Serpent Handling: Toward a Cognitive Account – Honoring the Scholarship of Ralph W. Hood Jr.

The ritual handling of serpents remains an unnoticed cultural form for the explanatory aims and theoretical insights desired by cognitive scientists of religion. In the current article, we introduce the Hood and Williams archives at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga that contains data culled from Hood’s 40-plus year career of studying serpent handlers. The archives contain hundreds of hours of interviews and recordings of speaking in tongues, handling fire, drinking poison, and taking up serpents by different congregants and congregations. The archive remains a rich but untapped source of data for building, testing, and refining cognitive theories of ritual in general, and serpent handling in specific. We connect Hood’s work to current cognitive theories and engage critically with research on the social functions of ritual. Finally, we discuss several further reasons to pay more attention to SHS communities and practices in cognitive theories of ritual.

Serpent Handling: Toward a Cognitive Account-honoring the scholarship of Ralph W

The ritual handling of serpents remains an unnoticed cultural form for the explanatory aims and theoretical insights desired by cognitive scientists of religion. In the current article, we introduce the Hood and Williams archives at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga that contains data culled from Hood’s 40-plus year career of studying serpent handlers. The archives contain hundreds of hours of interviews and recordings of speaking in tongues, handling fire, drinking poison, and taking up serpents by different congregants and congregations. The archive remains a rich but untapped source of data for building, testing, and refining cognitive theories of ritual in general,and serpent handling in specific. We connect Hood’s work to current cognitive theories and engage critically with research on the social functions of ritual. Finally, we discuss several further reasons to pay more attention to SHS communities and practices in cognitive theories of ritual.

Rattlesnakes, Holiness, and the Nearness of the Holy Spirit

Although the outside image of southern Pentecostal Holiness is often sensationalized by associations with serpent handling believers, that actual practice is confined to roughly a thousand individuals in an Appalachian crescent in the South. The story of Wesleyan Holiness belief in the nineteen century transforming in the twentieth to a wide variety of Pentecostal bodies is an important one that gains importance in the contemporary era wherein the South’s growing number of “bapticostal” black churches and other churches effecting the prosperity gospel far outnumber the formal number of Pentecostal churches. Furthermore, the convictions that the Holy Spirit is nearby and waiting on believers’ calling have come to characterize even many mainline and evangelical churches’ practice to the point where one can speak of the Pentecostalization of southern Christianity.