The Carpet Crawlers: the Meaning of the Lyrics

What is the meaning of The Carpet Crawlers? The Genesis song, whose lyrics were written by Peter Gabriel, has a dense, religious imagery leading to considerable discussion over the years as to what is the meaning of the The Carpet Crawlers lyrics. Here I’ll offer an interpretation that it is, at heart, addressing a terrible truth: that our world is hellish and those whom we believe we are following out of our own choice are keeping us trapped in illusion.

The Carpet Crawlers first appeared on the 1974 Genesis album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. In writing The Carpet Crawlers, the lyrics came first. And this is important in any attempt to understand it. Often a band will start with the music and fit lyrics in to suit the music; with The Carpet Crawlers, Peter Gabriel came to his band members with the lyrics already written and they created the D, E-minor, F-sharp minor sequence against which Gabriel then spent ‘hours and hours’ developing the melody on an out-of-tune piano. The sense of movement in the song feels simplistic when you isolate the keyboard or drum parts, but combined with the vocal melody the song becomes complex, unpredictable (even after multiple listens), and builds in a sinister fashion.

After an early version of The Carpet Crawlers was written, Peter Gabriel decided to add more lines and, again, the rest of the band provided the music, although they were under the impression an instrumental part was required and were surprised to hear his new vocals.

The lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers describe a scene where the narrator is in a hellish and surreal environment wanting to get out. Everyone else is being encouraged to get out by working their way upwards towards heaven, but all is not what it seems. In fact, listening to those who pretend to know that you ‘have to get in to get out’ will only doom you to remain stuck.

A Close Examination of the Lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers

Thinking about the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers in detail makes it more difficult to grasp the overall meaning of the song but also helps appreciate the skill, subversion, and powerful imagery of Gabriel’s lyrics.

The opening lines of The Carpet Crawlers introduce a first-person narrator, who in the The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album is a character called Rael. Treating Carpet Crawlers as a self-contained work, the narrator could be any of us. At first, the narrator is aware of a pleasant, cocooning sensation.

There is lambswool under my naked feet

The wool is soft and warm

Gives off some kind of heat

The lamb is a traditional symbol of innocence: a newborn animal whose gentleness is the opposite of the ferocity of the tiger in William Blake’s Tyger, Tyger. All is not well, however. A disturbing sight now appears to indicate that close by to the narrator this mild heat turns into an inferno.

A salamander scurries into flame to be destroyed

Mythology portrays the salamander as a creature that can dance in flames. Nor is this just a tradition in legend. Aristotle believed that the salamander was proof that ‘animals do actually exist that fire cannot destroy’. Yet here the lizard ‘scurries’ toward its own death. This lyric indicates that far from being in a protective and gentle environment, our narrator is somewhere hellish, and this sense of uncanny dread is enhanced by the following lyric in The Carpet Crawlers.

Imaginary creatures are trapped in birth on celluloid

Whatever these imaginary creatures are, the cinematic presentation of their birth is made all the more troubling by the fact of their being caught in the agony of being born and unable to properly come into being.

The fleas cling to the golden fleece

Hoping they’ll find peace

Now we come to a crucial moment in our the experience of the song. The fleas are us. A somewhat disgusting association, perhaps, but with Gabriel taking delight in inverting tropes, these fleas are not simply pestilent bloodsuckers, but have potential. In particular here, they want only peace.

We live in the lambswool (golden coloured and described in a fashion to evoke the Golden Fleece of legend), which while seemingly offering warmth and protection cannot provide lasting happiness. Not only are there horrors beyond the safety of the wool, but even within the wool there is no hiding from our self-created miseries.

Each thought and gesture are caught in celluloid

There’s no hiding in memory

There’s no room to avoid

The Carpet Crawlers: the Meaning Within the Lyrics

The crawlers cover the floor in the red ochre corridor

For my second sight of people, they’ve more lifeblood than before

As the music of the song becomes darker and begins its long, slow build, the narrator views humanity from above, having this additional dimension from which to view the crawling fleas. The narrator can see our bloodsucking nature, as we draw sustenance from the red ochre corridor.

