Deaths from Ceremonial Snake Handling
Photos by “haunted eclipse”
Photos by “haunted eclipse”
(This is the transcript of a talk I gave at Trampoline Hall, San Francisco, on 16 July 2024, with a semi-fictionalized version of the Q&A session afterwards.)
My wife and I used to live in rattlesnake country, and so I got kind of interested in snakebites — and I came across this quote from a herpetologist, who said that most poisonous snakebites are a result of a combination of two chemicals: alcohol, and testosterone.
A question we can ponder in what follows is: To what extent does that insight hold true in the case of ceremonial snake handling, which results in a significant proportion of the annual fatalities from snakebite.
I’m going to paint a picture for you now — (a slide I would have shown if this event had slides) — a simple low-slung clapboard shack, tin-roofed, down a dirt road near Birchwood, Tennessee. Nailed to the eave over the single door, a crudely painted sign proclaims: “The Dolly Pond Church In Jesus Name Miracle of Salvation With Signs Following — EVERYONE WELCOME”
This is the spiritual institution of George Went Hensley, a bootlegger, drunk, thief, serial adulterer, father of 14 children and, like his father before him and at least one of his sons, a preacher man.
Hensley was probably not the originator of the practice of snake handling, though he claimed to be — even he said he got the idea because he saw it done in his youth — but there is no doubt that he was a charismatic advocate of the practice; by the time he founded that church, he had been peripatetically traveling around the Southeast for some 40 years, procuring snakes locally and revealing them to the assembly at the climax of a service which usually featured one of his wives reading from scripture — as Hensley was illiterate — and occasional drinking of battery acid or cyanide. All of which is signaled by the phrase “signs following” in the name of his church; the signs are those of Mark 16 (verses 17 and 18): “And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them …” A passage with which Hensley was apparently obsessed.
A longer version of this talk might digress here to discuss David Abrams’ claim in his beautiful book The Spell of the Sensuous, that shamans and healers in places like New Guinea and the highlands of Nepal are engaged in a cocreation with their patients, where both parties are “in on the joke” in some sense — and a certain willful suspension of disbelief is mobilized by everyone in attendance, to leverage the power of the placebo effect.
But — we don’t have time for that kind of speculative philosophical mumbo jumbo! Let’s get back to the snake handling!
After leading the faithful in snake-handling services for half a century (and sustaining, so they say, many bites), in July 1955 Hensley showed up in the Florida panhandle, where he was preaching out of a blacksmith’s shop, leading meetings without snakes for several weeks before relapsing into his old ways, and procuring — from somewhere — a 5’ eastern diamondback, which he removed from the lard can in which it was stored and carried with him, wrapped around his neck, while he preached, rubbing its face on his; when attempting to return it to the can, it bit him on the wrist, and he was dead within 24 hours.
Hensley, however, was not the first believer to die after one of his services, for already in the mid 30s he had high-tailed it out of Florida after a young man was bitten twice during one; but not before holding the young man’s funeral, at which, according to reports, snakes were again handled.
The practice did not die out with Hensley — not at all. And here we should briefly digress on the headless and anarchic nature of American Protestantism.
Another slide I would like you to imagine in your mind’s eye: A complex diagram including names like “fundamentalism,” “pentecostalism,” “Evangelical,” “charismatic,” “foursquare” — which, the details are unimportant but, upon examination, it becomes clear that these designations are, first of all, not arrayed like branches of a tree, but rather vague, overlapping ovals; and second, that they are mostly exonyms, not to say slurs, but names that one group gives to another, in a process anthropologists call “schismogenesis” or, on a long enough timescale, “ethnogenesis,” but which begins in a kind of narcissism of small differences: “I believe they do that kind of thing in the next valley over; we don’t do that, here.”
So, as a result of the origins of American Christianity in the rejection of any kind of overarching organization, nobody knows how many churches today practice snake handling; there is no authority that could command it, nor any that could prohibit it; nor is their any governing body to which they could or would report. And so, we really are dependent on the researches of academics, of outsiders; and, since the practice is frowned upon if not illegal in most jurisdictions — the box of snakes is probably not brought out if unfamiliar faces are in the congregation.
