Vicious Circle:  Blood Meridian and the Eternal Return

Kelly James

After more than thirty years, Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West^⁠1 remains “one of the most elusive and allusive novels in Cormac McCarthy’s canon.”^⁠2  An exploration of the novel’s many allusions led me to a new comprehensive interpretation of the book incorporating the historical revelations of John Sepich, the Nietzschean interpretation of Shane Shimpf, and the Gnostic interpretations of Leo Daugherty and Petra Mundik.  In addition to referencing numerous literary works and thinkers, Blood Meridian repeatedly alludes to itself.  More than one hundred carefully placed mirrors—words, phrases, themes, and structures—occur throughout the book.  These mirrors form a ‘vicious circle’ as an expression of Friedrich Nietzsche’s August 1881 realization of the Eternal Return, that “everything becomes and recurs eternally.”^⁠3  Though the bulk of the novel is a “meditation on a Nietzschean world where God has died,”^⁠4 the epilogue, viewed through a Gnostic lens, provides a glimmer of hope opposing this nihilism.

In his essay, “Of Judge Holden’s Hats; or The Palindrome in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Christopher Forbis cites more than sixty mirrors throughout the book to convincingly argue that Blood Meridian is a palindrome.  “By way of method,” Forbis explains, “I ball-point pen numbered a copy of Blood Meridian’s last page, the Epilogue at 337, with a zero, until on the novel’s earliest page, of epigraphs, I wrote 337.  All page-pairs that sum to 337 are exact mirrors.”^⁠5  Forbis then searched through the book marking dozens of mirrors he found, allowing for a two-page margin of error.   Some mirrors Forbis cites are as follows:

The Leonid meteors (3) are described as the story opens, and on the mirror page at the book’s close, stars are “falling across the sky myriad and random” (333).

Several words appear on mirror pages: “childlike” (6, 332), “opinion” (6, 330), “destination” (112, 225).

One of the most striking mirrors concerns hats.  After he has disrupted the Reverend Green’s sermon, the judge stands at the bar with two hats and a double handful of coins in front of him, one of the hats likely the Reverend Green’s former collection plate (8).  On the mirror page at the book’s end, the showman in a tyrolean costume moves among the crowd shaking coins in his hat, while the judge wears a “round hat with a narrow brim” (325).  At the book’s meridian, at a peak moment for the gang, the judge appears last of all at the governor’s ball, clad in a freshly tailored suit complete with a Panama hat joined from “two such lesser hats” with such skill that “the joinery did scarcely show at all” (169).  Forbis argues that the spliced hat is a metaphor for the novel.  Indeed, the hat crowns the book’s most striking figure, the judge.⁶

John Sepich cautions that some of the more specious connections Forbis cites might possibly be a “seeker’s projection,” but Sepich acknowledges that these mirror pairings are “seductive.”  And, “given this Forbis work,” he continues, “there will always be a sense that McCarthy weaves more threads more deeply into the novel than the bland symmetry of some meteors to open, some to close.”⁷

Though Forbis cites an impressive number of mirrors, he offers no explanation for their meaning.  So on April 1, 2018, I began a possible fool’s errand to determine the meaning of these mysterious mirrors in Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West.  I copied Forbis’s technique of numbering the book’s pages backward.  As Forbis had focused on the judge’s spliced hat at the book’s center, it was there that I began my search, taking the number of pages in my copy and dividing by two to find the middle, or meridian, of the novel at pages 168-169.  This line nearly leapt off the page at me: “Cigars were presented and glasses of sherry poured and the governor standing at the head of the table made them welcome and issued orders to his chamberlain that every need be seen to” (169).  In his Notes on Blood Meridian, John Sepich reveals that Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession:  Recollections of a Rogue provides the historical framework for McCarthy’s tale.  Here on the book’s meridian page, McCarthy slyly confesses to lifting the backbone of the story from My Confession by having the governor issue “orders to his chamberlain.”

Upon discovering what I believe to be a secret clue to the book’s origin, I began an ongoing treasure hunt to find more mirrors and hidden details in Blood Meridian.  In addition to the pairings from mirror pages that Christopher Forbis relates, another set of mirrors exists throughout the book.  There are marks that separate scenes in chapters, the first appearing after the kid rides “through the latter-day republic of Fredonia into the town of Nacogdoches” (5).   The next mark appears after someone buys him a drink after the judge has disrupted the Reverend Green’s sermon (8).

