This paper was presented at the Fall 2022 Cormac McCarthy Society Conference. The topic is expanded from an earlier blog post.
Cormac McCarthy references the number eight over two dozen times in Blood Meridian. Other numbers reoccur in the text but eight stands out as a significant symbol for its connection to important episodes and imagery in the novel, as well as its implications for larger philosophical themes and motifs.
Given the meticulous way that McCarthy employs specific details, resonant imagery, and symbolism in Blood Meridian, the repeated use of eight invites investigation. At present, eight is an under-explored element within existing scholarship. An overview of McCarthy’s use of eight in Blood Meridian adds color and context to previously-established scholarship relating to Gnosticism, tarot, McCarthy’s narrative approach, and opens new angles for interpreting the philosophy of Blood Meridian, as well as other works.
EIGHT IN THE TEXT
McCarthy uses many symbols in Blood Meridian: falling stars, coins, the rising and setting of the sun, blindness, things luminous. Eight is equivalently important.
Denoted by their chapter headings, eight appears in the following significant episodes:
In Interview with Captain White, the kid fabricates a story of being attacked by eight bandits (35). In Adrift on the Bolson de Mapimi, eight escape from the massacre of Captain White’s party at the hands of the Comanches (59). Tree of dead babies, one of the more evocative and grizzly images in the novel, depicts eight dead babies hung in a bush (60). Soon after, the kid and Sproule cross paths with eight suncrazed Mexican riders in An encounter with bandits (67). In Trophies of war, the Glanton gang redeems scalps for a bounty along with the eight heads a Delaware from the party took during their slaughter of Gileños by the lake (174). Back on the warpath, the gang leaves twenty-eight Mexicans dead inside a tavern along with another eight in the street in A desperate encounter (188). In Westward, as a response to the gang’s overt attack on a group of mounted Mexican soldiers, a price of eight thousand pesos is posted for Glanton’s head (193). Harried by General Elias and his forces across the desert, following the tracks of the Apaches, the Glanton gang finds The ogdoad, a ring of eight heads in the desert (229). At The Yuma massacre, a final count of eight bodies are heaped on the bonfire (287). Years later, on the north Texas plains, an old buffalo hunter recounts to “the man” The millennial herds, eight million buffalo whittled down to a final group of eight, then zero (330). Finally, a boy, one of The callers, likely Elrod who ultimately dies at the hands of the man, brags about seeing up the bloomers of as many as eight whores sitting in a tree (332).
Eight appears many other times, somewhat more incidentally. Nonetheless, these repetitions further underscore eight as a symbol of importance.
On route to Chihuahua, Glanton’s gang fights eighty Apaches (171) for eight days without sleep (170). Captain White carries a pair of Colt dragoon pistols for which he paid eighty dollars (43). A figure eight appears as a pair of corrals (36) and the lemniscate of Glanton’s pistol barrels (239). Eight pounds of pure crystal saltpeter go into the judge’s gunpowder matrix (134). Eight appears as a measure of distance (97, 171, 271), time (197, 309), and counts of people (194, 229).
The degree and context of eight’s use in the text draws attention. The significance of eight can be interpreted at a high-level by way of its connection to major themes.
GNOSTICISM, TAROT, AND THE WHEEL OF TIME
Eight in Gnosticism
The second epigraph to Blood Meridian by the German mystic, Jacob Boehme, primes the reader to be on the lookout for Gnostic themes and symbols in the novel. McCarthy’s archived papers contain many references to Boheme that confirm the thinker greatly informed McCarthy’s philosophical and theological speculations (Crews).
Eight, commonly manifested as an “Ogdoad”, is an important concept in Gnostic traditions. Variations of an ogdoad in different gnostic systems include an astronomical theory of seven planetary spheres with an eighth of fixed stars above them, an extension of the Egyptian system of eight primary gods transposed as Gnostic aeons, and a Pythagorean notion of the world’s foundation rooted in a right- and left-handed tetrad (Smith). Eight is the key sum in each system. Midway through the novel, McCarthy explicitly references “The ogdoad” in the chapter XV heading.
A variety of Gnostic analyses of Blood Meridian have been advanced, perhaps most notably by Leo Daugherty and Petra Mundik. Gnostic readings have inspired a good deal of commentary and speculation. In practice, “Gnosticism” is a highly diverse collection of theological notions with often contradictory cosmologies. Details vary widely in Gnostic traditions, making it challenging to read Blood Meridian as a kind of single, coherent Gnostic allegory. In his article, “Hidden in What Is Visible: Deliteralizing the Gnostic Worldview”, Craig Chalquist comments that there can be a propensity of modern readers of historical Gnostic texts to get bogged down in direct interpretations when it is likely Gnostics themselves would have cautioned against taking their mystery teachings too literally.
