| The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last to ever be. -Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian |  |
When I finished reading Blood Meridian for the first time it didn’t sit right with me. There was something silent, but fundamental, hidden between the words, and I had missed it. I opened it again and read the epilogue, cryptic and enraging as it was, three or four more times.
| In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search… (351) |
Right. That’s just the beginning of the epilogue, and the rabbit hole only gets deeper. Finally, I put the book down, turned on my computer, and went looking for help. My vanity as a reader wouldn’t let me walk away.
I do not intend to argue here that Cormac McCarthy takes the myth of the Gnostics to be true in a literal sense. They didn’t take it literally themselves. Like all deeper understanding of myth the Gnostic story should be taken as a metaphor, a key to a mystery that is beyond the categories of human thought.
Gnosticism holds that the material world, including the bodies that hold us, is more or less a mistake, an aberration created by a tyrannical, ignorant God. For Gnostics all matter is corrupt and doomed, that’s its nature, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Our flesh is a tomb and Jehovah’s world is a serpent swallowing its own tail, monster feeding on monster, and in the material realm, power is the only rule (The earth and humanity as they exist in McCarthy’s novel The Road could be seen as the world of matter approaching its natural, and only possible, end). Pretty bleak, and Gnosticism, like Buddhism, has been accused of nihilism, and were it not for the fire, the "spark of the alien divine" it might be a just accusation.
The myth plays out differently in different texts, but essentially: Things once existed in a state of perfection called the Pleroma. God existed in a fullness that can't be comprehended and the Gnostic Gospels describe him mostly in terms of negatives, or what he is not, much as the state of Zen or Satori is described. This is intentional. The Gnostic authors didn't want to give readers anything to hold on to and wanted, as much as was possible, to avoid reducing God to a concept, a mental idol.
I do not intend to argue here that Cormac McCarthy takes the myth of the Gnostics to be true in a literal sense. They didn’t take it literally themselves. Like all deeper understanding of myth the Gnostic story should be taken as a metaphor, a key to a mystery that is beyond the categories of human thought.
Gnosticism holds that the material world, including the bodies that hold us, is more or less a mistake, an aberration created by a tyrannical, ignorant God. For Gnostics all matter is corrupt and doomed, that’s its nature, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Our flesh is a tomb and Jehovah’s world is a serpent swallowing its own tail, monster feeding on monster, and in the material realm, power is the only rule (The earth and humanity as they exist in McCarthy’s novel The Road could be seen as the world of matter approaching its natural, and only possible, end). Pretty bleak, and Gnosticism, like Buddhism, has been accused of nihilism, and were it not for the fire, the "spark of the alien divine" it might be a just accusation.
The myth plays out differently in different texts, but essentially: Things once existed in a state of perfection called the Pleroma. God existed in a fullness that can't be comprehended and the Gnostic Gospels describe him mostly in terms of negatives, or what he is not, much as the state of Zen or Satori is described. This is intentional. The Gnostic authors didn't want to give readers anything to hold on to and wanted, as much as was possible, to avoid reducing God to a concept, a mental idol.
| He is illimitable since there was no one prior to set limits to him...He is unsearchable since there was no one prior to him to examine him....He is ineffable since no one was able to comprehend him to speak about him. He is unnameable since there was no one prior to him to give him a name. -The Apocryphon of John |  |
This God created Sophia, his divine consort, and endowed her with all manner of creative powers. Sophia soon wished to use these to bring forth a likeness of herself without God's consent or agreement:
| And because of the invincible power which is within her, her thought did not remain idle and something came out of her which was imperfect and different from her appearance, because she had created it without her consort. And when she saw the consequences of her desire, it changed into a form of a lion-faced serpent. And its eyes were like lightning fires which flash. She cast it away from her, outside that place, that no one of the immortal ones might see it, for she had created it in ignorance...And she called his name Yaltabaoth. This is the first archon who took a great power from his mother. -The Apocryphon of John |
This is Jehovah, the God of Orthodox Christianity and Judaism, the god of our world of matter. He is a sort of aborted fetus, an infant thrown off of a cliff because he is an abomination. An archon is a name Gnostics give to those who hold power in Yaltabaoth/Jehovah's world of matter, and he is himself the chief archon. From here on out this false god goes about creating in the realm (our world of matter) he has been exiled to. To Gnostics the true God, the “Alien Divine” has nothing to do with this world. And Jehovah in his ignorance said:
| "It is I who am God; there is none apart from me." When he said this he sinned against the entirety. And this speech got up to incorruptibility; then there was a voice that came forth from incorruptibility, saying, "You are mistaken Samael" -which is "god of the blind.” -The Apocryphon of John |
In McCarthy’s screenplay for The Counselor the diamond dealer, who, like Jehovah, deals in false currency, repeats this idea for us.
