Blood Meridian Now

The Burning Tree: Our Winter Solstice Episode

Thank you for listening!!! We hope you have time to enjoy the winter season with your loved ones. 

We seem to have caught up with the months in the novel. We ask a lot of questions. Why didn't the kid kill Shelby? Would animals congregate in the cold around a fire? What does the new tv series PLURIBUS have to do with Cormac McCarthy?

Secret Beasts: Chapter 14

Thank you for listening...we are excited to have a new episode discussing Chapter 14 of the epic novel BLOOD MERIDIAN. We actually began this idea of this podcast a year ago, in November 2024. It's hard to believe we have been recording our podcast for a year but there eit is. And here you are too!!!! Thank you!

 

This episode we discuss mules, dead dogs, Apuleius's The Golden Ass" as well as mercury, Boehme, alchemy, and the tone of the novels narrator. And of course a bunch of other stuff. Please let us know what you think, are thinking or ideas you are thinking about. You can email us at:

bloodmeridiannow@gmail.com

 

An excerpt from Science Historian John Henry in THE LANCET...

"Without the tradition of European magic, science and scientific medicine could hardly have developed as successfully as they have. The historical evidence for the crucial role of magic in the origins of modem science is totally compelling. But to recognise this evidence we have to become historically aware that magic was once rather different from what it has become. Barely understood today, natural magic was, for the first 700 years of this millennium, the predominant kind of magic. It was based upon the assumption that God had created the world as a continuous “Great Chain of Being”, and that all the individual elements in creation were not only linked to one another through this unbroken chain, but that there were correspondences by which a creature in one part of the chain might resonate with, or somehow correspond to, a creature in another part of the chain. Underlying all this was a pervasive belief in purpose. God, or Nature, did nothing in vain, so there must be a reason for everything. Clues left by God, suggested the correspondences– eg, the flesh of the walnut in its shell and the human brain. Corresponding things were assumed to have occult powers or forces by which they could affect one another. The magician's role was to discover the correspondences and their precise occult effects in order to put them to use.

The discovery of such occult knowledge was difficult and the only sure way to discover, say, the healing powers of herbs or minerals was by empirical experiment, or trial and error. The “signatures” sometimes helped, but often they didn't. Just how is one meant to use the walnut to the benefit of the head? Is it a treatment for headache, or for mental disturbance? But if the adept failed to discover the secrets of nature empirically, he could summon a demon for help. Before the 17th century, nobody believed in the supernatural powers of demons, because only God could perform the supematural. Demons were thus God's creatures and so part of nature, but had greater knowledge of occult powers. Demonology was, therefore, inferior to natural magic. Consulting a demon was a means of taking a short-cut to the knowledge of natural magic. For us, the conjuring of demons is the essence of old magic, but this is a mistaken view since the secret powers of magic lay in the natural world.

The natural-magic tradition had a profound influence on the origins of modem science. All the leading thinkers of the so-called Scientific Revolution in late 16th and 17th century turned away from the kind of study of nature that was being pursued in the universities, known as natural philosophy, and embraced an empirical approach closer to that of the natural-magic tradition. Natural philosophy did not seek to exploit natural phenomena for pragmatic purposes, and did not recognise the experimental method as a fully valid way of gaining knowledge of the world. The leaders of the Scientific Revolution, however, like the magicians, developed and the experimental method to make it one of fruitful means of investigating nature. The new philosophers recognised the validity of experimentally defined occult qualities. The fact that this approach led to phenomenal success is best exemplified by Isaac Newton's treatment of gravity. In response to G W Leibniz's disparagement of his concept of gravity as an occult force, Newton did not deny it. Newton simply maintained that one should not make up hypothetical explanations of phenomena, but rather rely on the experimentally established facts and the mathematical analysis of the behaviour of objects. Any magician from the preceding 700 years would have agreed with him. By Newton's time, however, this empirical way of thinking was beginning to be regarded as “scientific”, not “magical” and the new philosophers wanted to distance themselves from the natural-magic tradition. Having appropriated what they wanted from this tradition, they joined in the chorus of disapproval of magic and disparaged what they had left behind in a distorted travesty of what magic had once been.

 

So history reveals that modem science was able to make such rapid gains in the 17th century only by plundering natural magic. Although Newton's work on gravity provides the most striking single example of the fruitfulness of notions of “occult” qualities, many medical men contributed to this story. Indeed, it was the newly discovered medical remedies whose efficacy defied understanding in terms of natural philosophical or medical theory, which stimulated reassessments of occult qualities and powers. It was this new work in medicine that led many intellectuals away from natural philosophy and back to the magical tradition. Although the real benefits of such reassessments were felt first in the physical sciences, the debt to medicine was later paid back with interest as medicine benefited from the advance of science. Both science and medicine, however, remain indebted to magic."

 

Mejor los indios

We have reached the end of the middle of the novel and we discuss everything from carnival, spectacle, hard-boiled writing Bahkin, Joyce and beyond in Chapter 13. Thank you for joining us on this adventure. Thanks you for listening!!!

Crossing The Border: Chapter 12

Thank you for listening! This episode we read listeners emails and...

