Jesus and Shamanism?
Some of my recent and ongoing themes on Medium have been a new Reformation for Christianity, and an exploration of Carl Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious — otherwise known as the journey into the Underworld — including its relationship to shamanism. I have also in the past written articles asking whether the story of Jesus is better understood as an allegory rather than literally.
It has always been my intention to gradually draw these ideas together into a single thread and, doing some research around these themes, I’ve found an interesting sentence. A classic text on shamanism is Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. He sums up the anthropological literature on shamanic initiations thus: “the death and mystical resurrection of the candidate by means of a descent to the underworld and an ascent to the sky”. Compare that with this passage from the Athanasian Creed: “He suffered for our salvation; he descended to hell; he arose from the dead; he ascended to heaven…”
Make of that what you will, but it’s an interesting and almost precise parallel. Food for thought perhaps?
