[Blizzi]

This was a good read too. You obviously put alot of thought into it. I had read it when you posted it, but didn’t think I could contribute anything to a discussion I know little about. This post was quite informative.

[granville1]

Why thank you, Blizzi, for the nice words. Glad you enjoyed it. Seems the mainstream churches tend to forget Christianity’s source in pneumatics, i.e., the phenomenology of the Spirit vis a vis the believing communities (although this has been preserved in a way in some Pentecostal groups).

Paul centered the Christian life in the Spirit or in the Spirit of Jesus – to be “in” Christ or to be “possessed by” Christ was Paul’s notion of the redeemed life. In fact, for St.Paul, to be “in” Christ resulted in “symmorphon”, i.e., the believer’s union with Christ causing the believer to become “like” Christ.

In a related vein, John’s Gospel has Jesus pray that believers, like him, become “sons” of God, “even as” Jesus and God are related in a father-son dyad.

Anyway, fascinating stuff which at least peripherally impinges on possession, which impinges on The Exorcist…

[granville1]

One of the bedrock foundations of Jesus’ ministry was his practice of exorcism and healing. These were done against the backdrop of a wholly mythological worldview. By Second Temple (“intertestamental”) times, Palestinian Judaism had adopted the cosmology of neighboring Semitic nations as well as some of the pneumatic ideas of Hellenization.

Ignoring for the moment post-Biblical isssues of Jesus’ divinity, it is clear that the historical, flesh and blood “Yeshua” shared the mythological perspective of his contemporaries. His exorcisms were not simply motivated by compassion. They were seen by himself and his followers as token victories against Satan’s earthly realm. Just as Satan had established a sort of worldly kingdom, so too Jesus held that his ministry established God’s kingdom in opposition to Satan’s (John 12:31). His exorcisms not only brought relief to the sufferer, but supplanted Satan’s. Paul duplicates Jesus’ Palestinian cosmology when he states that that Christian struggles against spiritual “principalities and powers”, and he judges the highest state to possess, or to be possessed by, Jesus’ spirit.

Shamanism typically involves exorcisms, familiarity with the spirit world, and the indwelling of spirit in the shaman. Jesus’ ministry fits the shamanic model in significant respects.

Jesus is baptized by John “the Immerser” and experiences the descent and indwelling of a spirit. This spirit then drives (Mark 1:12) him into the wilderness, where he undergoes a typically shamanic ordeal of prayer and fasting, in which he experiences visions and encounters another kind of spirit – an evil spirit. By the power of his own recently-aquired spirit, Jesus overcomes the Evil One. And there are easily some thirty points of confluence between major shamanic traits and the Gospel portrait of Jesus’ ministry and practice.

Jesus in the Gospel narrative then emerges from his shamanic ordeal imbued with a sense of mission, the bedrock of which, again, is exorcism and healing.

Both Jesus’ friends and foes agree that Jesus “has” – that is, possesses, or is possessed by – a spirit. The interpretations, of course, differ: his enemies claim that his possessing spirit is Beelzebul, whereas his friends claim that the spirit is a – or the – holy spirit.

Jesus’ own attitude seems to have been one of extreme solicitousness in regard to “his” spirit. In fact according to him, the one unforgivable sin is the one “against the holy spirit”. And his final gift was to bequeath the spirit as a “parakletos” (“helper”)to his disciples.

More important for the origins of the Christian movement, immediately after Jesus’ execution, his followers begin to experience “his” spirit active in them. They are not too particular in differentiating this living, internally-experienced spirit from the spirit that possessed, or was possessed by, Jesus during his lifetime, and the posthumous personality of Jesus himself.

Mass possession by Jesus or by Jesus’ holy spirit was the foundational impetus of his movement, and is commemorated in the Christian feast of Pentecost. Paul states more than once that the Lord Jesus “is a spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:17; 1 Corinthians 15:45).

When we witness this cinematic cosmic struggle in The Exorcist, we are viewing one expression of a tradition that goes back two thousand years, and more.

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