Today I learned that there is a small Christian sect of people who practice snake handling during their services. They refer to it as "Taking up serpents" after a passage in The Bible. The practice began when a man was reading this particular passage while on a walk in the woods and then came across a snake. He felt that it was a heavenly sign and bent to pick up the snake (which I believe was poisonous) and went away unscathed. After that he started a church based entirely on a literal interpretation of The Bible and incorporating snake handling that spread out all over the American Appalachians. Of course eventually someone had to be scathed. Many someones, actually (though not as many as you might think, though I don't remember the exact statistic), to the point that the law came into it and ended up making the practice illegal in most states with former congregations. Today, West Virginia is the only state where it is legal to take up serpents.
(I learned this by watching a History Channel documentary called
Hillbilly: The Real Story. It's pretty interesting though the facts are a little hazy in my mind due to the fact that I was watching the doc at the same time as I was surfing online.)
I also just learned that the line "When I was young and full of grace/And spirited a rattlesnake" in R.E.M.'s song "I Believe" is in reference to Christian snake handling. I've probably heard that song hundreds of times since I bought that album (
Life's Rich Pageant) when I was 15, and yet I never knew.
Hmm.
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