Shamanistic remnants in Hungarian folklore

Hungarian shamanism is discovered through comparative methods in ethnology, designed to analyse and search ethnographic data of Hungarian folktales, songs, language, comparative cultures and historical sources.

Studies of files of witch trials reveal that some features of Hungarian folklore are remnants of shamanistic beliefs, maintained from the deep past, or possibly borrowed from Turkic peoples with whom Hungarians lived before wandering to the Pannonian Basin; or maybe is an effect of Eastern influence thereafter (Cuman immigration).

These remnants are partly conserved as fragments by some features of customs and beliefs, for example

There were also people who filled similar roles to those performed by shamans among other peoples: fortune-telling, weather magic, finding lost objects. These people are related to shamanism (in contrast to the cunning folk of non-shamanistic cultures), because the former are recorded to go through similar experiences to those of many shamans: being born with physical anomalies such as surplus amount of bones or teeth, illness, dismemberment by a mythological being and recovering with greater or increased capabilities, or struggle with other shamans or beings.

Related features can be recognized in several examples of shamanism in Siberia. As the Hungarian language belongs to the Uralic family, we can expect to find them among Uralic peoples. Some of them maintained shamanism until modern times. Especially the isolated location of Nganasan people, made it possible that shamanism was a living phenomenon among them even at the beginning of 20th century. The last notable Nganasan shaman's seances were recorded on film in the 1970s.

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