Hungarian Native Faith

[6] 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.

[7] 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.

[5] 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".

[11] 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.

[12] In the post-war period, a direct filiation of the Hungarians from the Sumerians was theorised by Tibor Baráth, Victor Padányi, András Zakar,[12] 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.

[1] 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.

[8] 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.

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.

[21] 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.

[24] Mihály Hoppál supported the taltos revival in his country as a means for consolidating a Hungarian Native Faith, and therefore for ethnic rejuvenation.

[21] According to Attila Heffner's definition:[21] 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.

[28] 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).

[29] 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).

[30] 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 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.

These taltoses are considered by their followers valid spiritual leaders and while some practise only within the boundaries of their local communities, others have acquired a national reputation.

The church is not distinctively anti-Christian, but considered the adoption of Christianity by King Stephen I in 1000 CE a disaster which brought about the destruction of authentic Hungarian religious culture.

He, whose title in the organisation was bácsa ("master"), emigrated to Germany in 1956, during the revolution against the communist government of the Hungarian People's Republic in which he participated.

[41] He founded the Yotengrit Church as the representative of the ancient Hungarian religion, the so-called "Büün-religion", passed down through the unwritten tradition of the tudó ("knower") people along the Raba river.

He cannot be simply impersonated; whenever he was impersonated—Gönüz, Ukkó or Boldogasszony—it was always the result of human imagination.At the same time, the theology emphasises a national god peculiar to the Hungarians, Má-Tun, the deified hero of the folk tale entitled Fehérlófia ("Son of the White Horse"), who was originally a totemic animal ancestor.

[40] The Firebird Taltos Drum Circle (Tűzmadár Táltos Dobkör) was founded in 2006 by Zoltán Nagy Sólyomfi, who also acted as the chief executive of the Yotengrit Church when it was registered by the government.

Bolya's starting aim was to provide a way of good life for his students, whom formed the original core members of the group.

[49] They regard some natural sites surrounding Budapest and farther localities such as Sóskút, Borsodgeszt, and Bodrogköz, as their holy places where to make pilgrimage.

The latter, the system, defines unnatural and artificial superstructures which take shape in societies when individuals and groups are surrounded by growing webs of norms, and are gradually alienated from each other and from their natural contexts.

[39] The popularity of these stances is attributed by scholars to the abrupt fall of the Iron Curtain, followed by spiritual vacuum and the perception of being invaded by a "multi-faceted cultural market", which created an identity crisis in post-Soviet countries.

[39] In the case of Hungarian Native Faith groups, this resulted in a rejection of postmodern heterogeneity and a sacralisation of the national identity, in which language, religion and politics form a single entity.

In 2012 a nine-meters high élet fa (tree of life) was donated by Hungarian Native Faith groups to the Tengrists of Kazakhstan.