SOURCE: Spurgeon, Sara. “The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness: Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian.” In Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, edited by James D. Lilley, pp. 75-101. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

[In the following essay, Spurgeon suggests that Blood Meridian attempts to bridge the difference between the mythic representations of the old West and the true natural world, particularly through its reworking of the traditional figure of the sacred hunter.]

One of the many complex relationships Cormac McCarthy explores in Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West is between humans, especially Anglo Americans, and the natural world. He does so in part through the manipulation of several archetypal myths closely identified with the European experience in the New World, and most specifically with the border regions of the American Southwest.

McCarthy moves Blood Meridian through the dark and disordered spaces of what Lauren Berlant calls the “national symbolic.” Unlike the familiar icons of mythic frontier tales, however, McCarthy's characters seek no closure, nor do they render order out of the chaos of history and myth. The novel functions on the level of mythmaking and national fantasy as an American origin story, a reimaging upon the palimpsest of the western frontier of the birth of one of our most pervasive national fantasies—the winning of the West and the building of the American character through frontier experiences.

Both of these related themes demand a wilderness to be conquered, either literally via ax and plow or metaphorically by defeating the Indians rhetorically tied to the wild landscape. Annette Kolodny has defined the American obsession with land, especially land-as-woman, as an American pastoral, drawing some images from the European version, yet unique from it. The literary hero within this landscape, she says, is “the lone male in the wilderness” (147) struggling to define a relationship with the female landscape in its troubling metaphorical appearance as both fruitful mother and untouched virgin, one image offering nurturing fertility, the other demanding penetration and conquest.

Blood Meridian chronicles the origin of the “lone male in the wilderness,” the modern American Adam—though not the benignly patriarchal John Wayne version. McCarthy's project here is not simply to retell the familiar myths or dress up the icons of cowboys and Indians in modern, politically correct costumes à la Dances with Wolves; rather, he is using the trope of the historic frontier and the landscape of the Southwest within the genre of the Western to interrogate the consequences of our acceptance of the archetypal Western hero myths. Blood Meridian rewrites and reorders those myths in such a way as to bridge the discontinuity that Patricia Limerick identifies as being perceived by the public to exist between the mythic past of the American West and its modern realities.¹ This gap, marked by a feeling of discontinuity and limned by the continued popular obsession with traditional Western and frontier icons that have thus far failed to cover it, is filled in Blood Meridian with a newly structured version of national fantasy, though not one that imposes any kind of hoped-for order or control.

Instead, McCarthy presents a countermemory, a sort of antimyth of the West, illuminating especially the roots of the modern relationship between humans and the natural world. In many ways, McCarthy has produced a counterhistory that contradicts the meaning generated from most official histories of the period. It is within the accuracy of historical detail in Blood Meridian that McCarthy finds his mythic history, lurking within the liminal spaces of the familiar rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, the taming of the wilderness, John Wayne's famous swagger, and other pillars of the national symbolic.

The central myth enshrining that relationship and manipulated in Blood Meridian, mainly by the judge, is that of the sacred hunter. In Regeneration Through Violence, Richard Slotkin claims that this ancient form of the archetypal hero quest, twisted and hybridized through the meeting of numerous European and Native American versions, forms the basis of the modern American myth of the frontier, and thus much of the groundwork for our commonly perceived national identity.

Kolodny argues that the American pastoral was structured around the yeoman farmer responding to the female landscape, and discusses this figure as he appears in Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, Freneau, and others. However, as Henry Nash Smith noted, the image of the yeoman farmer was simply not romantic enough to sustain popular interest for long. What emerged instead was an American version of a far older figure, the “lone male in the wilderness”—the hunter. In essence, the myth of the sacred hunter is one of regeneration through violence enacted upon the body of the earth. The hunter must leave the community, track his game (usually a representation of the spirit of the wilderness or an avatar of a nature deity), and slay it. In many versions, the prey allows itself to be hunted and killed, willingly sacrificing its life to sustain the life of the hunter, who must in turn give honor and thanks to the prey and to whichever nature spirit it represents. Following the hunt, he or his community either literally or symbolically consumes the prey in a eucharist of the wilderness, thus renewing the hunter and providing life for those he serves. The eucharist, Slotkin argues, is itself a sublimation of the myth of the sacred marriage, which enacts a sexual union between the hunter and the body of nature. The game the hunter tracks in many versions is revealed at the end of the chase to be some female representative of the wilderness whom the hunter marries instead of slaying, in a parallel renewal of self and community through sexual union with nature.²

Slotkin writes that, especially in the modern Anglo-American version, “The hunter myth provided a fictive justification for the process by which the wilderness was to be expropriated and exploited” (554). It did so by seeing that process in terms of heroic male adventure commodified by visual and symbolic proofs of the hunter's heroic stature and, therefore, his rightful and proper triumph over his prey. Slotkin cites the famous image of Davy Crockett standing proudly next to his stack of 150 bearskins, the legend of Paul Bunyan clearing miles of virgin forest with a single stroke of his ax, and the often-photographed mountains of buffalo skulls littering the Great Plains as embodiments of this myth. In Blood Meridian these images are echoed in the scalphunters' collections of scalps, ears, teeth, and other trophies, and they are described in detail on the plain of the bonepickers. What is echoed and amplified as well is the subtle shift evident in the modern Anglo version of the myth, from the imaging of the prey as symbol of divine nature sacrificed so that man may live to simply that which deserves to fall before him.

