Sunday, October 12, 2008

Mothman, 14th century New Mexico, and the hallucinogen Datura


The Mothman Prophecies (book and subsequent movie) introduced us to a bizarre creature that terrorized the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the late 60s. Surprisingly, a similar entity haunted a 14th century pueblo that the ancestral Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma built upon a flat-topped pyramid in New Mexico. Stranger still, archaeologists have found evidence there of a cult involving a hallucinogenic plant called Datura (jimsonweed). Read the details and see ancient murals depicting the crypto-zoomorph in Gary A. David’s article “The Mothman, Pottery Mound, and the Sacred Datura.”