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Hungarian Native Faith

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The boundaries between Hungarian Native Faith groups are often traced along their differing ideas about the ethnogenetic origins of the Hungarians, which have historically been a matter of debate. The standing consensus is that Hungarians originated among the Uralic peoples. Some Hungarian Native Faith groups, however, cultivate further links with Scythian, Sumerian, Turkic and other cultures.

Besides the elaborations developed within intellectual circles, the grassroots development of the Hungarian Native Faith largely relies upon the work of individual shamans or neoshamans, the táltos, whom have become popular in Hungary since the 1980s. Some Hungarian Native Faith organisations are supported by political parties of the right-wing, including Fidesz and Jobbik.

Overview and essential features

Roots of the Hungarian Native Faith

Since the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, throughout the Enlightenment and especially Romanticism, the study of the ancient religion of the Hungarians has been tied together with the debate about their ethnogenesis and the nature of their language. This search for the origins of the Hungarians has continued to be productive well into the twentieth century, especially as a means to build a strong national identity. According to scholars, this search was fueled by the experience of the Hungarians under foreign powers, namely the Austrian and Soviet dominations. The theme of a national Hungarian religion was also dear to Hungarian Turanist circles in the 1930s and the 1940s, who looked for evidences to demonstrate a kinship between the Hungarian and Turkic peoples, and generally the origins of these "Turanian" populations in Central Asia. The Protestant priest Béla Muraközy, writing in 1921, forebode that Turanism, with its anti-Western slants and its fascination with the Orient, would have taken a religious direction trying to resurrect "ancient paganism". When Hungary was occupied by Soviet forces in 1945, many Turanists emigrated to Western countries and continued to work there on their ideas, to reintroduce them to Hungary starting in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Theories about Scythian and Sumerian origins were supported by many Turanist ethnologists. At the turn of the twentieth century, the first to popularise the notion of a Turanian linguistic family inclusive of Hungarian and Sumerian was Gyula Ferenczy. In the post-war period, a direct filiation of the Hungarians from the Sumerians was theorised by Tibor Baráth, Victor Padányi, András Zakar, and especially Ida Bobula, though the most well-known supporter of the theory is Ferenc Badinyi-Jós, who emigrated to Argentina, according to whom the original undivided Sumerian-Hungarian ethnicity was based on the Carpathian Mountains. The theory has left a lasting influence in the Hungarian Native Faith movement, as Badinyi-Jós was among the first to propose the constitution of an ethnic "Hungarian Church". Other scholars proposed the kinship of the Hungarians with Hebrews, Persians, ancient Egyptians, and others even with Japanese, Chinese, Greeks, and other peoples.

Already in 1770, János Sajnovics demonstrated the relationship of Hungarian with Uralic languages, with the publication of the Demonstratio idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse. In the nineteenth century, with new studies on folklore, academic circles welcomed the idea that ancient Hungarian religion was essentially shamanic, related to Uralic and Siberian traditions. In the meantime, Arnold Ipolyi, bishop of Oradea, published his monumental work Magyar Mythológia (Hungarian Mythology), finished in 1854, aimed at matching the Brothers Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie.

In the 1960s, Mátyás Jenő Fehér, another emigrant to Argentina who was a church-historian and former Dominican, provided a seminal view for a post-Christian Hungary. From 1967, he published several books about the Kassai Kódex or Collectio Dominicana. He claimed that in 1944 he had found in Kosice a previously unknown medieval codex with records from inquisition courts. The codex documented a centuries-long effort by the Christian church to exterminate the taltoses, Hungarian shamans, the representatives of the pre-Christian Hungarian religion whose role was to preserve the integrity of the nation. Though it is considered a forgery by academic scholarship, the document is among the reference points for proponents of the Hungarian Native Faith to illustrate the high morality of the indigenous religion and of its representatives.

Taltosism

"Taltosism" is Hungarian shamanism, practised by the táltos (English plural "taltoses"), that is to say Hungarian shamans, and is an essential element of the Hungarian Native Faith. Hungarian chronicles of the 13th century still reported about "magicians" (taltoses) who practised their rites for the welfare of society. Hungarian taltosism persisted until the World War II in rural areas, where certain people were still considered taltoses by the local communities, though they practiced weather-magic only.

Ideas about an ethnic Hungarian shamanism as a defining characteristic of the Hungarian essence were studied within a psychoanalytic framework by Géza Róheim in the 1920s, and later by Vilmos Diószegi with field work in Siberia in the 1950s and the 1960s. The shamanic character of the original Hungarian religion is accepted by most contemporary scholars, and has been the focus of most new studies.

Study of the taltoses

Diószegi described taltoses as specialists who are able of going through a controlled ecstasy (rejtezés). One becomes a taltos by heredity or vocation, and the process of becoming one includes the typical stages of psychophysical disease, acceptance and healing: After an initial resistance to vocation and the various symptoms of the "shamanic disease", the chosen by the gods finally accepts his role and is endowed with his powers. Taltoses acquire superior knowledge at a young age—usually at seven—, through shamanic journeys taking place in days-long dreams, in which the main goal is to climb the égig érő fa ("sky-high tree"), also called élet fa ("tree of life"), világ fa ("world tree") or tetejetlen fa ("tree without a top"). Diószegi considered many elements of Hungarian taltosism to be peculiar to the Hungarian ethnicity, not to be found in Central Asian shamanic traditions. He described the role of the taltos as the "recognition and accomplishment of things required by the community, but unresolved due to the limitation of its own [the community's] powers".