Using these marks to separate sections, beginning at the epigraphs on Page 1 through “Nacogdoches” on Page 5 as the first section, I found sixty-one such sections in the book.  By way of method, I numbered these sections in a paperback version one through thirty-one, then I numbered back down thirty to one.  In addition to the sixty mirrors on mirror pages that Forbis relates, I found more than fifty additional mirroring instances in these mirror sections.  A few striking examples are noted in the following paragraphs:

In ascending section five, the kid wades “out into the river like some wholly wretched baptismal candidate” (27).  In descending section five, the kid, now twenty-eight years old, speaks to the eldress in the rocks, telling her “that he had traveled much and seen many things and been at war and endured hardships” (315).   The kid’s “baptism” is mirrored with the man’s “confession.”  McCarthy uses the mirroring of these two Christian practices, baptism and confession, to strengthen the Messianic allusions surrounding the kid throughout the book.

In ascending section nineteen, fire is described as a living being.  “When the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight” (96).  In the mirror descending section nineteen, fire is once again described as if alive: “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” (244).

In ascending section twenty-six, when speaking of the proper manner of raising a child, the judge says, “The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die” (146).   In the mirror descending section twenty-six, McCarthy again links flowering with death.  After the judge throws the puppies into the river, Bathcat fires his huge pistol a “third time and the other dog also blossomed and sank” (193).

There also exist numerous mirrors throughout the story that do not quite fit into either of the afore-mentioned mirror page or mirror section structures but are nevertheless obvious mirrors.  For example, Tobin describes finding the skinned lost deserters (128) a little over a hundred pages before the party finds the second set of lost scouts (226), tortured to death in much the same fashion as the first unfortunate pair.  Also, one of the stallions from the remuda biting the snake-bit horse (115) mirrors Glanton’s mount seizing the Apache pony by the ear (228).

There are echoes all through Blood Meridian that begin in the first paragraph.  In the first paragraph, the words “child, pale, child, pale, child” (3), mirror the last paragraph “Judge, pale, judge, pale, judge” (337).   Similarly, the first page begins the book’s rhythmic repetition:  pale pale, thin thin, dark darker, watches watches (3).

With more than a hundred mirrors identified in an ever-growing list, it was clear that these mysterious mirrors were not merely a “seeker’s projection.”   To decipher their meaning, I turned to A Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian, in which Shane Shimpf makes the compelling argument that Blood Meridian is a “meditation on a Nietzschean world where God has died.”  Shimpf argues that “many of the novel’s most puzzling riddles can be solved by viewing the text through a Nietzschean lens,”^⁠8 so I began to explore Nietzsche’s work for clues that might help explain Blood Meridian’s mirrors.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “The fundamental idea of my work . . . first occurred to me in August 1881.”  While wandering through the woods alongside a lake near Sils-Maria, Switzerland, Nietzsche halted beside a huge, pyramidal and towering rock not far from Surlai.  “It was then that the thought struck me,” he recalled, “everything becomes and recurs eternally— escape is impossible!”^⁠⁠9  Nietzsche, long a sufferer of migraine headaches and neuralgic attacks, had an ecstatic vision, a moment of revelation in which he saw that “time is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite.  They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again. . . .”^⁠⁠10 In this ecstatic moment, Nietzsche realized the “Eternal Recurrence of All Things,” or the “Eternal Return.”^⁠11

Nietzsche first attempted to express this realization in his work The Gay Science, exploring whether the realization was a blessing or a curse.  He proposed a hypothetical question: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence. . . .^⁠  Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”¹²

Philosopher and Nietzsche translator Pierre Klossowski described this expression of Nietzsche’s Sils-Maria experience, as essentially a “hallucination at that very moment [of realization], the moment itself seems to be reflected in a flash of mirrors.”^⁠13  Klossowski described the Eternal Return as a “Vicious Circle,” the circle being a “sign for everything that has happened, for everything that is happening, and for everything that ever will happen in the world.”^⁠14  Blood Meridian, rather than a palindrome, is a vicious circle, an expression of Nietzsche’s moment of realization, a fever dream of inversions without end.

