Snakes, Arks, Floods

I recently saw someone online say, “There is always a snake in a Lafferty book,” and that is pretty much right. I like the snakes in Lafferty.

For example, I really like the first line of "The Forty-Seventh Island":

“Quincy, we will have to do something about the snakes in the girls' room,” Europa Phelan said.

No one can doubt that Lafferty gets a lot of mileage out of his snakes. Sometimes they’re cartoons, like Sammy and Horace the Snake in Space Chantey. Sometimes they’re two-legged, like the Pythons in Fourth Mansions or Snake-Oil Sam in "In the Garden." Sometimes they’re just plain old snakes. But when Lafferty gets really serious about a snake, he usually has a trick up his sleeve.

That trick is the Protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15, where God declares enmity between the serpent and the woman, between her offspring and the serpent’s offspring:

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

This verse is foundational in Catholic typology and Marian devotion. It is the first promise of a Redeemer and of the triumph of Christ over Satan. Mary, as the New Eve, is seen as the one who opposes the serpent, mirroring Christ’s opposition to sin and death.

As with many Catholics, Lafferty links this to Noah’s Ark—which, typologically, is the womb of Mary. The earliest example of this idea that I know of comes from St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (c. 213–c. 270):

"Let us chant the melody that has been taught us by the inspired harp of David, and say, 'Arise, O Lord, into thy rest; thou, and the ark of thy sanctuary. 'For the Holy Virgin is in truth an ark, wrought with gold both within and without, that has received the whole treasury of the sanctuary."

The woman-snake-ark complex is a workhorse in R.A. Lafferty’s fiction.

In Arrive at Easterwine, for example, the generation of the Snake within Epiktistes is followed by the appearance of Mary Sawdust inside him. There is immediate enmity between the two. And things begin to go badly for Snake:

And Snake, who has been smashed near to death on the flinty littoral of the pungent pool cannot now get out of this morass. He is knocked back in, he is pushed down into the bottomless sludge by a stick named virga in hands I can’t see. His head is bruised and burst, his eyes are torn and hanging. He is drowning in the foulness. (One does not usually think of snakes as drowning, or as bothered by foulness.)

Spotting the woman bruising the head of the serpent in a Lafferty novel is like spotting Hitchcock in a Hitchcock film.

G.K. Chesterton saw this kind of Marian devotion as a badge of honor, putting it like this:

"I do not want to be in a religion in which I am allowed to have a crucifix. I feel the same about the much more controversial question of the honour paid to the Blessed Virgin. If people do not like that cult, they are quite right not to be Catholics. But in people who are Catholics, or call themselves Catholics, I want the idea not only liked but loved and loved ardently, and above all proudly proclaimed. I want it to be what the Protestants are perfectly right in calling it; the badge and sign of a Papist. I want to be allowed to be enthusiastic about the existence of the enthusiasm; not to have my chief enthusiasm coldly tolerated as an eccentricity of myself. And that is why, with all the goodwill in the world, I cannot feel the crucifix at one end of the town as a substitute for the little Roman Catholic Church at the other."

The way Lafferty uses this complex of ideas can be subtle, or it can have supreme structural importance. In Arrive at Easterwine, it is both, while in Past Master, it is subtle.

Early in Past Master, we learn that Evita is “a female creature who was at the same time Succubus, Eve, Lilith, Judith, Mary, and Valkyrie.” When Lafferty calls a woman both Eve and Mary, a snake is going to get hurt.

As the novel reaches its apocalyptic conclusion, Lafferty writes,

There was one wave of fury, a minute thing as to the bulk of it, but incomparably savage. There is always one such small mad wave, rising to foaming and furious height all out of proportion to its bulk, that rises and strikes a very few moments before a true tidal wave or world-wave strikes. It is called the forerunner wave.

So we have the flood. Where is the ark? Where is Mary bruising the head of the snake?

Here is the death of Fabian Foreman:

“No, no, woman!” Foreman gasped as the blood pulsed out of his torn throat. “I’m the master of it all. It has to be this way. The furious reaction, the transcendent yeast will set humanity back into its proper place again and let a new world be born.”

“I know it!” Evita sang. “I’m a bunch of that transcendent yeast. I’m the heart of that furious reaction! I revel in it. And we’ve had a dog for puppeteer all this late time. No wonder it’s been a time of trouble.”

She broke his face completely with a lioness blow.