Avar-Hungarian Shamanism   Page 1         The following information was scanned and typed from the book called "Dioszegi Vilmos: A pogány magyarok hitvilága" 1828-1987, by our member Ilona. Her complete transcript appears in our Document section in Hungarian. Our member Attila translated all of the information into English for our community and for that I am forever grateful to the both of them!     This map shows the estimated migration routes of the Mayar's and/or Hun's out of Siberia The Ancient Hungarians' Belief System The curiosity of the scientific world has been aroused over the past several decades about the belief system of ancient pagan Hungarians. The source of the curiosity has been solely brought about by the ancient writings they left behind. Later, research focused its attention on the relationship between the Hungarian and Finn-Ugric languages. During the years between 1854-62, emphasis was turned toward the Siberian Turks’ and Mongol peoples' beliefs in Shamanism. The religious beliefs of our nearest language relatives, the Voguls and the East Jaks (Estonians), were just as unknown as the Finn-Ugor relationship to the Samoyed people, or Jurak-Samoyeds, Jeniszej-Samoyeds, Tavg-Samoyeds, otherwise known as the East Jak-Samoyed religion (of Estonia and Latvia). There was so much material available to researchers about Hungarian religious beliefs by the 1920’s, that there was an abundant means to compare the various belief systems sufficiently. Unfortunately, the research was without proper results. It was established that, if the pagan Hungarian religious beliefs were recognizable in the least, then first a Hungarian ethnography – i.e., popular beliefs, popular customs, children’s games and tales, and on the basis of songs and their music – had to be developed. This assignment was the first task of the ethnographers. The necklace of the girl is from pierced animal-bones, so called "orgon". It has role to prevent the girl from bewiching. In her hands there is a puppet made from grass and letter (corn-cob puppet"). The shamanistic world view could have created the backbone of the Hungarian perception of the world. It could not have been homogeneous, because Hungarian paganism was not. Except for the Finn-Ugric language of the Nyek and Megyer tribes, everyone else spoke the Turkish language.  The belief system gradually deteriorated to its elemental roots, and the later forms of created beliefs evolved into other beliefs, chants, forming incentives for tales, ritual songs, surviving into the future and preserved for us to this day. The moon and the sun tree The ancient Hungarians believed in shamans, who believed in the magical powers of nature.   Stylized world tree: At the top is the sun, on the left is the moon, among it's branches are the stars and horses heads (Berettyoujjfalu, from the collection of S. Szucs) A fundamental source of their view of the world was the world tree or life tree, which linked two or three different worlds together: the world above, the world in the middle, and the world below. This tree, among whose crowns traveled the sun and the moon, was only to be found and seen by the shaman. The everyday traveler could only hear about it. This tree grew only at the house of the “Life mother,” who is in charge of births. At the root of the trees are frogs, lizards and snakes, or the world of their spirits, the underworld. The trunk of the tree represents the present-day world. In the drawing, the man, along with the animals pictured around him, collectively represent the souls of a single being, or the “life force” of the man. The upper portion of the tree is heavenly or celestial, and reflects the world of the divine. This is the source of the life force, where, among the foliage of the heavenly trees, the life force lives in view of the nesting birds and procreates. These birds then fly down to earth, and penetrate the wombs of women, and there develop human beings. If a woman should see the bird in her dreams, and she can discern the bird’s gender, then she will know whether she will bear a son or a daughter. On the upper branches of the tree, the pregnant woman’s patrons, the cuckoos, are seated, which are sacred birds. There is an amazingly large tree in the world, which has nine bent branches. Each one is so large that it has its own forest. If they start to whirl or swirl, then the wind will attack. The tree is so amazingly huge that not only does the moon traverse through its branches, but the sun does also. But only he will come across this tree, as to where it is, in what direction it is, who is born with teeth, and who takes nothing else into his mouth for 9 years standing, anything but milk. It’s a known fact that one like this is a shaman. Because this amazingly large tree grew in such a place that only an all-knowing being like this can even get near it. Even this kind of man can only hear about it, that the tree exists, but even he cannot see it.” (Story by an 89-year-old shepherd, who heard it from an old peasant in Butum, 1945 collections).   Folktales also preserve the story of this amazingly huge tree; e.g., „In the courtyard of the king stands a tree that reaches to the sky and has no top. On its trunk in one house lives the moon’s mother and the moon, but further up, similarly in another house lives the sun’s mother and the sun.”  This tree is commonly known among the people of the Urals and in the circle of Siberian people. There are three holy trees: birch, larch, and the cedar. These are the Shaman’s trees; they live for only so long as the Shaman lives.  Continued Page 2