The gigantic figure of Judge Holden, who is both a fictional version of a historical personage and an amalgamation of numerous archetypes from the mythic West, acts throughout the book as the author of the new version of the hunter myth. McCarthy consistently presents the judge as a priest, a mediator between man and nature, shepherding, or more accurately manipulating, the scalphunters' souls even as Glanton guides their physical bodies. The image of the judge as priest is consistent with the dominant mood and tone of Blood Meridian as origin myth. Bernard Schopen calls the entire novel “profoundly religious” and claims that it takes place “in a physical and thematic landscape charged with religious nuance, allusion, and language” (191). That is not to say, however, that Blood Meridian is a Christian book or particularly interested in presenting any kind of Christian worldview. At its deepest structural and rhetorical levels, Blood Meridian uses mythic and religious imagery both Christian and non-Christian.

The first time we see the judge, for example, is at the revival meeting tent where he concocts elaborate lies about the camp preacher, which results in a riot among the congregation and a posse that sets out to hang the innocent man. Significantly, the primary charge the judge levels against Reverend Green foreshadows the betrayal and perversion he will commit as the novel progresses. The reverend, the judge claims, is wanted on “a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years—I said eleven—who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God” (7). This violation of a child and the profaning of a sacred office by a figure entrusted with upholding and protecting it will be enacted repeatedly throughout the novel, with the judge playing the leading role. The judge deliberately cultivates a feel for myth, ritual, and religion and directs it toward his own ends. His goal is to harness the unconscious response to mythic heroes, invoke it with the rituals of the sacred hunter and the eucharist of the wilderness, and reorder, or perhaps disorder, it on a deep and essential level. His aim is no less than the birthing of a new myth.

Throughout Blood Meridian the judge both exalts the natural world and strives to contain and destroy it, to usurp its power for his own ends. He is priest here not only of men's souls but also of their minds, and he often appears as the spokesman of what is presented as a sort of new religion—science. As the novel progresses, the figure of the judge becomes increasingly godlike, while that of nature is debased. The judge manipulates the power and mystery of the natural world and its association with the sacred through his scientific knowledge, which gives him the ability to penetrate that mystery and therefore disrupt the assumptions of the other characters about the place of humans within the world. While the scalphunters are camped at an abandoned mine, the judge collects ore samples:

in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth's origins. … A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The Judge smiled.

Books lie, he said.

God dont lie.

No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.

He held up a chunk of rock.

He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct … and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools.

(116)

The acceptance of traditional dogma regarding the world and the place of humans in the natural order of existence is deconstructed by the judge, built anew through the acceptance and belief of his listeners, then destroyed again. His audience may now doubt their own understanding of nature as well as Christian doctrine, but the one figure whose personal power has only increased in the eyes of his followers is Judge Holden. The judge is laying groundwork, gathering “proselytes,” participants in the ritualistic myth he is enacting. That nature plays the part of the sacred does not imply the sort of patriarchal relationship imagined by Christianity in which a merciful, all-powerful God cares for and watches over His children. As many critics have noted, in McCarthy's work nature is often brutal and almost always without mercy for humans, and yet the shadow of the sacred and the profane permeates Blood Meridian and is constantly evoked by the judge through humankind's relationship to the natural world.

That this destructive version of the myth demands material evidence of its fulfillment does not lessen its ritualistic power, especially as McCarthy has constructed it in Blood Meridian. The judge, having symbolically dethroned the priest of the Christian rituals and myths at the revival tent, will make proselytes of the scalphunters and lead them in a cannibalistic perversion of the old myth made new in this place where “not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay” (5).

Whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will is one of the central questions of the novel. Dana Phillips claims in “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian” that what McCarthy is questioning is “whether human beings have any privileged position in relation to the rest of the world” (443). His answer is that according to McCarthy they do not, that humans and nature are simply part of the same continuum, ignoring each other throughout the novel. At first glance it would seem that indeed creation cannot be shaped to human will, or, as Phillips says, “at least not for very long. Man's will does not seem a very relevant or potent force in this novel” (439). However, a closer examination suggests that in fact man's will is the most potent of forces as well as the central concern in the terrifying relationship between Holden and the kid. It is man's will that ultimately shapes myth, and, McCarthy seems to be implying, it is our myths that ultimately shape the world. The agent of this shaping is not nature but Judge Holden, who, as the only character who truly understands the immense power of will, acts almost as collective human will made flesh in order to shape the stuff of creation through the shaping of the myth that constructs it.

Phillips would disagree with this interpretation. He argues that there is no inherent meaning in the actions of the characters or of the natural world in Blood Meridian, that darkness is just darkness, death just death. McCarthy has even “dispensed with the concept of character” (441) in the traditional sense, Phillips says, in order to erase any hint of possible moral redemption for his band of scalphunters and their victims. I would argue, however, that the lack of traditional character development by McCarthy is more than a response to the “furious troping” (441) of Melville's Ishmael or an avoidance of Flannery O'Connor-style moralizing. McCarthy is interested in myths, not morals. It is true, as Phillips notes, that there are no real surprises in the plot of Blood Meridian, that “all the novel's complexities are fully present from the first page. … The novel does not seek to resolve ‘conflicts’ which trouble its characters” (443). This is so, not because there is no meaning or symbolism in the world of Blood Meridian, but because, like any mythic story, we already know the outcome. The characters are not explored in the Lukácsian sense because, as actors in a myth, their individualities are less important than the roles they are playing. The face of the hero is infinitely changeable—therefore the kid does not need a proper name, Judge Holden can be endowed with faculties that border on the superhuman, and Tobin can be referred to simply as “expriest” as often as he is called by name. What is meaningful are the actions the characters take and the power of their story to shape the world of those who hear it.

