He suggested that Lawrence's interest in the symbol of the circle resulted in part from his reading of occult writers such as Blavatsky. He concluded that the novel's symbolism endowed it with "peculiar brilliance." He noted that one scene, involving Ramón and Cipriano, had been interpreted as evidence of Lawrence's "latent homosexuality", but rejected the interpretation. The cultural critic Philip Rieff described the work as "a novel of pagan religiosity". Rieff stated that in his "imaginative rehabilitation" of Aztec ritual, Lawrence "rightly understands sun dancing as an imitation — or a dramatic representation — performed in substantiation of the divine concern with the human being." However, he saw the work as an embarrassment even to Lawrence's admirers. The critic Frank Kermode wrote that in 1928 Lawrence accepted Bynner's criticism of the "leadership mystique" advocated in the novel. The philosopher Michel Foucault considered The Plumed Serpent an example of how the modern "deployment of sexuality" has encouraged "the desire for sex—the desire to have it, to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to articulate it in discourse, to formulate it in truth". The writer Henry Miller maintained that Lawrence showed "great creativity" in The Plumed Serpent, finding it apparent in the way Lawrence dealt with "the eternal duality in man's nature" by deifying it in the form of Quetzalcoatl. He compared its themes to those of Lawrence's The Man Who Died (1929), and praised the way in which Lawrence employed "the old myth of the dragon." The novelist William S. Burroughs was influenced by The Plumed Serpent. The Mexican intellectual Enrique Krauze described The Plumed Serpent as "the most fascist" of Lawrence's writings, citing its "deification of violence and masculine power". The critic William York Tindall compared The Plumed Serpent to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô, and the paintings of Paul Gauguin. He called it a "great novel" and "metaphor for a feeling about reality". Maddox compared The Plumed Serpent to Kangaroo, describing both novels as successors to Aaron's Rod. She also compared it to Lady Chatterley's Lover, which likewise features a man who "condescendingly instructs a woman in how to be a woman." She stated that Frieda Lawrence, like D. H. Lawrence, considered it his greatest novel, and shared its message, which Maddox summarized as being that, "Christianity was outmoded and destructive and that the white races must find new modes