Visionariness and Perceptions of Flying Serpents

Abstract

There is a close relationship between memorates about flying serpents and special psychological states and visions. In southern Slavs, they are caused by mental illnesses and states of religious trance. In the north of the Slavic area, where widows’ visions are attributed to the actions of flying serpents, some parallels can be drawn between these phenomena and modern urban culture and the symptoms of acute grief when a person who has lost a relative can experience hallucinations involving the deceased. Despite the obvious similarities between the plots in which the flying serpent in a form of a dead spouse or a dead person himself visit the widow, the situation in which the form of the deceased is not related to the deceased itself requires further explanation. Even more so, since the Udmurt mythology, where the fiery serpent is not known, demonstrates exactly the same situation. The mediation of spirits could be connected with the belief in the impenetrability of the boundary between the afterlife and the world of the living. But it is not clear how such psychological phenomena in the past were mythologized. The article shows that there is some similarity, albeit rarely observed, between the Southern Slavic perceptions and Eastern Slavic folklore with regard to the relationship between the serpent and the obsessed and “demonic games”. It is possible to hypothesize that initially the appearance of a flying serpent was associated with the erotic techniques of ecstasy, and afterwards it became instrumental in understanding the nature of mental illnesses and manifestations of strong feelings caused by the loss of a close person.