It is true that the Christian God and the moral structures He represents are absent in the natural world of Blood Meridian, at least as a cipherable entity to the travelers. The judge alone among the scalphunters claims the power to solve the mysteries of the natural world, and he does so through science and a skewed rationality cloaked in the rhetoric of religion. The myth of science, with the judge as its sacred high priest, is now opposed to the earlier myth of nature served by the sacred hunter. Within the space of the national symbolic and in the tradition of the earliest Puritan writings about the New World, his figuring of wilderness as that which must be conquered by man lest it conquer him is a familiar trope, common to almost every Western written after the mid-nineteenth century.

Kolodny argues this is part of the defining structure of the American pastoral, born in conjunction with the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, that “implicit in the metaphor of the land-as-woman was both the regressive pull of maternal containment and the seductive invitation to sexual assertion” (67). Henry Nash Smith notes that by the late 1850s, as the myth of the garden and the land as fruitful mother began to fray, the archetypal frontier hero in the American wilderness had lost Leatherstocking's “power to commune with nature. … He no longer looks to God through nature, for nature is no longer benign: its symbols are the wolves and the prairie fire. … The landscape within which the Western hero operates has become … ‘a dreary waste.’ … He is … alone in a hostile, or at best a neutral, universe” (89). And yet the relationship McCarthy explores is considerably more complex than the simple nihilism of “Nature does not care for man.”

Dana Phillips refutes Vereen Bell's claim that human beings and nature compete in the novel by arguing that “this competition has been decided in favor of … the natural world even before Blood Meridian begins” (446). Humans and the natural world are not antagonists, Phillips claims, but are instead “parts of the same continuum” (446). That is indeed the case at the outset of the novel, and the balance of power between the various parts of the continuum appears fairly equal, but it is the fundamental change in this relationship, enacted on the level of the mythic and sacred, that McCarthy is interested in uncovering. That the nature of that relationship exists on a level significantly deeper than mutual indifference or antagonism is clear. Again and again, McCarthy invokes archetypal myths and references to the sacred when portraying humans in the natural world. Travelers of all sorts in the wilderness are commonly referred to as “pilgrims” and “proselytes.” As the scalphunters cross a dry lakebed, the narrator claims that the earth itself notes their passing, “As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality” (247). The narrator continues with the often-quoted passage regarding the quality of light in the desert, which “bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence … and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships” (247). These passages have often been interpreted as “a critique of our culture's anthropocentrism,”³ and, as Phillips notes, “the human does not stand out among the other beings and objects that make up the world” (443). However, that relationship of indifferent equanimity is neither stable nor unchanging. It is the laying bare of the cataclysmic evolution taking place in the mythic formations that have created the structure that McCarthy seeks to document through the actions of his characters and their mythic roles.

If we view the relationship between humankind and nature in terms of the sacred hunter myth, a clear set of images begins to appear. This myth implies the necessity of a certain kind of relationship—a bloody and violent one, to be sure, and one that does not necessarily hold any moral overtones in the Christian sense of right or wrong or good or evil, but simply a set of rules governing what is, how reality and the natural world work, and a sense of order and balance in the roles of each. That, of course, is the most basic function of myth, to organize and impose order on humans and their worlds, though in McCarthy's antimyth the revelation of the profound disorder at the heart of our myths seems to be the ultimate goal.

The scalphunters as a group can be read as playing the part of the sacred hunter, dark versions of classic Western heroes from the Deerslayer and Daniel Boone to Buffalo Bill, leaving their communities to enter the wilderness for renewal and regeneration through the act of hunting and killing. Although the scalphunters seek a human prey, it is a prey nonetheless rhetorically tied to the wilderness, and the goal of its killing is ostensibly the protection and renewal of the scalphunters' foster community—the Mexicans of Sonora. And yet the fact that their prey is human begins the degeneration of the myth, tilts it off its axis. Of course, the epigraph from the Yuma Daily Sun that opens the novel implies that such a perversion is equally as old as the myth itself. This idea is furthered by the name of the judge's gun, “Et in Arcadia Ego” (even in Arcadia am I [Death]) implying, as Leo Dougherty notes, that “the point of the gun's name is not that because of its appearance in the landscape, or by synecdoche the judge's appearance, death has been introduced into an idyllic Arcadia: the entire novel makes clear (primarily through the judge, who continuously emphasizes the point in his preachments) that the human world is, and has always been, a world of killing” (126-27). But for all its echoes of universality and timelessness, in Blood Meridian McCarthy is interested in the specific ways in which the ancient myths of the sacred hunter and the eucharist of the wilderness have been played out upon the particular landscape and within the particular historical context of the southwestern borderlands.

