Battesimo Del Fuoco
Believe you me: the price is clear
A child born, the mother near
To death and life as hand in hand
A failed life exposed the man
Who led her off into the flame
To cast her back to hell again
But hear you me: the break of dawn
Will wash away the sins thereof
Unto the lake beyond the tree
The child waits, alone is he
The flame is gone, the fire remains
The flame is gone, the fire remains
The flame is gone, the fire remains
The flame is gone, the fire remains
The flame is gone, the fire remains
The flame is gone, the fire remains
🌲🌲🌲
What happens?
Hunter is born. Information is given on his fate, grounding us with the central themes of the story that will unfold.
What’s in a name?
‘Battesimo Del Fuoco’ translates to ‘Baptism by Fire’ translates to ‘Hunter’s Life Is Arduous’. Our protagonist is going to hit many obstacles and be thrown into many painful situations, with little guidance of what to do.
It also denotes him as anointed with ‘the fire’, both metaphorically pointing to him as the fire in ‘the flame is gone / fire remains’, and reminding us literally that Hunter’s life starts with a burning building.
Whose viewpoint?
Omniscient narrator? Oracles? I don’t think it really matters. Casey just wants us to have this information as a central statement of what the story’s about.
🌲🌲🌲
>0:00 – 0:00 Instrumental
WOAH WOAH WOAH is something hot in here? I think I hear burning! Oh nevermind it’s just Hunter’s fate. Tah hah hah. Foreshadowing. Alright where to start here.
Well what hints do we have from Casey.
HM. Just act V? I’m not sure I believe that. There’s a bit of a stench of act VI-y stuff on this, given that
But that’s getting ahead a little. So here we have a song that sounds like it’s a prophecy, sung in a church or before some force of providence or somesuch, though I don’t think it’s meant to have any specific setting (if any, it would be the room of the Dime where Hunter is born…) so much as simply existing to give information to the audience.
>Believe you me: the price is clear
The only thing that’s happened so far is Hunter’s birth. What is the price of that?
Well, biggest the price would be the fated loss of his innocence. It’s somewhat inevitable he’d return to the city of corruption where he was born and get swallowed up. Simply by virtue of being born as product of rape to Ms Terri, who is deep in the thick of the beast, he is already damned to sin and corruption if he should ever learn himself at all.
This corruption is strong, evil, and heritable. It isolates Hunter and kills all the good things in his life, but it also is not something he can escape. Being that Hunter by the end of his life is a thief, a murderer, an adulterer, a crooked politician, a drug addict, and an arsonist at the very least, with powerful and evil enemies, his son may also be at risk of corruption if he gets wrapped in his father’s dealings, and the cycle of wicked fate continues… unless?
>A child born, the mother near
A shot of Hunter and Ms Terri, grounding us with some characters and a frank description of the scene. The child is a newborn and the loving mother is keeping him close.
>To death and life as hand in hand
A death is the trigger for a birth, or rebirth. ‘One life for another’. It is in the death and ending of one thing that a new thing may rise to prominence – our indicator that this is a story highly concerned with cycles, and the repetition of patterns across cycles.
Most of the rebirths are on Hunter’s part as he goes through different stages of identity. Ms Terri dies, Hunter gains agency. The Son dies, Hunter takes his identity. Ms Leading dies, Hunter’s true identity is freed. This works for Ms Terri too actually – Hunter is born, and Ms Terri the prostitute dies (attempted) to make way for Ms Terri the mother.
I figure Hunter’s death also makes way for his son to take the stage, while TP&P’s death gives way to Mr Usher’s dominion.
>A failed life exposed the man / Who led her off into the flame / To cast her back to hell again
Which men get exposed? Thinking in terms of Act V… well, Hunter does, when TP&P reveals his stolen identity, but Hunter’s not casting anyone into hell (specifically Ms Leading. He lights the fire that burns her corpse but he doesn’t kill her or force her to work in the Dime, say). So my gut reaction is the man is TP&P, though TP&P’s dual identity is never publicly revealed. You could say he’s exposed in the sense that he loses his power, though. Probably just following Act V, this is foreshadowing Ms Leading’s death (’led’ her off…).
A failed life -> Hunter in the opium den/Moon
Exposed the man -> TP&P grows nervous about his control over Hunter
Led her off -> TP&P targets Ms Leading
Into the flame -> as in The Flame (Is Gone), TP&P kills Ms Leading
To cast her back to hell -> she’s dead and her body burns (TP&P also regards her cruelly, with hell being her place)
Again -> working in the Dime is/was Hell. ‘It felt like heaven / but I’m sure she was in hell’
>But hear you me: the break of dawn / Will wash away the sins thereof
‘You were born with the sun / and you die with the moon’. What is the moon? A false reflection of the sun. Generally (and in tarot, which the acts do use symbolically at minimum for King of Swords), the moon is a symbol of deceptions and illusions, with the song titled for it being the one where Hunter is off hallucinating in an opium den after losing sight of his true self beneath his false persona. There’s a lot of dual-identities/personas in the acts, from Ms Terri, Ms Leading, TP&P, Hunter… but it’s when those false personas shatter that hope of an absolution comes. Hunter fulfilled this part of the prophecy by reclaiming his true self in act V.
Interesting choice of ‘wash away’ sins though, in what, maybe a lake? We get the theme of the Lake reprised at the end of A Beginning – paired with this prophecy, it maybe suggests that in the end, Hunter’s death didn’t damn him (or his son, as sins are hereditary, so he also retroactively absolved Ms Terri. Or to have a less literal view on afterlives, vindicated her).
>Unto the lake beyond the tree / The child waits, alone is he
You think this is Hunter? Psyche, it’s his son. Or both. That they wind up in the same place is definitely intentional… (And Hunter’s Son’s mother winds up having to leave him behind also, like Ms Terri did Hunter).
Also I can update my map! The tree is between the lake and the city.
>The flame is gone, the fire remains
And there it is! The whopper!
Oh god I barely want to touch this.
Alright. To start, initially, the ‘flame’ belongs to Ms Terri. The fire she sets to the Dime is the ‘flame’ – which lets Ms Terri escape, but then fizzles out without destroying the Dime. The flame offers liberation from evil, but cannot destroy it. However, it’s this smaller initial act of pure love that allows Ms Terri to find a good place to raise Hunter, who eventually does become a force (the fire) that can destroy the evil. Note also that though Ms Terri undoubtedly wants to see the Dime in ashes (’reprise, two times, the Dime / burn it to the ground’), she doesn’t have a ‘fire’ (or warpath) to go back at any point and actually burn it down (she loves Hunter more than she hates the Dime).
To step back for a moment, it’s like ‘the force that initiates a path toward goodness may perish, but its influence will survive to oppose evil in greater turn’.
There’s also a valence to these symbols:
The flame is loving, forgiving, nurturing, nonviolent, the fleetingly small but indispensable power source to something bigger
The fire is angry, vengeful, destructive, impulsive, the dominant uncompromising purge of evil that simmers, overwhelms, and spreads. This makes the fire sound kind of like a jerk, but, well (and Hunter isn’t all these things all the time, but he does have the ‘power’ of the fire in him)
Anyway, it can be taken for now as ‘Ms Terri will die, but Hunter’s around to finish her business.’ Later it becomes ‘Ms Leading’s death triggers Hunter to act with total abandon’. There’s more to it, but, just for now.
Gravity of the last two repetitions impresses the importance of this information
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