Intro
Big Hat Logan. The greatest wizard of his time; died in the Duke’s Archives, driven mad by the very knowledge he had sought.
Kurt Godel. The most prominent logician since Aristotle; starved to death, confident that somebody had been trying to poison him.
Georg Cantor. The first man to mathematically describe infinity; died at a mental asylum as a lunatic, unable to bear the vision he had discovered.
What do these brilliant minds have in common with the solitary sorcerer wearing a ridiculously large hat?
All three touched knowledge that lies on the verge of human comprehension. Knowledge promising enlightenment, yet exacting a price: madness.
This is a story about that price.
…and about the Big Hat Logan.
The Madness of Knowing
The Duke’s Archives are the infinite library in the world called Lordran, situated atop a hill in Anor Londo. Majestic in its isolation, the structure towers over all others. Within this building lies the library, a repository of arcane knowledge, which poses a threat to some minds.
Amidst shelves flooded with an eerie, crystalline light, a man is found. The greatest sorcerer of his time. Big Hat Logan. He is naked with the only piece of clothing being the ridiculously large hat obscuring his face. He doesn’t recognize you nor does he remember your name; he just… mutters. What happened, for the mighty sorcerer Logan to end up a lunatic?
This raises a fundamental question: can one know too much? Is there a certain kind of knowledge that can utterly destroy even the most brilliant of minds?
It would be easy to dismiss this, referring to the fact that Dark Souls is just a game, and Logan a fictional character created by writers. But the archetype of the mad genius did not come into existence out of nowhere. This is no mere literary fantasy, but a reflection of fear that lies dormant in our culture.
What did Logan truly discover in the Archives? And what does his story say about our own, relentless pursuit of knowledge and ambition? About their terrifying power… a power that can pull us straight into the abyss?
The Archives and the Labirynth of Knowledge
Just as the labyrinth in Greek myths had its Minotaur, the Duke’s Archives have their own architect and prisoner… who is the monstrous, dark core of it all. At first glance, the archives are a place of triumph for knowledge, cognition, and reason, just like our universities. However, the Archives serve also as a monument erected against the chaos and oblivion of the world of Lordran. Seath the Scaleless, its architect - a traitor dragon who betrayed his brethren in exchange for a ducal title and immortality, which he eventually accesses through his research - is also the first prisoner of his own creation; the guardian of knowledge that promises the transgression of all boundaries.
Therefore, the Archives are a perfect metaphore for what Jacques Lacan called the ‘symbolic order’. It is the system of language, laws, and categories that impose meaning upon the world; the meaning which Seath created for himself through his research. He gathered data, information, and defined it. What is truth? What is heresy? What is possible? What is impossible?
Meanwhile, the one who steps into all of this is Logan for whom none of the values such as army, titles, victory, position have any significance. He seeks only one thing. The one thing the Archives have in abundance. He desires absolute truth. He wants to reach the core of Seath’s system, and what lies at its foundation. He wants to reach the crystal magic, which in the world of Dark Souls, is the gateway to immortality.
However, in Lacanian terms, Logan doesn’t just want to master the ‘symbolic order’ since he also wants to touch what is concealed beneath it. Logan wants to touch the Real. He is no longer interested in knowledge that can be described in words and categorized in books. He wants to go further, to touch the crude, unformed materiality of the very existance that had been present before language and meaning. The Real is inherently traumatic, and such is the nature of Seath’s crystal magic. The immortality element is the traumatic, non-human core that should have remained unknown. Thus, Logan attempts the impossible. He wants to fully understand and describe something that is, by definition, indescribable. He wants to fill the void within reality that resists symbolization.
At this moment, Logan’s total obsession is revealed. He is no longer merely seeking and categorizing knowledge. This is ‘transgression’, as Georges Bataille would put it. The sorcerer attempts to cross the fundamental taboo of the world of Lordran - the boundary between human and dragon, mortal and immortal, the known and the unknowable.
Seath’s Archives are a trap with no exit. Every step the Big Hat takes here is a step towards his doom. Knowledge becomes an end in itself - an object of desire so intense that the pursuit itself provides a painful and addictive satisfaction. Lacan described this as ‘jouissance’. A pleasure that is simultaneously a suffering. One can only ask what exactly happens when a mortal mind, driven by this perverse desire, tries to absorb knowledge that is, by definition, non-human.
The Riemann Hypothesis and the Human Cost of Infinity
Let’s return to earth for a moment. Let’s hang our Big Hat on the coat rack. To fully understand Logan’s story, we ought to turn to historical figures and unsolved mathematical problems.
The Riemann Hypothesis has existed for over 160 years. It is the Holy Grail for the sharpest of mathematical minds. Today, it is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, for which finding the solution comes with a million-dollar reward.
It is believed that a solution to this hypothesis promises the discovery of a hidden order in our world. It would allow us to understand the distribution of prime numbers - virtually, a fundamental truth about the structure of our universe. Sounds familiar?
