelt and cast into a panoply, proven against the bite of real swords. 

Anthony, Sun Breathing Third Form: Raging Sun

His martial vestments are so subtle that they are but the curtains for the five open windows of his senses through which he receives the world. His rational mind governs, but his body reacts to reality and rectifies it faster than mentation, correcting sensual offenses against the right order. His senses have been tuned to this rightness by the childhood theophany he has lived for thirteen years. For example, he knows the smell of a well-ordered cosmos from the crisp mountain air and sharp fragrance of fresh sap. Foregrounded in this landscape of smell is the scent of his father’s slow burning charcoal furnace. This is the incense of the liturgy of his life. So when he inhales the stench of a demon glutted on the flesh of hundreds of decaying corpses, it is more than nauseating; it viscerally transgresses against his senses. What would to a less sensitive soul be a mere feeling of unease in the presence of evil, for Tanjiro is an offense against layered fragrances of the world. He excises the necrotic rot of demons for love of deep lungfuls of morning air. 

In this light, we see Tanjiro’s mode of operation, though propelled in part by crude rage, is tempered by his fundamental identity as an aesthete of theophany whose sword is an artist’s brush on the canvas of the world. He will not stop until the landscape is properly lit again, and the dark blot of the demons is erased. However, this is more than nostalgia or mere homesickness, because he knows that he cannot go back; instead, through gashes in the canvas of the world will spill out the holy beauty of transfigured trauma. He fights for an eschaton containing both the initial theophany and the fulfillment of its nascent promise that everything sad will come undone. 

JZ, Stone Breathing Third Form: Stone Skin

Scent and emotion are stored as one memory; scent “is the only fully developed sense a fetus has in the womb, and it’s the one that is the most developed in a child through the age of around 10 when sight takes over.... [C]hildhood tends to be the period in which you create ‘the basis for smells you will like and hate for the rest of your life.’”⁵ The golden thread of scent laid down like Ariadne’s through the labyrinth of the world, “the opening thread” of ontophany and theophany, is what Tanjiro follows all the way into the fathomless depths of the heart. This thread of scent is the narrow path, the golden path, the royal path; it is symbolic of the highest of Christian virtues, discernment (in the spiritual tradition of the Christian east, scent and discernment are oftentimes linked directly). Discernment is fundamentally the ability to distinguish between created and uncreated energies.⁶ The individual who has cultivated discernment can dance through a field of a thousand futures and never touch a thorn. He or she can freefall through the subfusc and crimson eye of a storm while drifting as gentle in the air as a golden feather on the lemon winds of the Isles beyond the West. Presented with a brambled lane of crisscrossed swords, he or she will step between them with all the fidelity that a maestro has in following a tune. Through his nose, Tanjiro never forgets the beauty that ripples in blue splendor, the freshness that resides “deep down things.” He knows the scent of his mother’s hair, of charcoal burning in the radiant cold of a sunny winter, the precise and dulcet sugar-sound of crunching arid snow. 

When Tanjiro smells a gap in an opponents’ defense, he is really smelling a portion of their being that is not integrated, that is in ruin. When he smells the “opening thread,” it is because he can see into the soul of his opponent. He sees the golden path through the serpentine coil of their wounded complexity; he sees the beam falling out of heaven into their heart, and the yellowing gauze wrapped around their wounds, barring that light from entrance. He knows just where to cut in order to rend it, to unravel it, so that the central diamond of their being can shine for a moment in the flowerlet dayspring of eternity. He knows what is truly them, and what only appears to be them. He can smell the difference, as between the smoke of cypress wood and burning plastic.

In Japanese philosophy of combat, one’s defense is a direct manifestation of one’s spiritual integrity and stability. Even if the mere tip of one’s sword wavers, this is an indicator of spiritual weakness.⁷ Thus, Tanjiro has a profound empathy for those he is fighting; once he sees how an enemy can be beaten, he sees also how his enemy is, for lack of a better word, traumatized.

Perseus, Water Breathing Second Form: Water Wheel

Snakes — according to the greatest orator in Christian history, John the Goldenmouth — were, in the garden of Eden, our best friends.⁸ The postlapsarian association of the serpentine pattern with predation leads to a paranoid state of alertness that stresses our entire system and is not according to nature (or essence) but comes about as a result of traumatic associations. If one doesn’t look for a meaning beyond fear/trauma in this serpentine pattern, then there will be elements of life’s beautiful surprise that pass us by. When one notices a serpentine pattern, it is a call to adventure. It’s actually an opportunity for our sense of beauty, our eye, to move inward. The serpentine motion that seems to be at the root of our perceptual systems is more fundamentally our contact with a personal love-letter: the line weaving between the created and the Uncreated — He who is a worm and not a man. Within trauma there is always vouchsafed a place of profound healing. 

JZ, Stone Breathing First Form: Serpentine Bipolar

The Stone Hashira, Himejima, is blind. The way he feels the world and prosecutes his battles is through his primary weapon, a nichirin chain, wherewith he devastates, coiling its iron braid and striking with its iron head. While he is not a bluntly serpentine character (as is, obviously, the Serpent Hashira) his slithering weapon admits him to the discussion. A bread-crumb on this trail is that the first stone breathing form is called by the name Serpentine Bipolar.⁹ Snakes feel their way largely by vibration, as does Himejima; and being the Stone Hashira, his familiar element is earth (the serpent slithers upon the ground; see Gen. 3:14). Having lost his sight, he must inhabit the earth of his body. The flame of his being has descended from his eyes into the center of his physical being, his heart. He stokes the furnace of his heart with memories. Indeed, he trains his body by literally standing in the embers of a fire. It is under his tutelage that Tanjiro will learn how the mind descends into the heart. 