Nietzsche engaged in a thought exercise, rationalizing that if everything recurs, it would make sense for an individual to seek only those experiences with the highest value, those “tremendous moments” that one would be happy to experience again and again for eternity.    In The Will to Power, Nietzsche asks, “Supposing we could judge value, what follows?  The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength and barbarism! . . . To endure the idea of recurrence,” he cautions, “one needs freedom from morality.”¹⁵

This advice to abandon traditional morality could have emanated from the mouth of the judge, whom Eric Miles Williamson describes as the seeming “embodiment of Nietzschean philosophic and aesthetic principles, a working out of Nietzsche’s concern with moral values and the value of these values themselves.”^⁠.⁠16  In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche analyzes traditional morals, asking, “Suppose the abused, oppressed, suffering, unfree, those uncertain of themselves and weary should moralize; what would their moral evaluations have in common?”^⁠⁠17 McCarthy’s judge answers, “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.  Historical law subverts it at every turn.  A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test” (250).

The realization that everything would recur eternally, that there would be no final reckoning, allowed Nietzsche to embrace “active nihilism,” or nihilism as a force to achieve these “tremendous moments,” to produce what he called the “highest spirit.”  Nietzsche proposed that in the absence of a God, man can achieve the same feeling of fulfillment and achievement, the “will to power,” by belonging to a team, by participating in a work, even, or especially, if that work is war.  The judge declares, “War is god” (249).

Nietzsche qestioned if such a man who had opened himself to the idea of active nihilism had “perhaps in the process, without really wanting to do so, opened his eyes for the reverse morality:  for the ideal of the most high-spirited, most lively, and most world-affirming human being, who has not only learned to come to terms with and accept what was and is but wants to have what was and is come back for all eternity, calling out insatiably ‘da capo!’ [from the beginning!] . . .”  This individual who truly wishes for the recurrence of all things would seem to worship the recurrence itself, “God as a Vicious Circle.”¹⁸

In an unpublished note, Nietzsche referred to the vicious circle, “This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever.  And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things — and for mankind this is always the hour of noon.”^⁠19  This idea is reflected in the judge’s statement: “The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day” (146).  In addition, the judge embraces the recurrence of all things, lecturing to the ruthless gang members about the remains of the Anasazi, “This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again?  Aye.  And again.  With other people, with other sons” (147).   

     Nietzsche had his moment of realization while looking at a giant rock near Surlai, and the judge hints at this moment of realization when he also recognizes rock as the source of truth.  “Books lie,” says the judge.  “God don’t lie,” replies a gang member. “No he does not.  And these are his words,” the judge says as he picks up a chunk of rock.  “He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things” (116).   On the book’s mirror page, a rock also appears:  The judge “took up a round rock weighing perhaps a hundred pounds, and crushed the horse’s skull with a single blow” (219).

McCarthy mirrors stone images again and again, linking stones with truth and with death.  For example, when Tobin recounts his first encounter with the judge, the ex-priest describes the judge as being “bald as a stone” (6).  On the mirror page, the judge says, “this desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty.  It is hard, it is barren, its very nature is stone” (330).   Similarly, Tobin says, “About the meridian of that day we come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self” (125).   On the mirror page, the “rising sun” finds the kid “crouched under a rocky promontory watching the country to the south” (212).  The judge sits on the rock at the peak of day, while on the mirror page the kid lies under a rock at the dawn of day.

In another example, the judge tells the parable of the white man who murders the traveler, saying, “He killed him with a rock and he took his clothes and he took his watch and his money and he buried him in a shallow grave by the side of the road” (144).  On the mirror page, when Glanton has taken a fit, McCarthy writes, “As he turned a shot rang out and the mule fell stone dead under him with a musket ball lodged in its brain” (193).  Again, McCarthy cleverly flips the order of the terms: “killed him with a rock” and “stone dead” to present a true “mirror image.”

Furthermore, at the book’s meridian, McCarthy presents us with a key truth of the book.  “The severed heads had been raised on poles above the lampstandards where they now contemplated with their caved and pagan eyes the dry hides of their kinsmen and forebears strung across the stone facade of the cathedral and clacking slightly in the wind” (168).  The scalps clacking against the stone facade of the cathedral represent the church’s “false truth,” or rather its inability to protect against the hard truth of death.

