2025/03/01 by Christopher Douglas · 1 voice
Psychology · Arts and Humanities · #Psychedelics and Drug Studies #Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies #Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs
paper · pdf · doi:10.5325/cormmccaj.23.1.0019
ABSTRACT Scholars pursuing a gnostic reading of Blood Meridian have never explained why and with what consequences an archon might assume human form. Indeed, the train of interpretation, from Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion, McCarthy’s most likely source, through McCarthy to his gnostic interpreters, is a muddle, resting on a doubly misinterpreted gnostic text, the Hymn of the Pearl. But there is in fact a precedent in three other gnostic texts involving a story about the rape of Eve by embodied archons. Crucially, embodiment seems to entail intellectual declension, a diminishment of archonic understanding about the nature of themselves and the world. Thus, interpreting the judge as a human-embodied and intellectually diminished divine being who labors as an evolutionary scientist to piece together the methods of creation in which he previously partook is the best explanation for the available evidence in Blood Meridian. Historical scholarship on the Bible, including scholarship on apocalypse and gnosticism, in turn illuminates how the Christian and gnostic interpretations of Blood Meridian are a distinction without a difference. The novel’s condition is our essential human ignorance as to the number and moral character of the god(s), underscoring the necessity of synthesizing these three approaches into one.