We discuss the disturbing...and poetic chapter 12 where the gang ambushes a community for scalps. 

And...we notice significant dates in the novel. We have a Substack page and we have created a list of dates and astronomical movements/descriptions. It's free to subscribe and read!

Blood Meridian was published only ten years after the Vietnam war effort of the USA. A lot of movies centered on the Vietnam experience were produced in the late 1970s but especially in the 1980s. Some of those movies were...

The Deer Hunter

Streamers

Birdy

4th of July

Full Metal Jacket

Platoon

Hamburger Hill

Good Morning Vietnam

Bat*21

The Expendables (yeah we were surprised that was an 80's movie too!)

Rambo

Air America

John Woo's Bullet In The Head

Dogfight

For The Boys

Forrest Gump

Dead Presidents

 

Old Ephraim: Chapter 11

The judge tells a story and we talk about it. Thank you so much for listening!

If you want to tell us a story email us at:

bloodmeridiannow@gmail.com

Et in Arcadio ego: Chapter 10

Queer powder, brokeback malpais, merestone and a storytelling feat. We love Chapter 10.  Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for following us on Podbeam and Instagram and Substack. Don't be shy leave us a review...we can take it...even a bad one! Again we are so glad you are joining us on this adventure with the Glanton Gang.

"[…] scientific corporations might well become independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world […] The world might, in fact, be transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment." Bernal, The World, The Flesh and The Devil 1929

"Language is always ambivalent. Its forms mutate and connect in unexpected ways. It's hard to instrumentalize language. But I think it's better to explore linguistic potentials than to keep on using language that's past its expiration date." McKenzie Wark

"

Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume." Erich Fromm

THAT HALLUCINATORY VOID: Chapter 9

"A writer is a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into a radiant body of everliving life." Portrait of The Young Man As An Artist by James Joyce.

JVH and Candy discuss Chapter 9 of Blood Meridian including lice, louse, antiwarriors, inversions, alchemy and Chamberlain's source material MY CONFESSION.

You can find supplementary content on our substack page here:

https://bloodmeridiannow.substack.com

 

Email us at bloodmeridiannow@gmail.com

 

or find us on instagram.

 

GRAVEYARD DEAD: Chapter 8 Blood Meridian

Welcome to our discussion of Chapter 8...thank you for listening!!! This is a bit of a long episode and we appreciate you for even beginning to listen to it. We found some concerns including sacrifice, ceremony, identity, capitalism, redistribution festivals, gambling, and even a brief hint at Moby Dick...we may or may not have got to them, ha!

"Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?

To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines." Ahab

 

Excerpt from TRICYCLE magazine, 2007,  

From interview with poet M.S. Merwyn...

 

"The paintings in the Paleolithic caves? Those aren't art; they weren't there for an audience. Except the great halls, which were initiation places. But the tiny figures that were 25 feet up inside a cleft where nobody could ever see them, an animal that someone built in there? Those animals are part of the person who put them there, and that person came down knowing something, and this is the ultimate vision quest. And it didnt even begin with Cro-magnon man. We found five years ago in Southwest France a place quite near Lascaux with a history of it's own that has never been published because the scientist who discovered them- the government of France would not let him go on with his excavations. So he said "ok well I won' t publish my findings, then." And he hasn't. He's kept them going for years, and I talk to him on the telephone. What he found sixty feet down was a burial. It was not Cro-magnon. It was Neanderthal. It was probably, he thinks, 19,000 years older than Lascaux. (It) was a Neanderthal skeleton and beside it the skeleton of a bear. And the bear's legs and the mans legs were exchanged so that the man had bears legs and the bear had mans legs. And they were surrounded by fossil pollen. It was a ritual burial. That's a great scoop, and it hasn't even been published yet. But the reason i'm telling you this, is that this is already saying that the link between the imagination-which to me is the great pinnacle of humanity, the imagination that makes the arts and makes compassion- is in our species and goes way back. And it's never been separate. And when you get any aspect of the culture that tries to separate it, it's destructive and suicidal. 

 

Take them away, names like Buddhism. I'm impatient with them. There's something beyond all that, beneath all that, they all share, they all come from. They are branches from a single root. And that's what one has to pay attention to. And of course the words in The Diamond Sutra that grabbed me were, when Tathagata (the Buddha) says, "boddi, does the Tathagata have a teaching to teach?" And Bodhisattva says," no, lord, Tathagata has no teaching to teach." At that point I got chills right down my spine.

 

And Tathagata says, " because there is no teaching to teach, it is the teaching." I thought this is it, you know. Here we go. I think that goes as far back as shamanism. I mean, what did those guys find up in those clefts? In the caves? There was no teaching to teach. They knew something, but they knew it from then on. And it was something distinct, and it was something to do with connection, with following, with what came before and after, and they couldn't express it in any other terms. But they were obviously guides to their people after that. Because you know, the animals that they were depicting were not the animals. I mean, they may have eaten a few of them. But that was not what it was about. It was about following, it was about the fact that these were the elders. They knew where they were going. The humans did not know where they were going."