Human nature is shattered into fragments by the fall. While there are many aspects to this fragmentation, one of the primary consequences is that the mind and the heart are separated. The mind wanders away from the body, getting trapped in imaginal eddies, succubi of the future and the past. It runs away from pain and seeks pleasure alogos (without or apart from reason). Psychologists today tell us two germane things: that trauma is a major catalyst for mind-body dissociation, and that the Unconscious might be best considered to reside in the somatic library, as it were, of the body (thus, trauma too is hidden in the body).¹⁰ Conversely, encountering beauty, or theophany, weaves our very nature back together, while trauma, and the ugliness of what we perceive as an ontological betrayal set off a quarantine protocol that dissociates mind from body, in order to stop the spread of disease, so to speak. 

To return to the prelapsarian state of Eden means to bring the mind down into the body, and to the center of the body, the heart. Himejima is the strongest of the hashira because he has achieved this integration. The technique by which this integration is achieved is called, in the show, Repetitive Motion. Among the demon slayers, it is a secret, untaught skill; it can only be learned by imitation. It consists of calling to mind a memory and repeating a phrase over and over, letting the image and the word sink from the cloudy atmosphere of the mind into the furnace of the heart, to be smelt into a taintless gold. Tanjiro achieves this prayer of the heart by remembering the love of his family, and the martyrdom of Rengoku; and the phrase Tanjiro repeats is the one that Rengoku said to him, his last words: set your heart ablaze.¹¹ When Tanjiro realizes this, his mind descends into his heart, and he is able to activate the latent strength in his core and his legs, which he had neglected till then, preferring the nasal strength of the upper body and mind. He is then able to move a boulder that he previously, with the water breathing techniques he had learned in the first arc, would only have been able to destroy.

It is critical to remember that, as this spiritual and physical integration of being occurs, the Mark grows deeper upon Tanjiro’s brow. The Mark is a physical sign (on Tanjiro it appears as a red emblem of flame on his forehead) that appears upon a swordsman’s body that signifies a gift of incredible strength, and impending death. It is a double-anointing.¹² When Tanjiro appears with the Mark (a thing of legend) before the master of the demon slayers, the latter knows that the eschaton is “slouching towards Bethlehem.”

The blazing heart of Rengoku starts a beautiful chain reaction (moving in the opposite direction to the emergency protocol mentioned earlier) that leads, eventually, to the Mark appearing on all the other hashira. Rather than segregating nature into disparate parts so that the ontological pathogen is stymied, this chain reaction draws them back into a restorative unity such that breath and music may flow from each to each. The festooned sacrifice of each character for the sake of their world appears to every other as a theophany which ignites in them the same chain reaction. Mind sinks into heart, and the whole being becomes flame. It stitches creation back together, it binds all the wounds, repairs all the ligaments, and unites the family of the Demon Slayer Corps. It is the theophany of Rengoku’s death, I think, that generates the ontic reserve that Tanjiro draws upon to achieve noetically the healing of his nature. It is only when he gains access to his whole body: nose, heart, stomach, and legs, that his sacrificial anointing becomes world-saving. Nothing can be left behind. 

Gift, surprise, and theophany are the primordial surety, knowledge and hope of human beings. Perverted, these become resentment/envy, trauma, and ugliness. The first triad is comprised of, as he says, a love-letter woven out of the created and the Uncreated. And if the first triad is like a love-letter, the second triad is like divorce papers. The snake is herald, then; but for us in this heavy-shadowed world, we often cannot trust that we know whom he announces.

Anthony, Sun Breathing Sixth Form: Solar Heat Haze

The very structure of an encounter with a snake is surprising: a black, liquid ripple on the edge of one’s awareness. There is a breathless, wordless millisecond of visceral recognition swelling up from guts to brain until laggard reason names in mind and mouth, “Snake!” One never gets used to that thrill, yet there is a way in which that frisson is wordlessly familiar. However cataractous the nous and eyes become, we stumble along by our own profane picture of everything and, to get inside the sealed frame of that picture, the sacred must slide into it from the periphery. These are thrilling, strange surprises. The Greek word for discover (ἀνακαλύπτω, anakalýpto) means to uncover something, but the word for reveal (ἀποκαλύπτω, apokalýpto) means “something that I did not know reveals itself to me.” 

In the Stone Hashira’s “founding memory,” he discovered (so he believed) that he had been forsaken by the orphans he cared for. His apocalypse, his surprise, revealed to him in his blindness, was that his wards only appeared to abandon him because they were trying to shield their sightless master from a demon.¹³ When his last Samson-like strength is spent and he dies, they welcome him in the afterlife with love and gratitude for all that he had done for them. What he knew to be the great tragedy of his life, for which he shed constant tears, revealed itself to him as the triumph of the Resurrection hidden in the Cross.

