entoptic phenomena are images of anthropomorphic animals.

Very few designs are recognizably human, but plenty are intriguing zoomorphic quasi-humanoid figures. There are also pictures of ticks, snakes, centipedes, and water striders.

The gallery of entoptic shapes and visual hallucinations depicted on the walls of rock shelters in Santa Barbara’s backcountry can include coronas, ladders, checkerboards, chevrons, and zig-zags, as well as zoomorphic fantasy beings. Whether from Chauvet Cave in France with its 40,000-year-old paintings, painted illustrations by the San tribe on rocks in Africa, or at the more recent California rock shelters with largely geometric designs, these astonishing, symbolic images strike deeply into our inner eye even today. It’s likely that the Chumash shamans considered these images to be divine messages from other worlds. But as the scientific worldview dominated after the 1500s, most Western humans learned to discount or conceal these illusions. Neurologist Oliver Sacks has shown that almost all of us have experienced frequent intense hallucinations, or visual percepts. Renowned anthropologist David Lewis-Williams ( The Mind in the Cave) believes that the original designs and symbols for rock art came from inside the painter’s own cranium via naturally firing entoptic phenomena, otherwise known as visual hallucinations. If you should be lucky enough to run across some of the distinctive paintings, it is a best practice to stay back from the rock shelter at first, cool down, remove packs and extra gear, and then quietly absorb the whole area and not simply the miracle of a tiny red triangle or anthropomorphic humanoid. Many can be enjoyed and pondered over through Campbell Grant’s seminal book Rock Paintings of the Chumash. The fragile art survives in the open air mainly because modern viewers know not to touch the cave walls or paintings and to never use flash photography. Ancient rock art has fascinated observers, an interest that reaches from Herodotus describing the awesome pyramids (ginormous petroglyphs) in 450 BCE to guys like me who search our San Rafael Wilderness backcountry, reverentially peering into Chumash rock shelters.

Entoptic phenomena are images of anthropomorphic animals.