Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings: What the Book Actually Argues

Someone searched for microbes and other shamanic beings and arrived here, most likely on the fly agaric entry. They were not looking for me. They were looking for a book — and it is a real one, by a real scholar, and it is genuinely relevant to the material on this site. So here is what it is and what it argues.

The Book

Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings is by César E. Giraldo Herrera, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. It runs to 388 pages; the ISBNs are 978-3-319-71317-5 in print and 978-3-319-71318-2 as an ebook, under the DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-71318-2. It was his second book. At the time of publication he was an Associate of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford, which announced it in April 2018.

One thing to be clear about before going further: what follows is an account of what the book claims, drawn from the publisher’s description and Oxford’s announcement of it. It is not a review of all 388 pages, and it is not an assessment of how the argument has been received in anthropology. I will come back to that limit, because it matters.

The Opening Move: “Spirits” Is a Missionary Word

The book’s starting point is a problem of vocabulary, and it is a good one. We habitually describe shamanism in terms of spirits and souls. Herrera’s contention is that those terms were not native to the traditions being described — they were introduced by Christian missionaries as part of the work of conversion. In the publisher’s own framing:

Shamanism is commonly understood through reference to spirits and souls. However, these terms were introduced by Christian missionaries as part of the colonial effort of conversion. So, rather than trying to comprehend shamanism through medieval European concepts, this book examines it through ideas that started developing in the West after encountering Amerindian shamans.

Anyone who has spent time with alchemical sources will recognise the shape of this complaint. It is the same problem as reading prima materia as though it meant what a modern chemist means by a starting reagent: you import a later vocabulary, and the thing you were trying to understand quietly rearranges itself to fit. Herrera is arguing that a whole field has been doing this for four centuries with a borrowed Christian lexicon.

His proposed replacement is the striking part. Instead of spirits, he reaches for microbes. (“Amerindian” is his term, and I use it here because it is the one the book uses.)

The Three Arguments

The book is described as developing three major arguments:

• That the resemblance is to microbial ecology, not religion. Since the earliest accounts of them, Amerindian shamanic notions have had more in common with current microbial ecology than with Christian religious belief.
• That the microbial world is perceptible without instruments. The human senses allow unaided perception of the microbial world — the example given is entoptic vision, which lets one see microscopic objects flowing through the retina — and shamans employ techniques that enhance precisely these kinds of perception.
• That germ theory arrived four centuries early, via syphilis. The theory that some diseases are produced by living agents acquired through contagion was proposed right after Contact, in relation to syphilis — a significant subject of pre-Contact Amerindian medicine and mythology, which European physicians treasured and translated. The West then took four hundred years to rediscover germs and bring microbiology into mainstream science.

From these he proposes the foundations of what he calls an ethnomicrobiology. The publisher’s description does not define that term beyond the coinage itself, so I will not pretend to a definition he may well give in the text.

The Claim Doing the Most Work

The second argument is the load-bearing one, and it is worth being precise about, because the phenomenon it rests on is real and often misunderstood.

Entoptic phenomena are things you see that originate inside your own eye rather than outside it. The specific case relevant here is the blue field entoptic phenomenon, also called Scheerer’s phenomenon after the German ophthalmologist who brought it to clinical attention in 1924. Stare at a bright, evenly blue sky and you will see tiny bright dots darting along branching paths. Those dots are not dust and not an illusion of attention. Red blood cells absorb blue light; white blood cells do not, so each white cell passing through a retinal capillary opens a transparent gap in an otherwise absorbing column, and you perceive that gap as a moving point of light. The effect is well enough characterised that it has been used clinically to estimate retinal capillary blood flow.

So the underlying observation is sound: you can, unaided, perceive the passage of individual cells inside your own body. That is a genuinely remarkable fact and most people go their whole lives without being told it.

What I would want to see argued carefully — and cannot report on, having not worked through the book’s treatment of it — is the step from there to perceiving microbes. Your leukocytes are your own cells, not microorganisms, and they are visible by a specific mechanism that depends on their optical contrast against red cells in a capillary. Whether that generalises into a faculty for perceiving the microbial world is exactly the question the argument has to answer, and it is the point at which a sympathetic reader should slow down rather than speed up. That is not a dismissal. It is where I would start reading.

What I Am Not Telling You

I could not source a table of contents, so I cannot tell you how the book is structured or where the weight falls. I could not find an academic review of it, so I cannot tell you how anthropologists have responded — and for a thesis this bold, the response is a substantial part of what you would want to know. The publisher’s page sits behind an access wall for anything beyond the blurb.

I also cannot tell you whether the book engages Amerindian perspectivism, which is the framework a reader coming from anthropology would most expect here, or whether it discusses the early microscopists and their animalcules, which is where a reader coming from the history of science would look first. Those would both be natural places for the argument to go. I simply do not know that it goes there, and the gap between “would be natural” and “does” is where bad summaries are made.

Why It Sits Next to the Material Here

This site keeps running into the same difficulty from the other direction. When I wrote about fly agaric and Siberian shamanism, or about peyote in Huichol lore, or about the divination bulbs of southern African healers, the hard part was never the botany. It was describing what practitioners understood themselves to be doing without reaching for a vocabulary that belongs to somebody else’s cosmology — mine, usually, or a nineteenth-century ethnographer’s.

Herrera’s answer is more radical than anything I would attempt. He is not saying the old descriptions were metaphors for germs; that would be the cheap version, and it would be condescending. He is saying the categories themselves were closer to microbial ecology than to the religious framework later laid over them, and that the translation into spirits and souls was a loss of precision rather than a gain in it. Whether or not that holds, it is the right kind of question, and it is being asked by someone with an institutional address and a university press behind him rather than in a blog post.

If you came here looking for the book: that is it, and this is not a substitute for it. Find the real thing.

Related Reading

• Fly Agaric and the Shaman’s Journey—what Siberian peoples believed a mushroom could do
• Peyote as the Herbal Transformation of a Deer—Huichol lore and the limits of the vision-quest myth
• The Bulb That Names the Guilty—divination plants of southern African traditional healers

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings?

César E. Giraldo Herrera. It was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018, runs 388 pages, and carries the ISBNs 978-3-319-71317-5 (print) and 978-3-319-71318-2 (ebook). It was his second book, and at publication he was an Associate of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford.

What is the main argument of Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings?

That the words “spirits” and “souls” were imposed on Amerindian shamanism by Christian missionaries, and that shamanic notions in the earliest accounts have more in common with modern microbial ecology than with Christian religious belief. The book develops three arguments from this: the resemblance to microbial ecology, the claim that human senses can perceive the microbial world unaided, and the claim that germ theory was proposed just after Contact in relation to syphilis, four centuries before the West rediscovered germs.

What is entoptic vision, and why does the book rely on it?

Entoptic phenomena are visual effects originating inside the eye itself. The relevant case is the blue field entoptic phenomenon, or Scheerer’s phenomenon, described clinically in 1924: against a bright blue sky you see moving bright dots, which are the transparent gaps left by white blood cells passing through retinal capillaries where red blood cells would otherwise absorb blue light. The book uses it to argue that the microbial world is perceptible without instruments and that shamanic techniques enhance such perception. The observation itself is well established; the step from seeing one’s own white blood cells to perceiving microbes is the part a reader should examine closely.

What does ethnomicrobiology mean?

It is Giraldo Herrera’s own coinage for the field he proposes founding—the study of how peoples outside the Western scientific tradition have understood and described the microbial world. The publisher’s description announces the term without defining it, so any precise definition would have to come from the book itself rather than from a summary of it.