JUDGE AND EXECUTIONER

The figure of the judge within this space is an almost Conradian expression of white American civilization, or perhaps the brutal force of its will. Like Kurtz, he engages in a savage war that is both sanctioned and denied by various authorities; like Kurtz, he carries his war forward from both sides, existing at once as the ultimate expression of Euro-American manhood (poet/scholar/warrior) and as the primitive savage he seeks to destroy and emulate, donning native clothing and defeating native peoples on their own ground. And more importantly, like Kurtz, the judge is the agent of the revelation of the savagery at the heart of the myths and the civilization that produces them. Through the course of the novel, the judge will turn the old myth on its head, pervert it, and cannibalize it. He leads the scalphunters in acts that violate the relationship contained within the sacred hunter myth while still seeming to follow its internal rules, in the same way the Black Mass was seen as an inversion of a sacred ritual and indeed depended on the sacred nature of the original for its own symbolic power.

This degeneration of the myth from within sounds a striking note of prophecy, for it marks a change not only in the outer form of the hero and his universe (to be expected with the passage of time), but also in the most basic narrative structure of the myth. A change on this level, Slotkin claims, “reflect[s] a fundamental alteration of the culture's conception of the relationship of man to the universe, a revolution in world view, cosmology, historical and moral theory, and self-concept. Hence such changes may be seen as marking the point at which a new epoch of cultural history or perhaps even a new culture can be said to begin” (9). The neobiblical rhetoric of the novel and its blood-washed, apocalyptic images support this vision of revolution, of violent death and rebirth, of some enormous and profound change in the fabric of things imagined by McCarthy through the perversion of the sacred hunter and his position in the natural world.

The first description in the novel of Glanton and his gang marks them equally as actors within the myth and as deviants from it, as both hunters and cannibals:

a pack of viciouslooking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies … bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description … the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears … the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs … the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh. Foremost among them … rode the judge.

(78)

The natural order of the original myth governing the relationship between humans and nature has been upset so profoundly that even the horses are seen as feral, feeding on flesh instead of grass, and the hunters themselves a visitation of the profane rather than the sacred. Although Glanton is their nominal leader, the judge is “foremost among them.” Their sacred nature as hunter heroes is evidenced by the “scapulars” they wear, and yet their pollution is obvious as well. The scapulars are formed of scores of human ears collected as trophies in the same skewed capitalistic spirit as Davy Crockett's bearskins or Paul Bunyan's logs. And this disturbing trope of cannibalization and the perversion of the sacred eucharist is continued throughout the novel, as is that of inversion and violation.

The first instance of the judge's symbolic cannibalization of those whom he is engaged to serve occurs when the scalphunters spend the night with the doomed miners at the ruined mines. As the gang prepares to retire for the night, “Someone had reported the judge naked atop the walls, immense and pale in the revelations of lightning, striding the perimeter up there and declaiming in the old epic mode” (118). The next morning the body of the boy is discovered, lying naked and face down, while the judge is seen “standing in the gently steaming quiet picking his teeth with a thorn as if he had just eaten” (118). The sacred marriage and the sacred eucharist in this scene are at once conflated and perverted, the whole echoing and reimagining the sacred hunter myth as well as the Christian crucifixion and eucharist.⁴ The naked body of the innocent child, “whose head hung straight down” (119) when the miners grabbed his arms and lifted him, mimics the image of the body of the innocent and sinless Christ on the cross, drooping head ringed by a crown of thorns. As the judge watches these procedures, he employs a thorn with which to pick his teeth clean of the cannibalized flesh of the child.

The connotations of rape in the explicit nakedness of the judge and the murdered boy mock the fertility rite of the sacred marriage with a union that produces only violence and death in much the same way that the cannibalism implied by the judge picking his teeth “as if he had just eaten” mocks the intention of renewal and life in the ritual of the eucharist. The judge both literally and symbolically consumes that which is forbidden, the child as a living representation of the community the sacred hunter is bound to serve and protect. The boy is neither proper prey for the hunter nor a proper bride, and yet as the myth is inverted and turned in on itself he becomes both. His childlike state—weak, helpless, and lost in the wilderness—at once feminizes him and marks him as prey for the foremost hunter in the gang. In the proper fulfillment of this emerging version of the myth, the judge rapes and cannibalizes him, absorbs his essence, and emerges renewed. Indeed, the entire gang appears rejuvenated, associated here with the symbols of life and rebirth; as the narrator tells us upon discovery of the boy's body, they “mounted up and turned their horses to the gates that now stood open to the east to welcome in the light and to invite their journey” (119).

This sequence of actions, enacting the ritual of the hunt and culminating in a perversion of the sacred marriage and sacred eucharist and the resulting regeneration of the hunters, ends chapter IX. The next major action within the narrative begins in chapter X with the expriest Tobin relating to the kid the story of how he first met Judge Holden, a story that again involves the judge as priest leading a group of men in the perversion of the ritual of the sacred marriage. Although the reflection of a past event disrupts the sequence of the action, the flashback establishes the ritualistic heart of the judge's new myth, for Tobin's story shows the gang's initiation into their roles as sacred, or perhaps profane, hunters. It is important, therefore, that McCarthy have this tale originate from one labeled “expriest,” fallen from the symbolic orders, both Christian and non-Christian, of the past, and ripe therefore to be baptized into the order (or disorder) to come.