Perseus, Water Breathing Eleventh Form: Dead Calm

Let’s return to the opening of the story — that scene of encounter between the newly-demonized Nezuko, Tanjiro, and the questing Water Hashira Giyu — because, through Giyu, the Demon Slayer Corps does in fact make an exception for Nezuko, and through that merciful exception, the narrative of Demon Slayer is allowed to unfold. ​​The atypical decision that Giyu makes in that moment is shown to be in agreement with the leader of the Demon Slayer Corps, which ultimately means his unprecedented gamble is in keeping with the word of the head. This shows that his actions are not subversive or merely expedient (it is the temptation of aqueous persons never to deport in a straightforward manner), but indicative of intelligent obedience. He truly symbolizes water: he is especially capable of filling any given form and is fittingly fluid to meet the crags and jags of a contextually elaborate situation. Even then, he is right to put Tanjiro to the test — after all, to this veteran it would seem more likely that this weird anomaly is based on an attempt at coercion rather than radiant purity of heart. Giyu is shown to be the perfect member of the Demon Slayer Corps to initiate Tanjiro, and, as the experienced swimmer that he is, to help Tanjiro and Nezuko emerge from the deep chaotic waters of their childhood’s destruction.

We find in this first interview between Giyu and Nezuko a special affinity between earth and water — earth being embodied by the wildness and rawness of Nezuko. The interaction between earth and water takes place below the wind and fire, as it were, of language. Giyu knows he doesn’t understand the nature of Nezuko’s impossible hybridity, and therefore is unwilling to give a definite answer; he’s capable of holding the contradiction in his person. Alone, earth and water are not fully capable of dealing with anomalous situations that require trenchant answers, and it’s possible that, combined, they can create a smothering bog replete with slimy monsters. They can fall back into the winding tunnels and slippery water ways of complexity, forgetting the need for, or lacking faith in, the simplicity that lead to true synthesis. The way in which Tanjiro and Nezuko are presented to the Pillars is extremely tentative and fragile, as it touches on the poisoned root of the world tree that the Corps upholds. One hurried movement or false reaction will permanently obfuscate what the pair mean in a larger context; it requires a precise understanding. Giyu is revealed to be not a false servant that relies on legalism, but one that acts according to his strengths and weaknesses. The leader, Ubuyashiki, is likewise shown not to be a tyrant whose law is based on hiding from insecurities or exploiting innocents. The Corps, though not perfect, deserves Giyu’s steadfastness.

JZ, Stone Breathing Fourth Form: Volcanic Rock, Rapid Conquest

The Corps is a community of those who have died, who live as if they were already dead. The demons may be trapped in their trauma (we will explore this later in detail), but the demon slayers refuse to accept as normal the world disfigured by the nocturnal reign of the demons. Muzan sees himself as an alpha-predator. Humans should, in his view, resign themselves, like cattle, to being eaten, thus tacitly accepting an entropic nomological order and, concomitantly, apostatizing from their hope in the victory of beauty. Should they accept the world as Muzan envisions it, they are accepting the associated perceptual system of a prey animal; an insensitive, opaque, self-centered and self-preserving mode of being. Fear is the mind-killer. One has to see the world as a gift, one has to love life, in order to be willing to die for it. As one recent author has said, “If to lay down one’s life for one’s friends is the ultimate act of love, the coward cannot love.”¹⁴

The demon slayers are people who refuse to accept death as normal, who refuse to believe that the beauty of life is destined for destruction. Like Romeo or Pyramus, they would rather die with their loved ones than live without them, and yet they make their deaths into a living sacrifice, a purposed gift, like a precious stone affixed to an arrow, driving in forthright wrath for the hidden chink in the monster’s armor. This state of dispassion is radiant and vigorous; it is noble and by no means thanatonic. They have put off the habiliments of the victim; the scales have fallen from their eyes. They have bathed in an unknowing fire and their footprints blister the ground sacred. Their arms are open to the white hot lance of the world; their blood waters the soil. They have forgotten everything, and thus become worthy of eternal remembrance.

Anthony, Sun Breathing Fourth Form: Fake Rainbow  

This is a dreadful vision, far more terrible and awesome than the power of the demons. It puts a holy fear in us, like seeing an angel strike: being, obedience, and action in perfect unison. How can a destroyer be so beautiful? 

Perseus, Water Breathing Third Form: Flowing Dance

In this context there’s a character whom we mustn’t fail to bring up again. 

The kendo-practising flame pillar, Rengoku, fully informed, voted to kill Nezuko, and also perfectly accepted what was eventually settled on (letting her live), in keeping with his straightforward disposition. Rengoku, following Alexander the Great, might, had he been in Giyu’s place, simply have cut the gordian knot in two. But maybe — and more probably — would have held his sword at seeing her protect a human. Either way, it would have been a much longer story, as he doesn’t necessarily have the serpentine wisdom that is forced on Tanjiro by necessity and that Giyu practices as his natural disposition. In Tanjiro, trauma and family love are intertwined, since he sees with clear eyes that even the ugliness of trauma can hide a beautiful secret. For him this is embodied by his sister, towards whom he remains as harmless as a dove.

Rengoku typifies previous shonen protagonists, like Gon or Naruto, in that he is an awesome pioneering blaze. We need such stories in a broken culture that only laughs at or questions men who have the audacity to believe in the objectivity of beauty. Even if we do not believe there are men who have upheld the world in every generation (we still have a world, do we not?), because some have dared to write such stories, there is an ineradicable thirst in us to aspire towards that glowing paradigm, and some will achieve it. 

