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ChAPter 1 Mexican Myth and Modern Primitivism: D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent H enry Moore’s British Museum holds as part of its permanent Mexican Gallery Collection a pre-Columbian stone sculpture of a serpent, the heavy figure coiled around itself, flitting tongue frozen on the verge of striking, a gripping representation of both ancient and contemporary Mexico available to Europeans who might not ever travel to the Americas. Archaeological convention argues that preColumbian figures of serpents or snakes symbolically represent Quetzalcoatl , a god of ancient origins.1 Also known as the plumed serpent, its prominence in pre-Conquest Mesoamerica is displayed on artifacts from various cultural contexts dating from the “middle pre-Classic” Olmecas to the “late post-Classic” Aztecas.2 Its importance to contemporary archeologists , anthropologists, and travel writers is displayed in titles such as Feathered Serpent and Smoking Mirror by C. A. Burland and Werner Forman (1975) and Legends of the Plumed Serpent by Neil Baldwin (1998). To Moore’s contemporary, the British traveler and novelist D. H. Lawrence , the serpent signified all that was frightening, seductive, and even inspiring about Mexico. Most biographies point to Bernal Díaz del Castillo ’s The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico and Lewis Spence’s Gods of Mexico as sources for Lawrence’s knowledge of Mexican history and preColumbian mythology.3 Drawing from these accounts, as well as from archeologists and from scholars of comparative mythology like Zelia Nuttall , he set his “American novel” in Mexico and titled it The Plumed Serpent (1926).4 His interest in this Mesoamerican figure merged with his fascination with the uroborus, a symbol that appears in ancient Egypt, among the Phoenicians, but is predominantly associated with the Gnostics and Western alchemy. Carl Jung designated this figure of a snake consuming its own tail as an archetype. In Mysterium Coniunctionis, his study of the 44 Blood Lines links between the symbols of alchemy and developments in theories of the unconscious, Jung writes, “[I]n the age-old image of the uroborus lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process . . . the uroborus is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e., of the shadow . . . he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself” (365).5 The snake, depicting both self-destruction and self-origination, suggests an unending cycle of energy transference and perpetual motion. Lawrence brought these distinct contexts together—ancient Mesoamerican religion and modern psychoanalytic theory—when he chose the selfconsuming snake as the emblem of the masculinist Quetzalcoatl Cult in The Plumed Serpent, borrowing from an archaeological record, as well as from emerging psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious. In Lawrence, the serpent is made to represent Mexico, which itself stands for the primitive , a convenient trope of the modern unconscious that was his real object of interest. American and European writers have repeatedly used the serpent to advance their own understandings of Mexico. The snake, however, is also a dominant image in a Mexican context. For example, Diego Rivera chose to frame his series of mural panels in Mexico City’s Ministry of Public Education with figures of feathered serpents. Mexican scholar Enrique Florescano devoted a book-length study to the serpent, titled The Myth of Quetzalcoatl, published in Spanish in 1993 and translated into English in 1999. Furthermore, one of the most prominent displays of national identity , the Mexican flag, combines modern nationalist sentiments with the fetishization of pre-Columbian history, using the serpent to establish the symbolic origins of the nation. The flag stages a scene from the first page of the Codex Mendoza, commissioned in approximately 1525 by Don Antonio de Mendoza, the first Spanish viceroy, for the purposes of gathering information about the Aztec Empire. The names of the actual authors of the text, a Native artist and a Spanish scribe, are unknown.6 Reiterating the Indigenous account of the founding of Tenochtitlan, the flag depicts the god Huitzilopochtli, in the form of an eagle holding a serpent in its mouth, landing on a nopal (cactus). According to the Codex Mendoza, this was the sign indicating to the Mexica/Aztecas the site of their future empire, Tenochtitlan. This visual on the Mexican flag, selected in 1821 after independence from the Spanish, asserts the beginnings of the Mexican nation, claiming the heritage of a Native, rather than European, past and creating an associative link between contemporary mestiza/o society and the pre-Conquest...

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