Specific Gnostic interpretations of the text are not without value, but the key to a Gnostic reading of Blood Meridian is the idea that symbols are literary mechanisms that create an effect of richness and depth in the same way that McCarthy’s influences employ similar tactics. For example, Herman Melville’s cetacean hyperdetail in Moby Dick; James Joyce’s highly allusive and experimental prose in Ulysses; Gustave Flaubert’s rigorously refined religious imagery in The Temptation of St. Anthony. The use of symbols, such as eight, are a key part of the method McCarthy employs to transform what began in drafts as a more raucous, traditional Western into something more rich and metaphysical (Crews).
Judge Holden himself, the voice of authority in the novel, preaches the primacy of symbols.
Only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will [Man] be properly suzerain of the earth (207).
The judge practices what he preaches, spending time deeply embroiled in minutia: stuffing birds, sketching petroglyphs, pressing leaves, chasing butterflies. According to the judge, the inductive process of seeking order from detail is how Man takes charge of his own destiny.
The man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate (208).
Core to Gnostic thought is the idea that symbols reveal truth. Complexity in Gnostic theology is not necessarily meant to be read literally but rather serves as a catalyst for the act of interpretation. The Gnostic Gospel of Philip says, “truth did not come into the world naked, but in symbols and images” (Meyer). In other words, arcane and Byzantine symbolism is a ‘feature’, not a ‘bug’, of Gnostic theology. It is a mechanism through which truth is revealed. The same can be said for McCarthy’s use of symbols in Blood Meridian and, in this way, Blood Meridian is truly a Gnostic novel.
Eight is an obvious example, among many in Blood Meridian, of McCarthy connecting narrative elements with symbols. This Gnostic use of detail is echoed in McCarthy’s use of tarot.
Eight In Tarot
Blood Meridian is “rife with Tarot cards and similar archetypes” (Lee). The Chariot, The Four of Cups, and The Fool are physically drawn in the book, but the imagery of other cards — as depicted in the Rider-Waite tarot deck, one of the most well-known decks and likely that with which McCarthy would have been most familiar — are readily identifiable such as the The Fool, The Hermit, The High Priestess, The Hanged Man, The Magician, Justice, Death, and others (Bradford).
The ‘Eights’ in the minor arcana also closely resemble imagery in the novel.
The Eight of Cups depicts a man of dejected aspect stealing off into the night, similar to the kid exiting the desert after the slaughter of White’s outfit.
With darkness one soul rose wondrously from among the new slain dead and stole away in the moonlight (58).
The Eight of Swords shows a woman bound and blindfolded with swords all about all her, calling to mind the blindfolded magician’s wife surrounded by Glanton’s heavily armed gang.
The woman sat like the blind interlocutrix between Boaz and Jachin inscribed upon that one card in the juggler’s deck that they would not see come to light, true pillars and true card, false prophetess for all (99).
The Eight of Wands depicts a flight of wands through an open country, reminiscent of the hail of arrows that cut down black Johnson at the attack on the ferry as well as the storms of arrows loosed at various points in the book.
A second arrow passed him on the left and two more struck and lodged fast in his chest and groin. They were a full four feet in length and they lofted slightly with his movements like ceremonial wands… (285)
The Eight of Coins shows an artist at work with his hammer and die, similar to the coldforging false graver in the kid’s dream:
The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal…he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die… (322)
These connections are representative of the way McCarthy uses symbology — often allusive, not necessarily direct or allegorical. A specific reading or conclusion may not be intended by McCarthy. Rather, the opportunity to extrapolate meaning and consider connections is left open by design.
In his article, “Men are made of the dust of the earth: Time, Space, Matter, and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Ken Hanssen discusses the ways in which Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chrnotopes connects items of ideological significance in the novel. In this sense, both eight and the appearance of tarot cards in the plot are significant chronotopes: symbols representing the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships artistically expressed in the text. Moreover, eight can be seen as a chronotope that ties other chronotopes together. For example, cycles of birth and death, desert spaces, concepts of free will and destiny, and the movements of heavenly bodies — each on its own an important motif — are all connected by eight as a symbol.
Astrological symbols are core to tarot imagery — The Star, The Moon, The Sun, The World — but one celestial card in particular, The Wheel of Fortune, connects the use of eight and Gnostic tradition to the philosophical underpinnings of Blood Meridian.
Eight as Wheel of Fortune
A circle or wheel of time is present in many world traditions, used to represent machinations of destiny and fate. In addition to Gnosticism and tarot, many Eastern belief systems such as Buddhism, Taosim, and Hundiusm use an eight pointed wheel to represent the eternal action of time. In regards to the novel’s worldview, it has been said that “McCarthy goes so far west that he reaches the East” (Dacus). McCarthy’s use of eight reinforces this perspective and presents a cyclic picture of nature.
