To Turn Towards Death: The Secret Mythology in RDR2

A story from Greek mythology is hidden in RDR2 and underlies some of Arthur Morgan’s last interactions with John Marston.

All articles on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game. This essay also contains major spoilers for Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.

One of the writers’ apparent motivations in writing Red Dead Redemption 2 was to make Red Dead Redemption even more sad. The way the first game is retconned in the second one can be annoying because of the mismatch in details, but at times, it’s very effective, such as when Dutch gives his speech about fighting gravity for the “first” time, and you realize he’s thinking about Arthur moments before he dies. John’s decision to go after Micah — against Arthur’s last wishes — has a similar function, and to make it work, RDR2 uses one of the most tragic Greek myths.

Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t always allude to Paradise Lost itself, but to the many allusions that John Milton makes in his poem, as if identifying a nesting doll by naming the smaller doll inside it. The writers particularly like to do this when multiple works reference the same thing. This particular allusion is one of the most poignant examples, and one of the easiest to miss.

At the beginning of many of the books that the poem is divided into, Milton invokes his muse, asking for her assistance with his project. In Book VII, he asks her to

drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned
Both harp and voice; nor could the muse defend
Her son.

Paradise Lost VII.32-38

This passage is about Orpheus, the superlative poet and musician in Greek mythology. His wife, Eurydice, died after being bitten by a viper. Orpheus went to the underworld to plead with Hades to let her come back to the world of the living. Hades agreed, but on the condition that on the journey out, Orpheus walk ahead of Eurydice and never look back at her. As soon as Orpheus reached the light, he turned to her, not realizing that Eurydice, following behind him, hadn’t left the underworld yet. His mistake doomed her forever (Graves).

Eventually, Orpheus was murdered, which is what the passage above describes. Orpheus was the “Thracian bard;” his music was so beautiful that “not only the animals but the rocks and trees stopped to listen, and wept at his fate” (Milton 894). His music ended when he was ripped apart by the Bacchae, crazed women who worshiped the god Bacchus. There are many variations on their motivation, but the general idea is that Orpheus was neglecting either his worship of Bacchus or the Bacchae themselves.

Mythology in RDR2 Place Names and Dialog

Naturally, imagery as violent and tragic as this appealed to RDR2’s writers. The Maenads seem to have partly inspired the Night Folk, the mysterious and terrifying group that haunts the Bayou.

To begin with, this mural in Lakay¹ is likely an allusion to John Collier’s painting “Maenads” (below). “Maenads” was the original Greek word for Bacchae; the Romans appropriated Greek mythology and changed the names. (I’m using “Bacchae” because Paradise Lost uses “Bacchus,” and therefore the game does.) Both paintings are energetic scenes of rituals. Note in both the primary figure with both arms stretched overhead, holding a snake/snakes; the figure to the right beating a hand drum; the figure to the left holding an object overhead; and the similar clothing style and spacing of the people (even the fire and the woman’s red flowing hair, both in the center of the images, are similar). Another sign that Lakay is associated with the Bacchae is the mask made from the skull of a large cat found in the half-submerged house: big cats were sacred to Bacchus (Atsma). There’s also a shrunken head hidden in the small house beneath the painting. When the Bacchae killed Orpheus, they tore off his head and threw it in a river. It floated away, was eventually retrieved, and became an oracle (Graves 113).

Another thing that associates the Night Folk with the Bacchae is found in the wilderness near Lake Owanjila. The grisly scene is the Pagan Ritual Point of Interest: the upper half of a man’s body on a stake in the center of a large symbol drawn on the ground. Similar symbols, appropriated from Voodoo veve, can be found around Lakay, creating a clear association between the two. Human sacrifice, however, is not an element of Louisiana Voodoo. The body appears to have been torn apart, not cut, which is how the Bacchae killed: an act called sparagmos.

This piece, “Red-Figure Cup Showing the Death of Pentheus (exterior) and a Maenad (interior),” shows Bacchae killing a man in exactly the manner the body at the Point of Interest was killed (gore warning for the link). The body wears a mask that appears to be the skull of a bull, and the head of a goat rests behind it. The bull is a symbol of Bacchus (Oracle Hekataios), and both goats and bulls were sacrificed to him (Wikipedia); in “Maenads,” the women are hunting a goat. The location is also appropriate for the Bacchae, who roamed the wilderness.

Taken together, these details make a compelling argument that these ritual scenes, and the Night Folk, are partially based on the Bacchae. The torn-apart body is an allusion to the way they killed Orpheus. Even the symbol drawn on the ground is suggestive: it’s similar to the veve for Papa Legba, “gatekeeper to the spirit world” (Beyer). That world, albeit a different conception of it, is where Orpheus travels when he tries to save Eurydice.

Two more places on RDR2’s map are connected to the passage in Paradise Lost. The first is Bard’s Crossing.

Bridges are liminal spaces, transitions between one place and another, much like Orpheus’s journey out of the underworld. The “Bard,” here, is likely Orpheus. The word “crossing” points to the journey itself and not the mere physical bridge. Although the name probably isn’t specific enough to say with absolute certainty (partially because it’s also an allusion to other things, too), Bard’s Crossing can be understood to mean Orpheus leaving the underworld.