So after an onslaught of depraved violence and a linguistic assault, with more than a hundred carefully placed mirrors in a construction taut and fragile, on the book’s last page the judge triumphantly declares that he will never die.  Blood Meridian opens and closes in the present tense, extending beyond the spatiotemporal world of the nineteenth century borderlands.  The book begins, “See the child” (3), a phrase reminiscent of both the title of Nietzsche’s book and Pontius Pilate’s command of “Ecce homo,” or “Behold the man,” placing the reader in the position to judge.  Blood Meridian closes with the judge, the embodiment of the Nietzschean worldview, towering over the dance of war as the drunken brutes “stomp and hoot and lurch against one another” (334).  In the anteroom the tobacco smoke circles the lamps “like an evil fog,” and within the ring of dancers pirouettes the judge; the smoke, the dancers, and the judge all circling to represent the Eternal Return (334).  For all we know the kid lies murdered and mutilated in the outhouse; the victorious judge is dancing, dancing; and it seems the vicious circle does not end.

But wait now, for there’s a rider to the tale.

Although the story concludes with the judge declaring he will never die, McCarthy does not give him the final word.  McCarthy presents us with an italicized epilogue, marking a change into a “heightened, poetic register, signified not only by the italicized font, but also by the esoteric symbolism that abounds within the strange scene.”^⁠20  The only other word that is italicized in the book is him, when the Reverend Green refers to the son of God (6).  I argue that the italicized font of the epilogue mirrors the italicized reference to Jesus, and therefore offers us a hint at its meaning.  While many of the preceding novel’s puzzles can be solved by viewing the text through a Nietzschean lens, to decipher the mysterious epilogue one needs to view it through a Gnostic lens.  Gnostic allusions abound throughout Blood Meridian, with the kid as the Salvator Salvatus, or a Savior in need of salvation; and nowhere are these allusions more evident than in the epilogue.  The dark of the preceding pages of the novel belongs to the judge, the embodiment of Nietzschean nihilism, but in the dawn of the epilogue a new figure emerges:

“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 steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there.”

Petra Mundik explains, “On the surface level, this passage can be interpreted quite prosaically.  For example, John Sepich argues that the novel’s epilogue is literally a description of digging postholes using a throw-down tool and this serves as a description of a historically significant ‘step toward the fencing of open range.’”^⁠21  However, as McCarthy wrote to his editor, Albert Erskine, in 1979, “The truth is that the historical material is really – to me – little more than a framework upon which to hang a dramatic inquiry into the nature of destiny and history and the uses of reason and knowledge and the nature of evil and all these sorts of things which have plagued folks since there were folks.”^⁠22  So it is safe to say the epilogue is probably more significant than just someone digging postholes.

McCarthy perhaps provides another oblique clue to the meaning of the epilogue in the novel’s second epigraph from Six Theosophic Points by German mystic Jacob Boehme: “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.”  In the introduction to Boehme’s Six Theosophic Points, Nicolas Berdyaev relates that Boehme’s soul “was a pure soul and good and full of compassion.  But his feeling for the life of the world was hard and far from sentimental.”^⁠23  Additionally, Boehme perceived “God not only as love but also as wrath.”^⁠24  In 1600, Boehme had his first of several mystical experiences. “Sitting one day in his room his eyes fell upon a burnished pewter dish, which reflected the sunshine with such marvelous splendor that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things.”^⁠⁠25  “In this moment was revealed to him the concept of the Unground or the Abyss;  essentially, an undifferentiated entity that was defined as the absence of everything.^⁠”^⁠26  McCarthy references Boehme’s recognition of God’s wrath or the Unground during the Comanche attack on Captain White’s company when up from the offside of the ponies rises “a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies” (52).  The sergeant speaks truer than he knows when he exclaims, “Oh my god” (53).  Berdyaev explains:

“The Unground, thus, is nothingness, the unfathomable eye of eternity and at the same time a will, a will without bottom, abysmal, indeterminate.  But it is a nothingness which is the hunger for ‘something.’  At the same time, the Unground is ‘freedom.’  In the darkness of the Unground blaze the flames signifying freedom, meontic, potential freedom.”^⁠27  Meontic means “that aspect of artistic creativity seeking to depict what has not been seen or experienced in reality.”^⁠28

