In the wake of the Civil War in America a curious movement sprang up across the South, Pentecostal snake-handling. Putting the dramatic and often deadly details of these rituals aside for a moment, a most fascinating aspect of this evangelical burlesque, one in which no member of the congregation could guarantee they’d make it through to tea and biscuits, is that it arose by what Rupert Sheldrake would call ‘morphic resonance’.
‘The beginnings of Pentecostal snake handling rituals cannot be ascribed to a single person. The observance arose independently on multiple occasions.’ Wiki
In other words, the snake handling pastors didn’t get the idea a box of copper heads might liven up the service from each other. Like blue tits across the land figuring out how to take the tops off milk bottles faster than blue tits can communicate the news, the snake handlers all came up with the same original idea to take a clutch of rattlesnakes to church on Sunday at the same time and for the same reason.
Now, waddafug is that all about?
At what point did worship and the prospect of sudden death get conflated in the collective imagination?
Way, waay back when some bright spark decided that he wanted to be a king rather than a chief, when he developed a taste for status superfluous to his already being the boss by way of also being the incarnate deity, perhaps that was the moment when there arose in humanity the wish to remain identified with the Gods. It might not even have been his own idea, after all…
“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” – Edward R. Murrow
In what way, you might wonder, might it serve the people to have this now divine and deadly figure in their midst? The prospect of protection from the regal right hand palls, given the likely activities of the left. It seems as though the need for kings, like the need for rattlers on Sunday, has some deeper significance.
Over the millennia, as individual consciousness has been slowly emerging out of the fogbank of collective identity, it has been faced with the problem of developing a relationship with that out of which it seeks to be differentiated. Some kind of diplomatic process has to be set up between ego and self, something that both connects and separates.
We managed this collective scam by designating the ruler a god, which is what the transition from chief to king entails. Having the ruler be a god is a kind of intermediate state between the extremes of being entirely identified with the collective to the detriment of individuality or pursuing it at the expense of communion.
The king gets to be God and through him you get to be God too, whilst also enjoying the new fangled development of individual consciousness and the lark of personal destiny without having to be separated from or rejected by the Gods, as the doleful story of Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden so fearfully portrays.
Such divine truculence on the behalf of God necessitates the advent of kings, rulers beyond the law, both as a safe conduit to the Gods and as figure to blame when the Gods are unforthcoming. Paradoxically, it serves the people for another to have such power over them. We get to have our cake and eat it, sufficiently differentiated from the Gods to be able to say ‘I’ and ‘me’, whilst maintaining connection to the divine by being the king’s subject. He will do all the fancy officiating stuff on your behalf, leaving you free to go fishing, write poetry, make love.
There is, however, a teensy wee problem.
This arrangement has some unfortunate small print in the contract, namely that it gives rise to a rather particular form of paranoia. The conflation of king and God required to pull off this Brexit from collective consciousness is an act of inflation which has to be appeased, traditionally in blood. So there is something to be paranoid about. The kings are bound to sacrifice their people to this end, just as the people are bound to sacrifice their kings.
Many cultures in ancient times sacrificed their kings to the Gods after fixed terms, to make the crops grow and give someone else a turn. During their lifetimes these same royals waged war upon each other whose singular purpose was to obtain captives for sacrifice to impatient God.. The Aztecs had a special name for it, ‘the Flower Wars’, whose purpose was not rape or pillage but capture and sacrifice.
Only recently have we given making war the glaze of righteous indignation. The Trobriand Islanders of the Pacific made ritualized war on each other without any personal animus. In mid April you went off and fought the Blue Parrot tribe. Not because you disliked them but because the gods required it. When the first man died, but mostly before then, someone would call a halt, the Gods having been mollified by all the hollering and cool gear everyone is wearing for the occasion. So then, it being apparent just how everyone gave the day their best effort, all participants would slope off to easier tasks like feasting on wild pig and drinking coconut wine.
We, more civilized, cannot bear the idea that in our meek souls there lies anything resembling blood debt to ambivalent gods and so we fondly imagine wars to be about other things, booty, land, slighted honor. Having missed the point, thousands perish were a few bruises would do.
The waste of numberless dead notwithstanding, how shall we propitiate the Gods when peace breaks out? Well, we seem to have found all kinds of interesting ways to deal with the ego/self paradox. The snake handlers of Appalachia, Tennessee and Carolina found a uniquely homegrown solution to appeasing the Gods whilst continuing to identify with them.
This ecumenical two step confers salvation on the snake handler for not getting bitten without condemning him if he does. Every once in a while someone gets sacrificed. The others pray over him, their collective sin momentarily expiated to live and sin another day. If the pastor lives he is filled with the living faith and all is well. If he dies, then his sacrifice cleanses the community and all is well. You can see how it might appeal, how people might even fight for the constitutional right to put themselves in harms way.
In 2013, a Mr. Coots published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal making an argument for U.S. Constitutional protection regarding religious freedom, especially freedom to practice the unique variety of religion found in snake-handling churches. Unfortunately, Mr. Coots died on 15 February 2014 from a snakebite before having the chance to further represent his cause.
It’s easy to dismiss such folk as fools though maybe we’d be given pause for the thought by the idea that they are the visible and flamboyant end of a dynamic in which we have all been participating for several thousand years, a cycle of kings sacrificing subjects and subjects sacrificing kings to propitiate un-named Gods for taking such chummy liberties with them.
The bedecked warriors of the Flower Wars or the ecstatic Snake-Handler may seem to belong to another time and place. Yet isn’t the news entirely filled with stories of people baying for the leader’s blood? And hasn’t said leader sacrificed his people with inaction, denial and obstruction?
The historian Jon Meecham notes that there is a growing correlation between covid cases and whether a county in the USA is red or blue, with Trumpeters claiming they’d rather die than [omnipotently] ‘kill the economy’.
So you might blanche at the barbarism of the Aztecs or scratch your head at the Snake-Handlers but we aren’t so different. We too have found creative ways to propitiate the Gods, though less directly, through catastrophe, incompetence, refrigeration trucks of the dead.
The Snake Handler’s belief that he can avert disaster by faith is no different from Trump’s belief that Corona virus would disappear by a miracle. Or that a laying on of hands might make him a half decent person. We should expect, when he gets bitten, as he will, that it wasn’t his fault. We must also expect him to pass the snakes around before he succumbs, knowing that not all of us will make it through to the end of the hymn sheet from which we are all so faithfully singing..