The Crossing is where Arthur saves Reverend Swanson from being hit by a train. As he runs out onto the tracks, he calls out, “It’s just a simple mistake. You can … still be … s-saved” (“Who Is Not Without Sin”), reinforcing the bridge’s thematic connection to being rescued or redeemed (albeit in a different sense than the one in which Orpheus fails to save Eurydice). Unlike Orpheus, Arthur successfully saves the Reverend’s life when a train nearly runs them both down.

Far to the North — but connected to Bard’s Crossing by the train tracks; one place leads to the other — is Bacchus Bridge. During “The Bridge to Nowhere,” Arthur talks with John about leaving, and he tells him, both at the beginning and end of the mission, “Don’t look back.” RDR2 phrases Arthur’s request that way, rather than “don’t fall into old habits” or “forget about this life,” specifically to evoke mythology: Hades’ instructions to Orpheus. Arthur, who is rapidly dying — at the end of the scene, he has to sit down, struggling to breathe, for a long time — is a suitable stand-in for someone from the world of the dead. John (whose ineloquence is stressed in the game for the sake of irony) represents Orpheus. Arthur’s words recall what Mary says to him in “Fatherhood and Other Dreams II” and what John says to Abigail and Jack shortly before being murdered in Red Dead Redemption. (The way that allusions are repeated in RDR2 can make it very difficult to tell the origin from the echo; here, it seems likely that the writers took a line from RDR so cliche as to be meaningless and found a way that it connected to Paradise Lost.)

Arthur repeats this injunction — again warning John not to “look back,” rather than speaking as directly as he usually does — when he and John are escaping from Beaver Hollow at the end of the main story. Writers will often repeat something three times when they want to draw particular attention to it. The timing is also important because they now know about Micah’s betrayal, and Arthur still doesn’t want John to “look back” — throughout the game, he’s spoken against taking revenge².

Arthur’s words aren’t there just to retcon the fact that he never existed in the first game, and so was never mentioned. If that were the case, telling John not to look back once would have been plenty of explanation, and it wouldn’t make sense for John to be able to talk to so many characters about Arthur³. Besides, there’s no reason Arthur would want John, specifically, to forget him. He would have wanted other characters to do so as well, and he had plenty of opportunities to tell them so. He also wouldn’t have given John his personal belongings. The player ends up with all of Arthur’s things, not just what was in the bag, so it isn’t because the developers were especially intent on the events making sense⁴. The hat, especially, is purely symbolic, a memento of Arthur.

Hubris is Always Punished

John, like Orpheus, fails to obey the given warning. After killing Micah, the player can revisit Mount Hagen and collect one of his guns. That’s probably the first time players will see what’s carved into the barrel, which is a reminder that John’s revenge, like Orpheus’s trip to Hades, was an act of hubris. The inscription reads “Vengeance is hereby mine,” a corruption of Deuteronomy 32:35:

Vengeance is Mine, and recompense;
Their foot shall slip in due time;
For the day of their calamity is at hand,
And the things to come hasten upon them.

Again, RDR2 is alluding to this passage because Paradise Lost does. The Son — who, as we’ve seen, is represented by Arthur in the game — tells the angels:
“But of this cursed crew/The punishment to other hand belongs;/Vengeance is his, or whose he sole appoints” (VI.806-808). In claiming his vengeance, John seals his own doom. It isn’t an allegory for the myth of Orpheus; John’s the one who winds up dead, not Abigail, but the underlying principle is the same: if you’re escaping death, you can’t look back.

During the credits, we see the agents investigate Micah’s execution, which eventually leads them to Beecher’s Hope. Agent Ross found the Marstons because John failed to honor Arthur’s last request: he looked back. But the narrative’s damning John for this decision is questionable: In mythology, Orpheus, in looking back, fails Eurydice, but in RDR2, John “looking back” inarguably saves many lives. Should the fact that he’s motivated by a desire for revenge be a reason to damn him? Micah needs to be stopped; his crimes are not confined to the past but quite literally bleed into the present. As the in-game newspapers make clear, the law hasn’t been able to stop him. John can. And while John is punished for this decision, Charles and Sadie are not, just as they aren’t punished for prior acts of revenge. This is another example of the game’s inconsistent themes — or maybe only white men are subject to such lofty tragedies, and the rest of us are beneath the notice of the gods.

Perhaps John was wrong to go after Micah. But perhaps, having killed so many people, it was only right for him to risk what happiness he’d found. In any case, the narrative seems to agree with Mary that Arthur and John’s world “is not a world from which one can escape.”⁵ Given the way that tone of inescapability carries through both the first and second game, it seems unlikely John ever could have avoided what eventually happened to him. One thing is clear: in Redemption, you can never win.

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1. This image is from the game files, slightly edited to better show details. The mural is in the largest house in Lakay (the one with the big trapdoor). ↩︎
2. ”Old Friends”; “Sodom? Back to Gomorrah”; “No, No, and Thrice No”; and “Just a Social Call,” for instance. ↩︎
3. For instance, Mary-Beth, Charlotte Balfour, Rains Fall, and Hamish Sinclair. ↩︎
4. The player will also get their guns back after/if they lose them in “Blessed Are the Peacemakers” and “Lost and Not Quite Found.” In the latter, the guns end up at the bottom of the ocean. ↩︎
5. “Goodbye Letter from Mary.” ↩︎

Bibliography