‘Red ochre’ is a carefully chosen colour and appears in the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers not simply to make the line scan. Ochre is a clay and sand mix of yellow-to-orange colour; red ochre is closer to the colour of dried blood, because the clay contains iron oxide. When blood leaves the body, the iron in haemoglobin turns to iron oxide. Red ochre represents the blood, life-force.

Drone-like, we have a shared rhythm as we move to a heavy wooden door that – by association with the Biblical idea that it is easier for a camel to pass through a needle than a rich man enter heaven – is heaven’s gate. The needle’s eye is winking, mockingly. And it is the poor who are excluded from this journey. Like with the salamander, this place is not what it seems. It is a mockery of the journey to heaven. Again too, there is a sexual aspect to the needle’s eye, which suggests the vulva.

According to Gnosticism, our current world is hell and we are deceived when we think the path to heaven consists in following the preaching of those telling us the god of this world is good (the truly good god exists elsewhere). These lines in The Carpet Crawlers are thoroughly Gnostic. A sense-dulling refrain that the way out of hell requires us to get past the door is causing us all to move as one in that direction. But should we be doing so when the anti-Biblical needle is winking at us?

Gnosticism and the Meaning of The Carpet Crawlers

From this point – the introduction of the idea that the callers are calling humanity to a route that promises escape from hell but which will not deliver it – the song drives forward with increasing intensity: via the drum beat, the plaintive guitar, the increasing volume of the keyboard arpeggios, and the exchange of vocals between Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins.

There’s only one direction in the faces that I see

It’s upward to the ceiling, where the chamber’s said to be

Like the forest fight for sunlight, that takes root in every tree

They are pulled up by the magnet, believing they’re free

The carpet crawlers heed their callers:

“We’ve got to get in to get out

We’ve got to get in to get out

We’ve got to get in to get out”

The narrator can see that the pull of the callers is upwards (the conventional direction for heaven) and a rumoured chamber exists there, full of promise. Note that the narrator is unsure whether the chamber is actually to be found there. Everyone believes they are freely choosing this path to the chamber, but like trees striving for sunlight or iron aligning to a magnet, we are allowing the callers to lead us without any real freedom on our part. We are trapped in an illusion but cannot see it.

The next line introduces a strangely modern cultural reference to what up to now has been a largely (with the exception of celluloid) timeless atmosphere.

Mild-mannered supermen are held in kryptonite

While one could imagine dozens of Clarke Kents fixed in place, the real meaning of this lyric is to challenge the idea from Nietzsche that with God dead, the way out of the restraints and limitations of existence is to become an Übermensch, a superhuman. But in the hellish world of our narrator those – cerebral rather than athletic – superhumans are just as trapped as everyone else.

And the wise and foolish virgins giggle with their bodies glowing bright

Through the door a harvest feast is lit by candlelight

It’s the bottom of a staircase that spirals out of sight

With these lines the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers return to Christian imagery. The Biblical parable of the ten virgins – five wise, five foolish – is spoken by Christ when he is asked what sign will indicate the end of the world. Unlike the Biblical women, half of whom miss the crucial moment (the Day of Judgement) through being ill-prepared, in the song they are all aglow and inappropriately cheerful. Again, the route of our escape from hell is not what it seems. And this makes the ostensibly heaven-sent harvest festival and ascending staircase uninviting, despite the chant of the callers continuing to dominate the minds of the crawlers.

The carpet crawlers heed their callers:

“We’ve got to get in to get out

We’ve got to get in to get out

We’ve got to get in to get out”

The Final Images in the Lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers

The porcelain mannequin with shattered skin fears attack

And the eager pack lift up their pitchers, they carry all they lack

The liquid has congealed, which has seeped out through the crack

And the tickler takes his stickleback

Leaving aside the porcelain mannequin for the moment, our narrator witnesses the end of the journey of the carpet crawlers as they eagerly lift up their pitchers, whose contents are the lifeblood they will need having left their source of sustenance, the blood of the red ochre corridor. But the pitchers are broken, as Ecclesiastes 12:6 puts it when introducing the subject of death and the return of the dust of our bodies to earth. The lifeblood has seeped away and congealed.