Of course, this promise has its price. The history of mathematics is littered with stories of those who fell in the battle with numbers or buckled under the weight of their own discoveries. The aforementioned Georg Cantor who tried to map different kinds of infinity. Another person, Kurt Gödel. His incompleteness theorems proved that in any system there are truths that are unreachable, which may have pushed his own mind into the abyss.
And even in modern times, mathematics continues to claim its victims. Sir Michael Atiyah was one of the greatest mathematicians of the last century. Near the end of his life, he announced that he had solved the Riemann Hypothesis. His proof was not accepted by the mathematical community. Sir Atiyah and his brilliant mind desired to touch the absolute so intensely that they succumbed to the force of their own desire.
As we can see from these real-world examples, Logan’s pursuit is a mirror image of our own human obsessions. Logan, just like the mathematicians, believes that somewhere out there, a final formula is hidden––a key to immortality. Yet all he finds is the Primordial Crystal.
The mathematicians, too, find infinity. It eludes Cantor’s intuition whereas the incompleteness of Gödel’s system is another blow. In both cases, they are confronted with the fact that reality is full of hollows, incomplete, and infinite. The attempt to grasp this truth, to limit infinity to the finite capacity of the human mind, leads to its inevitable fracture.
Logan did not become mad because he failed to find an answer. He went mad because he found an answer his human mind could not comprehend. There is no final, coherent meaning in the system. He touched the divine and entered the realm of the sacred, just like Cantor and Gödel. Logan’s story is a tale of the human price for tampering with the divine.
The Immortality trap: System without exit
At the very end of this story, and of the Archives, we find two figures. Two mirror images of the same tragedy. On one side, there is Seath the Scaleless; the traitor who achieved immortality. Nevertheless, the price for this was the fate of his entire species, and he himself became lost in the system. He became a crystalline, soulless demon - a caricature of a dragon. He is both the architect and the prisoner of his archives, and of his own dead, artificial world. His immortality is not life, but an endurance in eternal lunacy and paranoia.
On the other side stands Big Hat Logan. A man who wished to follow the same path, but in an intellectual dimension. He desired the immortality that flows from absolute, ultimate knowledge. He, too, achieved his goal, and yet, his ego dissolved as he lost that what defined him as Logan.
And here, the terrifying trap of the Archives is revealed: that the trap is the success in the pursuit of knowledge. Both characters achieved this success and won their own game. Their reward was complete self-annihilation and madness. Knowledge, it turned out, was the poison that shattered their souls.
Why?
Because this system is not meant to have an exit. The Archives are not destined to be a simple path leading to the target point . They are a labyrinth designed to devour those who enter. Like the Riemann Hypothesis, the Archives have no end. There is no victory, no prize. There is only another corridor, another book, another crystal… another layer of infinity.
Cognition has no end––there is only the dissolution of an entity in the information overload.
Lacan: The Empty Core of the Symbolic
To grasp the core of the sorcerer’s psychic disintegration, we must return to Lacan and his concept of the ‘symbolic order’. Logan’s pursuit is a drive towards the Real. We must also focus on the discovery that tore his worldview down.
For Logan, the Archives are not just a library. It is not a vast collection of books, but the big Other - the grand Autre. It is the omnipotent instance that guarantees meaning and truth. Logan believes that somewhere within this infinite labyrinth the final answer awaits him. A coherent and complete body of knowledge. The dragon Seath becomes his master - a figure who appears to be the lord of this knowledge, as he is, after all, the architect of this place.
The problem, however, is incredibly trivial. As trivial as all the trivial zeros in the Riemann hypothesis. As Lacan would say: the big Other does not exist. This means that the ‘symbolic order’ has no ultimate guarantor. It is merely a convention.
When Logan reaches the heart of the Archives and the source of Seath’s knowledge, he finds only the Primordial Crystal. It is not a text written in a book, but a raw, chaotic object that is a source of power, but not of meaning. Logan discovers that the truth of the system is not coherent. And that the system itself is authored by Seath.
This is the key moment in which Logan experiences a rupture. The big Other is just as helpless as the Big Hat. The system simply responds: ‘What do you want?’ There is no ultimate answer to what truly drove Logan. He himself no longer knows.
Therefore, Logan’s madness is the ultimate consequence of this discovery. In Lacanian terms, the subject undergoes a disintegration, just as in the case of Bataille. His ‘symbolic order’ turned out to be a convention built upon a void. All that remained was a madman. A man who attacks anything that holds any illusion of meaning - the player.
So, Logan’s madness is not a failure to understand knowledge. In fact, it is the inevitable result of understanding it all too well. He had learnt that an ultimate, coherent knowledge does not exist. And at the very heart of the system to which he had devoted his life… there is nothingness. A void. One more time did he stare at that void, and the void answered.
