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ABSTRACT: This note explores the cultural implications of the Penitente sect's deathcart and figure of Death armed with bow and arrow, and identifies McCarthy's source in Fergusson's Rio Grande. The Penitentes' female death angel, La Muerte, is represented either as a bare skeleton or in feminine garb. The ungendered skeleton in Blood Meridian allows for the protagonist's misinterpretation of the figure as male and thus a reminder of his Indian-fighting. The eldress in the rocks, wearing the icons of Our Lady of Guadalupe but unrecognized by the man, is another death angel, a conflation of the Virgin and Death. The deathcart appears not only in the Penitente procession, but also in the tarot reader's prediction of Black Jackson's death and again in the buffalo bonecarts. Together these tropes support the novel's representation of border, national, and human history as the procession of Death Triumphant. keywords: Blood Meridian, deathcart, La Muerte, Penitente sect, sources
Late in Blood Meridian, after the Glanton gang has been destroyed and the protagonist, the man, tries to redefine his life, he comes across a "troubled sect" re-enacting Christ's procession to Calvary (314). Among these self-flagellating men is a figure who bears a massive cross. Others laboriously drag a stone-filled cart on which rides a carved wooden skeleton armed with a bow and arrow, a striking reference to the deathcart and carved angel of death of the New Mexican Penitente sect, which was organized after Mexico expelled her Roman Catholic priests during the Reform period of the mid-nineteenth century. While McCarthy's scene of the ritual seems clear enough on the face of it, our recognition that the man misinterprets what he witnesses and our understanding of the scene's implications for the novel may be enhanced with knowledge of its historical context and sources.
According to some accounts, the Penitente sect's processional deathcarts are "regional commentaries on the more sumptuous triumphal chariots of Death that appeared in images of the elaborate religious ceremonies of Renaissance and Baroque Europe" (Pohl 205). Louisa Stark argues that they are adapted from Spanish and Spanish-American Holy Week processions in which the skeletal Death figure sits dejected at the base of a cross, denoting Christ's defeat of death (308). However, this allegorical theme is at variance with...