Aaron Gwyn, who’s a writer I follow on this platform, has written some of the most insightful and vigorous essays I’ve ever read about Cormac McCarthy, a writer I flat-out adore.

(Full disclosure: Blood Meridian is one of the six or seven books I would take with me to a desert island. Some of the others are Lolita, A Hundred Years of Solitude, Moby Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, Gaudy Night, and Alice in Wonderland. What can I say, I’m weird).

And I whole-heartedly recommend his piece, “Cormac McCarthy’s Gnostic Conservatism,” even though I wholly disagree with its interpretation of Gnosticism.

Perhaps it would be better to say that my personal gnostic beliefs are diametrically opposed to those which Gwyn, in his analysis, attributes to McCarthy. Not that I think Gwyn is wrong. I think the chilly, unyielding earth upon which McCarthy’s characters move and live and have their being (and upon which they take such terrible vengeance on one another) is very much a reflection of one aspect of Gnostic theology. This is the idea that the created world is a snare, imagined into life by a vicious demiurge, intent on distracting the soul from its knowledge of truth and light.

Gwyn’s certainly got a point. As he writes, McCarthy’s “Judge offer us a way of interpreting the incredible violence we’ve witnessed, arguing that men don’t go to war against enemies, but against their own vacancy of spirit….in plainer language: we slaughter to escape our sorrow.”

And the Glanton gang, their saddles ornamented with reeking scalps, are certainly men with vacant spirits. Quoting Australian scholar Petra Mundik, Gwyn writes, “According to Gnostic theology, the entire manifest cosmos was created by a hostile (or at best ignorant) force of darkness, and is thus a hideous aberration. This demiurge, identified as Yahweh of the Old Testament…rules over all that he has created…while the real or alien God remains wholly transcendent and removed from the created world.”

Which is basically Gnosticism in a nutshell. The demiurge, in his pride, says, “I am the One, True God,” and distracts us with love and lust and appetites and video games, TikTok and war and presidential politics, from the truth that transcends the world and lies behind it: that all we experience with our senses is maya, tying us to the wheel of samsara.

The Gnostics can in that sense be seen as really, really strict Hindus (the world is a snare created by divine power) or Buddhists (the world is an illusion, one you believe in because you don’t know any better). In either case, the message is clear. Don’t have any fun. Stop indulging in your senses. Keep your mind on the abstract. Castrate yourself (as his enemies accused Origen of doing) because your penis distracts you from higher things.

Did you ever notice how often men jump to the conclusion that all sin and evil comes from their dicks? Kind of makes you wonder.

I ended up weaving quite a lot of Gnostic philosophy into the plot and characters of my Saturni series (Orphans, Under Saturn’s Sun, Forbidden Feast, and The World Made Flesh), because it was a way for me to define and dramatize the central question at the heart of the novels: how can a benevolent God allow evil?

I’m certainly not the first or best writer to wrestle with this conundrum, but what I finally settled on was the Gnostic idea that the demiurge doesn’t KNOW he’s not the One, True God.

Here’s how this goes. The Aeons, emanations of the Divine One, are pure light. However, one of their number, Sophia (Wisdom) decides to answer the central dilemma of that Light: how can it know itself? She creates the Demiurge, who following his nature, creates the heavens and the earth: space, time, seas, land, animals and plants and of course, Adam and Eve and the Serpent.

The Demiurge is very pleased with himself, unaware that by creating sentient beings, he’s also created passionate beings, who want and hunger and get angry and look around themselves and realize they’re going to die and get terrified and furious at that eventuality.

And so they lay the world waste.

They slaughter to escape their sorrow.

The Sophia (God’s mother, if you want to call her that) looks on the works of her son with pity and terror, but also with understanding. This is the only way the Light can know itself…by means of a cosmos in which light and darkness exist. Far from withdrawing from the created world, the Sophia and the other Aeons look upon it as a necessary evil whereby the One can experience itself in all its permutations.

Yes, it’s not real.

Yes, it’s very compelling.

Yes, it’s tragic, and also sometimes funny and entertaining and creative and immensely beautiful.

It’s both a wasteland and a wonderland. And I think while we’re alive in this illusory world, our task is to experience it in all its aspects, both the horrifying and the exalted.

Love stories and murder mysteries. Whale hunting and incest. Death in outhouses and croquet with flamingos. The whole messy, idiotic banquet.

Dig in.

XXX,

Adrienne Parks