Striking the Fire Out of the Rock: Gnostic Theology in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is an essay by Petra Mundik, published in 2009 in South Central Review, Volume 26, Number 3.In his expansion of Leo Daugherty's 1992 Gnostic study, Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy, Mundik holds that despite the end, the novel is not entirely grim. Mundik contends that and quot;every one of Cormac McCarthy's novels to date, no matter how bleak, contains a tiny glimmer of hope reminiscent of the divine spark trapped in the manifest cosmos and quot; This spark is the spirit or pneuma, a part of the true god which is imprisoned within the human body in the realm the demiurge oversees. The pneuma will ultimately return to the true God, according to Gnosticism, and herein lays the dwindling hope at the end of the destructive and gore-ridden road down which the reader is led. But McCarthy himself has stated that people will do better to open their eyes to the impenetrable darkness of the world. This ambivalence with regards to evil's darkness and whether any fleeting glimpses of hope can assuage it continues with Mundik's division of McCarthy's readers into two camps: nihilists and moralists.