Tobin relates the much talked about scene in which the judge appears, alone in the middle of the desert, acting as savior for Glanton and his riders, who are without gunpowder and in a desperate flight from nearly a hundred Apaches. The judge uses an uncanny knowledge of the natural landscape to lead them on a new course to a distant mountain range that holds both a bat cave full of niter and a sulfur-ringed volcano. Tobin recalls that the judge, before commencing his bloody ritual, tells the men “that our mother the earth … was round like an egg and contained all good things within her. Then he turned and led the horse he had been riding across that terrain … and us behind him like the disciples of a new faith” (130).

And like all converts, the men are required to unite themselves in a group ritual pledging them to this “new faith,” legitimizing the degeneration of the myth they have been enacting all along. The judge combines charcoal, the niter from the bat cave, and sulfur scraped from the mouth of the volcano as Tobin continues, “I didn't know but what we'd be required to bleed into it” (131). The scalphunters do pour forth their own bodies, in the form of urine instead of blood, into the hole in the earth the judge has made for the preparation of his eucharist.

He worked it up dry with his hands and all the while the savages down there on the plain drawin nigh to us and when I turned back the judge was standin, the great hairless oaf, and he'd took out his pizzle and he was pissin into the mixture, pissin with a great vengeance and one hand aloft and he cried out for us to do likewise. … We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneadin the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughin the while and workin up this great mass in a foul black dough, a devil's batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself.

(132)

Here again the sacred marriage and the eucharist of the wilderness contained within both the hunter myth and Christianity are conflated and perverted. Rather than the flesh of a deer or the sacred host, the judge kneads “a foul black mass, a devil's batter” made of elements of the natural world turned black and stinking by a symbolic and ritualistic rape, with all the men gang-raping the great vaginal hole in “our mother the earth,” spewing piss instead of semen. The ritual reaches its violent climax with Glanton firing his rifle, primed with the foul mixture, straight down the open mouth of the volcano. The flesh of men and the flesh of nature are united here by science to create gunpowder used to slaughter every last Apache, with the judge as a midwife and antipriest, a “bloody dark pastryman.”

In the aftermath of the rape, as the final ceremonial step cementing the men to the judge as their spiritual leader within this version of the myth, the judge “called us all about to fill our horns and flasks, and we did, one by one, circlin past him like communicants” (134). And indeed, communicants is precisely what the scalphunters are, participants in a ritual of renewal dependent on acts of violence and the perversion of the very myth (and mother) that gave them birth.

In this scene, with its savage rape of the earth and resultant “butchery” (134) of the Indians, is a brilliant condensation of McCarthy's violent countermemory of the winning of the West, his antimyth of the frontier, deconstructing the forms of national fantasy so often and so fondly used in building the space of the national symbolic and shaping the realities of modern America and the West. From this ritual, ceremonially setting down a blueprint for America's future relationship with the natural world and with the West's native inhabitants, McCarthy prophesies the future. Here we see that indeed “the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will,” (5) and the results of the shaping, of the wholesale acceptance of this version of the sacred hunter as the governing myth of the new nation, are played out through the last half of the novel.

Immediately following this narrative, in revenge or perhaps fulfillment of the perversion of the sacred marriage/eucharist, a bear, a powerful symbol of the natural world for McCarthy, steals a Delaware. Like many chapters, this one begins with a detailed description of the natural world through which the scalphunters ride, this time the aspen and pine forests of a high mountain. The bear rises up unexpectedly beside the trail, and Glanton shoots it. “The ball struck the bear in the chest and the bear leaned with a strange moan and seized the Delaware and lifted him from the horse. … The man dangling from the bear's jaws looked down at them cheek and jowl with the brute and one arm about its neck like some crazed defector in a gesture of defiant camaraderie” (137). Acting as an avatar of the natural world, perhaps as nature's own sacred hunter, the bear escapes with his “hostage” (137). The relationship between them is something more than simply an unlucky rider falling prey to a random wild beast or indifferent nature. The Delaware has been consumed by the myth, as the narrator states, “The bear had carried off their kinsman like some fabled storybook beast and the land had swallowed them up beyond all ransom or reprieve” (138).

By this time all the scalphunters have been swallowed up beyond ransom or reprieve by the antimyth they are enacting, their disconnection from the wilderness through which they ride so complete that even their shadows on the stones appear “like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god” (139). The balance of power, which may be perceived as resting on the side of nature at the start of the novel, has by the final scenes shifted to the side of man. The original covenant has been violated, the sacred myths structuring the relationship of humans to the natural world now perverted to an extent that McCarthy suggests cannot be redeemed, reprieved, or corrected.

The first powerful vision we receive of the results of this reordered myth is on the plain of the bonepickers, fifteen years after the main action of the novel. The kid, now a man, camps on the prairie, where he meets an old hunter who tells him of the slaughter of the buffalo herds in which he had participated, an event Tom Pilkington calls “an ecological calamity so stunning as to be almost inconceivable” (317).

Initially, the old hunter paints pictures that, though bloody and full of gore, reflect the sheer abundance of life that once existed on the now empty and silent plains, “animals by the thousands and tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground … and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half crazed and wallowing in the carrion. … On this ground alone there was eight million carcasses” (317). In contrast to this, the hunter then recalls the “last hunt” in which he and the other hunters searched the empty plains for six weeks for a sign of buffalo. “Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They're gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they'd never been at all” (317).

