First off I read that there should be a huge resemblance to gnosticism in this book. Which might be, propably is true. But the thought of Judge Holden being the demiurge og Yaldabaoth just doesn’t really sit right with me. I think the judge is just simply put the devil himself.

The name for the judge might just be in my opinion derived straight from the book "My Confessions" by Samuel Chamberlain he so clearly took inspiration from. Not have much of any meaning other than being a name. Since the look of the judge also has been taken straight from that book.

Cormac was also very much inspired by Paradise Lost which is very clear, and at one point in the book Satan disguises himself as a cherub, which is a childlike angel. Maybe took some inspiration from that, if this is truely satan disguised as a human.

Also paintings depicted from Paradise Lost you see lucifer or satan potrayed perched on a rock, in nowhere, which coincidentally, where do they first find the judge? Perched on a rock in the middle of nowhere. Also the epic "details Satan and the rebel angels cast out of Heaven into a fiery abyss, where Satan first rallies his troops from the burning lake and rocky infernal landscape". Does that also not sound very much of the first encounter with holden? They find him in a desolate desert surrounded by rocky landscape, where he rallies the gang and from there on out the go on a slaughter spree?

The Judge is often cited as the demiurge because of his knowledge of the land specifically when they go to the mountains were he creates gunpowder from rocks. This is true and definietly could be/have some gnosticism to it. But Satan in Paradise Lost literally does the exact same thing word for word at some point in the story. Digging into the ground using raw sulfur and nitre to create gunpowder to which they create an engine of destruction out of nothing slaying the apaches. Also the judge is very intelligent, knowledgeable, strategic and well spoken. All features specifically mentioned in Paradise Lost's Satan.

I think much of this points towards the judge being satan or the devil in disguise much more than him being some gnostic entity or god. Also specifically because a key point in Paradise Lost or difference made between god and Satan is that satan never creates anything independent from god. He always takes the material of god and perverts it into something evil or use for evil. Which Holden never does. He's just knowledgable, and just like satan in Paradise Lost perverts the material into an evil use.

Also I read a theory that the pedophile or child killer was the kid throughout the novel. Which I really took a liking to because that would actually make more sense in this story. Judge is seen as evil, but not always unnecessarily evil. But the acts of children getting killed or raped are extremely unnecessary. So we think it is Holden, because he’s very evil, but he’s also scary, and implecations it’s him since he does not sleep. (The scalping of random civilians also seem very unnecessary but there's always a reason which is for money throughout the story even though it is extremely evil(also the relationship between glanton and the judge, they both walk into a tent and comeout good friends and suddenly the glanton gang rakes in money?? Does that not sound like a deal with the devil, getting in return material goods? Perverting the material again)). But the kid is described as having large hands. Holden is described as having small hands. Some people say oh well he's so big so his hands would still leave large imprints upon the children but no. There's no way mccarthy writes this and it is not purposefully done. It is so odd and specific. There should be no reason to even mention the marks on the children unless it is to nudge towards a character. So large hands. Easy way to tell who it is, write a person with large, and the one people would think would do it as having small hands so you can figure it out yourself. It is definietly on purpose.

And one thing that don't make sense is why Holden is so interested in the kid in the book. He's a half shitty guy nothing special about him over the others. He's not moral he's not more anything, interesting even. But if it is the case, that the kid kills the children carelessly throughout the novel. That makes him evil, maybe the closest to pure evil in the story. The difference is, Glanton is evil yes, but your never unsure of it. Everyone knows Glanton is ridicoulously evil. But the kid not so much. The kid multiple times tries to do acts out of kindness. What I think it is, is the kid tries to fool the people around him, fool them into believing he has goodness in his heart. But we are told he is born with a taste for mindless killing. But yet even we are fooled. But the judge knows. Because he is the devil. He sees through him. He never sleeps, he sees what the kid does in the night, he even yells to the kid in their standoff, "There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart... You came forward, he said, to take part in a work, but there was something not right in you from the start." Recognizes pure evil, and I think therefore is so interested in the kid throughout the story. I think that makes it far more interesting. Maybe also why he’s the only character we know of in the book who escapes a duel with the judge alive, he could have killed the kid, but he didn’t.

Also I saw some tarot cards which people say are gnostic, and referenced throughtout the novel which might be true. The one with two people in chains in Holdens room there lay the fool and a child in chains, I mean yes maybe that references the tarot card. But on that tarot card in the background is baphomet. Even though he is not satan and symbolizes more so harmony and balance he did become known as satan or symbolized as it in the 1850's even though the origin maybe different. The symbol in that era still symbolized satan, and if cormac mccarthy is as history literate as he is, I would like to believe he would use the popular goat symbol as what it was believed to be back then which was satan. And also the card LITERALLY says the devil.

This leads me to the ending.
With all the whores dancing and in the middle standing tall above them Judge Holden. Dancing aswell. I felt this very much resembled or referenced goya's black paintings. Specifically the Witches' Sabbath. The whores resembling the witches dancing. And in the middle the devil. The Goat. Baphomet, or Judge Holden. Standing tall above them.

