The Consciousness Thread: How Graham Hancock Connects Archaeology to the Spirit World

There is a moment in Graham Hancock’s intellectual journey where the trail splits. Follow one fork and you find the lost civilization researcher — the man chasing underwater ruins, precession codes, and comet impacts. Follow the other and you find something stranger: a serious investigator of altered states of consciousness, DMT entities, shamanic trance, and the possibility that the painted caves of Ice Age Europe are not primitive art galleries but maps of other dimensions.

Most people know Hancock from the first trail. The second is where his work gets truly radical. And the two trails, it turns out, lead to the same place.

Supernatural: Where the Investigation Began

In 2005, Hancock published Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind (reissued in 2022 as Visionary: The Mysterious Origins of Human Consciousness). The book asked a question that archaeology has never satisfactorily answered: What caused the “creative explosion” of the Upper Paleolithic, roughly 40,000 to 30,000 years ago?

Before this period, anatomically modern humans had existed for at least 150,000 years with minimal cultural complexity. Stone tools changed slowly over immense timescales. There was no art, no symbolic behavior, no evidence of abstract thought preserved in the archaeological record. Then, seemingly overnight in evolutionary terms, everything changed. The caves of Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira burst with sophisticated paintings. Carved figurines appeared. Burial practices became elaborate. Musical instruments were crafted. Symbolic ornaments proliferated.

Something switched on in the human mind. But what?

Hancock’s answer draws on the work of David Lewis-Williams, a South African anthropologist who spent decades studying the rock art of the San Bushmen of southern Africa. Lewis-Williams proposed in his influential book The Mind in the Cave (2002) that much of prehistoric cave art depicts images experienced during altered states of consciousness — specifically the geometric patterns (entoptic phenomena), therianthropes (human-animal hybrids), and tunnel or vortex imagery that are neurologically hardwired into the human visual cortex and reliably produced during trance states.

The San themselves confirmed this interpretation. Their rock art, they explained to researchers, depicted the experiences of shamans during trance — journeys to the spirit world, encounters with animal spirits, transformations of the shaman’s own body into animal form. The therianthropes were not mythological fantasies. They were records of direct experience.

The Universal Visionary Experience

Hancock took Lewis-Williams’s insight and extended it globally. If the San rock art records trance experiences, and if the same imagery appears in the painted caves of Paleolithic Europe — the same geometric patterns, the same therianthropes, the same tunnel imagery — then the European cave painters were recording the same kinds of experiences. And if the same imagery appears in the visionary art of Amazonian ayahuasca shamans, in the rock art of Aboriginal Australia, in the temple carvings of ancient Egypt, and in the reports of modern Western volunteers under the influence of DMT and psilocybin, then we are looking at something universal to the human nervous system.

The entoptic patterns that appear in the early stages of trance — grids, spirals, zigzags, nested curves, dots, and parallel lines — are generated by the neural architecture of the visual cortex itself. They appear regardless of culture, era, or substance used to induce the trance. Heinrich Kluver documented these “form constants” in the 1920s through laboratory mescaline experiments. They are the visual signature of a brain shifting into a non-ordinary state.

But it is the deeper stages that interested Hancock most. Beyond the geometric patterns, people in altered states consistently report encounters with intelligent beings — entities that take the form of therianthropes, luminous humanoids, serpentine figures, or insectoid creatures. These beings communicate, teach, and sometimes perform what subjects describe as surgical or genetic operations on the experiencer’s body. The experiences feel more real than ordinary waking reality, not less.

The consistency is remarkable. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, conducted the first FDA-approved study of DMT in humans from 1990 to 1995, administering the substance to 60 volunteers in clinical settings. His subjects — educated, rational Westerners with no knowledge of shamanic traditions — reported encounters with “entities” strikingly similar to those described by Amazonian shamans, by San trance dancers, and by the painters of Lascaux and Chauvet. The entities were experienced as autonomous, intelligent, and non-human. They appeared as humanoid-animal hybrids, as luminous beings, as “machine elves” (a term coined by Terence McKenna), as serpentine or reptilian intelligences.

Strassman published his findings in DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000), and Hancock draws heavily on this work. The question Strassman posed — and that Hancock amplifies — is devastatingly simple: Are these entities real?

The Ayahuasca Connection

Hancock did not merely research altered states from the safety of a library. He traveled to the Amazon and drank ayahuasca with indigenous shamans — not once, but repeatedly, over years of research. He also smoked DMT, consumed psilocybin mushrooms, and ingested ibogaine as part of his investigation.

Ayahuasca is a brew made from two plants: the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, which contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), and the leaves of Psychotria viridris (chacruna) or Diplopterys cabrerana (chaliponga), which contain DMT. Neither plant produces the full psychoactive effect alone. The vine’s MAOIs prevent the gut from breaking down the DMT in the leaves, allowing it to reach the brain orally. This is a remarkable piece of pharmacological knowledge: out of the estimated 80,000 plant species in the Amazon, indigenous peoples discovered a combination that requires understanding of enzyme inhibition — a concept Western pharmacology did not formalize until the twentieth century.

