Serpent-Handling Believers

What enables a person to handle poisonous snakes, drink poison, stick bare hands into hot furnaces, thus superseding human law? Ask the Pentecostals in Serpent-Handling Believers and they answer, "The anointment of the Holy Ghost." The Spirit of God descends, enters, possesses, fills, baptizes and enables. Such anointment is to be distinguished from the more usual Spirit indwelling given to all who give their lives to God. Though new and changed, the believer is fully anointed only when God's Spirit takes complete control of the body and begins to shout and speak in tongues and preach through you.

Says Anna Prince, kin to two famous serpent handling preachers, her father Ulysses and late brother Charles: "It's a spiritual trancelike strand of power linking humans to God.... You know you are right with God, totally in tune with God; everything is right with everyone on earth.... It's a power surge that is near to a light electrical shock and a sexual orgasm simultaneously felt, but it is not sexual or electrical, just a similar sensation.... It's addicting—once you feel it you want to feel it again; it causes people who get hooked on the feeling to band with others who feel it in order to get a bigger and deeper high.... The anointing is catching; once it begins, it often runs around the room from person to person—sometimes whole buildings of people are hit at once, and everyone stands up and begins moving around the building and praising God."

Pastor Liston Pack, another renowned serpent handler, speaks of the Holy Ghost having different gifts, some get numb, others a tingling sensation particularly in the hands. "I don't think any two people get anointed just alike," he says. When anointing comes upon him, "You would think I was havin' a stroke or somethin' tremendous was takin' place." His scalp gets numb, then his face-"just feel like I didn't have any face"—then the hands, skin followed by the complete loss of use of the body.

"Then I am fully anointed," declares Pack. "I don't care what happens. I don't care how big the serpent is, how big the devil-possessed person. At my anointin', as I speak, it will bring out the demon power that's in the person or the serpent that's in the box. I don't care where its head is, I don't care where its tail's at or the middle of it; I don't care where it's at, and I'll handle it just any way that I see fit. And that's as close to the anointing that I can explain."

It is thought that serpent handling began in East Tennessee in 1912, spread by the legendary George Went Hensley, a Church of God preacher. Like all such people, says the author, he was "strong, courageous and ethical...a person willing to die for his beliefs. Not only willing, he repeatedly verified that commitment directly and concretely."

Among the biblical verses serpent handlers cite to defend their practice is Mark 16:17-18: 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; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Music is an important part of the serpent-handling service. The serpents do not hear the service, since they don't have the auditory mechanism for airborne sound. One serpent handler says the music helps him get "his mind on God.... It's like a booster—like preaching, testifying or praying. It helps you get into the perfect will of God."

Improvisatory in nature, serpent-handling music is characterized by free melodic and textual variation. Religious prose and biblical texts are set to a mixture of commercial bluegrass and country-western music. The two most distinctive things about the music are its blues harmonic progressions and melodic repetition.

Pastor Liston Pack once had his EEG recorded as he called down the anointing. Though his alpha rhythm was never as steady or slow as those obtained by mystical Christians or yogis, the fact he could call down the anointing in an alien, scientific atmosphere showed his control over his mental state. When the anointing began, there was a sudden conversion of alpha to beta. The beta rhythm persisted throughout the anointing. It is a very active state, not like that of a monk in contemplation. "Taken as a unit," says the researcher, "the Rev. Pack's EEG patterns [show that] the keys to understanding his physiological, or at least neurological, functioning during anointment are probably more likely to be found in the literature on hypnosis, than in that on meditation."

The most personal, poetic and tragic insight into this form of Pentecostal worship is given in the book's autobiographical sketch, "A Snake-Handler's Daughter," by Anna Prince. Her father, Ulysses G. Prince, prayed every morning in the toilet behind the house. "He and Mamma liked Jesus a lot. I was afraid of Jesus." Finally anointed, he spoke in tongues and felt called to preach. Ordering a Bible and a guitar from Sears and Roebuck, he began to street preach. Four years later Ulysses and Anna, then nine years old, visited a small church where two brothers handled snakes. Both had their arms in slings from snake bites. "Suddenly," Anna says, "Daddy jumped up from the back bench where we were sitting, jumped over the little white picket fence around the church podium and grabbed a copperhead out of the snake box. He looked happy and excited as he held it in the air. We all watched in astonishment. He had a strange gleam in his eyes as he drove us home." After that, both parents quit their jobs. Her mother wept, "Ulys, how am I going to make clothes for these kids?" Answered Ulysses—"The Lord will provide, Sister Prince."

Her father heard of people in West Virginia who were drinking poison following Mark 16:18: If they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them. He bought some Red Devil Lye used for unclogging drainpipes. Mixing it with one teaspoon to a pint of water, he took a sip. It burnt a hole in his tongue. He went up on the mountain and fasted for a week. Tasting it again, it tasted sweet. Anna says the family lived a clean life, not smoking, drinking—even coffee—wearing jewelry or going to movies. "Anything Daddy even imagined might be a sin, we stopped doing immediately.... We strove to be clean, truthful, honest, and sincere."

The intensity, total commitment and self-sacrifice of these mountain people reminds one of the Early Christians or even the Yezidis, themselves snake handlers, or the Ahl-i Haqq, People of the Truth, who handle hot coals. Hounded by the sheriff and seen as ignorant primitives by the so-called sophisticated, the life and strength of these serpent handling believers leaps across the pages of this extraordinary book.