At this point, the tickler takes his stickleback.

This final line before a long repetition of ‘we’ve got to get in to get out’ may seem humorous. Isn’t a tickle a pleasant experience? In fact this line is the awful climax of the song. No English child of Peter Gabriel’s generation will have grown up without attempting to catch sticklebacks, tiny fish which used to be abundant in fresh water. To tickle these fish is to wait for them to enter the trap of your hand and pluck them out of the water.

The carpet crawlers have been lured into the hands of death and a return to hell by the promise of the callers, along with a mistaken belief in the location of the escape chamber, as well as the illusions of the virgins, the candlelit harvest feast and the staircase.

What about the porcelain mannequin? It could well be the narrator, feeling vulnerable at the moment that the mass of crawlers leave the lambswool. An individual who has become a mannequin has had their unique features replaced by generic forms, making them able to represent all humans. A mannequin is designed to be moveable by others and an already shattered porcelain one is particularly vulnerable to harm. It would be frighting to be a porcelain mannequin and part company with the mass movement of the people around you because you intuit their final destination is not what it seems. That fear might bind you to their collective folly.

The proximity of the sound of ‘mannequin’ to ‘Manichaeism’ suggests an alternative reading of the line: that the porcelain mannequin is the Prince of Darkness, Satan. Manichaeism was the Gnostic-inspired religion that believed that it was necessary to release the light within us and become free from rebirth and pain. From this perspective, the porcelain mannequin who fears attack is the Prince of Darkness, the ruler of Earth, a hellish realm. He is fragile and vulnerable to the collective action of the carpet crawlers, should they ever change direction, for we carry light within us and for all our faults – every one of them on view – we carry the answer as to how to get out within ourselves.

If the porcelain mannequin is Satan, he need not worry. He can reabsorb our light (our death also being a moment of fertilisation to bind our light into the material world once more), causing us to be reborn in darkness, thanks to the assistance of the callers and their illusory religion.

And the tickler takes his stickleback

The pull of the music, which peaks after these lines during the repetition of We’ve got to get in to get out, implies the increasing pull of that argument, and reinforces how impossibly difficult it is to resist submission to that refrain and thus defeat.

Why are the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers so powerful?

Peter Gabriel has a strong engagement with William Blake, the revolutionary poet, something that was evident in his setting Songs of Innocence and Experience to music for the millennium, with performances eight times a day in the Greenwich marquee. And while there are no direct references to Blake in The Carpet Crawlers there do seem to be some in Supper’s Ready, Gabriel’s other lyrical masterpiece for Genesis.

Peter Gabriel took a Blakeian approach to writing the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers in this sense: he drew on Christian imagery and mythic creatures of his own invention to condemn orthodox religion and the way that people become trapped in the illusion that they are freely following the philosophies that bind them. It takes a prophet to write a song like Carpet Crawlers and I think that reading Blake helped Gabriel assume that mantle, at least in 1974.

As with all prophetic writing, the lyrics of The Carpet Crawlers affect us because they are addressing a fundamental truth. There is something real and important about the nature of human experience that is touched on here. And that’s why our bodies shiver on listening to the song, regardless of the extent to which we comprehend the exact meaning of The Carpet Crawlers.

Humanity is living in hell and is constantly recreating the conditions of our immiseration by callers who think they know how to direct us to heaven. And while atheists and materialists baulk at the thought that the Prince of Darkness orchestrates all this, just ask yourself, what if that evil god was Mammon? If you lived in a world that sacrificed everything to the pursuit of profit, while telling you everything was going to end well, what would that world look like?

The hell of the carpet crawlers.

Conor Kostick is the author of the international bestseller Epic , in which the people of a dystopian world are obliged to play a fantasy RPG for their living. Conor Kostick’s science fiction can be read on Substack.