More on Béla Hamvas

For more on the leading Hungarian Traditionalist Béla Hamvas (1897-1968), see the chapter on “Traditionalismus in Ungarn” (Traditionalism in Hungary) in Magdalena Marsovszky, Erfindung und Okkultisierung des Magyarentums, der heilige Gral und die heilige ungarische Krone: Völkische Esoterik in Ungarn als Gegenkultur und Modernisierungsabwehr (The invention and occultization of Magyarism, the Holy Grail, and the Holy Hungarian Crown: Ethnic esotericism in Hungary as counterculture and resistance to modernization), Springer 2025, €69.99 e-book.

Marsovszky has previously published a fine introduction to Traditionalism in Hungary in 2023, discussed here. This article also discussed Hamvas, though in less detail than in the new book chapter, which focuses on him. After an introduction, there are sections on his work between 1933 and 1943 (“Humanization as degeneration; desire for unification of the German-Italian spirit”), his conception of a leading elite (Führungselite), his “theories on the emergence of the ‘New Man,’” his Scientia Sacra (written 1943-44, published in 2000), and Scientia Sacra. Das Christentum (Scientia Sacra: Christianity, 1966).

Marsovszky writes of Scientia Sacra that “had it not been published in Hungarian, a language with limited circulation, it might long ago have found a central place as the ‘sacred text of Traditionalism.’” Its importance in Hungary, she suggests, was also that it was “the first manifestation of modern European Neoplatonic and Ariosophical thought in the Hungarian language.”

Marsovszky analyses Scientia Sacra under the following headings:

• Cultural pessimism 
• Hostility toward science 
• Hostility to evolution 
• Archaic-cosmic anthropology 
• Cyclical view of world history 
• Racist caste system 
• Those worthy of life versus those unworthy of life 
• The spiritual leader 
• Numerology 
• Gnostic dualism 
• Samsara, the swastika, and initiation 
• Gnostic elitist thinking 
• Intellectuals as alchemists of modernity 
• The image of women in Sophia mysticism 
• The unity of theory and practice 
• Hinduism, Buddhism, yoga, the Bhagavad-Gita 
• The Grail a s a symbol of spiritual
•  Aryan purity

If one knows other Traditionalist works, one can imagine relatively easily what many of these are. Less familiar is “archaic-cosmic anthropology.” By this Marsovszky means Hamvas’s view that (in his own words) “There has never been primordial architecture, a primordial religion...  just as there has never been a primordial people, a primordial race, or a primordial language.” Instead there was a “spirit” (Geist) on which peoples of all races and languages drew, and which might now be recovered through Hermetic science and made available to a new “Logos race” that was Hamvas' own version of Helena Blavatsky’s new “sixth race.” These are “those worthy of life.”

The much later Scientia Sacra: Christianity drew strongly on Leopold Ziegler (1881-1958), the German Traditionalist whose work still awaits a full treatment. After examining Ziegler’s debt to Guénon, Marsovszky observes that “What was new in Ziegler’s thinking was that he envisioned the religious future of the world in terms of a ‘new Catholicity’ (neuer Katholizität) that incorporated the integral tradition… he criticized… [the] ‘Christian arrogance’ with which Eastern philosophies and religions… were summarily dismissed as pagan. He therefore called on Christians to ‘raise themselves to a higher vision,’ by which he meant the integral tradition.” “What is important for Hungarian Traditionalism,” proposes Marsovszky, is “the theological justification that made it possible… to embed Catholicism within the integral tradition.”

Marsovszky also notes that Ziegler “denounced the devastating consequences of centuries of ecclesiastical masculinization of the Trinity” and proposed the replacement of the Holy Spirit with the (female) Heavenly Sophia. Hamvas does not seem to have followed Ziegler in this.