A “meridian” is a line intersecting a circle, and Blood Meridian can be read as a circular journey. The three epigraphs establish a continuity of violence in human history. The action of the novel represents a particularly barbarous point in time, not to be seen again in “all the world’s turning” (5). The epilogue prefigures a modulated continuance of the same trajectory. The Frontier closes, but the proverbial Prometheus carries on to face similar trials.
There is an inherent dualism to a wheel of time because each point on the circle has its antipode. Light contrasts with dark; a burial is a rebirth; a rising implies a falling.
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 to its repeated, non-incidental usage, major scenes that contain eight adjoin in a variety of ways. Common connections include death, blind eyes, monetary sums, and the possibility of a count totaling 7 or 8. Each connection deserves individual investigation but, at a high-level, it is clear that certain instances function as counterpoints to others.
- The kid tells a story of eight fictitious bandits to Captain White (35); eight real bandits appear in possession of the slain Captain White’s horse (67).
- Eight dead babies are hung in a tree (60); one of “the callers” tells of eight whores sitting in a tree (332).
- Glanton turns in eight heads for a bounty (174); a bounty of eight thousand pesos is later put on Glanton’s head (193).
- One hundred and twenty-eight native scalps redeemed are for a bounty, plus eight heads (174); twenty-eight Mexicans are shot dead in the tavern, plus eight in the street (188).
- Eight native heads are taken by the lake (174); eight heads of pilgrims are found in the desert (287).
- Eight survive the massacre of White’s party (59); a final eight bodies from Glanton’s party are ultimately burned at the ferry (287).
Each occurrence is not a direct opposite but an echo. As phrased in the epilogue, uses of eight function “less as the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality” (351).
CONCLUSION
The degree to which McCarthy uses eight in Blood Meridian is worthy of attention commensurate with that of other symbols given its connection to significant motifs and themes in the book. An examination of eight as a reoccuring symbol reinforces Gnostics readings of the novel, elucidates McCarthy’s use of tarot imagery, and emphasizes a cyclic view of nature..
The preceding overview is not exhaustive but rather provides a starting point for investigation. Eight’s connection to other topics of interest include Kabbalah, Eastern influences, numeric symbology in other works of McCarthy, numeric symbology in McCarthy’s literary influences, traditional feminine connections to eight, McCarthy’s conception of the role of symbols in the subconscious, and the mathematical themes of The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Throughout Blood Meridian, McCarthy plays with the idea that fates are bound by unseen tethers, yet he also demonstrates that those who would claim to divine the certain trajectory of those futures are but false prophets. Even the judge doesn’t claim to know the future. McCarthy uses symbolism to great effect in the novel and, while it is tempting to draw specific interpretations related to the use of eight, McCarthy seems to also warn against this. In the judge’s words, “your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery (263).”
WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. Translated by Emerson and Holquist. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Holquist, University of Texas Press (1981), pp. 84–258.
Bradford, Shanna. “Divination and symbolism in Blood Meridian.” Southwestern American Literature 40.1 (2014): 19-31.
Chalquist, Craig. ““Hidden in What Is Visible” Deliteralizing the Gnostic Worldview.” Jung Journal 4.4 (2010): 46-64.
Crews, Michael Lynn. Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences. University of Texas Press (2017).
Dacus, Chris. “The West as Symbol of the Eschaton in Cormac McCarthy.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 7.1 (2009): 7-15.
Daugherty, Leo. “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.” Southern Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4 (1992): 122–33.
Douglas, Christopher. “If God meant to interfere”: evolution and theodicy in” Blood Meridian.” Religion & Literature (2013): 83-107.
Hanssen, Ken R. ““Men are made of the dust of the earth”: Time, Space, Matter, and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 15.2 (2017): 177-192.
Lee, Demetria. “Tarot in Blood Meridian.” Philologia 10. (2018).
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. Picador (2009).
Meyer, Marvin W., ed. and trans. The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random (1984).
Mundik, Petra. “” Striking the Fire Out of the Rock”: Gnostic Theology in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” South Central Review 26.3 (2009): 72-97.
Smith, William. A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines. Volume IV. London: John Murray (1887): 71-72
Thompson, Lucas. “Reverse Engineering Cormac McCarthy’s Sentences.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 15.1 (2017): 88-95.
Vanderheide, John. “On the Germanic Element in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 20.1 (2022): 2-22.
Waite, A.E.. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. (1910).
SLIDES
This post Ogdoad: The Significance of 8 In Blood Meridian [McCarthy Conference Paper] originally appeared on williamwickey.com.