From the Narrow Desert: Serpents

Showing posts with label Serpents. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Still "From the Narrow Desert"

A few weeks ago I discovered and started listening to a second Vampire Weekend song, "Step":

This is the chorus:

The gloves are off, the wisdom teeth are out
What you on about?
I feel it in my bones, I feel it in my bones
I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house
Such a modest mouse
I can't do it alone, I can't do it alone

Given the immediate context, I don't think "the wisdom teeth are out" refers to routine dental surgery. It means "the snake has bared its fangs," snakes being a metonym for wisdom ("wise as serpents"). The third line reinforces this reading with its (probably unintentional) nod to Emily Dickinson's "A narrow Fellow in the Grass":

But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.

Listening to "Step" now, I naturally think of Narrow Brain, "the snake-pale, narrow-faced one," the malevolent spirit in Time and Mr. Bass. In the post I've just linked, I noted with concern the link between Narrow Brain and my blog title From the Narrow Desert. It's a line from a poem by George MacDonald in Phantastes. The complete couplet is:

From the narrow desert, O man of pride,
Come into the house, so high and wide.

I've been thinking of the implications of that last line because of the recent syncs relating to the Wise Men: "And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him" (Matt. 2:11).

And what does the chorus of "Step" say? "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house."

I started to think that maybe it was time to retire the name From the Narrow Desert. I started the blog in 2018, when I was circling around Christianity like a moth but had not yet made the plunge. It expressed my aspiration to find my way out of the narrow desert of know-nothing materialism and into the "house" of a coherent Christian worldview. And, I thought, haven't I done that? I made it -- right, guys? Whatever else you might say about me, I'm not a narrow materialist anymore. I've made it into the house. Maybe I should change the blog name to High and Wide.

When I played "Step" just now, YouTube queued up after it an unfamiliar song by an unfamiliar band: "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco:

The video shows Brendon Urie walking up the side of a skyscraper in Los Angeles until he reaches the roof, where he performs with his band. At first I took this as confirmation -- it's a house that's very high -- but almost immediately I realized that this interpretation didn't sit well with me. Urie (a lapsed Mormon, incidentally, and not in a good way) never actually goes into the building. He stays on the outside, never entering its heart, and uses it to realize his "high hopes" -- which turn out to be no higher than some vapid dream of being a famous pop star. This isn't the imagery of the Wise Men bowing down to the infant Christ, but of the people who wanted "a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven," an idea planted in their hearts by the same being who plotted with Gadianton (Hel. 6:28).

Returning to "Step," "Such a modest mouse!" now seems like a sarcastic response to "I'm stronger now, I'm ready for the house."

In 2002, They Might Be Giants released their first children's album, No!, and these lines from "The House at the Top of the Tree" startled me:

There's a plan to eat the house
In the mind of a mouse in the woods.

Back when I lived in Maryland, more than a decade before this song was released, we had a big tree house which was the site of some strange goings-on. We had a big antique radio in there, with which we picked up transmissions we imagined were from outer space, dealing with a sort of bomb called "the Big Herbie," which they regularly threatened to drop on us. The tree was down in a ravine, so the tree house could be entered by a ramp connecting it to higher ground, without the need for a ladder. One time my sister and I went into the tree house only to find two large snakes coiled around the radio. They looked like colubrids of some kind, and therefore non-venomous, but they still scared us enough that we turned tail and ran back down the ramp.

A persistent mental image or fantasy I used to have while in that tree house was that somewhere deep in the woods but not far away was a "mouse" that wanted to eat the tree house. I could feel its presence and its thoughts, like those of the nightmare toad. Although I thought of it as a "mouse," my mental image was of a very large animal almost like a rodent grizzly bear. When I saw the illustration associated with the TMBG song, it startled me even more:

Where do mental images come from? Why would we get the same one like that?

I've been reading the Psalms, a few a day, and today these two passages jumped out at me:

Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me (Ps. 131:1).
Lord, remember David, and all his afflictions: How he sware unto the Lord, and vowed unto the mighty God of Jacob; Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house . . . until I find out a place for the Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob (Ps. 132:1-5).

So no, I'm not going to rename the blog. High hopes to one side, these posts remain dispatches from the narrow desert.

