The Plumed Serpent

The Plumed Serpent is a 1926 political novel by D. H. Lawrence; The novel’s plot concerns Kate Leslie an Irish tourist who visits Mexico after the Mexican Revolution. She encounters Don Cipriano a Mexican general who supports a religious movement the Men of Quetzalcoatl founded by his friend Don Ramón Carrasco. Within this movement Cipriano is identified with Huitzilopochtli and Ramón with Quetzalcoatl. Kate eventually agrees to marry Cipriano while the Men of Quetzalcoatl with the help of a new President bring about an end to Christianity in Mexico replacing it with Quetzalcoatl worship. The Plumed Serpent has been compared to works of Lawrence such as the novels Kangaroo (1923) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and the essays Sketches of Etruscan Places and other Italian essays (1932) as well as to the work of the poet T. S. Eliot. Lawrence’s mesmerizing and unsettling 1926 novel is his great work of the political imagination.