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ABSTRACT
This article explores how ancestry is displayed in the Kurultaj festival where historical reenactment clubs, contemporary Pagan leaders and their followers, politicians, physical anthropologists, and archaeologists as well as folk ensembles gather to celebrate present-day Hungarians’ purported Central Asian origins. Considering this event as an instance of re-enchantment closely connected with the Pagan revival, the article’s objective is twofold. On the one hand, it attempts to understand how Pagan conceptions of the past exceed the strict limits of groups engaged in (re)creating pre-Christian religious beliefs and practices, reaching a wider public and interweaving spirituality with politics and historical sciences. On the other hand, it suggests that the Pagan revival, as re-enchantment, might be characterized not only by the sociological, economic, historical, and ideological background of the persons and groups that instigate it but also by the new forms of rituality that compose it.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Michael Houseman, Marika Moïsseff, Michael Stausberg and the anonymous reviewer who have carefully read and helped improve this text with their insightful comments and suggestions. I also warmly thank Riki Papp for the inspiring discussions and for taking photos of the tree of life for me and Miroslav Mavra for his proofreading.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 According to the figures of the media brochure released in August 2022 by the association in charge of organizing the event, the Magyar-Turán Alapítvány. Available online: https://felvidek.ma/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/szervezok-osszefoglalojaban-ITT.pdf
2 This ambiguity of the Kurultaj between entertainment and ritual as well as the secular and the religious/spiritual, which I tackle in the following pages and which may possibly be considered as a component of ‘re-enchantment’ in this case, point to the more general question of the devotional aspect of festivals. As Teewen, Sen, and Rots (Citation2023) show in their analysis of the entanglements of patronage, play and piety in festivals in Asia, pious attitudes are not always necessarily religious. The distinction the Kurultaj’s organizers make between other festivals and their ‘tribal gathering’ calls for further ethnographic data and comparison with festivals elsewhere.
3 The instability of the ritual frame also characterizes the emergent spiritual practices involving angels analyzed by T. Utriainen (Citation2016) in Finland as instances of ‘enchantment’. However different the context and the ritual form, it is interesting to observe that, here too, the underdetermination of the boundaries between ritual and everyday behavior enable varying degrees of engagement in the practices in question.
4 The insights discussed here are based on my attendances to the Kurultaj in 2012 and 2014, when I did not yet officially start fieldwork on Pagan revival, and later, in 2021 and 2022. Observant participation at the winter solstice ceremony organized in 2017 in Kolárovo (Slovakia) by the association responsible for the Kurultaj (Magyar-Turán Alapítvány) also provided some of the data used here.
5 This article relies on ethnographic data gathered through observant participation in two Pagan circles in Budapest since 2015. The materials presented here benefited from fundings from the LabEx Hastec (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes / Paris Sciences & Lettres), between 2017 and 2018, as well as from the ERC CZ project ‘ReEnchEu’ (n. LL2006), led by Dr. Alessandro Testa between 2020 and 2022 at the Department of Sociological Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, and funded by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.
6 I use the term ‘Pagan revival’ as an alternative to ‘Neopaganism’ used to describe comparable practices in Western Europe and North America, such as Wicca (generally underrepresented in Hungary, see Szilárdi Citation2009) and ‘ethno-paganism’ used in the Hungarian literature (Povedák and Hubbes Citation2014) which, in my view, overemphasizes the sui generis character of this movement in Hungary. Keeping in mind the different origins and ideological/political stances that apparently divide Pagans in the West and in Central Eastern Europe, I am also attentive to the fact that this dichotomy between eclectic/reconstructionist forms is not clear-cut (Strmiska Citation2005; Ivakhiv Citation2005; Rountree Citation2015; Citation2017). The ethnographic data I have gathered shows that however strongly Hungarian Pagans emphasize local traditions, they do resort to exogenous (for example, North American native) traditions. This term also allows considering that persons engaged in this movement do not use a single auto-designation, and they do not refer to themselves as Pagan (pogány), Whichever their preference, persons I have met during my fieldwork do not identify themselves as being ‘Pagans’, as other authors have also noted in Hungary and in other contexts (Simpson and Filip Citation2013; Povedák and Hubbes Citation2019). ‘Walking on the path [of the ancestors]’ (útonjáró) and ‘preserver of traditions’ (hagyományörző) are recurrent self-designations.
7 Winter solstice celebrations usually consist in a wake around a ritual fire, accompanied by teachings as well as drumming and singing. Participants are expected to fast from sunset until the end of the ceremony, closed by the greeting of the sun and a communal meal.
8 Bíró’s stay among the Madjars of Kazakhstan was preceded by previous and (also) contested scholarship. It is a physical anthropologist of the Museum of Natural History, Tibor Tóth, specialized in Hungarian ethnogenesis, who ‘discovered’ this ethnic group in 1965, through a fortuitous encounter with a Kazakh linguist. Although his findings were not recognized at his time, orientalist historian Mihály Benkő unearthed his work thanks to his own acquaintances in Kazakhstan (see Kremmler Citation2022). It is interesting to note that these expeditions are modeled on the journey of friar Julian, a Dominican monk, who, in the 13th century travelled east to attempt to find the Hungarians who remained in their homeland at the time of the Conquest of the Carpathian Basin.
9 Kurultaj 2008/Az új Szövetség, directed by István Bán. Falcon film, 2008.
10 These are, for example, the foreign policy named ‘Eastern opening’ (see Moreh Citation2016), what Katrin Kremmler (Citation2022, 180) describes as ‘government-owned institutionalized illiberal science and scholarship’ which promotes, among other things, extensive archaeogenetic research, the oriental inspiration of different artists in the beginning of the 20th century (see Ablonczy Citation2022), the teaching of the supposedly ancient Székely runic script in extracurricular activities for children.
11 With the expansion of the Pagan revival and ‘public Paganism’, yurts have become quite popular in the past decade. Persons engaged in the Pagan revival, especially shamanic leaders use them essentially for ritual purposes (teachings, solstice celebrations) and to house their followers when needed. Yurts are also increasingly used as permanent homes by individuals who opt for more ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’ lifestyles in the countryside. Nowadays, there are several companies specialized in the building of yurts.
12 It would be reductive to ascribe a merely scientific and educative function to museal spaces displaying ancestry, especially when human remains are involved. Ksenia Pimenova (Citation2022) analyzes the complexities of the ritual relationships that can emerge in a museal setting through the compelling example of the mummy of an Altaian princess. This case provides elements for further comparison with the exhibitions organized in the Kurutlaj and the Museum of Natural Sciences of Budapest.
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Viola Teisenhoffer
Viola Teisenhoffer is a researcher at the Institute of Sociological Studies at Charles University in Prague. Her research interests include ceremonial devices, ritual experiences, and identity constructions in Neopaganism and in contemporary spiritualities in general.