Shamanic Christian thought...

The Shaman’s Vision » The Anthropik Network:

"If we depart from traditional views of Christ and instead look at the historical evidence of what Jesus actually said and did, the shamanic elements become even stronger. Consistently, Jesus undermined the basic 'brokered' nature of Roman society (see John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant) and urged his followers to end Roman power by denying the very principle of authority itself. He contested this primarily in the arena of religion, by denying the efficacy of the brokered religious hierarchy, instead teaching his followers to seek direct religious experience. In this way, Jesus was denying the very essence of civilized religion, and promoting the 'open source' spirit of shamanism and ecstatic religious experience, even within the cosmological context of Second Temple Judaism. As an ascetic and very likely an Essene (see my 2002 paper, 'Subversion Incarnate: Asceticism as Political Resistance in Roman Judea, 6 - 66 CE,' [PDF], also featured in the Vault), Jesus also may have engaged directly in the same ascetic practices for inducing such ecstatic states as ancient shamans.

This line of Christian thought was largely extinguished by Paul, who reinvented Christianity and the direct threat to civilization that it posed, as a civilized religion that supported the same mechanisms of hierarchy and control that Jesus gave his life trying to bring down. Paul did this by invoking Jesus' name as a godhead, while simultaneously either radically interpreting, reinventing, or (more often) simply ignoring everything Jesus taught. Jesus' shamanic influences were kept alive even to the smallest extent only by Christian Gnostics, who pursued the same ecstatic, personal, religious experience that Jesus instructed his disciples to pursue. Because personal religious experience is very difficult to control, this made the Gnostics a particularly hated enemy of the orthodox church, particularly after the final major reinvention of Christianity took place under the Emperor Constantine. Persecution of the Gnostics persisted for centuries until finally institutionalized, hierarchical Christianity carried the day through the violent eradication of all who remained true to Jesus' original, shamanistic message, and a judicious exercise of terror."