| And this is the God of the Jewish people. There is no other God. (19) |
This "god of the blind" creates man, a creature made only of matter, in all its destructive and corrupt nature.
| ...and the spirit which originates in the ignorance of darkness and desire and their counterfeit spirit. This is the tomb of the newly formed body, with which the robbers had clothed the man. -The Apocryphon of John |
McCarthy tells us the same thing about the Glanton Gang in Blood Meridian:
| Like a patrol condemned to ride out some ancient curse. A thing surmised from the blackness by the creak of leather and the chink of metal. (157) |  Photo by Trigger Image |
The material body and world exist under this “ancient curse” we are “condemned to ride out.” This state of affairs doesn’t leave us much to live for or look forward to. As Leo Daugherty points out in his wonderful essay on Blood Meridian:
| So, whereas most thoughtful people have looked at the world they lived in and asked, “How did evil get into it?” the Gnostics looked at the world and asked, “How did good get into it?” |
In order that at some point things can be made right again, so that we can come back around to truth and spirit, the “Alien God” who cannot be named blessed us with a small grace, or, in McCarthy's language, the fire. It is the divine essence, the spark of the true God buried within the corrupt and opposed matter of the human body. In the Hypostasis of the Archons this comes from God through Sophia.
| And immediately Sophia ("Wisdom") put forth her finger and introduced light into matter, and she followed it down into the region of Chaos. |
The arrival of the Christ on the physical plane was intended to help us awaken to the Gnostic spark or flame within us. See the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas:
| Jesus said, "I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it until it blazes.” |  |
Waking up from the slumber of matter and the body into knowledge, gnosis, or the divine fire, is our journey, and people exist in different places in that journey. Some people are still completely asleep and ignorant of the "spark of the alien divine" and they live only by the destructive laws and power driven dynamics of the material world (which is doomed no matter how far we come in our individual realization). Because they operate according to the laws of the material world they are often seen as the greatest survivors, the most powerful and successful within it.
Back to McCarthy. Many of McCarthy's central characters are what could be called tragic Gnostic heroes. "Hero" might not sound like the most accurate word to describe the kid in Blood Meridian, Llewellyn Moss in No Country For Old Men, or the counsellor in the screenplay from the Ridley Scott movie of the same name, and they are not heroes in the traditional sense, but only become so once one understands their characters within a Gnostic framework. But before we understand McCarthy's heroes we need to understand his villains.
The Judge in Blood Meridian is one of Jehovah's archons (lords) and is McCarthy's most terrifying creation. He rapes and murders children, kills without pause, lusts after power, speaks all languages, dances, and plays the fiddle prodigiously. He takes spiritual possession of things by drawing them in his notebook. Anton Chigurth from No Country for Old Men and Malkina from The Counselor are lesser archons. Chigurth, like the judge, cannot be killed and Malkina knows things she cannot possibly know. All three, the judge, Anton Chigurth, and Malkina lust after power, control, and violence. Each comes right out of parts of Nietszche, who McCarthy clearly considers the greatest philosopher of the material world. See the judge in Blood Meridian:
Back to McCarthy. Many of McCarthy's central characters are what could be called tragic Gnostic heroes. "Hero" might not sound like the most accurate word to describe the kid in Blood Meridian, Llewellyn Moss in No Country For Old Men, or the counsellor in the screenplay from the Ridley Scott movie of the same name, and they are not heroes in the traditional sense, but only become so once one understands their characters within a Gnostic framework. But before we understand McCarthy's heroes we need to understand his villains.