According to the Gnostic worldview, humans are composed of “flesh, soul and spirit.” Of these, “flesh” and “soul” are from the archons, servants of the demiurge, the creator god who stands between man and a transcendent God who can only be reached through gnosis, or spiritual knowledge, and “spirit” is from that transcendent God.^⁠29 The coldforger from the kid’s ether dream before surgery is the demiurge, hammering out counterfeit coins representing the false value of the material world, when the only true value is the gnosis, or spiritual knowledge.  That the man in the desert of the epilogue is “progressing by means of holes . . . striking the fire out of the rock that God has put there” suggests that he is “freeing sparks of the divine fire trapped in matter, or rock, by the god of this world, the demiurge,”^⁠30 while “on the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search” (337).  Some search fruitlessly for truth in the bones and relics of the past, while “those who do not search” seek fulfillment in other areas such as family, work, or sex.

While the coldforger from the kid’s ether dream in descending section six represents the demiurge, or creator god (310), the hermit from the beginning of the book in ascending section four is the transcendent God (18).  The hermit shares water with the kid, albeit salty and sulphorous.  The hermit protects the kid, telling him to stay with him to avoid the approaching storm.  The hermit shares with the kid the remains of a lank prairie hare interred in cold grease, and in the middle of the night the kid awakes to find the hermit watching over him.  Tobin tells the kid that the gifts of the almighty are weighed and parceled in a scale peculiar to him.  It is the hermit who holds the dried, blackened heart of a slave “as if he’d weigh it” (18).

In Six Theosophic Points, Jacob Boehme states that, “When I see a right man there I see three worlds standing.”  According to Edwin Arnold, “Boehme saw humankind existing in three states simultaneously:  the external world composed of the natural elements, the world of darkness . . . and the world of light.”^⁠31  Nikolas Berdyaev explains in the introduction to Six Theosophic Points, “The visible world is a manifestation of the interior spiritual world of eternal Light and Darkness, of that spiritual activity, it is a reflection of eternity which allows eternity to make itself visible.”^⁠32  I argue that Blood Meridian is an expression of “three worlds standing:”  the ‘natural’ world of the nineteenth century borderlands as the novel’s setting and framework, the Nietzschean world of darkness and nihilism in the novel proper, and the Gnostic world which only offers glimpses of light in the epilogue.

I also believe the title of McCarthy’s work is a description of these “three worlds standing.”^⁠33  First, as one definition of “meridian” is “a great circle passing through the poles of a sphere,” “Blood Meridian” in McCarthy’s title refers to the Vicious Circle, the book structured as a violent circle representing Nietzsche’s Sils-Maria realization of the Eternal Return.  Second, ten years after his ecstatic vision in the sun’s shine off a pewter dish, Jacob Boehme wrote down his revelation of the Unground in Aurora the Day-Spring, or Dawning of the Day in the East, or Morning-Redness in the Rising of the Sun.^⁠  “Evening Redness” is an inversion of Jacob Boehme’s vision, a reference to the world of light.  “In the West” refers to the West of Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession.  To represent these “three worlds standing,” McCarthy selects three specific moments of reflection:  Nietzsche’s Sils-Maria realization of the Eternal Return, Jacob Boehme’s recognition of the Unground in the sun’s shine off a pewter dish, and Samuel Chamberlain’s dream.  In addition to handwritten tales of his adventures in Texas and Mexico, Samuel Chamberlain included dozens of his watercolor paintings in his Confession, including a painting of himself as an old man dreaming of his past scalp-hunting adventures.  I speculate that this painting, “Old Sam Dreaming,” serves as the third vision in McCarthy’s layering of three moments of reflection.  McCarthy weaves his expressions of these three moments of reflection with such skill that “the joinery does scarcely show at all.”  The book can be viewed as a Nietzschean meditation on peak violence or a Gnostic tragedy, both laid over a nightmarish vision of American expansion:  Vicious Circle or the Unground in the West.

While the bulk of the novel, with its circular mirrors and violence, is an expression of Nietzschean nihilism, the novel concludes with a glimmer of hope.  The fire the man is striking out of the rock represents the gnosis, the spirit from the true God, meontic potential.  As Petra Mundik explains, the epilogue “seems to be suggesting that the ordinary worldlings are incapable of recognizing the miracle of the saints, saviours, and Bodhisattvas, even if the works lie right before their eyes.”^⁠34   The preceding vicious circle of the novel proper would seem to suggest that Blood Meridian is a novel bereft of hope, but here in the mysterious epilogue, hope is to be found, brief as flintspark.

