The School of Mensis: the Cage-Wearing Scholars of Yahar'gul

The School of Mensis is a group of scholars inside the Healing Church who control Yahar'gul, the Unseen Village. With the Choir, they make up the Church's upper ranks. Where the Choir looked to the sky, Mensis tried to meet the Great Ones in dreams, and their attempt left them trapped in the Nightmare of Mensis with the Great One Mergo. (Bloodborne)

What does the game say the School of Mensis is?#

The clearest statement is on the Upper Cathedral Key: the upper ranks of the Healing Church are formed by the School of Mensis, based in the Unseen Village, and the Choir, who occupy the Upper Cathedral Ward. The Mensis Cage description opens with the same fact, that the School of Mensis controls the Unseen Village. (Bloodborne)

The Yahar'gul Black Garb adds that the village's hunters answer to its founders, the School of Mensis, and calls them "hunters in name only". They are kidnappers who blend into the night, and the rope binding their clothes is meant to restrain their foes as well as protect the wearer. That is how the player first reaches Yahar'gul, carried there in a sack. (Bloodborne)

The Mensis Cage#

The cage is the school's badge. Its description calls it a hexagonal iron cage that "suggests their strange ways". It restrains the will of the self so the wearer can see the profane world for what it is, and it works like an antenna for contact with the Great Ones of the dream. Then the description turns: to an observer, it says, the cage looks like exactly the thing that delivered them to their harrowing nightmare. (Bloodborne)

The Moon rune explains why Mensis looked to dreams at all. It says the Great Ones that inhabit the nightmare are sympathetic in spirit and often answer when called upon. (Bloodborne)

What was the Mensis ritual?#

The game gives fragments, not a full account. Notes left around Yahar'gul read like warnings from hunters who got too close. One says madmen toil in secret in rituals to beckon the moon. Another, beside a dead hunter in a cell, says the Mensis ritual must be stopped, lest we all become beasts. A third says nightmarish rituals crave a newborn, and tells the reader to find one and silence its cry. (Bloodborne)

The result is described on Mergo's Cord, a One Third of Umbilical Cord taken from the Nightmare of Mensis. Every Great One loses its child and yearns for a surrogate, it says, and this cord granted Mensis audience with Mergo, "but resulted in the stillbirth of their brains". The Living String adds that Mensis retrieved an immense brain from the nightmare. It was lined with eyes on the inside, but evil ones, and the brain was terribly rotten. It was still a real Great One, and it left a relic. (Bloodborne)

Micolash and the Nightmare of Mensis#

The one Mensis scholar the player speaks to is Micolash, Host of the Nightmare, who wears the Mensis Cage and fights with the Choir's own tools, the Augur of Ebrietas and A Call Beyond. He prays to Kos, refuses to "abandon the dream", and begs for eyes to be planted on his brain "to cleanse our beastly idiocy". When he dies, he says he is waking up and will forget everything. (Bloodborne)

Past him lies Mergo's Wet Nurse, who guards the infant Great One. Once she falls, Gehrman waits under the great tree in the Hunter's Dream and tells the player the night is near its end. (Bloodborne)

What fans believe about Mensis#

Several popular ideas go beyond the text, and it's worth keeping them separate from what is stated.

• The most common reading is that the Mensis ritual made the blood moon appear, or let Yharnam see what was already there. The notes about beckoning the moon support a link, but the game never says the ritual caused the red moon. (Bloodborne)
• Many players believe the Mensis scholars left their bodies behind in Yahar'gul while their minds went into the nightmare. A seated, cage-wearing body in the village is often identified as Micolash's. The game does not label it. (Bloodborne)
• The Choir and Mensis are usually read as rivals. The evidence is circumstantial: a Choir agent named Edgar, Choir Intelligencer, is found inside the Nightmare of Mensis. No line in the game spells out a feud. (Bloodborne)
• Mensis is often linked back to Byrgenwerth and Master Willem, because Micolash shouts about "the Vacuous Rom" and wants eyes, which was Willem's goal. That's a sensible link but an inferred one. (Bloodborne)