The shamans themselves say the plants told them. Hancock takes this claim seriously. In his ayahuasca experiences, he reports encounters with intelligent entities — serpentine beings, maternal presences, and what he describes as “teachers” who communicated through visions rather than words. These experiences, he writes, were the most significant of his life, and they fundamentally changed his understanding of consciousness and reality.

The Cave Art as Map

Hancock’s central argument in Supernatural/Visionary is that the painted caves of Europe are not art in the modern sense. They are records of visionary experiences — shamanic journey maps. The therianthropes are not products of imagination but depictions of entities encountered in altered states. The geometric patterns are not decorative but neurological signatures of trance. The deep cave environments — dark, silent, sensory-deprived — were themselves tools for inducing altered states, functioning as natural flotation tanks that facilitated the shift into non-ordinary consciousness.

Consider the “Sorcerer” of Les Trois-Freres cave in France: a figure with the antlers of a stag, the ears of a wolf, the eyes of an owl, the tail of a horse, and the legs of a human, painted on a wall 13 feet above the cave floor approximately 13,000 years ago. This is not a costume or a mythological creature in the modern sense. It is a therianthrope — a being of the kind consistently reported in deep trance states across all cultures and all eras.

The Chauvet cave in southern France, dating to approximately 36,000 years ago, contains some of the oldest known paintings in Europe. Among them are panels showing animals in dynamic motion, overlapping and flowing into one another, creating an almost cinematic effect when seen by flickering torchlight. There are handprints — both positive and negative — pressed against the walls in deep chambers accessible only by crawling through narrow passages. And there are therianthropes: a figure with the lower body of a human woman and the upper body of a bison, painted on a pendant stone in the deepest chamber.

Hancock argues that these caves were not galleries. They were sanctuaries. People went deep into the earth, into the dark, to encounter the spirits that lived there — and they painted what they saw.

DMT and the Hard Problem

This is where Hancock’s work intersects with one of the deepest questions in science: the nature of consciousness itself. The “hard problem,” as philosopher David Chalmers named it in 1995, asks why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. No materialist explanation has solved it.

Hancock does not claim to solve it either, but he points toward an alternative framework. If consciousness is not produced by the brain but rather filtered or received by it — as thinkers from William James to Aldous Huxley to Henri Bergson have proposed — then altered states of consciousness do not create hallucinations. They adjust the filter. DMT, psilocybin, ayahuasca, sensory deprivation, rhythmic drumming, fasting, meditation — all these techniques might work by temporarily broadening the bandwidth of consciousness, allowing perception of dimensions or entities that are always present but normally screened out by the brain’s reducing valve.

This is speculative. It is also consistent with the phenomenology — the actual reported experiences of millions of people across thousands of years. The entities encountered under DMT are not random hallucinations. They exhibit consistent features, autonomous behavior, and apparent intelligence. They interact with the experiencer in ways that feel objectively real. And they match, with eerie precision, the beings depicted in the oldest art on Earth.

The Thread That Connects Everything

Here is where the two trails of Hancock’s work converge. The lost civilization researcher asks: How did ancient peoples build monuments of impossible sophistication, encode astronomical knowledge they should not have possessed, and transmit a coherent body of myth across unconnected cultures? The consciousness researcher asks: What was the creative explosion that gave birth to symbolic human culture, and what role did altered states play in the development of religion, art, and social organization?

Hancock’s answer weaves these questions together. The lost civilization was not merely technically advanced — it was spiritually advanced. Its people understood consciousness as a primary reality, not a byproduct of matter. They used altered states systematically — through plant medicines, through trance techniques, through the architecture of sacred spaces — to access dimensions of reality that materialist science cannot detect. The knowledge they encoded in myth and stone was not just astronomical or mathematical. It was cosmological in the deepest sense: knowledge about the nature of consciousness, the structure of reality, and the relationship between the human mind and the larger intelligence of the cosmos.

When that civilization was destroyed in the Younger Dryas cataclysm, its survivors carried this dual inheritance — technical knowledge and spiritual practice — to the cultures that would become Sumer, Egypt, India, Mesoamerica. The mystery schools, the shamanic traditions, the temple complexes, the psychedelic sacraments — all are downstream echoes of a lost original.

Is this provable in the conventional sense? No. But Hancock has never claimed certainty. He has claimed that the questions are worth asking, and that the evidence — from nanodiamonds to neural architecture, from precession codes to DMT entities — points toward a far richer, stranger, and more magnificent human story than the one we have been told.

The painted caves of Chauvet and Lascaux are 30,000 to 17,000 years old. The ayahuasca traditions of the Amazon are of unknown antiquity. Rick Strassman’s volunteers in a New Mexico hospital room in the 1990s saw the same beings that shamans have been encountering for millennia. The thread is consciousness itself — the one phenomenon that science cannot explain yet cannot deny.

What if the ancients did not merely imagine the spirit world, but mapped it with the same precision they brought to mapping the stars — and we have simply forgotten how to read their maps?