The Entoptic Model: Bridging Ancient Art and Consciousness

All usual warnings about psychedelic usage apply.

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The Entoptic Model: Bridging Ancient Art and Consciousness

Neil Rushton

A version of this article appeared previously on Ancient Origins. While slightly peripheral to the faerie phenomenon, it does seem that the study of prehistoric rock art may provide some evidence that our ancient ancestors were interacting with faerie-type entities, and were doing so by altering their states of consciousness.

So, although we cannot know how Palaeolithic people were altering their states of consciousness, it is clear they certainly had the opportunity, and if they behaved as every other shamanistic culture in the anthropological record, they would have been doing so. The entoptics catalogued by Lewis-Williams and Dowson are, in effect, a code that links shaman-visions painted on cave walls from distant prehistory to the experience of indigenous cultures in Africa and the Americas, and the first stages of modern psychedelic trips by people experiencing a peripheral shamanic episode.

The debate continues among anthropologists as to whether we can warrant the ethnographic-stretch that joins the experiences of altered state of consciousness across tens of thousands of years. Lewis-Williams and Dowson’s model has gained relatively wide academic acceptance, but this is mostly from the perspective of a reductionist worldview, where altered states of consciousness — whether Palaeolithic or 20th/21st century — are simply delusions produced by chemical alterations in the brain. From this viewpoint, even if the entoptic model is accurate, it is simply a model of delusional thinking carried out over a very long time-span, effected by substances (or activities) that cause hallucinatory images. This viewpoint is a standard Western academic position. Fortunately, there is a new wave of academic thinking that looks to go beyond such reductionism in an attempt to get a closer epistemological view as to what the neuropsychological model might mean to the human condition...