Anthony, Sun Breathing Seventh Form: Beneficent Radiance

Rengoku is thus a stumbling block in his heartbreaking magnificence. He resonates with us on a visceral level; we meet him for a brief instant, less than a day, and suddenly we are precipitated into a crisis because, even nested within a story, a world within our world, even his imaginal existence compels us to belief through the pain of heartbreak. We are pining for what he represents, and must confront the fact that either the object we long for exists in some form, or we are mad. 

Perseus, Water Breathing Fourth Form: Striking Tide

While Demon Slayer revivifies the older generation of classic Shonen anime, it is a completely different creature under the hood. It appropriately glorifies Rengoku, the warrior of his era. It also shows us that his fire would only be absurd if he didn’t have hidden nurturing qualities (One-Punch Man explores this). These are best shown in the principles he lives by: he has “been made strong to help the weak,” and he will not allow  “young warriors to be nipped in the bud.”

Anthony, Sun Breathing Fifth Form: Fire Wheel

In a time of miserable subversion, when a paragon hero is introduced only to undermine him, we get a warrior on par with Gon, Naruto, or Alex Louis Armstrong. Yet we fear, even as we rejoice, that this hero might be a misplaced relic of the past; we are terrified that he might ring false in our utterly confused moral climate. Basically, what if Rengoku is just cringe? What if the thing that we long for no longer has a place in our world?

There are a million ways to address that fear wrongly: they could have given him a mental health crisis, or had him be a coward at the last moment, or done anything to unman himself. Instead, we encounter a solution to the dialectic. The Fire Hashira is at peace with the other elements: he foreshadows Tanjiro’s marriage between fire and water techniques, not by his swordplay but thematically, when we see the theophany at the source of his blazing heart: maternal love. 

Perseus, Water Breathing Fifth Form: Blessed Rain after the Drought

This is the water within his fire. He gives shade to saplings, leading to a prodigious phoenix being hatched in the hearts of the young that uniquely inspires them. We should understand that it’s not about “fire or water”; you need both for blood to flow through your art.

Demon Slayer basically introduces as much femininity into an almost exclusively masculine genre as anyone can possibly handle in our time. As a note, we really shouldn’t see fire as purely equated with masculinity, nor water with femininity, for men can have naturally watery dispositions and women naturally fiery ones, without either abandoning the cross of their God-given gender. It’s helpful to see this as one dynamic synergistic axis among many, by which we enter into the deeper communion of personhood. Generalities exist for persons. The concreteness of personhood comes with repentance and is hidden in Christ, not formulaic thought.

Anthony, Sun Breathing Sixth Form: Burning Bones, Summer Sun

On a parallel note, we should address, if briefly, one of the few weaknesses of the show: it still includes fan service. Unfortunately, after her transformation into a demon, this includes Nezuko. During the blissful days before the tragedy, she wore a traditional kimono, spoke, and held herself with consummate elegance. Her trauma has precipitated her into the fallen aspects of anime, as if she had to endure the travail of fan service because of Muzan’s vicious attack. It is only as a demon that she is drawn in a revealing way. In part this is unnecessary and salacious, but at the same time it fits thematically. This is a battle for innocence and chastity on every level, including the sexual. 

Critically, both Water Hashira pledge to commit Seppuku if she harms a human being. They bet their lives on her innocence and integrity; her ability to remain loyal to her humanity, and overcome the desire for human blood. 

JZ, Stone Breathing First Form: Serpentine Bipolar

Seppuku, as a form of ritual disembowelment, is connected to the integrity of the epithymetic, or desiring aspect of the soul. The digestive system is related to both memory (recent research connects memory to the gut biome) and desire, as the need for the consumption of food is fractally related to the tendency to view the world itself as a comestible. The fact that Nezuko’s podvig, or glorious struggle, is to keep her appetite for human blood under control, directly relates to the healing of the traumatized, depersonalizing view of the world that we mentioned earlier. When we have a strong core, a “belly like an earthen wall,” the energies of our soul are collected at the center of our being; the streets of the city no longer run with water. If we can refuse ourselves the temptation to grasp and feed upon the apple of the world, then we can receive it and delight doxologically in its abundant good taste. 

Anthony, Sun Breathing Seventh Form: Sunflower Lance

As Nezuko fasts, she becomes human again. As the rest of the demons consume humans they distance themselves ever further from what they once were. She and Tanjiro escape the dialectic of “eat or be eaten” just as they escape the dialectic of demon vs. human. Their pursuit of theophany leads them into the right relationship with eating and ultimately to the laying down of their own body and blood for the nourishment of their world and society. Their lives are a sacrificial feast.

JZ, Stone Breathing Second Form: Upper Smash

Thus, we can see the significance of Giyu and Urokodaki, the two Water Hashira, pledging to eviscerate themselves if she should break this fast. If she eats, they lose the ability to eat. They bet their faculties of eating on her ability to abstain. In this way, they fast alongside her through their faith in her. Their lives are not wagered as a deterrent to Nezuko, but as a show of solidarity. Both sides realize that with the arrival of Nezuko has come the endgame of this thousand-year struggle between demons and humans. It has to do with the healing of desire through pledging oneself to the objectivity of beauty.