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

They shall take up serpents

When I got up this morning, I found that the wallpaper image on my phone had inexplicably been changed from an astronomical photograph to one of a coiled rattlesnake -- a photo I had found online and saved on October 18. I guess I must somehow have set it to wallpaper while asleep or half-asleep, but I have absolutely no hint of any memory of doing so. Changing the wallpaper would have been a multi-step process -- tapping through several screens in Settings, scrolling through to a not-so-recent photo -- and I don't see how I could possibly have done it without the benefit of full waking consciousness, but I did, obviously.

As discussed in my last post, my thoughts after waking soon turned to Jannes and Jambres, the Egyptian magicians who duplicated some of the miracles of Moses and Aaron -- including turning rods into snakes:

And the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, "When Pharaoh shall speak unto you, saying, Shew a miracle for you: then thou shalt say unto Aaron, Take thy rod, and cast it before Pharaoh, and it shall become a serpent."

And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the Lord had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.

Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods (Ex. 7:8-12).

This echoes an earlier miracle, the first shown to Moses after he was called by the burning bush:

And Moses answered and said, "But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee."

And the Lord said unto him, "What is that in thine hand?"

And he said, "A rod."

And he said, "Cast it on the ground."

And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.

And the Lord said unto Moses, "Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail" -- and he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand -- "that they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee" (Ex. 4:1-5).

Taking a snake by the tail is crazy, suicidal behavior -- but Moses did it, and it became a rod in his hand. Not until today did I think to connect this story with the strange promise in the epilogue to the Gospel of Mark:

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; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover (Mark 16:17-18).

A few fringe groups like the Church of God with Signs Following take this as an invitation to practice ritual snake-handling as a demonstration of faith. I suppose most "normal" Christians are taught what I was: that the intended meaning was that God could miraculously protect believers from snakebite when necessary (as reportedly happened with Paul in Acts 28), not that we should "tempt God" by intentionally risking it. The Bible does say they shall actively take up serpents, though. The only biblical account of someone doing that is that of Moses -- and in his case what had been a serpent became a rod in his hand.

I think this miracle has a similar symbolic meaning to that of Jesus walking on the surface of the stormy sea: You take something slithery and treacherous, treat it as firm and solid, and it becomes so for you. This is shown in the "King and Lionheart" video, where slithery insubstantial creatures of light become solid enough to climb or run across when treated as such:

I think this may also be related to Samuel's prophecy about all things becoming slippery:

Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them (Hel. 13:34-36).

Isn't this Moses' first miracle in reverse -- or rather the first part of the two-part miracle? Lay a tool down -- a rod, say -- and it comes to life and slithers away. The difference is that the accursed "cannot hold them" again, but Moses can -- provided he has the courage to reach out and take a living snake by the tail.

This connection came to me in a meditative state this afternoon while I was saying my Rosary. It struck me how like a snake the string of beads was, and how when I took it up it became as solid and reliable as the iron rod of Lehi. Then I remembered that very similar imagery had been used in The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet:

And now, to the boys' amazement, Ta drew from around his neck the beautiful necklace of stones and flung it up to them -- and as it came slithering and swerving upward through the green air, it seemed almost like something alive. "You must divide the stones between you," said Ta, "and because of them, you will always remember me . . . . Those stones were taken from our Sacred Hall in the depths of the mountains, and are given only to the kings of our people" (p. 117).

Stones -- more solid and inflexible even than a rod -- slither like something alive. Despite Ta's instruction, the boys never do divide the stones between them; the necklace remains intact.

Back on Earth, the boys believe the necklace has been lost, washed away to sea, but later Chuck produces it, and it is explicitly likened to a serpent:

And like some marvelous rainbow-colored serpent the necklace of Ta poured from his fingers and hung there, swaying back and forth in the bright air (p. 168).

Asked how he had recovered it, Chuck explains:

I looked down into one of those little rock pools, and I thought, 'What a beautiful crab.' And then I thought, 'But there's never been a crab as beautiful as that!' and I got down on my knees and put my hand in the rock pool -- and pulled out Ta's necklace (p. 168).