The Judge in Blood Meridian is one of Jehovah's archons (lords) and is McCarthy's most terrifying creation. He rapes and murders children, kills without pause, lusts after power, speaks all languages, dances, and plays the fiddle prodigiously. He takes spiritual possession of things by drawing them in his notebook. Anton Chigurth from No Country for Old Men and Malkina from The Counselor are lesser archons. Chigurth, like the judge, cannot be killed and Malkina knows things she cannot possibly know. All three, the judge, Anton Chigurth, and Malkina lust after power, control, and violence. Each comes right out of parts of Nietszche, who McCarthy clearly considers the greatest philosopher of the material world. See the judge in Blood Meridian:
| Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. (261) |
Or Malkina in The Counselor:
| The hunter has a purity of heart that exists nowhere else. I think he is not defined so much by what he has come to be as by all that he has escaped being. You can make no distinction between what he is and what he does. And what he does is kill. We of course are another matter. I suspect we are ill-formed for the path we have chosen. (183) |  |
The archons destroy anything that doesn't fall under their dominion, kill without pause or remorse, and toy with human prey for entertainment. The most disturbing thing about them is that they always come out on top. They never lose, never die, never learn their lesson or meet their end at the hands of more righteous powers. But that's the point. Each of McCarthy's bad guys is in sync with the corrupt nature of matter, and since, to Gnostics, matter is in itself evil, evil must win out on the physical plane. It's only natural.
In McCarthy's works the Gnostic spark is revealed through empathy, a sense that the hero identifies with another as himself. It is a recognition in the very questionable hero that beneath the surface of the material world each of us has a spark buried within that is a part of the unity that is the divine fire, the “Alien God.” This comes out in a very muddled way, as it initially must through the filter of a physical body. All three of the central characters mentioned above perform these acts of empathy amidst other much more selfish acts, even violent and damaging ones. Each hero is at a stage in the journey, as much of the world is, where he has only begun the process of unclothing the divine spark within him. It is easier to use moral language to describe this idea, but I don't believe McCarthy is presenting us with a moral lesson at all. For him the Gnostic spark is more like a scientific fact, and our individual recognition of it is a phase in our evolution. It only appears as empathy to a world used to interpreting things in moral language.
Like all tragic heroes the kid, Llewelyn Moss, and the counselor have a tragic flaw, but the “flaw” in the case of McCarthy's heroes is the Gnostic fire. It is what makes them vulnerable, incapable of victory and survival, in a world of matter where power is the ruling principle. They have to die, or in the counsellor's case be destroyed, because they're no longer playing by the rules of the game (the world of matter) they are a part of. The death or downfall of each can be traced to a moment of empathy, a moment when they recognized that the divine fire in them was the same as the divine fire in someone else. In Blood Meridian the kid's moments of empathy and identity take place alongside murder, indifference, and cruelty, but they still separate him from the other members of the Glanton Gang who are still completely in the grips of the material world and the body’s slumber. As the Glanton Gang engages in the slaughter of a group of natives and scalps them one of their members, a man named McGill, is skewered through with a lance, while the rest of the gang waits for him to die the kid has a brief moment of empathy. The kid moves to help the injured man, but McGill has become a liability, and Glanton shoots him in the head.
In McCarthy's works the Gnostic spark is revealed through empathy, a sense that the hero identifies with another as himself. It is a recognition in the very questionable hero that beneath the surface of the material world each of us has a spark buried within that is a part of the unity that is the divine fire, the “Alien God.” This comes out in a very muddled way, as it initially must through the filter of a physical body. All three of the central characters mentioned above perform these acts of empathy amidst other much more selfish acts, even violent and damaging ones. Each hero is at a stage in the journey, as much of the world is, where he has only begun the process of unclothing the divine spark within him. It is easier to use moral language to describe this idea, but I don't believe McCarthy is presenting us with a moral lesson at all. For him the Gnostic spark is more like a scientific fact, and our individual recognition of it is a phase in our evolution. It only appears as empathy to a world used to interpreting things in moral language.
