Religion: Serpents Taken Up

When Jesus Christ first appeared to His assembled disciples after His resurrection, He told them that believers “shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents” (Mark: 16:17, 18). To many a U. S. religionist of the Pentecostal or “Holy Roller” variety, the “gift of tongues” has long been vivid reality. In recent years the taking up of serpents has gained equal favor. Two years ago in Sylva, N. C. a rawboned mountaineer named Albert Teester let himself be bitten by a rattlesnake, became gravely ill, recovered (TIME, Aug. 20, 1934). Soon in Birmingham one female and three male Holy Rollers safely handled a rattler from which, it later was revealed, the fangs had been drawn at the behest of their Rev. Dewey L. Dotson. Famed in the rural districts of Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia is George Hensley, a cracker parson who has been publicly snakebitten 200 times, is apparently immune to serpent venom.

Holy Rollers gathered two Sundays ago in Virginia near Mulberry Gap on the Tennessee border. Their pastor, 60-year-old Rev. Hugh C. Anderson who had once been a Southern Methodist minister, taught school and run for the Legislature, had survived a rattlesnake bite last year, was ready this time to take up not one but three serpents as a test of faith. Holy Roller Anderson shoved both arms in a box holding two rattlers, one copperhead. He was bitten three times. While 100 Holy Rollers shouted and sang, Anderson reeled, was assisted from the platform and taken home. “I’ll hold out faithful to the end,” he gasped. Last week he summoned doctors. No toxicologists, they watched him die, declined to say whether it was from the delay or from the mixture of venom, potent even for Southern believers in pious immunity.