I think the story is very on the nose with The Judge being in some sense Satan or the devil.
There might be more persuading gnostic references I haven't read or heard of, but those I've heard or seen I feel as if much more tries to fit gnosticism into the story rather than actually reading what is said or told. Devil, satan and such is referenced a lot and I just feel a lot of the gnostic stuff I read just fits kinda half. But the stories that inspired this one, just has characters that fit perfectly ontop of this one like satan from Paradise Lost. So to me that makes far more sense to listen to than what I've heard.

I finished Blood Meridian a few weeks ago now and naturally haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

One thing that stood out to me was actually the epilogue, which describes the process of fencing off the desert. Initially I thought, this is the only optimistic part of the whole book. After crossing the completely violent, unforgiving deserts of Mexico and the US, finally, the humans in the story are free of it. The violence and desolation is being sequestered, now is the age of civilisation.

But that didn’t seem right. Could McCarthy’s meaning really be that once the age of the desert is over, humanity managed to cordon off violence and terror? In one way yes, we did manage to do that. The horrors of Blood Meridian are not commonplace now, nor were they ~50 years after the events of the book, which we can see clearly with Lonesome Dove. The epilogue points to the future, which is better and more civilised than what the Glanton Gang experienced and perpetuated.

But then I thought about another interesting bit of the book’s finale. McCarthy could have very easily ended it at the creek, or the sand dunes. But he didn’t. Instead, we get the final stand off between the Judge and the Kid in an American city, in a symbol of civilisation: essentially, a port-a-loo, the place we invented to separate ourselves from the disgusting reality of human excrement. This is where the Kid is subsumed by the Judge and where (on my reading) the Kid finally gives in to the Judge and his nihilistic philosophy. The Judge then merrily goes about his other “civilised” endeavour: dancing in a hall with musicians etc. He steps into a symbol of social joy, connection and camaraderie.

Realising that made me rethink the epilogue. Did we fence the violence and horror out? Or did we fence it in?

With the civilising force of city- and institution-building, we fenced in this cosmic force of violence and death. The Judge is no longer roaming the desert, he’s in our dance halls and restrooms.

He doesn’t have the free rein he used to, but he is there, beguiling even those that resist him, making little doe feet impressions over concrete instead of volcanic rock.

Blood Meridian is a Western, a cowboy novel by a writer who apparently specializes in writing that kind of book. Many smart alecks thought Cormac McCarthy would never be translated into Spanish, and they plundered him with impunity, shielded by ignorance and by a rather sui generis way of understanding intertextuality.

Blood Meridian is not only a Western (its action takes place in the mid-nineteenth century) but also a novel about life and death: delirious, hyperviolent, with several underlying currents (nature as man’s main enemy, the absolute impossibility of redemption, life as inertial motion). It narrates, on the one hand, the final incursion of a group of Americans into the lands of Chihuahua and then, after crossing the Sierra Madre, into the neighboring state of Sonora. Their mission, well paid by the governments of both states, is to exterminate Indians and take their scalps. Indians are very hard to hunt, and costly in time and lives, so the group ends up massacring Mexican villages, where the scalps, when all is said and done, look very much alike, if not identical.

On the other hand, Blood Meridian is a novel that narrates landscape (the landscape of Texas, Chihuahua and Sonora) as if it were the flip side of a bucolic text. The narrated landscape, which takes on the leading role, rises up imposingly, truly a new world, silent and paradigmatic and atrocious, where everything fits except human beings. One might say that the landscape of Blood Meridian is a Sadean landscape, thirsty and indifferent, ruled by strange laws that have to do with pain and anesthesia, which is how time often manifests itself.

The other two characters in the novel, Judge Holden and the Kid, are antagonists, though both belong to the same gang. The judge is a learned man and a child killer, a musician and a pederast, a naturalist and a gunslinger, a man who longs to know everything and destroy everything. The Kid, by contrast, is a survivor. He is fierce, but he is a human being, which is to say, a victim.

According to the distinguished Harold Bloom, this is one of the best American novels of the twentieth century. Cormac McCarthy was born in 1933, and his life has not lacked adventure and risk. The first edition of Blood Meridian dates from 1985. The one discussed here is the Debate edition, 2001, translated by Luis Murillo Fort.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Chigurh finds the case in the motel. He goes back to his truck, gets in, and sees Sheriff Ed Tom pull up. Chigurh does not go anywhere. He waits.

Ed Tom goes in the motel room, et cetera, leaves. He gets in his cruiser and drives until he's out of sight. He calls for backup. He has already decided - ANYONE who leaves the motel when backup arrives, their sirens on, Ed Tom will run off the road, forcibly.

Backup arrives, sirens on. No one leaves. Ed Tom and the deputies check every vehicle. Nothing.

HOW DID CHIGURH GET AWAY? How? Re-read my post, or better, read the book. If it's a PDF the pertinent section begins around page 225 out of 296 pages (on my PDF). Depending on your particular download it could be different.

The way Cormac tells the story, there is no way Chigurh could have left that parking lot without being seen. But he is not seen. I do not understand.