9 - The Plumed Serpent

Summary

To us, God was in the beginning, Paradise and the Golden Age have been long lost, and all we can do is to win back.

To the Hopi, God is not yet, and the Golden Age lies far ahead. Out of the dragon's den of the cosmos, we have wrested only the beginnings of our being, the rudiments of our Godhead.

Between the two visions lies the gulf of mutual negations. But ours was the quickest way, so we are conquerors for the moment.

This passage comes from the penultimate essay in Mornings in Mexico (p. 89), a collection of travel pieces which Lawrence had written for miscellaneous journals and which he assembled for publication in 1927. It demonstrates his continuing concern, during his months in Central America, with the contrasts of ‘western civilization’ and ‘primitive culture’, with the evolution of man and his relationship to the wellsprings of life. It shows, too, in the phrase ‘so we are conquerors for the moment’ how Lawrence was still as interested as he had been when he wrote Kangaroo in the nature of colonized society, though he was now living in a land where, unlike Australia, the indigenous population had once possessed a deity as potent, a social system as hierarchical and an art as vigorous as that of the peoples, Spanish or American, who now dominated it. We come across all these issues in The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence's last ‘foreign’ novel and the only one, if we count the ‘Nightmare’ section of Kangaroo as part of the action, to be set entirely outside England.