Deaths, however, we have a record of; and as I said, while people do die of garden variety mishaps and stupidity, intentional, ceremonial snake handling, as a test of faith, is the cause of a significant proportion of fatalities — about one a year — right up to the present day.
In 1936, the same year as the first death in Hensley’s church, in Virginia Reverend Harvey Kirk handed a snake his pregnant wife, Anna Kirk, who was bitten thrice; after the general practice of her faith, she refused medical attention — either for the bite or the pregnancy — went into labor, and gave birth, without medical intervention; she and her baby both died of the venom. Reverend Kirk ended up serving three months in prison for involuntary manslaughter, but not before skipping town and being tracked down three years later in Florida. It is not recorded whether Kirk continued leading handling services on his release.
(Kirk’s case, by the way, brings up another confounding factor which is that deaths from ceremonial snake handling are not normally recorded as crimes. The overwhelming majority are recorded as “accidental deaths,” with perhaps 5% considered manslaughter and a small few considered as suicide.)
Shall we do some more?
[Audience: Yes!]
Okay, let’s talk about Jamie Coots and Punkin Brown.
Here’s a diagram — in your mind’s eye — of the complicated interrelationships between three generations of Coots’s, and three generations of Browns. The outline of the story is this: In 1995 Melinda Brown, wife of Punkin Brown, dies of snake bite received in Jamie Coots’s church. The state threatens to take their five children from the father, Punkin Brown, because he also leads handling services and keeps a room full of venomous snakes in his house. This problem is soon resolved, though, when Punkin dies of a bite received in one of his own services three years later; custody of the children is granted to Punkin’s parents, and again challenged because they are also believers and are taking their grandchildren to handling services.
And what of Jamie Coots, in whose church the children’s mother was bitten? He was himself a third generation snake handling preacher, and the church had been founded by his grandfather. His father and grandfather both died of natural causes — but Coots was not so lucky, or perhaps his soul was not so free from sin. In an attempt to promote the understanding of his faith, he agrees to appear in a tv program about snake handling, which is canceled — when, tragically, Coots is bitten in a service and dies.
The full plot is byzantine enough to warrant treatment by Tolstoy — or maybe Garcia Lorca. But I think we can draw two conclusions from this story: First that death by ceremonial snake handling is, in some sense, heritable, or anyway the risk is — actuaries take note; and, more subtly, that the snake handling church is the anchor of an internally coherent and insular microsociety, with its own standards and morals.
One final example. This one does not involve a fatality, though it easily could have — and it is rather dark.
Glenn and Darlene Summerford were co-pastors of the Church of Jesus Christ with Signs Following in Scottsboro, Alabama. One night Glenn fell to drinking, and in a drunken rage he held a gun to his wife’s head and forced her to put her hand in the cage where the couple kept the canebrake rattlesnake they brought out for services. She was bitten, and as her hand swelled and blackened, Glenn forced her to write a suicide note to their children, then to put her hand again into the cage, where it was bitten again.
Fortunately for Darlene Summerford, Glenn eventually passed out, and Darlene was able to call her sister who sent an ambulance, and she survived. Glenn Summerford is still in prison for that crime. Had she died, though … it might have been the perfect crime …
So — what to make of all this? Can we draw any conclusions?
I want to be clear to start that, as a card-carrying member of the coastal elite, it would be easy for me to stand up here and poke fun at people with names like Punkin getting bit by snakes they themselves chose to hold — and as much as possible I want to avoid that kind of cheap mockery. There is, of course, a part of me that wishes I had such unshakeable faith. In anything. There is a part of me that wishes I was enmeshed in such a tight-knit and homogeneous community.
And there are, also, other parts that are grateful for my doubt. That are grateful for my relative freedom from social pressure.
