An investigation into para-scientific imageries and esoteric nationalism around the cult of the Holy Crown of Hungary

ABSTRACT

This article examines the process of re-enchantment in Hungary through the para-scientific and esoteric nationalist interpretations of the cult of the Holy Crown. The process of esoteric and para-historical re-enchantment had already begun in the early 1980s, during the easing of the cultural policy of the Kádár regime (1956–1989). From the 1990s onwards, the Holy Crown became one of the mainsprings of esoteric and para-historical ideas, which gradually became increasingly popular in neo-Shamanist and neo-pagan circles, as well as in radical right-wing nationalist circles. At first, it was considered a counter-cultural movement, but since the third Orbán government (2010 – ) esoteric nationalism has enjoyed increasing visibility and government support.

KEYWORDS:

• Esotericism
• para-history
• pseudo-history
• neo-paganism
• esoteric nationalism

Acknowledgements

This article is an outcome of the ERC CZ project n. LL2006 (‘ReEnchEu’) funded by the Czech MŠMT and led by Dr. Alessandro Testa at the Department of Sociological Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. The research was also supported by the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest. The author would like to thank reviewers for taking the time and effort necessary to review the manuscript, and Jonathan Riches for language proofreading.

All translations of the Hungarian sources were made by the author of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Holy Crown was made of gold and decorated with 19 enamel pictures, semi-precious stones, genuine pearls and almandine. It has two main parts, corona graeca, the lower diadem, and corona latina, the upper bands with the cross on the top, which today is crooked. There are four pendants hanging from chains on each side of the diadem and on the back. As most historiographers and art historians agree, the differing styles and techniques used in making the enamel pictures and the fact that the inscriptions in the diadem are in Greek, but in Latin on the intersecting bands, suggest that the two parts were made in two different periods. See among others Tóth 2011. For the image of the Holy Crown see https://www.nemzetijelkepek.hu/ Last accessed January 4, 2023.

2 The history of the Hungarian Holy Crown has been closely interwoven with Hungarian history for the past 1000 years. It cannot be the task of this study to follow the adventurous destiny of the Holy Crown. Several comprehensive analyses of these issues have been published, most recently Pálffy 2019; Tóth 2011.

3 Already in the 19th century there were historians who dated the different parts of the crown to between the 9th and the 13th centuries (we find among their authors Arnold Ipolyi, Gyula Pauler, Béla Czobor and Nikodim Kondakov).

4 The events of 1978, i.e. the antecedents of the last return of the Holy Crown and its reception in Hungary, are described in detail in Pálffy 2019, 563–605.

5 It is worth citing a few lines from Berta in this connection for their instructive content. ‘The Holy Crown was sent back from America at the advice of the seer Jeane Dixon. (Jeane Dixon (1904–1997) was one of the most famous seers of the 20th century. The event – Dixon’s vision of the crown – appears to have really happened. See the 26 February 1978 issue, section B of the Ocala Star Banner or The Ledger issue of 27 April 1980, page 14.) She claimed that the Crown only exerts its beneficial effect in the place where it was designed. And taking it to a foreign territory destroys it […] Naturally, I was doubtful when I heard this story. So when President Carter visited Hungary in 1996 I asked an acquaintance of mine to ask him whether it was the seer who sent the Crown back. The president and his wife – Rosalynn Carter – confirmed that it was in fact at the advice of the seer that they sent back the Holy Crown in order to avoid its further harmful effects. Indeed, the president’s wife had a dream in which she was told that the holy relic had to be returned to the Hungarians’ (Berta 2011, 80).

6 Besides Csomor, also receiving permission were Béla Lantos, Rezső Ludvig, Magdolna Poór and the applied folk artist Márta Kocsi.

7 Avars were nomads of Eurasian origin who lived in the Carpathian basin – the historic territory of Hungary – from the late 6th to the early 9th century. A small minority of historians and archaeologists together with the vast majority of pseudo-historians believe that Avars and Hungarians spoke the same language and belonged to the same ethnic group.

8 Gábor Pap is one of the earliest pioneers of Holy Crown reinterpretations and para-scientific historiography. Both the Ferencz-group and the Csomor-group were influenced by his ideas. For more detailed information on Pap’s effect on Hungarian para-scientific circles in the 1980s see Kürti (2001, 336–337). [Pap’s surname was misspelled in the article as Papp.]

9 The first wave of pseudo-historical reinterpretations in Hungary already appeared alongside the awakening of nationalism in the 19th century (Keményfi 2008; Mikos 2013). They were diverse in the details, but mutually rejected the ‘academic’ – and officially accepted – Finno-Ugrian kinship theory and proclaimed either Turkic or the ‘more glorious’ Turanian lineage of Hungarians (Ablonczy 2016). Although Max Müller’s initial concept of Turanism (Müller 1855) did not emerge as a religious phenomenon, it acquired a religious guise in Hungary. Not only did the radically nationalist, racist and anti-western movement believe in the cultural and moral supremacy of the Turanian people and their resurgence to world leadership, but Hungarian Turanianism also sacralized the ethnic community and was manifested as a ‘political religion’, a ‘religion of nation’ believing Hungarians to be God’s chosen people with the world’s most glorious past and to have a unique role in shaping civilization. Naturally, the prophetic consciousness of the nation is not exclusive to Hungary. The concept can be found in many places and many religious traditions, including civil religion (Bellah 1967; Hammond 1976; Margry 2012) and Eastern European neo-paganisms (Rountree 2015; Aitamurto and Simpson 2013). These concepts became popular during the interwar years, reaching significant masses. Their spread was facilitated by the cultural policy of the Horthy era (1920–1944), which was dominated by an obsession with the territorial losses suffered in the Treaty of Trianon (1920).