Anthony, Sun Breathing Eighth Form: Soaring Flame Haze

In Giyu, Urokodaki, and Tanjiro’s faith that Nezuko can keep the fast, they implicitly affirm that all humans and demons are redeemable. Indeed, a demon in the context of this series is just a sick human. If she can be healed of bloodlust, so can they; if she is subsumed into the ultimate evil of Muzan, then hope is truly lost. That’s why the final, cataclysmic battle is explicitly a battle for possession of Nezuko, and in the chastity of the genre at large, a deciding field toward final victory or loss. 

Her existence condemns all demons because if a demon can successfully abstain it means that they bear some responsibility for their gluttony. If she becomes human again, it signals to everyone that becoming a demon was never some evil apotheosis, just a perversion of their humanity. This would change the whole demonic way of life; the untold centuries of demons accruing more strength would be revealed as the horrible journey to non-being it really is. For this reason, even though both the slayers and the demons were not planning open warfare, the moment Nezuko regains the ability to walk in the sun, the finale of the story is thrown into motion. 

JZ, Stone Breathing Third Form: Stone Skin

Chastity is nothing but the right ordering of our desire; it is the auric wholeness of our soul’s eros as it courts the silver hart of the Beautiful.¹⁵ Thus, though the battle for chastity manifests itself in the genre very bluntly, it is once again more broadly an asymmetrical antagony between kenotic beauty that would feed itself to the world to give it life and a suspicious close-minded indigence that prefers to feed on the world to preserve its own. 

Anthony, Sun Breathing Ninth Form: Setting Sun

So now we have revealed the existential dispositions of the battle. The two armies are ranged against one another across an ontological abyss. Tanjiro is not the strongest demon slayer — he’s not even a hashira — but he is the one anointed to face Muzan in single combat because only he has mastered Ontological Combat Mode. The Water Hashira revealed to him their aqueous secrets, and his master Rengoku stoked the blaze in his heart, but it was his father teaching him the ancient Hinokami Kagura dance that integrated water and flame together into an elemental fullness pre-eternally made capable of burning and drowning the draconic monstrosity that is the demon lord Muzan.¹⁶ For this battle, he unveils all the hideous coils of his strength. Behold him, Muzan, a hideous, chitinous insect battened on the lives of the innocent, lashing out with his many serrated appendages. He flails against the demise of his thousand-year reign. His world is ending, as all worlds do, in fire and water, and those primal forces bear the name of Tanjiro Kamado. 

Tanjiro chains together the twelve forms of ancient Sun Breathing:

Dance
Clear Blue Sky
Scoring Crimson Mirror
Parhelion Rainbow
Fire Chariot
Burning Bones, Summer Sun
Sunflower Lance
Soaring Flame Haze
The Setting Sun
Shining Ray of Grace
Solar Halo Dragon Dance
Flame Dance

JZ, Stone Breathing Third Form: Stone Skin

These movements are written on his bones. And now, faced with the false king of a false eschaton robed in all the dark matter of his reign, the marrowed letters of that writing begin to glow. The movements speak their names to him; he knows them again, he knows them as one. Twelve forms that seemed but sentences of a dangerous prose are revealed to be the dawn-tongue of a primordial unity. This is the Sun Poem, the Sun Dance, passed down through the centuries, vouchsafed to him in plainspoken secrecy. Together, these twelve techniques are shown to be, according to the world’s necessity, a thirteenth form, made to remake the world. 

Anthony, Sun Breathing Fifth Form: Setting Sun Transformation

This dance is a river of fire and water, a kinetic fullness in which every move flows into the next with such momentum that the impossible kenosis of such a continuous onslaught is possible. 

The boy’s very frame, muscles and bones, should not be able to withstand such rigor. Previously, unleashing a sun-breathing technique, a solar geyser of the body, incapacitated him for days afterwards. But lo, how he circumscribes by thirteen cardinal points the myriad hateful limbs, limning them with water and fire until sunrise burns them away like a nightmare. How can a sixteen-year-old boy bind a thousand-year-old monster in a fairy ring of death the whole night long?

The same way his asthmatic father kept his mysterious all-night vigil dancing the Hinokami Kagura until the sun rose. The same way Rengoku grappled with Akaza until morning though his abdomen had been ripped out. They become conduits, expressions of the cosmic powers which undergird their world. Tanjiro is on the side of what is, and so his strength is not the romantic whim of the storyteller but has behind it the inevitable heft of alignment with the source of being. Muzan is weaker, no matter how strong physically, because he is drawing upon infernal, self-consuming fire. 

JZ, Stone Breathing Fourth Form: Volcanic Rock, Rapid Conquest

In the battle Muzan becomes more and more hideous, as opposed to the demon slayers, who are revealed to be more and more thoroughly true, righteous and beautiful as they are threshed by gladial flails (the demons are unceasingly made incredulous by the sheer persistence of the demons slayers, some of whom fight with eviscerated stomachs and blinded eyes). And, after the demons undergo this entropic katabasis, passing through realms of maleficence that literally erupt from their bodies in uncontrollable ways, as their repressed selves, their repressed memories, erupt from their flesh in abyssal sutures of teeth and broken orthogonal swords; what is left behind, revealed beneath it all, is no sable, serious, ineffable purpose, but pure carnality, a putrescent wound, pure need. Muzan’s final form is not a powerful darkling ungoliant, but a corpulent baby. Though he has by that time lived for millennia, his being had never matured past that of a baby, clinging narcissistically to life without a single thought for the world beyond himself.