Here is the new covenant, this hunter and those like him, proselytes of the new order the judge has helped bring into being in which humankind's relationship to the wilderness is one of butchery on a scale scarcely imaginable. The outcome is not regeneration, for no animals remain alive to carry on the relationship. This new version of the ancient hunter myth represents degeneration signified by the images of the enormous mountains of bones, miles long, stretching across the prairies in which the mythic figure of the sacred hunter has been reduced to that of the bonepickers, ragged children gathering dead evidence of the now vanished herds. It is the culmination of the task the judge has set for himself early on, when Toadvine questions his taxidermy of one of every species of bird they have encountered. The judge replies, “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. … The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos” (198).

Human will clothed in the sacred rhetoric of science, far from being insignificant, is the most powerful force in the novel. If only nature can enslave man, only man can enslave nature, even if by doing so he leaves a sky as empty of birds as the plains now are of buffalo. Through his will man can make himself suzerain of the earth, though in so doing he must destroy that which he would rule. Kolodny has identified this as “the pastoral paradox” and argues it has been at the heart of the modern American relationship to the natural world. Within this paradox, she writes, “man might, indeed, win mastery over the landscape, but only at the cost of emotional and psychological separation from it” (28).

The judge foreshadows this situation through the allegory he relates at the Anasazi ruins: “The father dead has euchred the son out of his patrimony” (145). In destroying the sacred power of nature and the myth that tied humankind to it, the father has robbed those sons to come of their right to take part in that myth and of the regeneration and rebirth to be had from it. Instead, ironically, by making himself suzerain, the hunter/father engenders his own demise, and thus has ensured that for the son “the world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way” (145). Like the son in the story, these sons will grow to be “killers of men” (145) rather than sacred hunters, resulting in generations of those “not yet born who shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's soul” (327).

The great patrimony of nature has been reduced to the level of a zoo or circus by the final chapter of the novel. The gigantic figure of the bear, formerly the magnificent and terrible avatar of the wilderness able to pluck a Delaware from the midst of the scalphunters, is now dressed in a tutu and dances on a saloon stage to the music of a little girl's crank organ. As the kid watches, a drunk from the judge's table shoots the bear, but there is nothing sacred or holy in this hunt; the prey is killed without even the feeling of power or ritual and its death is a meaningless spectacle: “The bear had been shot through the midsection. He let out a low moan and he began to dance faster, dancing in silence save for the slap of his great footpads on the planks. … The man with the pistol fired again … and the bear groaned and began to reel drunkenly. He was holding his chest … and he began to totter and to cry like a child and he took a few last steps, dancing, and crashed to the boards” (326).

This scene is the antithesis of the one that occurred in the mountains. The bear, like the last few buffalo and the defeated remnants of the native tribes, is now the hostage. In the place of the Delaware with his arm around the neck of the mighty beast that will carry him off crouches the sobbing child with her arms around the neck of the dead bear that “in its crinoline lay like some monster slain in the commission of unnatural acts” (327). The unnatural acts here are many—nature as captive, forced to dance on a stage, crying like a child, its death as the shedding of blood without meaning or significance. This scene is capped with perhaps the most unnatural act of all—the judge's subsequent murder of the little girl, who, like most of the other children in the novel, is betrayed by the sacred hunter who should be her protector but who takes her as prey.

The destruction and reordering of the original myth is now complete. This point for McCarthy is both a meridian and a nadir, the final mastery of humankind over the wilderness and the prophetic embarkation of his descent. The judge tells the scalphunters, “in the affairs of man there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of his achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day” (147). There is the implication here of something inevitable and preordained, perhaps more than the random tragedy of history. As the quote regarding the three-hundred-thousand-year-old skull from Africa that closes the epigraph suggests, neither scalping nor any other vicious perversion is new or unique. The scalphunters and the Indians, the dancers in the saloon, the lone buffalo hunter on the empty prairie, and the long-dead scalper of the unfortunate Ethiopian whose skull now speaks to modern anthropologists are all tabernacled in the other's books (141), “each pass[ing] back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys” (121) in an “endless complexity of being and witness” (141).

The suggestion is that the myth has always contained within itself the antimyth, the dark shadow double awaiting a Kurtz or a Holden to strip bare the original and turn it inside out. McCarthy's earth in Blood Meridian and many other works is hollow, full of empty caves and echoing caverns, at once womb and tomb, signifying the hollowness at the heart of all myths. There is no center to the sacred hunter myth, any more than there is to its antithesis. And yet the power of myth to move and shape us remains, and through Blood Meridian, McCarthy has done more than simply invert the sacred hunter and the eucharist of the wilderness; he has altered their form in several significant ways.

The most basic relationship enshrined in that myth, between man and nature, is ultimately replaced with a new ordering based on the relationship between man and man in the form of sacred war. The death of a bear or deer, the sacrificial shedding of the blood of some symbol of holy nature, once an essential part of the ritual on which the sacred hunter myth rested, is no longer sufficient for regeneration. Regeneration depends on ritual, but, as the judge explains, “A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals” (329). The myth of science, therefore, is not enough. It must be enacted through the more ancient ritual of war. Because all generations following this one have been euchred of the patrimony of nature, invalidating the blood of bears or deer as sources of regeneration, the prey must now become humanity itself. The new version of the myth demands human blood, for now no other will suffice, and therefore the holiest of all acts is war.