10 Ferenc Badiny Jós – however surprising it may seem to the experts – the iconic, most influential, thematizing and legalizing actor of the new Hungarian mythology, the propagator of the Hungarian Jesus theory and the Sumerian-Parthian-Hungarian relatedness concept, has not come forward with any new theory on the Holy Crown, one of the foremost elements in the new Hungarian mythology; he has basically summed up the numerological results of the Ferencz group and the findings of the goldsmiths led by Csomor and claimed that the creation of the Holy Crown occurred in the Middle-East (Badiny Jós 1986).

11 In ‘Was Christ Jewish?’, published in 1936, Ferenc Zajti, an influential painter and Orientalist researcher with no academic credentials, set out practically all the axioms of the Hungarian pseudo-historical Christ mythology (Povedák 2021a). He claimed the divine chosenness of the Hungarians and their sufferings, the Scythian-Hun-Hungarian (Magyar) origin of Jesus, the doctrine of the ancient Hungarian ‘religion of love’ and the Jewish-Hungarian bipolar (sinful-uncorrupted) opposition. In Zajti’s words, the ‘Scythian-Hun-Magyar race’ as glorious ancient people ‘were predestined to receive the revelation […]. Jesus was born among them and entrusted them with continuing His messianic mission’ (Zajti 1936, 40, 192). In his book ‘King Jesus, the Parthian Prince’ (1998) Badiny Jós claimed that everything in the New Testament except the Book of Mark had been falsified as a result of a Jewish conspiracy against Hungarians driven by Rabbi Saul (Saint Paul) (Badiny Jós 1998, 247–256). Badiny Jós attempted to demonstrate with historic and linguistic sources that Mary was of Scythian-Parthian descent, and was the daughter of a Parthian prince. Similar to Zajti, Badiny Jós was thinking in a dualistic worldview where malevolent races (Semitics, especially Jews) struggled against benevolent ones (Turanians, Parthians, Hungarians).

12 For the original source see http://w3.osaarchivum.org/galeria/vir_ex/millennium/docs/doc001.html Last accessed September 2, 2023.

13 Ethno-paganism is a stream of neo-paganism with a strong ethnic character. Ethno-paganism is strongly correlated with national ideologies and mythologies. For more details see Hubbes 2012, 2013.

14 For a detailed description of the shamanistic cleansing ritual see Kürti 2015, 250–251. The short video and the interviews with Adigzi Tuva and Éva Kanalas can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqpMPdXGxdo&ab_channel=TSTSambhala Last accessed January 5, 2023.

15 For a comprehensive introduction of these festivals see Povedák 2021.

16 Between 2009 and 2012 MOGY was organized in Bösztörpuszta, then in 2013 the neighboring Apajpuszta. Due to political reasons and personal debates among the founders the event was cancelled between 2014 and 2017. Since 2018 the venue of the festival has been the National Heritage Park at Ópusztaszer.

17 Táltos is a figure in Hungarian mythology with a similar supernatural power and social role as shamans. See Pócs 2018 for more.

18 The origins of the Holy Crown doctrine can be traced back to the dedication of the kingdom of St Stephen to the Virgin Mary in 1038. From this legend developed the mystical Holy Crown doctrine, first mentioned in the Tripartitum, a compendium of Hungarian common law written in 1514-1515 by ‘nádor’ (the king’s deputy) István Werbőczy. According to the Holy Crown doctrine, the Holy Crown is not merely an object, but a symbol embodying the Hungarian nation as a legal person. It is the source of all sovereign power. The members of the Holy Crown (Totum Corpus Sacrae Coronae) are the monarch, the nobility, and the free landowners. The kingdoms of the Holy Crown make up the body of the country, they are organic parts of the crown, therefore, the crown became the reference for the unitary Hungarian nation state. Although the Tripartitum never became law, as it was never sanctioned by the monarch, it has remained in existence for centuries. See László 2003, 438-455, 458-461 for more information.

19 For more details see Körösényi, Illés, and Gyulai, 2020.

20 https://mki.gov.hu/hu/hirek-hu/minden-hir-hu/az-europai-es-a-magyar-identitas-prof-dr-kasler-miklos-eszmetorteneti-sorozata Last accessed January 7. 2023.

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Notes on contributors

István Povedák

István Povedák is an associated professor at the Institute for Theoretical Studies, Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design, Budapest. He is a European Ethnologist, the president of Hungarian Cultural Anthropology Association. His books and articles investigate everyday nationalism, ethnic paganism, E.T. culture, and Romani culture in Hungary.

The author appreciates any comments and questions about the article at [email protected]