Anyway, I think this phenomenon raises some interesting questions, many of which are summed up in the title of I think a beautifully titled paper published in the West Virginia Law Review some years ago: “Protecting the Faithful from their Faith.” I wanna just let that title hang there. Protecting the Faithful from their Faith. What does that mean, in a country founded on the right to freedom of religion? Are there other kinds of faith from which we might wish to protect our fellow Americans? Indeed, are there some who might wish to protect the faithless from their lack of faith?
Who protects? Who decides? Who defines the harms?
I don’t have any answers, but … in closing I’d like to paint another picture for you. A low-ceilinged room, the back of an auto mechanic on the outskirts of town, on a Sunday. We — all of us — are attending service together, and the presence of the Holy Spirit is palpable. Some feel it more than others, but no one can deny that something electrical, something important, is moving in the room. People are falling on the ground, foaming at the mouth, speaking in tongues. The music is rising to an ecstatic pitch.
And then comes the moment, which we have all been awaiting with mingled dread and exaltation: A wooden chest is lifted from behind the pulpit.
Within, writhing, several kinds of venomous serpent. I hold one, a five foot copperhead, while I continue to speak, but you can no longer follow what I am saying.
I hand the snake to you; and you accept it, without thinking. You don’t even really know why, but you take it, and hold it in front of you — and gaze, into its cold, alien, death-dealing eyes.
Thank you.
MC: Wow, that was great!
Hap [shivering a little]: Yeah, I got a little high on my own supply at the end there.
Audience: When was a time when you felt something akin to what you describe? The fear, and the unshakeable faith?
Hap: Well, in a certain sense right now. It’s scary standing up here! And I have faith in all of you.
But if you really asked me, the nearest analogue in my life is probably drinking ayahuasca. I have really come face to face with death on ayahuasca, I’ve really died. And it’s a kind of bedrock to rest on. To know, to really know, what death is … that’s something unshakeable, in my life.
Audience: Snakes? Dicks?
Hap: Yes!
Audience: What made you want to give this talk?
Hap: It seemed like a funny title for a talk.
I have come to realize that I like naming things — and I really like making things that serve as delivery systems for the payload of their name.
For instance, I wrote a book called “A Provisional Manual of West Coast Tantrik Psychedelic Druidry.” And in a certain sense the book is a delivery method for the memetic payload of the title. I mean, it’s a whole book, too. I don’t want to sandbag people, I followed through on the promise of the title. But — if all somebody ever reads is the title, I’ve still accomplished something.
And, this talk is similar; like, once you’ve heard the title, you could kind of give the talk yourself. Like you know this is a practice, and it has some kind of history, probably pretty colorful, pretty picturesque; and you know there are deaths, because it’s right there in the title, so you know there will be some anecdotes. Again, I tried to follow through on the promise of the title, and toss in a few curveballs here and there.
It reminds me a little of something my old poetry teacher, Robert Duncan, said — he said, “Once you’ve called a poem a sonnet, it would be redundant to actually write it in sonnet form.” Which, he was half right. You don’t want to do too much cutesy false advertising. But you can get away with a little.
MC: I’m curious if you want to expand on what you said about the imaginary longer version of the talk, and — was it David Abrams?
Hap: Come on man. I’m not giving that talk. I gave the talk I gave! That’s the whole rhetorical trick — as you are well aware — get your audience to do your thinking for you. If I were smart enough to give that talk, would I be wasting my time here in Trampoline Hall?
Audience: Why snakes? What is the fascination with snakes?
Hap: Well I mean — it’s biological. You know, there’s a deep fear of snakes that’s prehuman, probably pre-primate. Snakes appear in people’s dreams; some people have an uncontrollable panic around snakes, which is probably adaptive.
Audience: What’s the closest you’ve come to a poisonous snake?
