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| “ | Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. | „ |
| ~ Judge Holden expressing his desire to know and control all things in existence, also his most iconic and famous quote. |
| “ | Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. [...] This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. | „ |
| ~ Judge Holden philosophizing his views on war. |
Judge Holden, commonly known as The Judge is the main antagonist of the late Cormac McCarthy's 1985 horror/thriller crime and anti-Western epic novel Blood Meridian.
He is an enigmatic polymath who joins a cowboy gang in order to 'help them', only for it to be revealed he is a deranged serial killer and child molester, who enjoys causing as much suffering as he can.
Holden holds both a sinister side and a curious side. He enjoys harming, raping, hanging, skinning, and burning people but also has a fondness for geography, mathematics, reading, shooting, horses, and (his personal favorite) technical drawing. Holden is theorized to be a demon by some fans, due to his almost monstrous appearance and hatred of religion, which is shown when he manages to convince a peaceful town to brutalize their local preacher for no reason. Holden also holds some form of enigmatic power over the people around him, as everybody wishes to shoot him but somehow find themselves compelled to not do so. In the end, Holden's goals are truly unknown, but his survival in the novel's ending indicates he plans to continue killing for the rest of eternity.
He was voiced by the late Vincent Price, who also played Egghead from the 1966 Batman TV series, Dr. Phibes from the horror film series of the same name, Irontail from Here Comes Peter Cottontail, Prince Prospero from Masque of the Red Death, Henry Jarrod in House of Wax, voiced Professor Ratigan from Walt Disney's The Great Mouse Detective and Zigzag from The Theft and the Cobbler.
Personality & Traits[]
Judge Holden is an extremely ruthless, callous, depraved, and remorseless psychopath, but also a very intelligent and knowledgeable individual. He often teaches lessons about the world to his fellow mercenaries and philosophizes with them. He tends to avoid personal confrontation but is perfectly willing to murder or rape people in the most brutal ways imaginable if they are his enemies. The Judge is perennially calm and rarely loses his cool throughout the novel.
He is an immensely cruel and vile being, demonstrating his penchant for sadism on multiple occasions, such as buying two puppies just so he could toss them off a bridge to drown in a river (before the two puppies were shot and killed by the Vandiemenlander). The Judge is also known to be an abusive pervert given his additional status as a murderous child molester who habitually lures children into his clutches with sweets. A child goes missing in nearly every town that he visits, and he is, on several occasions, seen with a naked child in his room.
Physical Appearance[]
The Judge is a man of strange appearance. He has an enormous frame and is close to 7 feet in height. His skin is extremely pale, to the point of being described as fluorescent and purely white in coloration; his lack of pigmentation is possibly the result of albinism, as exposure to direct sunlight is painful to him, as evidenced by how desperate he was to purchase a hat from Toadvine to protect himself from the harsh sunlight of the desert. According to Tobin, he weighs 150kg.
He also lacks any hair, including eyebrows, facial hair, and body hair, raising the possibility that he suffers from an autoimmune disorder such as alopecia universalis that has caused him to lose all his hair. Physically, Holden is very strong, being capable of lifting a Howitzer with ease and using a large rock to kill a mule in a single blow. In contrast to his apparent age and strong features, the Judge has a strangely childlike element to his appearance, having hands and feet that are small in proportion to the rest of his body and possessing a childish aspect to his face.
The Judge is often partially or entirely nude, but (when clothed) will tend to wear clothing typical of his era, such as long coats, linen shirts, boots, and wide-brimmed hats. Often, the Judge can be seen smoking a cigarillo.
In Samuel Chamberlain's autobiography, My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue, Holden's appearance is described almost identically to that of his fictional counterpart, though he has a head of hair.
He stood six foot six in his moccasins, had a large, fleshy frame, a dull, tallow-colored face destitute of hair, and all expression, always cool and collected.
Biography[]
Past[]
The novel is vague about the origins of the Judge to the point where there is almost nothing known about him. The narrator states that Judge is something "wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go" and that he has no beginning or end.
Blood Meridian[]
It is known that the Judge was active around the Mexico-United States border in the 19th century and seems to be a possibly middle-aged man. He is first seen entering a revival to falsely accuse a priest of being an imposter, as well as an illiterate, zoophilic criminal wanted for pedophilia, agitating the people in attendance of his service to the point where they try to kill the priest on the spot.
The Judge later met a group of nomadic mercenary scalp hunters who were out of gunpowder and at risk of being overtaken by a group of Apaches. They encountered Holden sitting on an enormous boulder in the middle of the desert as if he had been waiting for them, even though there was no way he could have known that they were coming.
