Entoptic Imagery and the Ancient Record
From the public record
Proposed by: David Lewis-Williams; popularized by Graham Hancock
Paleolithic rock art worldwide repeats the same geometric signs that altered states produce. People may have been recording these forms for tens of thousands of years.
David Lewis-Williams argued that the recurring dots, grids, zigzags and lattices of cave art are entoptic forms carried out of trance states by early practitioners. Graham Hancock popularized the extension of this argument to visionary encounters generally. For this project the reading matters because it supplies a deep-time comparison set: if the registry's glyphs are real and stable, their families should be findable in the archaeological record.
Source: The Mind in the Cave (2002) (book)
Tags: archaeology, rock-art, entoptic