Coahuila

[ANTHONY APPLEYARD]

 --- Juan Alvarez Cuauhtemoc <tonantzn at CHORUS.NET> wrote:
> Flying Serpent? Anthony Appleyard's take on "Flying Serpent" may not
> be so farfetched. But I doubt that this notion of a "Flying Serpent"
> was a result of the Sonora desert heat and hallucinations caused by
> dehydration. Perhaps it is more related to the Mesoamerican
> mythological matrix of the "Feathered Serpent."  ...

> As to Herodotus, what prompted him to ascribe "flying snakes" to the
> Arabian desert but nowhere else?

Because in areas well known to ancient Greece, only the Arabian desert
was hot and dry enough to cause this sort of hallucination frequently.
Even the King of Assyria once saw winged flying snakes when he was
crossing desert in a campaign, or so an inscription says.

As to hallucination versus current mythology :: given a cause of
hallucinosis (drugs, heat delirium, insanity, or whatever),
hallucination tends to follow (and thus reinforce) existing belief.

I read that one cause of persistent hallucinosis in an area of
countryside was non-alcoholic delirium tremens caused by magnesium
deficiency.