The Judge climbed a mountain with them, extracting potassium nitrate (referred to as nitre in the novel) from bat guano and manufacturing charcoal while he was there, amongst other scientific pursuits. The Judge later led them to a small area of volcanic activity, while Apaches were following them closely. When they arrived, he collected sulfur and then mixed that with the charcoal, potassium nitrate and urine, producing gunpowder. The Judge then created a false surrender against the Apaches. However, when the natives approached the mercenaries, Holden and his fellow men brutally killed them all. Shortly after, the Judge formed a partnership with the captain of the gang, a small, dark-haired man named John Joel Glanton.
The Judge was involved in several more conflicts with natives, including a raid that resulted in the slaughtering of multiple babies and defenseless non-combatants. After a year, Glanton and most of his gang were slaughtered in a conflict with Yumas Native Americans. Holden was one of the few that managed to survive. The other four remaining members of the Glanton Gang (the Kid, Benjamin Tobin, David Brown, and Louis Toadvine) encounter the Judge and the Idiot after the Glanton Massacre. After Davy Brown and Toadvine leave, Holden suddenly attacks Tobin and the Kid, stalking them across a field before the duo is forced into hiding to escape him. The duo manages to get into San Francisco, but Tobin goes missing. His ultimate fate remains unknown.
The Kid encounters Holden decades later in a saloon, although the Judge has not aged at all. Holden describes the Kid as a disappointment, stating that he held in his heart "clemency for the heathen." He then follows the Kid into an outhouse, dragging him into a stall with a little girl who was also present in the saloon. After this event, two men approach the outhouse, and another man walking back to the saloons tells them that they should not go near the place. They open the door and are confused and horrified by what they see.
What happens to the Kid is unknown. One theory is that Holden rapes and kills the Kid. Another is that the Kid is tempted by Holden to rape the girl. The latter is supported by the fact that an unknown man was walking away from the outhouse and told the other men not to approach. This may have been the Kid walking away from his actions. The Judge has attempted to corrupt the Kid throughout their acquaintance and make him commit acts of evil. However, the Kid already committed many sins and killed a 15-year-old boy in the previous chapter (albeit in self-defense), so the Judge may have simply come to end his life.
The Judge is last seen dancing in the dance hall attached to the saloon. He is completely naked and has enchanted the crowd. He says that he never sleeps, and he claims that he will never die.
Abilities, Powers & Skills[]
The Judge is extraordinarily strong and durable. He can hold a heavy howitzer under one arm, break an arm with ease, and crush a man's head so hard that he starts to bleed from his ears. Holden also has incredible stamina, being capable of walking vast stretches of desert without ill effect. His large size betrays his capacity for stealth, and he often appears and disappears like a phantom without anyone noticing. It is these traits that suggest the judge is not, in fact, human but a demon of some sort.
The Judge is an appointed judge of law and enjoys all the privileges that come with such a position, including the ability to negotiate for the pardoning of criminals. While his jurisdiction is not known, he can cite the words of the law from several jurisdictions from memory. He is a genius polymath with an exceptional level of intelligence and has extensive knowledge of many branches of science, including geology, botany, history, chemistry, and archaeology, and also can draw lifelike portraits of objects.
He is skilled at hiding his atrocities and never leaves behind any evidence. He can speak several secondary languages, including Spanish and Dutch. He possesses great strategic and tactical prowess, so much so that it causes Tobin to believe he cannot be overcome in battle.
Quotes[]
| “ | Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. | „ |
| ~ Judge Holden's desire to exercise complete dominion over the world. |
| “ | The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate. | „ |
| ~ Judge Holden to Toadvine. |
| “ | The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos. | „ |
| ~ Judge Holden after being asked why he catches birds. |
| “ | It makes no difference what men think of war, War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way. | „ |
| ~ Judge Holden about war. |
| “ | Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. |
„ |
| ~ Judge Holden philosophizing his views on war. |
| “ | Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural. | „ |
| ~ Judge Holden in his moral law lecture. |
| “ | Hear me, man, There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don't. | „ |
| ~ Judge Holden to the man. |
| “ | He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. | „ |
| ~ The ending of Blood Meridian. |
External Links[]
- Judge Holden on the Wikipedia
- Judge Holden on the Pure Evil Wiki
- Judge Holden on the VS Battles Wiki
- Judge Holden on the Ultimate Evil Wiki