There's an echo of Moses here, too. Reaching for a crab in a rock pool may be considerably less foolhardy than taking a serpent by the tail, but in ordinary circumstances you would still be risking a nasty nip. When he grasped the "crab," though, it became a necklace of stones in his hand.

Given all the brilliant colors of Ta's necklace, I almost think that the crustacean Chuck saw in the pool must have looked more like this:

Saturday, December 3, 2022

Sync: Archaic Revival and the serpents and birds of paradise

I'm normally reading several books at once. I'm still in the middle of Valentin Tomberg's Lazarus, Come Forth! but last night I randomly decided to start reading a book I'd picked up some time ago but never opened: Terence McKenna's The Archaic Revival (1992). I only read a few pages. Between the table of contents and the foreword was this full-page illustration by the German collage artist Wilfried Sätty.

A naked couple in a jungle with a huge snake -- a pretty obvious Garden of Eden reference, presumably chosen by McKenna because of the forbidden fruit's character as a "mind-altering plant." There are also a lot of birds in the picture -- vultures or cormorants or something, but also, by virtue of the setting in which they appear, "birds of paradise."

I didn't really think much about it until today, when I picked up Lazarus, Come Forth! again and read this:

The madness in which Nietzsche's great adventure ended was not personally deserved; nor was it brought about by addiction to a personal lust for power, position, and greatness. Nietzshce was a sacrifice to the superhuman force of the collective all-human subconscious, which came to a kind of volcanic eruption in him. And what broke through there was the archaic evolutionary drive itself, belonging to the most archaic layer of humanity's subconscious. Here lies the most general and most hidden drive working in the subconscious of man: this is the impulse and promise given by the serpent in Paradise.

Here again the word archaic and the idea of revival (one of the main themes of the book, as indicated by its title) are paired with the serpent in Paradise.

My decision to start reading a book by a drug guru was probably inspired in part by the experience recounted in my recent post "Nutmeg is a drug." In that post, I mentioned that nutmeg belongs to the same class of drugs as datura, and I told how I had tried in vain to track down a novel I had read as a child in which a bird became intoxicated by eating nutmegs. I had reached the tentative conclusion that it must be one of the many English versions of The Swiss Family Robinson, but Kevin McCall has discovered that it was actually 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. (Oddly, in the post I had mentioned dreams of the sort "where you wake up feeling as if you've been underwater.") Check out the context:

Some inoffensive serpents glided away from us. The birds of paradise fled at our approach, and truly I despaired of getting near one, when Conseil, who was walking in front, suddenly bent down, uttered a triumphant cry, and came back to me bringing a magnificent specimen.

"Ah! bravo, Conseil!"

"Master is very good."

"No, my boy; you have made an excellent stroke. Take one of these living birds, and carry it in your hand."

"If master will examine it, he will see that I have not deserved great merit."

"Why, Conseil?"

"Because this bird is as drunk as a quail."

"Drunk!"

"Yes, sir; drunk with the nutmegs that it devoured under the nutmeg-tree under which I found it. See, friend Ned, see the monstrous effects of intemperance!"

Another book I am reading at the moment is Divination in Ancient Israel by Frederick H. Cryer, a lot of which is devoted to preliminaries. (Not until p. 229 does the actual discussion of ancient Israel begin.) In a passage I read a few days ago, Cryer is commenting on the book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by E. E. Evans-Pritchard and cites, of all the things to cite in this rather pedantic book, The Teachings of Don Juan.

[Evans-Pritchard's] distinction between "empirical reality" and "Zande explanations" of the same cannot ultimately be maintained. Just how meaningless the distinction in question can be may be illustrated by an event in the course of Carlos Castaneda's initiation at the hands of a Yaqui "man of power", Don Juan. Having been taught how to prepare the datura plant for a psychic excursion, Castaneda has an experience of being transformed into a bird and soaring above and away from his mentor. . . .

I've posted about this business of transforming into a bird before -- and no prizes for guessing what specific kind of bird! See my 2020 post "Whitley Strieber and the thing that turned into a bird of paradise."

I also note in passing that the Spanish don derives from Latin dominus, while Juan is the Spanish form of Iohannes. Both Latin words featured prominently in my recent post "What does 'do-re-mi' mean?" as they are the reason the scale begins with do and ends with si.