Graham Hancock's Books: Altered States of Consciousness
Across his later work, Graham Hancock has turned much of his attention toward the question of how human consciousness shifts, what altered states actually are, and the ways such experiences ripple through individuals and the broader societies they belong to. One thread running through his writing points back to the oldest cave art we know of. For Hancock, those early drawings are evidence that shamanic practice was already present deep in human prehistory, a tradition later carried forward by countless groups and solitary practitioners.
He reads the cave imagery as records of altered consciousness: glimpses of other realms, encounters with spirit worlds. The painted chambers at Les Trois Frères in the French Pyrenees are often cited as showing these early shamanic conceptions.
Part of Hancock's argument concerns therianthropic figures in the symbolism, images that blend human and animal traits. Therianthropy, as the term is used now, describes the mythic capacity of a person to shift shape into some other animal form. The old depictions, he contends, point to minds that had slipped into non-ordinary states and to cultures convinced they could see into spirit realms. Studying the symbols, you get a kind of reflection of what those people believed they were witnessing, including a conviction that one could cross over into animal worlds and other spaces entirely.
What Hancock finds striking is the repetition. Distinct figures turn up in art separated by continents and by thousands of years, produced by people who had no contact with one another yet apparently reached the same altered states. From this he draws the conclusion that some common space exists, something accessed again and again by different cultures encountering beings that look remarkably alike.
The hallucinogenic plants used today, he argues, open visions that echo those ancient images with uncanny closeness. Looking at living tribal traditions alongside contemporary culture, he suggests the old visions may also have come through trance dancing and through ayahuasca ceremonies, during which a person seems to leave the body and move into a spiritual world, meeting beings there who instruct them. The cave paintings, in his reading, amount to a record of humanity's first contact with supernatural realms and the beings that inhabit them.
Modern society, Hancock notes, tends to teach that altered states are dangerous: demonic, irrational, a threat to body and mind. He regards that as a mistaken stigma, a product of our particular moment rather than anything true about the experiences themselves, which he believes can be healing and generative. These states, he proposes, are built into what it means to be human and form a basic part of who we are. If we keep treating them as something to fear and condemn, he warns, we may be stalling our own evolution.
Hancock did not keep his distance from the subject. His first-person research involved hallucinogens, ayahuasca among them. Ayahuasca, also called yagé, is an entheogen, a word meaning roughly 'generating the divine within.' The brew is a drinkable tea prepared from the vine of Banisteriopsis caapi, which grows in the jungles of South America, and the peoples of the Amazon call it the plant teacher. It is taken in religious and healing settings: for transcendence, for divination, for spiritual cleansing, and for guidance from forces understood as greater than oneself. It is one plant medicine among several with hallucinogenic effects that carry a person into altered consciousness. Its main psychoactive agent is dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a compound present in many plants and in human bodies as well.
He catalogs the shifting forms these mythical creatures take as people encounter them. Shamans name them spirits. Medieval Europeans called them fairies. Our own age calls them aliens. The correlation Hancock draws is that in every era the beings carry both human and animal likeness, which leads him to treat them as a single experience of vision refracted through the lens of whatever culture is doing the seeing.
He extends this to the land itself. Ancient European megalithic sites, he says, show signs of electromagnetic energy, and they line up with the places where such beings, fairy presences in that framing, were reported most vividly. Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire, two of the best known megalithic sites anywhere, were placed where they are, in his view, because their builders knew of some phenomenon in the earth, an energy that could act on human consciousness and swing open the door to spiritual realms.
For Hancock, any serious investigation of the supernatural has to begin with consciousness: with understanding how it responds to the world outside it, whether the trigger is a plant, an energy in the ground, or some other variable. And he is blunt that we still lack a social framework capable of supporting that kind of research in full. - Brandon Petty