Critique of the model and further research

Lewis-Williams and Dowson's study inspired researchers outside archaeology to further explore the connections between (prehistoric) art, shamanism, and entoptic phenomena—and to find them in other religions and historical periods as well. Critics, on the one hand, rejected the connection between geometric figures in prehistoric art, entoptic phenomena, and shamanism. They argued that abstract art does not constitute evidence for entoptic phenomena or shamanic practices, because abstract forms also appear in non-shamanic societies or even in the crude drawings of young children.

Today, the topic has lost some of its relevance. Lewis-Williams and Dowson's thesis has not been fully confirmed or refuted. In my opinion, this thesis seems plausible if we consider the current situation: anthropologist Erika Bourguinon observed that, out of 488 societies, 437 have institutionalized forms of altered states of consciousness. These are precisely the same altered states of consciousness that form the intersection between the perception of entoptic phenomena and intense religious experiences. Therefore, there is a high probability that most societies that have lived and continue to live on this planet were not only aware of the existence of entoptic phenomena but also attributed cultural or religious significance to them.

American anthropologist Linda Thurston's 1991 master's thesis supports this claim. Thurston provides numerous examples of anthropologists studying the hallucinogenic art of indigenous peoples and explaining it in terms of changes in the neurophysiological visual system. Even if most of these anthropologists do not explicitly refer to entoptic phenomena, it is not difficult to see similarities in the abstract patterns of indigenous art in Peru, including the famous Nazca Lines, the art of the Tukano community in the Colombian Amazon, the historical paintings of the Huichol Indians in Mexico, the so-called "grecas" in indigenous art in North America, and so on. Thurston herself points to entoptic patterns in the traditional art of the Australian Aboriginal Dream. All of these societies operate, or have operated, in altered states of consciousness, which were achieved in different ways and using different techniques in different religious rituals.

Entoptic imagery in religious art likely spread among indigenous cultures. Certain symbols from more complex and institutionalized religious traditions may have originated from entoptic patterns observed in altered states of consciousness. For example, abstract representations of the Egyptian sun god (Re/Ra) and the Mesopotamian solar disk or winged sun, Hindu and Buddhist yantras, mandalas and abstract representations of the chakras, the Indian solar wheel (swastika), the arrangement of the ten Kabbalistic Sephiroth, and some representations of the Christian cross. In contemporary Western societies, some artists work with subjective visual and entoptic phenomena, although not necessarily in a religious or spiritual context