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Paper short abstract:

I compare three Hungarian new religious groups’ historical re-enactment: 1. a Neo-Pagan group organized by an urban shaman; 2. an esoteric New Age group with elements of Neo-Paganism; 3. a Charismatic Christian new religious movement. I focus on their referred historic age, groups, and value-system.

Paper long abstract:

I work with new religious groups as a social and cultural anthropologist since 2007. I chose three groups for my comparative analysis: 1. a Neo-Pagan group organized by an urban shaman, 2. a New Age esoteric group (with elements of Neo-Paganism), and 3. a Charismatic Christian new religious movement, established by a contemporary vernacular prophet from Transylvania. All of them have different ways of historical re-enactment. I outline the re-enacted Age and their references to the idealized social groups since they are all different. I focus on the visual signs, re-enacted time, the participants’ social environment, and the referred values in my comparison. The Neo-Pagan group has a special concept about the age of the equestrian nomad empires and the Hungarian conquerors in the Medieval Times. The New Age esoteric group has a kind of anarchic image of the idealized “organic” cultures and societies opposite to the “organized” and overregulated civilization, so they refer to a “timeless” primitive culture and – joining the self-supporting eco-village movements – the so-called “traditional peasant society”. The Charismatic Christian movement that I study re-enacts the Age of Apostles, and the early Christians, before Constantin the Great. The participants’ value-system, educational level, and social environment are all reflected in their re-enacted endeavours.