clipping from the Yuma Sun reporting the claim of members of an Ethiopian archeological excavation that a fossilized skull three hundred millennia old seemed to have been scalped. Regarding the meaning of the epigraphs, D. H. Evans writes that Ending The narrative closes with ambiguity pertaining to the final state of the kid, or the man. Since the book portrays violence in explicit detail this allusive portrayal has caused comment. Given the judge's history and other details in the text, presumably the judge rapes the man before killing him. Alternatively, perhaps the point is that readers can never know. Religion Hell David Vann argues that the setting of the American southwest which the Gang traverses is representative of hell. Vann claims that the Judge's kicking of a head is an allusion to Dante's similar action in the Inferno. Gnosticism The second of the three epigraphs which introduce the novel, taken from the "Gnostic" mystic Jacob Boehme, has incited varied discussion. The quote from Boehme is: No specific conclusions have been reached about its interpretation nor relevance to the novel. Critics agree that there are Gnostic elements in Blood Meridian, but they disagree on the precise meaning and implication of those elements. Leo Daugherty argues that "Gnostic thought is central to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian", (Daugherty, 122) specifically the Persian-Zoroastrian-Manichean branch of Gnosticism. He describes the novel as a "rare coupling of Gnostic 'ideology' with the 'affect' of Hellenic tragedy by means of depicting how power works in the making and erasing of culture, and of what the human condition amounts to when a person opposes that power and thence gets introduced to fate." Daugherty sees Holden as an archon and the kid as a "failed pneuma." He says that the kid feels a "spark of the alien divine." Daugherty further contends that the violence of the novel can best be understood through a Gnostic lens. "Evil" as defined by the Gnostics was a far larger, more pervasive presence in human life than the rather tame and "domesticated" Satan of Christianity. As Daugherty writes, "For [Gnostics], evil was simply everything that is, with the exception of bits of spirit imprisoned here. And what they saw is what we see in the world of Blood Meridian." However, Barcley Owens argues that while there are undoubtedly Gnostic qualities to the novel, Daugherty's arguments are "ultimately unsuccessful," because Daugherty fails to adequately address the