Contemporary Hungarian religious studies, primarily the academic circle revolving around Mihály Hoppál, has acquired an important role for the international study of shamanism. The Hungarian ethnological discourse presents taltoses, and shamans in general, as those whose socio-religious role is to heal, prophesize and keep the integrity of cultural traditions by connecting the past and the present and thus projecting into the future, integrating the individual and the community, mankind and the gods. In the words of Hoppál, shamanism is depicted as a "bridge and symbol, because it interconnects the traditions of the past with the present, and anchors the future of traditions". The shaman's tasks are "leading the community, guarding the ethnic consciousness, being a (sacrificial) priest".

Modern taltosism

The modern taltos movement started in the 1980s, developing links with Michael Harner and other representatives of core shamanism from the United States since 1986. However, there are significant differences between American neoshamanism and Hungarian modern taltosism. While the American movement aims at representing a trans-cultural technique, designed as adaptable to different cultural contexts, and focused on self-empowerment and healing application, Hungarian taltosism is first and foremost an ethnic religious technique. Mihály Hoppál supported the taltos revival in his country as a means for consolidating a Hungarian Native Faith, and therefore for ethnic rejuvenation.

Congregations of taltoses and their followers hold weekly ritual and healing gatherings, and they organise pilgrimages to holy sites. Rituals practised by Hungarian Native Faith practitioners include rituals of initiation and passage, and rituals for fertility, healing and purification, either for the environment, the community of believers, or the entire Hungarian nation. They may involve sweat lodges, fire-walk, drumming, and techniques of meditation. While the ceremonies are usually led by taltoses, the community of believers is actively involved.

Among well-known modern taltoses there are Zoltán Nagy Sólyomfi, István Somogyi, Fehérholló Öskü, and András Kovács-Magyar. Other mediators of the tradition are Imré Máté, Attila Heffner, Tamás Hervay, and Gábor Szemző. Although they belong to different organisations, they agree on the monotheism of Hungarian Native Faith's theology and on the role of the taltos. According to them, the taltos functions as "the bridge between the celestial and the earthly worlds, between the irrational and the rational, the endless and the finite". Taltoses are interpreters of the transcendent.

According to Attila Heffner's definition:

Taltoses opened up, expanded their consciousness to this world, which is not perceivable in a normal state of the mind. During the so-called soul-journey ... they brought answers to questions, healing to diseases, seeing events of past and future, with the help of a purposive, goal-oriented action in this broader horizon of the existing world.

Taltoses share their knowledge acting as instructors, teaching their ideas in organised frameworks (for instance Sólyomfi's School of the Ancient Source or Kovács' Taltos School), through lectures or in discussion circles. The techniques for getting in touch with the transcendent (révülés) take place through an active participation in ceremonies and rituals. Taltoses are religious specialists, and their role of healers is particularly pronounced; for instance, exercises of directed meditation, induced by drumming, to eliminate harmful thoughts, play a prominent role in their practice.

In their responsibility for the entire nation, and their role as keepers and awakeners of the national essence, modern taltoses often claim connection with the royal House of Árpád—the first dynasty to rule Hungary—and with Jesus, reinterpreted as a shamanic figure. According to Attila Heffner:

[While] the shamanic quality is characteristic of the system of universal human culture, ... the taltos is specifically the guardian and executive of the Hun, Székely and Hungarian human world and traditions. Whereas a shaman can be a member of any culture ... a taltos pronouncedly exists in accordance with the spirituality of our Hungarian culture saturated in the appreciation of Jesus.

Scriptures

Within the Hungarian Native Faith movement, two mythopoetic texts have become the bases of two concurrent streams of religious doctrine. These texts are the Arvisura written by Zoltán Paál, and the Yotengrit four-books collection written by Imre Máté. Mythopoetic themes from both the works have more recently been synthesised in other media, such as the long animated film Sons of Heaven (Az Ég fiai, 2010). Another long animation influenced by Hungarian Native Faith narratives, this time based on ethnographic and historical data from the Uralic paradigm and realised with subsidy from the national government, is the Song of the Miraculous Hind (Ének a csodaszarvasról, 2002).

Zoltán Paál (1913–1982) was a steelworker who, during the Second World War, was initiated by a Siberian Mansi shaman named Tura Salavare, whom was then soldier in the Red Army. Paál compiled the knowledge he acquired in the Arvisura, which tells the history of the Hunnish tribes starting from a mythical prehistory, to their settling of Mesopotamia and then Ordos, and finally to Matthias Corvinus. The book draws elements from Finno-Ugric traditions.

The Yotengrit is more religious-philosophical in its message. Its author Imre Máté was the taltos, or bácsa, founder of the Yotengrit Church. The work claims to represent the faithful transmission of the ancient knowledge preserved by people in the Rábaköz region of western Hungary, the heritage of the so-called "Büün-religion", the persecuted original faith of the Hungarians. The work and especially the Prophecy of Nyirka which it contains, an allegorical text supposed to forebode the future of Hungary and global politics, has become a stronghold for nationalism and far-right occultism.

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