Logan As the Bataillean Transgressor
Understanding Logan’s fall requires abandoning the standard path of comparing gains to losses or successes to failures. In this case, we will turn to the thought of Georges Bataille, for whom the key concept was not achievement, as it is for someone like Byung-Chul Han, but the aforementioned transgression.
But let’s take a closer look at transgression itself. What is it? It is not simply breaking a law. For Bataille, the human world - the world of work, reason, and social order - is the world of the profane, which is built on fundamental prohibitions. These prohibitions mostly concern death and sexuality. This is the element that separates us from the chaotic world of nature, which is the world of the sacred. This is a world of intensity, violence, decay, and unrestrained sexuality and death.
At this point, we reach the heart of transgression, which is the act of touching the world of the sacred. This is a paradox created by prohibition itself. The prohibition makes certain aspects more attractive, precisely for being forbidden. The goal of transgression is to break free from the routine, everyday schema of the profane world and escape into the momentary world of the sacred. But that’s not all. It’s about the sovereignty of the sacred world - a state of pure existence, free from the limitations and goals of the world of work and utility itself. This state is achieved through the non-productive expenditure of excess energy, wealth, or even oneself.
This is exactly what Logan does. He wants to violate the taboo of immortality. This is the fundamental taboo of the world of Lordran, reserved only for dragons and gods. Logan was seeking knowledge, but in the Archives, he begins to do so obsessively. The pursuit of knowledge becomes an end in itself. This drives him further, until he crosses over into the world of the sacred. Logan becomes a transgressor. Furthermore, Logan’s symptoms are symbols of the success of his transgression into the sacred:
One: Nudity. Logan abandoned his clothes, remaining only in his hat. For Bataille, this is an act of the ultimate expenditure of social identity. In this way, Logan shed the robes of a sage. He rejected his role in the symbolic order. He returned to a pre-social state, in which he is a pure, sovereign being.
Two: Madness and Laughter. Logan’s ego dissolved in the act of transgression. Through this, he experiences ecstasy, and his muttering is not an impaired communication. It is the sound made by a being who has touched that which lies beyond language. He has touched the sacred. Logan produces non-productive sounds of joy and sorrow, flowing from the loss of his very self.
Three: The Dissolution of the Entity. Logan achieved what every transgressor desires - he abolished his ego. The sorcerer disintegrated as a coherent subject. He ceased to be ‘Big Hat Logan’. He became an impersonal form of knowledge, a chaotic force. His attack on the player is a mindless spasm, a final expenditure of energy.
Logan sacrificed everything to touch the absolute for a single moment and enter the world of the sacred. His madness is the price, but it is also a trophy. It is proof that he succeeded in crossing the line.
Coda: When You Stare Into the Crystal
The ego, dissolving in the information overload… It’s as if… as if I’ve seen and heard this somewhere before.
Big Hat Logan and Seath… this isn’t just a story about a distant fantasy world. It’s a story about us, here and now. Our Duke’s Archives are a place as beautiful as it is terrifying.
Our Archives are built from crystals of silicon.
Our Archives are the infinite scroll on social media. The black box of an algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves. An algorithm that knows better what you want to watch next. It’s the promise of Silicon Valley - Big Data, meant to solve our every problem. And AI, supposed to give us an answer to every question.
We, too, tend to our own Primordial Crystals, dispassionately devoting ourselves to them, every single day.
In a world that promises you all knowledge and an answer to every question… In a world where your Primordial Crystal knows more about you than you do yourself… In a world where you pay for all of this with your attention, your data… and perhaps, something more?
Where does the boundary lie? What is more valuable: the truth you might find in the Primordial Crystal… or the humanity you might lose?
Bibliography
These particular books affected the overall shape of the article
- Georges Bataille - Eroticism: Death and Sensuality
This is the foundational text for understanding Logan’s fall not as a failure, but as a successful transgression. Bataille’s concepts of the “profane” (the world of reason and work) and the “sacred” (the world of violent, non-productive expenditure) provide the framework for interpreting Logan’s madness, nudity, and dissolution of self as trophies of his journey into the absolute, rather than mere symptoms of defeat. - Bruce Fink - The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance
Fink’s work is an essential guide to the complex concepts of Jacques Lacan used in the essay. It clarifies the crucial distinction between the “Symbolic” (the ordered world of Seath’s Archives), the “Real” (the traumatic, unknowable core Logan seeks), and the “big Other.” This book is the key to deciphering Logan’s psychic collapse upon discovering that the ultimate guarantor of meaning does not exist. - David Foster Wallace - Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
While not a direct philosophical source, this book provides the historical and psychological soul of the essay’s central analogy. Wallace’s exploration of Georg Cantor’s struggle with the concept of infinity captures the real-world drama of a brilliant mind confronting a truth too vast to contain. It grounds the story of the “mad mathematician” in reality, making Logan’s fictional plight a powerful echo of a genuine human tragedy.