D H Lawrence and ‘The Plumed Serpent’

When completed in 1925, the author was pleased with the result: 'It interests me, means more to me than any other novel of mine. This is my real novel of America...' And his German wife Frieda commented later 'All of Lawrence is in that book. Two years he spent writing it, one winter in Chapala and the next winter in Oaxaca'. But just how far did Lawrence succeed in faithfully portraying Mexican culture - particularly its pre-Columbian roots?

Pic 1: Lake Chapala at sunset

According to his close American travelling companion, the poet Witter Bynner, the germ of the novel's theme may well have come to him at Teotihuacán, where, as Bynner wrote, 'In the great quadrangle of Quetzalcoatl, we saw Lawrence stand looking and brooding. The coloured stone heads of the feathered snakes in one of the temples were a match for him. The stone serpents and owls [presumably the Tlaloc reliefs!] held something that he obviously feared. In The Plumed Serpent he mentions "the ponderous pyramids of San Juan Teotihuacan, the House of Quetzalcoatl with the snake of all snakes, his huge fangs white and pure today as in the lost centuries when his makers were alive. He has not died. He is not so dead as the Spanish churches, this all-enwreathing dragon of the horror of Mexico."'

Pic 3: The Lawrences with friends, Mitla, 1924

Unable to fathom the Mexican Indian psyche - Lawrence wrote off Mexico's magnificent Day of the Dead festival ('There's no hope or happiness in it, no real gaiety, only a black, crude cynicism') - Lawrence succumbed to his personal fears and complexes, his distrust of people, his homesickness, his tuberculosis, his anti-democratic politics, his belief in racial superiority: speaking through Kate in the novel he writes of her (his) being from '... a proud old family. She had been brought up with the English-Germanic idea of the intrinsic superiority of the hereditary aristocrat. Her blood was different from the common blood, another, finer fluid. But in Mexico none of this...' (Lawrence called mixed-bloods 'a calamity', and claimed that 'the dark races belong to a bygone cycle of humanity').

Pic 5: The Lawrences with Witter Bynner, Teotihuacán, 1923

For Lawrence the solution was ever-so-simple: 'They need a new religion.' And so was born his search for deliverance through a messianic new belief system, in which the gods themselves 'must be born again', led by a new Quetzalcóatl (and a new Lawrence...), and symbolised by the 'snake of all snakes' that had haunted him at Teotihuacán. Lawrence (through Kate) 'could well understand the potency of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya imagination. Something smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in this man [Cipriano in the novel] suggested the heavy-ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins. That was what it was, the heavy-ebbing blood of powerful reptiles, the dragon of Mexico.'

Pic 7: 'La Serpiente Enplumada', Teotihuacán

Entire temples were dedicated to the cult of the Plumed Serpent, rich in relief sculptures of flowing feathered snakes... Often - the best examples are at Teotihucacán and at Xochicalco - the temples were jointly dedicated to Quetzalcóatl and to Tlaloc (god of rain). Quetzalcóatl was largely a benevolent god, associated with learning, knowledge and general prosperity. Because of an age-old connection between him and good government, rulers and priests adopted his name, the most famous being the legendary leader of the Toltec people, Ce Acatl Quetzalcóatl.

Pic 9: The Pyramid of the Serpents at Xochicalco

In fact the early carvings of plumed serpents at Teotihuacán seem to reflect the idea of the benefits to humankind of good government (both earthly and divine). In the mural paintings of Techinantitla, Teotihuacán, plumed serpents can be seen pouring rain over growing vegetation - and over rulers' thrones, perhaps as a symbol of the high value placed on the responsibilities of governing the earth.

Pic 11: Karl Taube's drawing of plumed serpents on top of petates, Teotihuacán

If D H Lawrence could only see the dark, negative 'face' of the Mesoamerican plumed serpent - the stone sculpture in the National Museum he describes in the novel as 'hideous,fanged, writhing...' - and failed to grasp its age-old duality, he made some beautifully perceptive comments on ancient Mexican culture in general.
In conversation with Kate the young Mexican Mirabal sings the praises of the very names of the Mexican deities: 'Ah, the NAMES of the gods! Don't you think the NAMES are like seeds, so full of magic, of the unexplored magic? Huitzilopochtli! - how wonderful! And Tlaloc! Ah! I love them! I say them over and over, like they say "Mani padma Om!" in Tibet. I believe in the fertility of sound. "Itzpapalotl" the Obsidian Butterfly! Itzpapalotl. But say it, and you will see it does good to your soul. Itzpapalotl. Tezcatlipoca.... Think of "Jehovah! Jehovah!" Think of "Jesus Christ!" How thin and poor they sound...'

Pic 13: Itzapapálotl - 'The Obsidian Butterfly' - in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis

Sources
D H Lawrence: 'The Plumed Serpent', Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1950
Witter Bynner: 'Journey with Genius, Recollections & Reflections concerning the D.H. Lawrences', Peter Nevill Ltd., London, 1953
'La Serpiente Enplumada en Mesoamérica', Arqueología Mexicana, Vol. IX, no. 53, Jan-Feb 2002
David M Jones: 'Mythology of the Aztecs and Maya', Anness Publishing, London, 2003.

Pic 15: © Caroline Kintzel/Nadine Schmitt