Hap: Well — actually, I did meditate with one once. I was hiking, some friends and I were backpacking in Southern Nevada, and I went off by myself, off trail, scrambling in the back country. And up on top of this mesa, I came upon a rattlesnake, coiled. So I sat — out of striking range, you know — in full lotus posture, and meditated with it, looking into its eyes. I’ve always felt a kind of personal kinship with rattlesnakes.
MC: You feel you have a … kinship with rattlesnakes?
Hap: Yeah.
MC: That … makes sense. But I’m curious to hear more.
Hap: Well, uh — something you don’t know about me is, I’m a Zen priest. And there’s this thing about frogs, in Zen. Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, was fond of frogs. He said that zazen is sitting like a frog, still but — ready to, you know, snap your tongue out and catch a fly. And, I kind of, because I have this personal kinship with rattlesnakes, I kind of feel that zazen is more like being a coiled rattlesnake — perfectly still, but completely engaged with all your senses, flickering your tongue, you know, tasting the wind, hyperalert — but deeply still.
Audience: Why don’t they defang the snakes? Do you think it could have the same effect?
Hap: Well, actually, there have been some scandals, where people were using defanged snakes. But no, the point is not just to handle snakes. It’s to handle deadly snakes. It’s a confrontation with mortality, but, that’s not so much the emphasis within the belief system. For the faithful, it’s a test of faith, of purity.
From an outsider’s perspective — you can put together a theory. You know, venomous snakes don’t want to bite large predators. Prey animals, they bite, and use their venom, and the venom is enough to incapacitate their prey pretty quickly. But something big … it’s not going to be incapacitated quickly enough. So if a snake bites a large predator, the snake is almost certainly going to die in the encounter as well. Snakes are slow and they don’t have any other defenses. So the large predator is very likely going to kill the snake, maybe eat it; and then be incapacitated and possibly die itself, hours or days later.
So, it’s, from an evolutionary perspective it’s a mutually assured destruction game. The point, for the snake, is to let the predator know, “You can kill me — but you will die, and I don’t have much meat on my bones, so it’s really not worth it — go pick on somebody else.” And that’s why rattlesnakes have rattles. To let everybody know.
Anyway, so snakes don’t want to bite anybody, unless you’re really egregiously harassing them. You can carry one around, rub it on your face, all that, and your chances are pretty good. Especially if you’re a member of the congregation, if you engage in this behavior once or twice a year — your chances of being bitten are very slight.
If you’re a pastor, though — or a pastor’s wife — and you’re doing this every Sunday, week after week — your odds are a little worse. But still pretty good.
So here you have a very real chance of death, which seems, for evolutionary reasons, much more dangerous than it is. You know … there are people in basements, doing shots of vodka, playing Russian roulette. Because they’re addicted to risk, maybe. I don’t know, I don’t have a theory about them. But they have a one in six chance of getting shot. Snake handlers have much better chances. But it feels dangerous. And if you survive — which you almost certainly will — you feel as if you passed a test. You know, like it says in that passage from the book of Mark: “These signs shall follow them.”
So that’s kind of a cynical theory of what’s going on under the hood. They’re not leveraging the placebo effect, so much as basic human inability to reason probabilistically.
Audience: More on the personal kinship with rattlesnakes?
Hap: Uh … well if you really want to know … so my wife and I used to live in rattlesnake country, as I said, but I also grew up in rattlesnake country, in the hills of southern California, and one day, when I was quite young, maybe four or five, a rattler came down out of the dry hills to this little fishpond that we had, and — you’re not supposed to do this, it’s bad luck — but my dad killed it. He chopped off its head with a shovel. And my mom — she was a terrible mother in many ways, truly awful, but she was also completely amazing in other ways, and my mom, amazingly — she took the snake’s carcass, and she slit its belly all the way down its body, and skinned it, and actually cooked the meat for our dinner. I remember it, it really did taste like chicken. And she dried the skin, flat; and hung it on my bedroom wall. With its rattle. And it hung there on my bedroom wall all throughout my childhood.
And I remember gazing at it there, at night, as I drifted off to sleep.
MC: Hap Savage, everybody.