Conversely, Tanjiro taps into the source of Story itself, an uncaused power that is outside the world of the narrative.¹⁷ Tanjiro cannot grow weary, for he is ontically replenished by Love, which does not cannibalize, but deepens, divinizes, protects, and integrates, kenotically, the whole of creation into a unity that is entirely personal, and entirely free. He is more Tanjiro than he has ever been. At the fractal level of the story, Tanjiro accomplishes exactly this. I would not be surprised if the story of Demon Slayer came to be after the anonymous author’s initial imaginal encounter with the cruciform persons of Tanjiro and Rengoku slain, as it were, before the foundation of their particular world. A story and its characters have longevity and power insofar as they participate in the ever-ongoing creation of all things through the cruciform person of the Logos (Story) Himself.¹⁸ 

Anthony, Sun Breathing Tenth Form: Shining Ray of Grace

Because Tanjiro is beautiful, he is an echo of that Beauty which caused non-being to repent and to be born as Creation. The wounds he sustains from Muzan’s tentacles are the apertures through which the rising sun bursts into the exhausted night of the demons and the demon slayers, burning away the former and crowning the latter. He had not looked on daybreak since before his family was slain but he never ceased seeing it, and never betrayed it until at last morning was birthed again into the nocturnal world through him. 

Now witness the heart of the chiasm; Tanjiro, like a mother spent after long labor, is at the moment of greatest vulnerability. In that moment, Muzan’s dying act is to sting the boy full of all his own wickedness, malice, and hatred. He envenoms the child with the pathogen of non-being, turning Tanjiro himself into a demon. Like Nezuko of old, he thrashes, lashing out suddenly lost and disoriented. The surviving members of the Demon Slayer Corps rally but find themselves unable to strike. How could they raise a hand against Tanjiro? He is now to them what Nezuko was to him: the most precious life.

She comes now, Nezuko the Human, bursting through the stunned spectators, restored to the full eloquence of her loveliness and wraps her writhing brother in her arms, burying her face in his chest. 

The world has been righted. No one strikes him, no one slays him. Why would they? He’s just a little kid throwing a tantrum, and his big sister’s got him. Medicine is administered. Into the foggy confusion of his soul descend the spirits of fallen demon slayers and pull him out of Muzan’s clutch. One of his closest friends says, “Come Tanjiro, you’ve made Nezuko cry, and you mustn’t make her cry.” 

He hears, and he returns to them. 

Perseus, Water Breathing Sixth Form: Blessed Rain after the Drought

Tanjiro gives Nezuko his future. When we are broken, stability returns to us through the quiet of darkness. Throughout the story, as Tanjiro is tried voluntarily to his utmost, Nezuko mirrors him as a moon to his light; she contains her violence, enjoying the healing rays of community and rest, secretly supplying that community with purpose — because of her, not all is in vain. She accepts this, not because Tanjiro is an inviolable protector, but because he is willing to be broken for her. In the unweaving of her natal family, she had momentarily become a loose woman, with no place to be — everyone seeming violent, everyone looming like a stranger. Tanjiro jumps feet first into the hell of her world by giving her a beautiful, durable box — his mind’s eye. She inhabits it as a sacred nest, within which she weaves the incumbent world which must bear the eventual shattering of Tanjiro’s mind: a consequence of Tanjiro answering his father’s call to drain his sister’s bitter cup. 

Tanjiro becomes the Bread which nourishes her as she is being reborn; she becomes his Clothing which preserves his hope and adorns his naked vulnerability. Tanjiro gives her Abraham’s hospitality, imaging to her the call that she has to be a mother, by giving her his body and bearing her on his shoulders as a place to rest and to mourn. Nezuko’s newfound deep affiliation with mother-earth causes strength to pool in her legs — her primary form of combat — nourishing the deepening roots of Tanjiro’s mind which has descended into the belly of the beast: the very inner workings of Muzan’s game. The siblings abide together as falling sky and rising earth, sprouting the cosmic world tree which their mother and father had given them in secret: Nezuko holding Tanjiro’s hope like the doll she had held hours earlier, and Tanjiro — just after encountering the ultimate ugliness manifest in the slain bodies of his other siblings — having the integrity of mind to dance with peril in Japan’s snow, like his father had taught him. In their relationship as brother and sister they have moved from play and practice, to being that standard by which all men are judged: a vernal, procreative Ragnarok for demons and for men.

Nezuko is the lens through which he sees everything; he holds her innocence in the Stasis of his mind; he has to believe that every demonized person is capable of repentance if given the space — capable, that is, of accepting the pain of death — for otherwise it would imply that his sister is broken beyond cure. He has made a bet, a wager on the objectivity of beauty. It is not a measured response, nor does it have the guarantees of a contract. The raw manfulness of his action breaks Nezuko from the Haze of the passions, focusing her like a rattlesnake’s rattle. She is amused by Tanjiro’s foolishness, but feels safe because of it, knowing that such a man, brave enough to love her who has been deprived of her dowry, is incapable of trespassing on her even in thought (we ought to remember that, in pre-Christian and sometimes in Christian societies, a daughter of the household who had been trespassed upon would often be totally ostracized, or at the very least seen as a source of shame, even if, like here, it was through no fault of her own). 