Like all tragic heroes the kid, Llewelyn Moss, and the counselor have a tragic flaw, but the “flaw” in the case of McCarthy's heroes is the Gnostic fire. It is what makes them vulnerable, incapable of victory and survival, in a world of matter where power is the ruling principle. They have to die, or in the counsellor's case be destroyed, because they're no longer playing by the rules of the game (the world of matter) they are a part of. The death or downfall of each can be traced to a moment of empathy, a moment when they recognized that the divine fire in them was the same as the divine fire in someone else. In Blood Meridian the kid's moments of empathy and identity take place alongside murder, indifference, and cruelty, but they still separate him from the other members of the Glanton Gang who are still completely in the grips of the material world and the body’s slumber. As the Glanton Gang engages in the slaughter of a group of natives and scalps them one of their members, a man named McGill, is skewered through with a lance, while the rest of the gang waits for him to die the kid has a brief moment of empathy. The kid moves to help the injured man, but McGill has become a liability, and Glanton shoots him in the head.
| The kid waded out of the water and approached him and the Mexican sat down carefully in the sand. Get away from him, said Glanton. McGill turned to look at Glanton and as he did so Glanton levelled his pistol and shot him in the head. (163) |
Later, being stalked in the desert by the judge, the kid and the badly injured ex-priest Tobin stop to rest. Tobin feels he can no longer continue.
| He raised his head slightly and he spoke without looking at the kid. Go, he said. Save yourself. The kid took the water bottle from the shales and unstoppered it and drank and handed it across. The expriest drank and they sat watching and then they rose and turned and set out again. (307) |
These are a long way from shining moral victories, and in my view this makes them all the more interesting. At best we could call the kid morally ambiguous, he “has a taste for mindless violence,” but alongside this the Judge recognizes there is something different about him. McCarthy’s breadcrumbs about what separates the kid are subtle, but towards the end of the novel the judge finally tells us outright:
| No assassin, called the judge. And no partisan either. There's a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone in your soul reserved some corner of clemency for the heathen. (311-312) |
The “flawed place in the fabric” of the kid’s heart is the Gnostic fire. The judge calls it flawed because by the standards of the material world, the world that belongs to the judge, it is flawed. One of the reasons McCarthy makes the kid (like the counselor) nameless is so that the judge can’t control or comprehend him (following the ancient idea that naming something gives one power over the thing named). The kid meets his end at the archon’s hands, the tragedy on the material plane comes to an end, and the Gnostic spark returns to the divine fire. The ruling dynamic of tragedy has always been participation, and as the kid is released from the bonds of the body the reader is too.
Early on in The Counselor a conversation between Reiner (played by Javier Bardem) and the Counselor (played by Michael Fassbender), hints at the same idea –empathy makes him ill-fitted for the world he is about to enter. Just before the counselor commits to take part in a drug deal to get himself out of financial trouble:
Early on in The Counselor a conversation between Reiner (played by Javier Bardem) and the Counselor (played by Michael Fassbender), hints at the same idea –empathy makes him ill-fitted for the world he is about to enter. Just before the counselor commits to take part in a drug deal to get himself out of financial trouble:
| Reiner: Yeah. Well, you’re not the straight dude people think though, are you? Counselor: I guess not. Reiner: I don’t mean the caper. I mean you. Women like you. Counselor: All right. Reiner: You know what they like about you? Counselor: I’m a good fuck? Reiner: Yeah, right. They can sniff out the moral dilemma. The paradox. (32-33) |  Michael Fassbender as the counselor and Javier Bardem as Reiner in The Counselor. |
It is this moral dilemma, the empathy that divides his actions, that ultimately destroys the counselor. A client in a women’s jail asks for help with her son who has just been arrested. The counselor agrees to help and puts up the money to bail her son out, even though he is in financial trouble himself. This moment of empathy with the woman in jail causes the drug deal to fall apart and makes things look to the Mexican drug cartel as if the counselor was involved in stealing from them. His fiancé is kidnapped and used in a snuff film to make up for the money the cartel believes the counselor has cost them. He is Oedipus, wandering the rest of his days as an exile who has gouged his own eyes out. Again, things have played out as they must on the physical plane. Everyone in touch with the divine spark has been destroyed –at least on a material level.