Again, the suggestion is that of inevitable procession toward this end. “War was always here,” the judge says. “Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner” (248). War, in fact, is God, according to the judge, because, as myth or game enhanced “to its ultimate state” (249), it is the perfect embodiment of human will, the force of will made divine, driven to test itself against the very stuff of creation, “a forcing of the unity of existence” (249), beyond what the judge considers the petty concerns of moral judgments. In engaging in the act of war, in forcing the hand of existence to choose who shall live and who shall die, the sacred hunter becomes one with the prey, and humankind itself assumes the cloak of divine power. Moral law, good and evil, wrong or right are simply trivialities enshrined by one church or another, one religion or another. Questions of right and wrong are subsumed by the force of will made manifest in war, and to prove this notion the judge challenges Tobin, the de facto representative of religion and moral order.

The judge searched out the circle for disputants. But what says the priest? he said.

Tobin looked up. The priest does not say.

The priest does not say, said the judge. … But the priest has said. For the priest has put by the robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor. The priest also would be no godserver but a god himself. …

I'll not secondsay you in your notions, said Tobin. Dont ask it.

Ah Priest, said the judge. What could I ask of you that you've not already given?

(250-51)

The judge's new myth has long ago swallowed up Tobin and the religion and morality he symbolizes, the impotent state of those institutions marked by Tobin's status as “ex” priest. The churches are empty shells, like the Anasazi village, crumbling ruins of an order dead and vanished, now “wondered at by tribes of savages” doomed to erect new churches, new edifices of stone in their attempts to “alter the structure of the universe” (146). But all such attempts, the judge insinuates, will ultimately fail. “This you see here, these ruins … do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons” (147). The judge has proven that the only thing that can truly alter creation is the brute force of human will, sharpened and focused through the lens of a mythic structure unconcerned with morality and bent to the task of godlike war. The eucharist of the wilderness has now become a eucharist of humanity.

Everyone now is a participant in the dance of war, as either hunter or prey. All in the gang have been baptized into the new myth, have partaken in its ceremonies of cannibalism and rape. Only the kid finally attempts to renounce the dance and to assert a will independent of the judge and his antimyth. By giving up his position as a hunter of humans within this new myth, he makes himself prey. At the ruins, the judge supplied the blueprint for raising hunters, explaining that at a young age children should be put into pits with wild dogs, forced to fight lions and to run naked through the desert. Only those with the most perfect wills would survive such tests (mercy, we are to assume, would produce weakness instead of strength) and, ironically of course, only those with the most potent of wills could administer the trials without succumbing to the urge to help the children. The kid faces several such trials throughout the narrative and fails them. He alone of the gang answers David Brown's call for aid in removing an arrow from his leg (162). By the rules of the antimyth, Brown should have been left on his own, like the child in the pit of wild dogs, to triumph by the force of his will alone or to fail and die in the desert. Tobin warns the kid of the danger of his actions, “Fool, he said. “God will not love ye forever. … Dont you know he'd of took you with him? He'd of took you boy. Like a bride to the altar” (162-63).

The “he” here refers to the judge, who has earlier refused to help Brown, and who tests the kid later by calling for help himself in the killing of a horse (219). None of the other members of the gang answers, and Tobin again warns the kid not to respond. In doing so, the kid violates the internal order of the myth, though the prospect of being taken “like a bride to the altar” by the judge is perhaps not such an appealing one. Although the phrase echoes the rhetoric of the sacred marriage common to both Christianity and the sacred hunter myth and perverted by the act of rape in this new order, in this instance we can understand Tobin to intend a positive meaning. Although the relationship between the judge and the kid might be more properly characterized as that between father and son rather than husband and bride, the implication at least is of renewal and rebirth, the promise of regeneration that the kid betrays.

As Tobin and the kid crouch in the desert after the slaughter at the ferry crossing, the kid receives his final chance to seize his place as hunter within the new myth and fails once again when he refuses to shoot the unarmed judge. To do so would only have been right and proper within the relationship of hunter and prey, human will against human will in sacred war, as well as within the relationship of father and son, because, as the judge has said at the Anasazi ruins, it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled. When the kid will neither shoot him nor join him, the judge charges, “There's a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. … You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency” (299).

The kid ignores the judge's warning, and over the final section of the book, covering the last fifteen years of his life, he attempts to return to the previous order, to reestablish the relationship of the sacred hunter as guardian and protector of his community. He becomes a guide for other travelers passing through the wilderness, protecting them from the forces of nature, from Indians, and from those like his old companions who have become hunters of men. Most significantly, he begins to carry a Bible, a book already made defunct by the judge as a false book and symbol of the empty moral laws thrown down before the force of human wills in war. Like the church it represents, the Bible is a kind of ruin here, silent and without reference in the world shaped by the new myth. It is a mute emblem of a fallen system even for the illiterate kid, “no word of which he could read” (312).

Its futility as a symbol within the world shaped by the new order is reified by the kid's encounter with the penitents he finds butchered in a canyon and his attempts to speak with the old woman:

The kid rose and looked about at this desolate scene and then he saw alone and upright in a small niche in the rocks an old woman kneeling in a faded rebozo with her eyes cast down.

He made his way among the corpses and stood before her. … She did not look up. … He spoke to her in a low voice. He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships. He told her that he would convey her to a safe place, some party of her countrypeople who would welcome her and that she should join them for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die.

