Since I’m on the street level of the book biz, I get a lot of promotional material. There are authors who will send a five page letter about their artistic process or publish in blogs or fanzines lengthy accounts of their influences and inspirations as if they were JAMES JOYCE cluing us into the creation of Ulysses – all for an unreadable, self-published pile of dreck called Murder by Cowpie or the like. Most people these days seem to like the idea of being a writer a lot more than actually writing. The contemporary world is so caught up in the process of celebrity and the manufacturing of successful "product" that the prose component of fiction is considered the least important part.

That said, I’ll give all you lucky readers a quick peep into how I came to put certain elements into MY unpublished and largely unread pile of dreck Snakes in Caves, if only to comment once again on the weird affinities and synchronicities that haunt our world.

The first spark came into my mind in Minneapolis when I read a newspaper story about a couple of teens who were suffocated when the sand cave they were in on the banks of the Mississippi collapsed. They were supposedly "partying" and that image struck me, the cave as the place where not only the laws of society were broken, but perhaps, as in E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, somehow the laws of nature and physics as well. But I wasn’t sure what to put in the cave. At first I was going to have the protagonist’s beloved be killed by the cave in, and her spirit return to the cave. But, unlike Dante, a dead beloved doesn’t work for me, I needed her to be a more active part of the plot. Then, when I was working on a poem about seeing the beloved again after a space of years I got the perfect objective correlative.

The poem compared the shock of seeing someone you loved again to being struck by a snake or squeezed by a python, and this imagery led me to Cleopatra, her avatar Isis, eternal recurrence (like a snake shedding its skin), Pythia, the oracle of Delphi, and on and on. I hadn’t really been into the esoteric very seriously since teendom, but the more I read mythology, occult work, internet paranoia and reputable skeptics, the more snake stuff I found. My protagonist similarly peruses an old library left by the vanished Miller, discovering a wealth of sinister lore soon after I did. There’s a whole chapter of just quotes about the Egyptian, Aztecs, American Indians, Aliens, and the notion of subterranean snakes that could have gone on for ever (and as a matter of fact I’ve been told it goes on too long). I eventually finished the book to the world’s complete indifference, but I really only scratched the surface of snake/cave lore and speculation. The interesting thing to me is how this intuition through image led me to such a fertile place.

I’ve found a bunch a books post writing that were germane, and some have been published since I finished. One such volume is The Serpent Grail: The Truth Behind the Holy Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life by Philip Gardiner with Gary Osborn. It’s not bad as esoteric books go, not on the high level of a COLIN WILSON or GRAHAM HANCOCK, but an interesting read. The authors have certainly uncovered a lot of serpent lore and write pretty well, but as is common with such books they also play a lot of etymological games of dubious worth and fail to tie everything up convincingly. The payoff is the authors’ assertion that a mixture of serpent venom and serpent blood would do wonders for longevity and health, and it’s a little sad that such lofty esoteric speculation so often devolves into how to stay healthy, live long and make money. I also would have respected their argument more if they themselves (like Hancock in Supernatural) had taken a little dose of their own medicine and at least experiment with drinking venom themselves.

But what really struck me was the way their research echoed several of my fictive inventions in Snakes in Caves. The talk about how, through serpent power, at a specific place and specific time a hypnagogic state may be reached that transports the individual to the "portal of the underworld," the place of the dead. That’s pretty much the mechanism of the snake cult in my book, and Gardiner and Osborn even specify the same time I came up with, the equinox, not to mention the fact that, as my faithful readers know, "hypnagogic" is one of my pet words. Like me they found that "everywhere we looked we seemed to see the serpent."

Anyhow here’s some of my favorite bits from the book:

Later on, the famous Assassins emerged from the Druze via Nizari…The Assassins secured loyalty with the use of the drug hashish, hence the term hashashin. The use of hashish, a hallucinogen, is interesting in the light of the shamanic trance state techniques used to access the underworld. The name "Nizar" is also interesting, as we note that the Hindustani term nazar, which is very similar, is the Yogic term for the so-called esoteric third eye, the Agnya or Anja chakra, which is "opened" (i.e. activated) through meditation and the hypnagogic trance state. Moreover, John the Baptist was known as the "Great Nazar." The Gnostic term "Nazarean," which is used in the title "Jesus the Nazarean" and often mistakenly interpreted as referring to the town of Nazareth, which mean "to envision" or "behold" and is also linked to the snake.

There is more to the serpent than meets the eye. Its coils lie at the very foundation of the Western world.

Indeed, the evidence suggested that, at their very core, the world’s religions were all the same. It was just the outward cultural dressing which differed. At the root of them all was the snake – the giver of immortality.

And the snake/serpent became a symbol of wisdom in its feminine aspect, a wisdom for which there is no more powerful image than Sophia.

There is now little doubt that early Christian sects venerated the serpent. St. Epiphanius seemed to put his finger on it in Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies), when he stated that the serpent worshipers "venerate the serpent because God has made it the cause for Gnosis."

It has been suggested that early ritual dances predate the labyrinth itself and symbolize the motion of the serpent, thus enabling the initiate to obtain immortality, either on earth or in the afterlife.

We also suggest that this unique mixture of poison and hallucinogenic drugs must have made the ancient "user" feel that they were in contact with their god, for it would have boosted their immune system and left them on a high for several days, giving them a feeling of being "born again."

It is widely acknowledged that the ancients believed that caves, wells and other openings in the Earth were entrances to the womb of the world Mother or Earth Goddess, from whom all life emerged and into whom all things returned at death. The snake lives within the Earth, the body of the Goddess, and is thus aware of her wisdom and her secrets, including those of life, death and rebirth.