Daniel Garrison Brinton’s Nagualism

Record summary

Daniel Garrison Brinton’s 1894 study Nagualism examined Mesoamerican ideas of animal-linked identity, sorcery, dreaming, and specialized ritual knowledge using colonial and ethnographic materials. It is a clearly identifiable text for comparing historical claims about transformation and visionary experience without treating them as modern paranormal reports. The work also exposes nineteenth-century problems of translation, evolutionary classification, and reliance on Spanish colonial sources. Researchers should read it alongside the Indigenous traditions and later scholarship it interpreted, rather than assuming Brinton’s categories accurately represented local concepts.