The American biologist Lynn Margulis (1938 to 2011) argued that the complex cells of all plants, animals and fungi were formed when separate bacteria came to live inside one another and merged, so that the mitochondria in our own cells are the descendants of once free-living bacteria. From this she taught that symbiosis, different kinds of life living together, is one of the main ways new life comes into being, and that an individual body is less a single sealed thing than a community. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that there is no one, single ‘I’, and adds that the community a person belongs to reaches out to all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer and to Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.
Who was Lynn Margulis? #
An American biologist, born in Chicago in 1938, who taught at Boston University from 1966 and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1988 until her death in 2011. She received the National Medal of Science in 1999. With the British scientist James Lovelock she developed the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that life and its surroundings together regulate the Earth’s climate and chemistry.1 See What is the Gaia hypothesis, and who was James Lovelock?
Her best-known book for general readers is Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (1998), in which she defines symbiosis simply as members of different species living in physical contact with each other, and traces it from the first cells through to the planet as a whole.2
What is endosymbiosis? #
The idea that some of the working parts of our cells were once separate living things. Bacteria are simple cells with no nucleus. The cells of plants, animals and fungi are far more complex, and inside them are small bodies with their own jobs: mitochondria, which release the energy from food, and, in plants, chloroplasts, which capture the energy of sunlight. Margulis proposed that these were once free-living bacteria which entered other cells, stayed, and over a very long time became part of them.
Her paper setting this out, “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells”, appeared in 1967 after being turned down, by her own recollection, by about fifteen journals. For years it was treated as fringe. It became widely accepted in the early 1980s, once studies showed that mitochondria and chloroplasts carry their own DNA, different from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus and closer to that of bacteria.3 Every cell in a human body that has mitochondria is, on this account, a partnership of what were once different kinds of life.
What is symbiogenesis? #
Margulis’s wider claim, that the joining of different organisms is one of the main sources of new kinds of life. Darwin’s natural selection explains why some variations survive and others do not, but in her view it does not explain how new forms arise in the first place. Her own phrase was that natural selection “eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create”.4 New life, on her account, comes about very often by merging, two kinds of organism living together so closely, for so long, that they become a new kind of being. A lichen, a fungus and an alga living as one, is the familiar picture of it, and in Symbiotic Planet she traced the same process through the origins of cells, of sex and of forests on land.5
What does this mean for the idea of the individual? #
That the boundaries of a living being are far more open than they look. The biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber, building on Margulis’s work, writes that every organism depends on its symbionts and they on it, symbionts change their host so that it cannot live without them, and so a single organism, however distinct it looks, shows “more similarity to a whole ecosystem” than to a single solid subject.6
Margulis used the word holobiont, a term the German biologist Adolf Meyer-Abich had introduced independently in 1943, for a host together with the many organisms living in and on it.7 Later biologists have pushed the point further. In a much-cited paper of 2012, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals”, the biologist Scott Gilbert, with Jan Sapp and Alfred Tauber, made the case that genome sequencing has blurred the boundaries of the individual in every branch of biology. Animals depend on resident microbes for their metabolism and their development, and their immune systems help to bring those microbes in, so a body cannot be defined as one individual by its anatomy or its physiology. They proposed the holobiont, “the multicellular eukaryote plus its colonies of persistent symbionts”, as the real unit to study.8 It is in this sense that the individual is porous. What looks like one being is a living community whose edges are always being crossed.
Is Margulis’s view of evolution accepted? #
Partly. The origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts in once-free bacteria is now standard biology.9 Her larger claims, that symbiosis rather than gradual mutation is the main creative force in evolution, and that the holobiont is itself a unit of evolution, are still argued over. The biologists Angela Douglas and John Werren, writing in 2016, called the related hologenome concept “unhelpful” for studying hosts and their microbes, on the grounds that treating host and microbes as a single unit of selection hides the competition and conflict between them.10 Gilbert, Sapp and Tauber had made the opposite case four years earlier: that because the host’s development, immunity and inheritance all depend on its symbionts, the holobiont is the unit biology has to study.11
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the refusal to treat a person as a single, sealed ‘I’. Before the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer people experienced themselves as individuals, but to a much lesser degree than now, and equally as part of a larger whole. The more someone journeys and experiences being things like Otter, Oak Tree, Ocean or Obsidian, the more they find that they are a community: part of Human, part of Animal, part of the great Tribe of all the Peoples and of Mother Earth. And inside, there is no one, single ‘I’ either, but a tribe of different parts-of-self, each with its own needs and drives.12 See What is the inner tribe?
The body is a collective too. Its thirty-seven trillion cells, each wanting to survive, together make it possible to experience being one self-aware person.13 Margulis showed, from the side of microbiology, how literally a body is made of many, of cells that are themselves old partnerships, living alongside the countless microbes that share the body with them.
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On two points. The first is an emphasis of its own: alongside the many-in-one, the separate individual matters too. A strong sense of being separate is needed to survive in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer; facing a stalking lion, it is no time to experience the interconnectedness of everything.14 Individuality is a characteristic of the middle-world and wholeness a characteristic of the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, and both are real.15 Nor does the teaching picture the middle-world as only cooperative. It holds some cooperation, but it is also a place of the survival of the fittest, where nature is red in tooth and claw.16 Margulis, for her part, never painted nature as gentle either; she and the writer Dorion Sagan wrote that “Gaia is not the nurturing mother or fertility doll of the human race.”17
The second is what the community is. Margulis was a scientist describing material partnerships between organisms, and she insisted that the Earth is a self-regulating living system, not an organism and not a mother.17 For Therapeutic Shamanism, the web that each person belongs to is conscious, and its roots are in Mother Earth, who is indeed our Mother.18 The partners in it are not only microbes and cells but the Animal, Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, beings to be met and related to. See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People? and What did Denis Noble mean by biological relativity?