By this trust in Tanjiro’s hands, his spirit will find its art, and Nezuko will find her voice; whereby their love shall be lettered into the breast of the world. Tanjiro’s katana ought to be seen as a tool of empathy, based on the understanding that we betray Christ’s commandment to love our enemies both when we hate them and when we do not fight them with adequate strength to protect the oppressed and to meliorate the self-harm of the oppressor. Either failure would re-enact the dark liturgy of revenge. By expressing in action a newfound mutually established loyalty, they mirror the age’s tragedy and its antidote: breaking through a closed gate of adamant deep within, forming a powerful torrent that breaks the cycle. The tribal categories of “man” and “demon” reside on either side of this gate; the place of healing is also the place of greatest fear. They image the fullness of creation in their duality, forcing an encounter with the surprising grammar of the cure. 

The specific nature of the tragedy is Muzan’s evil logic, a lie, which is that the relationship between the demonized and humans must be “kill or be killed”. The fundamentally deeper relationship of the two siblings fits within the parameters of this logic, and yet breaks the lie from within (since Tanjiro becomes a demon slayer, paradoxically, in order to protect a demon); thus reframing the cosmic order in a gratuitous and joyful way. Both have accepted to suffer the otherness of the other rather than to kill; Tanjiro first, then Nezuko. The siblings are like unto a gently abiding tree planted by still waters — theirs is a relationship that places no demands on the other, and yet is founded steadfastly in a beautiful purpose where nothing is truly lost. 

Viewed categorically, Tanjiro loves and protects a demon; and Nezuko loves and will not consume humans; in a sense, both are traitors to the current defining worldly order, engendered by Muzan’s misuse of man’s creative powers. For love of this very world they introduce a new logic, a metalogic, a “third force,” to use Jane Jacobs’ term. The show’s title itself, Demon Slayer, hides their scandalous binding of fates. In their relationship, Tanjiro and Nezuko reverse the devil’s irony; redirecting our intentions so as not to slay one another (or even Muzan and his servants — our initial interpretation, as we are all sinners in need of repentance) but to hate the father of lies himself. 

Tanjiro and Nezuko set forth and exist in a transitory state as the world is unraveled by their otherworldly disposition. It is a position taken in disputed territory, the eye of the storm, small and vulnerable enough to fall through the cracks to the ground of being, and yet beautiful enough to sustain the healing and subversion of the reciprocally large and invulnerable fortress of pain. Not until near the end of the story does their secret infiltrate Muzan’s maze along with all those whose paths have unfolded into theirs. Their own brokenness forms a bridge between the false linguistic bifurcation between men and the demonized, presenting an alternative story to Muzan’s “fake news,” one that is capable of containing the entirety of all other stories through a communal sharing of pain and joy, slowly lifting the layers of trauma, and thus giving rest to the world. 

Tanjiro and Nezuko embody the world’s wounds, accessing infinity in their unique reciprocity, a position nestled in the broader chasm of creation’s suffering under the weight of misdirected desire. The story’s spiraling structure — of meeting by turns larger and larger problems — is the movement up from this chasm, and its inversion. They are teaching the world how to grieve by delicately pushing on the place where it hurts. This bloodletting causes a world that had lost its center to be reborn in a rush of blood and water, an overflowing of life.

Demon Slayer courses with the water of empathy, drinking of which allows us to recall and redeem the demonized parts of our being. It slays either our lack of valor or our overzealousness by guarding the reason we liked anime in the first place: a commitment to the objectivity of beauty and the worthwhileness of art itself — the same thought that animates the depths of medieval romance. The line of good and evil runs through the heart of anime, often clouding our discernment; when we treat the good, and the good that is captured by evil, as the same thing. The corruption of the medium is typified by the genre being consumed, in the center, by formula and best girl worship, and on the edges, by hentai and pointless violence. There is an incalculable hidden cost to this annexing and enervation of young people’s potential. Out of fear of association with this influence and the judgment that comes with it, we choose to forget our first love, become ashamed, or even scoff at the art we loved when we were kids. We become persuaded that the real reason we engaged with it was that it has only fulfilled our adolescent fantasy, something we believe that we’ve now moved beyond. If we have outgrown anime, it’s precisely because it did not appeal to our fantasies but rather nurtured us to move deeper within, to return our fantasies to our body, helping us to become whole. 

Becoming a cynic just means we haven’t grown at all; we have only moved farther from our center, “the eternity of human feeling,” as Master Ubuyashiki puts it. The Alpha and Omega of human feeling is Christ. Demon Slayer, aptly, destroys this false postulation that the corruption of the medium draws us toward: either a quicksand-like inward pressure for one who is a native of the genre, or a medusa-esque repugnance if one is unfamiliar with it or was harmed by it in the past. This happens even if we are not in the thralls of, or suffer direct exposure to, these demonic energies. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12). The existence of so much corruption means that there is a surpassing amount of good surfacing, and thus a titanic struggle worth engaging — or at least not being craven towards. We should realize that if Muzan captures Nezuko, his reign of darkness might continue indefinitely. Within Demon Slayer, Nezuko is a symbol of life. It is hope in this symbol that frees the human person from the weight of hijacked desire and allows him to be soulful. This hope can be lost when good men do nothing. Hope is the way in which transitory things become eternal; we should not try to argue legalistically with what inspires hope, and we certainly must acknowledge anything that does.

