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Shapeshifting is not new. The pattern responds to present conditions. It also belongs to a longer lineage of human coordination and sense-making.

Across history and cultures, there have been other types of roles focused on moving between worlds, disciplines, communities, institutions, or ways of knowing. From shamans, merchants, and diplomats, to organisers, translators, fixers, and boundary-spanners, forms of work-in-between have long been essential.

Below is a short, first draft list of potential ‘shapeshifter ancestors’

• Religious explorers and missionaries: Jesuits in China, Japan and India, missionaries to America.
• Priests, shamans and mediators between the human and the divine: those figures sometimes ‘become’ someone else, or serve as a ‘vehicle’ for some superior force that operates through them. Functionally, they also often acted as peacemakers in communities.
• Diplomats: people officially representing the interest of a state or leader, who reside in a separate land or next to a separate leader, and whose primary functions are a) to cultivate goodwill and b) to gather information (i.e., spy). Essentially, maintaining good channels of mutual intelligence, as a way to anticipate conflicts and mediate them early.
• Judges and community mediators: people whose function is to maintain balance in society by solving conflicts, listening to both parties, and creatively identifying some acceptable way forward that avoids the conflict spiralling.
• Merchants:
• Salons and courtesans: how do you create the conditions for some unified culture? There is a long tradition, in Europe and elsewhere, of women inviting different people for informal conversations
• ‘Jack-of-all-trades’: we hear of those figures in literature, people who travel around, shifting from role to role, sailors, salespeople, repairing
• Intuitive hunters: there are traditions of hunting where the hunter ‘feels’ the prey, ‘becomes’ that animal. This can be seen as a form of shapeshifting.