Zuism


Zuism, also known as Sumerian-Mesopotamian Neopaganism and Semitic-Canaanite Neopaganism, is a group of Neopagan new religious movements based upon ancient Sumerian-Mesopotamian religion|Mesopotamian] and Semitic religion|Semitic]-Canaanite religions. There are Zuist groups across the United States of America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, as well as the Middle East.
The origins of Zuism lie among Hungarian Neopagans in the 1960s and 1970s, especially within the work of the Assyriologist Ferenc Badiny Jós, who founded a Hungarian Zuist Church and was the author of the Magyar Bible of the Sumerian tradition. Mesopotamian Neopaganism was also cultivated by the American esoteric author Joshua Free, who made his doctrines public from 2008 onwards under the denomination of "Mardukite Zuism". In Iceland, a local Zuist organisation, the Zuism trúfélag, officially recognised by the state between 2013 and 2025, was used to bypass the local tax on religious organisations and protest against the bonds between religion and the state.

Etymology

The noun "Zuism" is derived from the Sumerian verb zu ?, that means "to know", "to understand". "Zuism", therefore, means "Way of Knowledge", and the word was used for the first time by the American esotericist Joshua Free in the mid-2000s. The term is a semantic parallel of the Greek gnosis.
The movement is also known under the names of "Kaldanism", that is to say "Way of Chaldea", "Sumerian-Mesopotamian/Semitic-Canaanite Reconstructionism", Anunna Umun ?????, that is to say "Knowledge of the Heavenly Principles" in Sumerian, or Ntb Qdš ???????, that is to say "Holy Way" in Ugaritic, the language which was spoken in the ancient Canaanite city-state of Ugarit.

Types of Zuism

Hungarian Zuism

The earliest organised Zuist movement was established by the Hungarian Assyriologist Ferenc Badiny Jós, together with the historian Ida Bobula and other authors, including Tibor Baráth, Victor Padányi, and András Zakar, between the 1960s and the 1970s, among those Hungarian Neopagans who sought to relate the origins of the Hungarians to the ancient Sumerians, especially based on the shared, common features of the Hungarian and Sumerian languages, notably agglutination.
Ferenc Badiny Jós, who emigrated to Buenos Aires, in Argentina, when Hungary became part of the Soviet Union, and after the latter's collapse returned to his home country, founded a "Hungarian Church" following the Sumerian tradition, the legacy of which continues to this day among Hungarian Zuists. An important bequest of Badiny Jós is his Magyar Bible of the Sumerian tradition. Among the Hungarian Zuist organisations which continue in the wake of Badiny Jós' teachings there are the "Hungarian Religious Fellowship" and the "Old Hungarian Church".
Hungarian Zuists interpret Hungarian runes and symbols as deriving from Sumerian cuneiform, the Turul bird of Hungarian mythology as being the same as the Sumerian Anzû, and they equate the Hungarian term Isten with the Akkadian Isten, as well as the Siberian Tengri — the Hungarians and the Sumerians are considered within these circles, which espouse Turanist ideas, to have remoter Siberian origins — with the Sumerian Dingir–''An''.

Mardukite Zuism

Mardukite Zuism is a Zuist doctrine established by the American esoteric author Joshua Free in 2008 and incorporated by the "Founding Church of Mardukite Zuism". Mardukite Zuism harkens back to the later Akkadian Assyro-Babylonian tradition, rather than the earlier Sumerian tradition.
The religious books of the Mardukite Zuist movement comprise the Anunnaki Bible and other texts of the "New Standard Zuist Edition", The Power of Zu, the Mardukite Necronomicon, and the numerous other writings about theory and practice by the same author, Joshua Free. The latter defines Zuism as a "systemology" and "spiritual technology" for the realisation of oneself, that is to say the reunification of the self with God, and, beside "knowledge" and "understanding", he also gives to the concept of zu the meanings of "consciousness" and "awareness", and interprets it as the radiant energy that permeates all living beings.

Iraqi Zuism

The Russian Assyriologist V. V. Yemelyanov documented the rise of a Zuist movement in Iraq at the beginning of the 2010s, with the dissemination of prayers to the Mesopotamian gods in the Arabic language.
Among the Assyrian-speaking people and their diaspora across the world, there is a distinct Assyrian Zuist movement, also known as "Ashurism", that focuses on Ashur as the utmost god instead of An, incorporated since 2023 in Australia by the "Assyrian Creed Founding Council".