JZ, Stone Breathing Fifth Form: Arcs of Justice

When one person in a story enters Ontological Combat Mode, we can feel it — the world makes a claim on us that other imaginal worlds do not, because that character has tapped into the fire that made and makes this our greater world. It begins to take on flesh. It covers the sins (hamartia, the missed purposes) of the other characters, those who failed to tap into OCM. Such is a victory that gives this particular imaginal world a place inside our many-mansioned hearts; it is a flag planted by an authorial angel on a distant, fictive moon. It becomes hard to say whether Dickens is a product of England, or England a product of Dickens. Demon Slayer is ultimately concerned with our being incarnational — it is a world unsatisfied with itself; it courses with a blood that wants to surge through other veins. When we, the viewer, begin to enter the shallows of OCM, remembering the cruciform persons of Tanjiro and Rengoku blossoming in a theophanic fire — who are in turn remembering the sacrificial theophanies of their comrades — then we and the characters, hypostatized within us, generate a tidal, perichoretic language that everyone can speak; a hidden Breathing Form, a personal art wherein we sing together our secret names and the water of our blood becomes a liquid sun in which all living souls can bathe. This is why Beauty can save the world.

“We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts” (2 Pet. 1:19).

Set your heart ablaze.

1.  For some worthwhile context on this poem, see briefpoems, “Dewdrops – Brief poems by Kobayashi Issa,” Brief Poems, WordPress, May 31, 2022. Translation by Lewis Mackenize.

2.  Dr. Timothy Patitsas, in his book The Ethics of Beauty, equates Beauty with Surprise. One could infer, therefore, that this attentional architecture was meant to recognize Surprise.

Anecdotally, there is a good example of this janus-effect in the play Les Miserables. Jean Valjean saves the life of his persecutor, Inspector Javert, introducing a strange, high logic into the ordered system of laws which Javert venerates as ineluctable; thus, his worldview is broken apart. Valjean, who has on the surface transgressed against the “divine” laws of the state, appears to Javert as one “either from heaven or from hell.” The appearance of this higher logic, namely, Mercy, gives Javert an opportunity for metanoia (change of mind/perspective); he can choose to enter this larger world, but only if he denies the smaller, interior world that he has chosen to deify (law/orderliness) at the expense of Others and their threatening Otherness. Valjean is a beautiful, poisonous stranger, offering Javert a glimpse of the true world. Unfortunately, he refuses it. This is a hint of the eschaton: love is the eternal fire. What condemns a man is his inability to let himself be loved; in his pride, refusing forgiveness. Importantly, the world that Valjean offers Inspector Javert is not accessed through any kind of gnostic ecstasis. The world of Mercy has room for the world of Law; this is demonstrated by Valjean’s refusal to impugn Javert for carrying out his duty; in fact, he commends him. It is merely that Valjean’s world is a higher participation in Logos: “Mercy triumphs over justice” (Jas. 2:13).

3.  “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter 4.

4.  Rainer Maria Rilke, “What Survives,” translation by Alfred Poulin.

5.  Colleen Walsh (quoting Dawn Goldworm, co-founder and director of olfactive branding company 12.29), “What the nose knows,” The Harvard Gazette, February 27, 2020.

6.  See note 2. For further reading, see the works of St. Sophrony (Sakharov).

7.  See H.E. Davey, “Budo and the Art of Japanese Calligraphy,” Shudokan Martial Arts Association website; originally published in Furyu: The Budo Journal, Spring-Summer 1995.

8.  Jonathan Pageau, “The Serpents of Orthodoxy,” Orthodox Arts Journal, July 14, 2014.

9.  “The user throws both the flail and axe towards their intended target and manipulates the chain by rotating it thus causing the axe and flail to also rotate in order to drill and grind right through their target.” Kimetsu no Yaiba Wiki, “Stone Breathing.”

10.  Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group, 2021).

11.  One ought to keep in mind that Rengoku’s final technique is called Esoteric Form: Rengoku.

12.  “We personally may want to be ‘the best,’ but, in fact, in true religion we only sacrifice ‘the king’ of what exists; we give our very best to God. The thing which is the best is also destined to die, to give its life for the renewal of the cosmic order. To be chosen, anointed in Christ, is exactly like this, and thus to follow Christ is both to be counted worthy of eternal life and to be called to give our lives here and now for those around us.” Timothy G. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty (St. Nicholas Press, 2020), p. 153.

13.  See the sixth arc of the show or the corresponding volumes for context.

14.  Savatie Baștovoi, The Book for Men (Karpatika, 2020).

15.  According to Dr. Timothy Patitsas, the opposite of war is not peace — it is liturgy: a complex order arising from the reciprocal dialogue between surprise and gratitude.

16.  In the context of the story qua story, the author is simultaneously imminent and transcendent to the work. The logic of Demon Slayer is apophatic to the characters themselves, just as the logic of storytelling is a form of embodied apophatism for the authorial voice, since the primordial world insofar as one can know it is a total given, and thus saying that world in microcosm is a synergistic participation in an ineffable affirmation of being itself. –JZ

17.  In the same way, human beings can be, and are, to differing degrees, ontically nourished by the Logos that is both outside of and wholly other to creation, whilst simultaneously totally and uniquely inhabiting all things, from discarded candy wrappers to the Petrine keys.

18.  Translating logos as “story” is unconventional, but not entirely without basis.