Novel: The Plumed Serpent

Overview
David Herbert Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent follows an Irish widow, Kate Leslie, through post-revolutionary Mexico as she is drawn into a radical project to resurrect the pre-Columbian god Quetzalcoatl and refound Mexican life on ritual, hierarchy, and indigenous myth. What begins as a traveler’s curiosity turns into spiritual submission as Kate becomes entangled with two charismatic leaders, Don Ramón Carrasco, a visionary landowner and poet-prophet, and General Cipriano Viedma, a stern soldier, who fuse religion, politics, and aesthetics into a new, authoritarian nationalism.

Setting and Premise
The story unfolds in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, with Mexico portrayed as spiritually exhausted, politically unstable, and culturally fractured by imported European ideas and the dominance of Catholicism. Ramón proposes that Mexico can be healed only by reawakening the “old gods,” particularly the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, whose cult he reconstructs through hymns, ceremonies, and a ceremonial hierarchy. Cipriano provides the force and administrative muscle to move this vision from private ritual to public power.

Plot Summary
Kate arrives as a tourist, initially recoiling from the violence and rawness of Mexico, its volatile crowds, bullfights, and the palpable sense of fatalism. Meeting Ramón and Cipriano, she is disturbed yet fascinated by their intensity. Ramón, married and landed, crafts liturgies and songs that reconnect people to “blood-consciousness” and ancestral rhythm; Cipriano, a local military commander, drums loyalty into men’s clubs, enforces discipline, and clears obstacles to the cult’s rise.

As the movement spreads through villages, processions and drum ceremonies replace fiestas and parish gatherings. Broadsheets of Ramón’s hymns circulate; worshipers adopt new names and ranks; sacrifices of animals and symbolic offerings mark a break from Catholic forms. Resistance comes from priests, liberal politicians, and urban elites, but the movement consolidates regional authority as Cipriano becomes the effective governor. The pair envision a Mexico ordered around guild-like labor, sacred tribute, and obedient communities under the god’s banners.

Kate is repeatedly tested, emotionally, erotically, spiritually. She resists the demand for submission, recoils from the movement’s coercion, and questions the place of women within a male-lit ritual. Yet she is drawn by the cadence of the drums, the vividly staged rites, and the promise of meaning beyond European disillusion. Ramón, as the living Quetzalcoatl, remains aloof and sacramental; Cipriano, identified with the warlike Huitzilopochtli, presses Kate toward a marriage that would seal her initiation into the new order.

The climactic phases involve public ceremonies that bind peasants and townspeople into a common, mythic polity. After struggle and hesitation, Kate marries Cipriano, accepting a role as consort within the cult’s hierarchy. The novel ends with her decision to remain, poised between attraction and dread, as the movement looks beyond its regional base toward a remaking of the nation.

Themes and Ideas
Lawrence explores a revolt against modern Western rationalism and liberal individualism, arguing for a revival of “living” religious feeling rooted in land and body. The novel probes charisma and authority, the allure of ritual, and the thin border between spiritual renewal and political coercion. It interrogates gender, depicting Kate’s desire for significance alongside her subordination in a male-centered cult. Race and indigeneity are filtered through Lawrence’s primitivist lens, producing a charged portrayal of Mexico as both dangerously “other” and spiritually vital.

Style and Tone
The prose is incantatory and polemical, rich with ceremonial description and oracular speeches. Songs, processions, and drums structure the narrative’s rhythm, while the omniscient viewpoint hovers close to Kate’s unsettled consciousness. The atmosphere is visionary yet ominous, where aesthetic beauty and authoritarian impulse feed each other.

Significance
The Plumed Serpent stands as one of Lawrence’s most provocative experiments: a political-religious romance that tests the costs of mythic rebirth. Its unsettling ending leaves Kate, and the reader, caught between the hunger for meaning and the perils of surrender to power.