¹ Even the book’s exact title is mysterious.

I used the spelling on the cover of the paperback Vintage International edition with 337 pages, the same number of pages as the first edition:  “Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West”.  However, various printings don’t seem to agree on the spelling of the title.  The 25th Anniversary edition, for example, spells the title on its cover:  “BLOOD MERIDIAN or THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST”.  In the Library of Congress catalog referenced a few pages into this edition, however, the book is titled with an even stranger spelling:  “Blood meridian, or The evening redness in the West”.    Peter Josyph discusses in detail in pages 5-8 of his book, Cormac McCarthy’s House.

² Sepich, John. Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.  p. xi.  Foreword by Edwin Arnold.  Original quotation:  “…one of the most allusive and elusive in McCarthy’s canon…”

³ Nietzsche, Friedrich W, Walter Kaufmann, and R J. Hollingdale. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

⁴ Shimpf, Shane. A Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian.  Bon Mot Publishing, 2014.

⁵ Forbis, Christopher. “Of Judge Holden’s Hats; or The Palindrome in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”

http://www.johnsepich.com/documents/palindrome.pdf

⁶ Forbis, Christopher. “Of Judge Holden’s Hats; or The Palindrome in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”

⁷ Sepich, John.  “Notes on the Palindrome”

http://www.johnsepich.com/documents/palindrome_letter.pdf

⁸ Shimpf, Shane. A Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian

⁹ Nietzsche, Friedrich W, Walter Kaufmann, and R J. Hollingdale. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

¹⁰ Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche; Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 1959, p. 376.

¹¹ Ibid. p. 376

¹² Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. The Gay Science; with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

¹³ Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. p. 66.

¹⁴ Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.  p. 58.

¹⁵ Nietzsche, Friedrich W, Walter Kaufmann, and R J. Hollingdale. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

¹⁶ Williamson, Eric Miles, “Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Nietzsche:  The Metaphysics of War,”

Wallach, Rick, ed. They Rode On:  Blood Meridian and the Tragedy of the American West, Casebook Studies in Cormac McCarthy, Volume 2, The Cormac McCarthy Society, 2013. p. 261.

¹⁷ Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. Beyond Good and Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. London, England ; New York, New York, USA: Penguin Books, 1990.

¹⁸ Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. Beyond Good and Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. London, England ; New York, New York, USA :Penguin Books, 1990.

¹⁹ Kierkegaard, Soren.  Repetition and Notes on the Eternal Recurrence, Living Time Media International, 2007.

²⁰ Mundik, Petra. “This Luminosity in Beings So Endarkened,” They Rode On, p. 215

²¹ Mundik, Petra. “This Luminosity in Beings So Endarkened,” They Rode On, p. 215

²² King, Daniel Robert. Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution, University of Tennessee Press, 2016.  p. 82

²³ Boehme, Jacob.  Six Theosophic Points, University of Michigan Press, 1971. p. ix.

²⁴ Boehme, Jacob.  Six Theosophic Points, University of Michigan Press, 1971. p. x

²⁵ Bucke, R. M. Cosmic Consciousness, p.180 – 182.

http://www.bodysoulandspirit.net/mystical_experiences/read/notables/boehme.shtml

²⁶ Shimpf, Shane.  A Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian, p. 85.

²⁷ Crews, Michael Lynn. Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences.  University of Texas Press, 2017.  p. 160.

²⁸ ibid. p. 159.

²⁹ Daugherty, Leo.  “Gravers False and True:  Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy”

https://peter-mclachlin.livejournal.com/115239.html

³⁰ Mundik, Petra. “This Luminosity in Beings So Endarkened” They Rode On, p. 218.

³¹ Crews, Michael Lynn. Books Are Made of Books, p. 160.

³² Boehme, Jacob. Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings, The University of Michigan Press, 1971. p. vii-viii

³³ Boehme, Jacob.  Six Theosophic Points, University of Michigan Press, 1971. p. ix.

³⁴ Mundik, Petra. “This Luminosity in Beings So Endarkened” They Rode On, p. 218.