Hungarian Neopaganism (movement)

Hungarian Neopaganism, or the Hungarian Native Faith (Hungarian: Ősmagyar vallás), is a modern Pagan new religious movement aimed at representing an ethnic religion of the Hungarians, inspired by taltosism (Hungarian shamanism), ancient mythology and later folklore. The Hungarian Neopaganism movement has roots in 18th- and 19th-century Enlightenment and Romantic elaborations, and early-20th-century ethnology. The construction of a national Hungarian religion was endorsed in interwar Turanist circles (1930s–1940s), and, eventually, Hungarian Neopagan movements blossomed in Hungary after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The boundaries between Hungarian Neopagan groups often relate to differing beliefs relating to the ethnogenesis of the Hungarians, generally believed to have originated on the Asian Steppe. Some Hungarian Neopaganistic groups sought to reconstruct their native faith based upon contemporary ideas about Scythian, Persian, and Sumerian religions and cultivate Turanist links with Turkic cultures.

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

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" 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.