Canaanite Zuism

Canaanite reconstructionist Zuism is a small community in contemporary Israel. It has antecedents in the cultural and literary movement of Canaanism among the Jews of British Palestine during the 1940s, in particular within the work of Yonatan Ratosh, who was born under the name of Uriel Helpern in Warsaw, Poland.
The Israeli adherent Elad Aaron formulated a cultural ideology for the political rediscovery of the ancient Canaanite pandeistic religion called "Re-Zionist New Canaanism". Canaanite Zuism is also known as Natib Qadish, an expression in the Ugaritic language first used by the American practitioner Tess Dawson at the beginning of the 2000s. The followers of this denomination are called Qadish in the singular and Qadishuma in the plural, and the priests, male and female, are called respectively kahin and kahinat.

Icelandic Zuism

The "Faith Fellowship of Zuism" of the Sumerian tradition was established in Iceland in 2010 by Ólafur Helgi Þorgrímsson and the two brothers Ágúst Arnar and Einar Ágústsson, originally as a branch of a mother church located in the state of Delaware, in the United States, and was registered by the Icelandic state in 2013.
In Iceland, all citizens, on a yearly basis and regardless of whether they are believers or not, have to pay a tax on religion, the sóknargjald, which is then allocated by the government to religious organisations in proportion to the number of their followers. In 2015, some people, disapproving of such a system, and under the leadership of Ísak Andri Ólafsson, took control of the Zuist organisation with the aim of using it as a tool for tax resistance: in their plan, the portion of the religion tax allocated to the movement by the government was to be redistributed to each of the followers, who would thus find a way to bypass the system.
The Zuism trúfélag of Ísak Andri Ólafsson intended to fight against not only the imposition of the religion tax, but also the maintenance of the Icelandic national registry of the citizens' religious affiliations. Such a protest was part of a broader movement within the Icelandic population in those years asking for a complete separation of church and state, to such an extent that even some well-known politicians, such as Birgitta Jónsdóttir, joined the organisation. Given that the Zuism trúfélag was used for clearly stated tax purposes and not for religious reasons, some Icelandic elected officials requested its removal from Iceland's national registry of recognised religions. Nevertheless, a spokesperson of the Zuism trúfélag answered to such a request by claiming that one can neither precisely define the religious nature of an organisation nor measure the sincerity of the religious belief of people.
As of 1 January 2015, the Zuism trúfélag had only four registered adherents, but their number grew very rapidly over a few weeks at the end of 2015, reaching 3,000 to 3,500 followers, or 1% of the Icelandic population in 2015–2016. The majority of the followers were young, connected to the Internet, and already disaffiliated from Christianity. After a legal struggle for the leadership of the organisation, in 2017 the Ágústsson brothers regained control of it. In 2020 the leaders of the organisation, still the Ágústsson brothers, were accused of tax fraud and embezzlement; they were later acquitted of all charges in 2022, but were indicted again and convicted in 2025.

Holy places

The Church of Mardukite Zuism has designated an area in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, in the United States, as "Mardukite Babylonia", where it has established the "Babylon-Eridu Headquarters" near Mosca, named after the ancient Mesopotamian holy cities of the gods Marduk and Enki, and the "Borsippa Headquarters" near Monte Vista, named after the ancient holy city of the god Nabu, following the same principles of sacred geography as those of the ancient cities.
The northernmost holy site in Mardukite Babylonia is the Crestone Ziggurat, built in 1978 by the American businessman Najeeb Halaby, father of Queen Noor of Jordan, as a place for prayer and meditation, a modern interpretation of the ancient Mesopotamian "stairways to Heaven", linking Heaven and Earth; the ziggurat is thus used by American Zuists and others as a spiritual centre.
In 2018, Icelandic Zuists also applied for the allocation of a piece of land in Reykjavík on which to build a ziggurat-type temple, intended to replicate the Ekur of Enlil of the ancient Mesopotamian holy city of Nippur, but the project was ultimately cancelled due to the problems which the Icelandic Zuist organisation ran into.

Zuist literature

;Hungarian Zuist tradition
  • There are two versions of the Magyar Bible, the shorter "Buenos Aires version" first published in 1985 and the longer "Budapest version" last published in 2005.
;Mardukite Zuist tradition
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;Necronomicon Gate-Walking Zuist tradition
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;Canaanite Zuist tradition

  • Academic studies

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