He knelt on one knee, resting the rifle before him like a staff. Abuelita, he said. No puedes escucharme?

He reached into the alcove and touched her arm. … She weighed nothing. She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years.

(315)

The kid attempts here to perform the act of confession, a ritual based on the acknowledgment of a moral order that the speaker has in some way violated, but the kid has himself been a participant, as his confession makes clear, in the destruction of that moral order, which has rendered this ceremony empty and meaningless, the authority of the church now “just a dried shell.” The kid has turned his back on the new myth he helped bring into being, but it is too late to revive the old ones. He prostrates himself before a dead body that cannot hear his confession and can therefore offer no absolution or forgiveness, cannot even move to accept his proffered aide, and is as mute as the Bible he carries but cannot read. He even clasps his rifle, not like a weapon of divine war, worthy of the name the judge has bestowed on his gun, the tool of death in the garden, but like a staff, symbol of the doomed priest, administrator of an empty office whom the kid is said to have now come to resemble.

The kid has in fact betrayed the sacred office he once occupied as a hunter of men in this new myth, and it is this betrayal for which the judge castigates him in the prison. “You came forward,” he said, “to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgement on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part” (307). And it is for this betrayal that the judge, described as immense and bearlike (having subsumed the figures of the old myths within himself), finally kills the kid in a horrible embrace, a perverted hug, a perversion of the act of reproduction performed in the midst of human excrement (333), and yet despite all this, an act that is holy and proper within the structure of the new myth, for after the killing the judge emerges renewed and rejuvenated to join the dance in the saloon.

If we accept Slotkin's claim that any fundamental alteration of the narrative structure of the myth signals some profound shift in the culture that produces it, then the sense of momentous change is inescapable. Here is the bloody tie binding the West's mythic past to its troubled present, here in this mythic dance is the violent birth of a national symbolic that has made heroes out of scalphunters and Indian killers and constructed the near extinction of the buffalo and massive deforestation as symbols of triumph and mastery, the proud heritage of the modern American citizen.

This is one possible interpretation of the novel's rather obscure epilogue. The man progressing over the silent plain digging postholes is striking out of the rock with his steel the fire, and symbolically the life, “which God has put there” (337), the first step before stringing barbed wire along that “track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground” (337). The barbed wire fence is a potent and deeply paradoxical symbol in the American West. On one hand, it is the triumphant emblem of Anglo America's conquest of the land once referred to as the Great American Desert, of the sheer force of human will necessary to empty it of those animals like the buffalo that do not serve Anglo America's needs and to fill it instead with cattle—nature tamed and controlled by the sharp-edged product of Eastern factories.

It is also, for many Westerners, the sign of some final closure, usually expressed nostalgically as the loss of the wandering horseman's right to travel freely and without restriction across the landscape. That wandering horseman, the lone cowboy with his bedroll and his rifle, is the most commonly recognized modern American expression of the sacred hunter, the lone male in the wilderness, here digging the postholes that mark his own demise and performing the final fencing-in of the natural world.

The plain in the epilogue is empty of life, no buffalo, no bears, wolves or antelope, the patrimony of nature gone, only “bones and the gatherers of bones” (337), following behind the diminished hunter striking out hole after hole. The act of the posthole digger “seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality” (337), the consequence, perhaps, of our national acceptance of the judge's perverted antimyth, of the disruption of the continuum identified by Dana Phillips in which some balance or relationship between humankind and nature has been destroyed and replaced with a mythic structure few besides Cormac McCarthy have dared to gaze at unflinchingly.

Notes

1. In The Legacy of Conquest, Limerick argues that the association of the Western landscape with “a potent and persistent variety of nationalistic myth” (30), coupled with the government's official declaration of the end of the frontier in 1891, has resulted in a public perception of “a great discontinuity between the frontier past and the Western present” (31). The perception has persisted, she claims, in part because of the romanticization of the frontier experience, and in part because such a discontinuity allows the grim realities of conquest and colonization to be viewed from a safe remove, as associated with the distant past and unrelated to the present day.

2. Slotkin argues, for example, that the common and extremely popular folktale regarding Daniel Boone's first meeting with Rebecca Boone is a version of this myth. The story claims that Boone was hunting deer by torchlight one night when he saw two eyes shining among the trees. He raised his rifle to shoot, but at the last moment stayed his hand. What he had believed to be a deer was actually Rebecca, walking at night through the woods. Although this portion of the story may or may not be true (neither Boone nor Rebecca denied it, though their children, feeling it to be too primitive and pagan, did so vehemently), we do know that Boone married Rebecca soon after their first meeting. Within the bounds of the myth working at the level of popular culture, this act would have been the proper fulfillment of the rules of the sacred marriage that culminated the hunt and that decreed that woman or deer, married or slain, the hunter must love and honor that which he hunts for its sacred nature in order to receive union, and communion, with it. For a further discussion of the Boone myth as the first truly American (i.e., combination of European and Indian) version of the sacred hunter story, see Regeneration Through Violence 152-56.

3. Bell, 124.

4. Many scholars have noted the connection of the symbolic cannibalism of the Christian eucharist and the figure of Christ with both Old and New World versions of the sacred hunter myth, in which the hunter himself must die in a symbolic mirroring of the hunter as stag and prey. See Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence, especially chapter 2, “Cannibals and Christians.”

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