Why does this call Jan Pauls to mind? Scholars have long speculated that snake handling—as both a religious ritual and a folk practice—predated Hensley by perhaps a decade, but apparently religious leaders did not feel a need to record earlier incidents of snake handling at coal camps or in brush arbor meetings. The earliest references to serpent handling appeared in non-southern sources. Secular news sources from 1909 reported on a “queer sect” of “snake worshippers” in Hutchinson, Kansas, that allowed snakes to bite one another during worship services.* These accounts did not frame the worshippers as holy rollers and did not regard them as pentecostal even though the handlers quoted in these reports directly appealed to a pentecostal logic for handling snakes and specifically cited the “signs” of Mark 16. 51 For their part, the “snake worshippers” self-identified as the “True Followers of Jesus of Christ.” As with Hensley’s later embrace of the practice, these earliest accounts suggest that a certain convergence of reading, healing, and preaching strategies connected to Mark 16—in conjunction with attention from the popular press—led to the development of the practice in the early twentieth century. The Hutchinson church attracted attention because it allowed children to handle snakes and at least one church member had gone “missing” (likely died, but the sources are not clear on this issue) as a result of handling snakes in church. *“Worshipers Are Bitten,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 18, 1909, in America’s Historical Newspapers database (hereafter cited as AHN); “Serpents in Their Religion,” The Kansas City Times, June 22, 1909, AHN; “Snake Worshipers Are Found in Kansas,” Kalamazoo Gazette, June 25, 1909, AHN; “Snake Worshippers,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 27, 1909 AHN; “Queer Sect Not Afraid Of Snakes,” Trenton Evening Times, August 25, 1909, AHN; “Queer Sect Immune from Snake Poison,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 27, 1909, AHN. jsr.fsu.edu/issues/vol15/mcvicar.html
Posted on: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 00:28:47 +0000
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