In No Country For Old Men Llweleyn Moss stumbles into a world he too cannot survive in. McCarthy uses narcotics again, because for him the world of drugs is one of the clearest examples of the material world’s drive to destroy itself. Moss tries to stay alive, but like the Kid and the Counselor “the flawed place in the fabric” of his heart ends up being the death of him. Llewelyn has a briefcase full of money and no one knows where he is. All he has to do is get on a plane and leave. But he can’t leave his wife behind, his love and identity with her brings him to the motel where he’s supposed to meet up with her and where the Cartel kills him. Had he been not had this empathy he would not have met the tragic end he does. Just before he dies an attractive young woman that he picks up hitchhiking asks him if his wife knows what he does for a living.
In No Country For Old Men Llweleyn Moss stumbles into a world he too cannot survive in. McCarthy uses narcotics again, because for him the world of drugs is one of the clearest examples of the material world’s drive to destroy itself. Moss tries to stay alive, but like the Kid and the Counselor “the flawed place in the fabric” of his heart ends up being the death of him. Llewelyn has a briefcase full of money and no one knows where he is. All he has to do is get on a plane and leave. But he can’t leave his wife behind, his love and identity with her brings him to the motel where he’s supposed to meet up with her and where the Cartel kills him. Had he been not had this empathy he would not have met the tragic end he does. Just before he dies an attractive young woman that he picks up hitchhiking asks him if his wife knows what he does for a living.
| Does she know what you do for a livin? Yeah. She knows. I’m a welder. She watched him. To see what else he would say. He didn’t say anything. You ain’t no welder, she said. Why ain’t I? (232) |  |
Here we have one of McCarthy’s few clues. Llewelyn Moss is a “welder,” someone who creates bonds with fire. The young woman tries to use sex to tempt him away from his empathy, from the identity he shares with his wife. The last thing Moss says before he’s murdered is an affirmation that he is in touch with the Gnostic Spark, that in his own humble way he won’t be swayed by the destructive gravity of the body. It is again easy to take this in a common, moral sense, and see it as Moss being faithful to his spouse. But that’s not the mark McCarthy is trying to hit, it’s too simple, and too obvious. Moss turns down the woman’s advances and she says:
| There’s a lot of good salesman around and you might buy somethin yet. Well darlin you’re just a little late. Cause I done bought. And I think I’ll stick with what I got. (235) |
Gnosticism holds that the nature of matter is destructive, and that ultimately all matter will be destroyed. The very stuff that our bodies are made up of will take us to our death. This destruction is a process that we are creeping closer and closer to. There is no longer any “country for old men” because we are into a period of decline, a period that those “old men” who were still able to identify with the Gnostic spark in one another can no longer fit into. Gnosticism’s saving grace is that this world wasn’t the important thing to begin with. Nietzsche might say that this too is nihilism, the denial of this world in favour of another one. But part of the Gnostic claim, like the Buddhists, is that the spark can be realized in this world, that individuals can evolve into an expression of the divine essence on this plane. The Gospel of Thomas tells us:
| The kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth. But men do not see it…Split a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find me there. |
This is why McCarthy’s man of the epilogue in Blood Meridian goes about the earth “striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there.” The man of the epilogue is the artist, and his job is to reveal the divine spark buried within the nightmare that is our history. McCarthy’s task is to awaken, and the tool he uses to strike the fire from us is darkness.
NOTES
1. The entry above is a continuation of a much shorter, earlier piece on Cormac McCarthy and his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road. The first entry, How I Discovered Fire and Cormac McCarthy, can be found here.
2. I would like to acknowledge the heavy debt my understanding of McCarthy and Gnosticism owes to Leo Daugherty and his paper Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy. You can find Daugherty’s paper here.
| 3. The sheriff in No Country For Old Men could almost be looked at as a Gnostic narrator. He repeatedly emphasizes that we are in a period of decline and that the state the of the world is getting steadily worse. The final scene in the movie adaptation of McCarthy’s novel reaffirms the Gnostic idea that no matter what occurs in the material world the divine spark, or the fire, is the essence we will return to on the other side. This is the same fire McCarthy uses in The Road and Blood Meridian. | |
4. I have avoided the temptation here, for the sake of brevity, of a much more detailed Gnostic analysis of Blood Meridian, The Counselor, and No Country For Old Men. A more in-depth look at each piece individually is needed to do McCarthy’s work justice.
5. Other excellent tools for further insight into Blood Meridian include Bookdrum’s guide to Blood Meridian, which can be found here, and Professor Hungerford’s two part lecture at Yale University, available below.
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