When the Spirit Maims and Kills: Social Psychological Considerations of the History of Serpent Handling Sects and the Narrative of Handlers

Abstract

An analysis of the serpent handling sects (SHS) of Southern Appalachia based on extensive participant observation reveals that they are not a bizarre aberration of religion doomed to extinction. They are a deviant religious sect with importance both for the scientific study of religion and for the theological implications of their beliefs and practices. The textual justification for serpent handling presented in typical believer narratives reveals a rich tradition whose practices and rituals are themselves integral to the emphasis on textually justified expressions of emotion within Pentecostalism. The serpent serves to ensure the inability to routinize out- comes that themselves can produce either maiming or death and hence, require beliefs and procedures that ensure adequate confrontation with fear as a basic emotion that must be both elicited and overcome in the rituals central to SHS.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.