Did a Primordial Covenant exist?

Arkadaş (Turkic) and háttárs (Hungarian) denote more than friendship or companionship; they express an ancient covenantal bond rooted in mutual protection, fidelity, and shared destiny.

In the Turkic tradition, arkadaş originally meant “one who covers your back.” It referred to a person with whom one stood side by side in life and in danger—someone entrusted not merely with loyalty, but with one’s very survival. The bond implied reciprocal responsibility, truthfulness of word, and readiness for self-sacrifice. An arkadaş was not chosen for convenience, but recognized through trial.

The Hungarian concept of háttárs preserves the same primordial meaning with striking clarity. Literally “the one who stands at your back,” a háttárs is the person who safeguards you when you face forward—who carries responsibility without supervision, who holds the line when no witness is present. In Hungarian organic culture, this bond was not contractual or emotional, but ethical and existential. A broken word toward one’s háttárs meant the collapse of personal integrity.

Across both traditions, arkadaş / háttárs represents a living moral alliance:
not friendship, but standing-for-one-another;
not hierarchy, but shared responsibility;
not ideology, but embodied trust.

The Primordial Covenant (Ősszövetség) is the original, pre-institutional bond between human beings and the sacred order of life. It precedes all written law, formal religion, and historical doctrines. Its essence is not commandment, but commitment; not obedience, but fidelity.

This covenant lives wherever the spoken word is sacred, responsibility is mutual, love is active, and inner law governs action. It is a covenant of living truth, transmitted not primarily through texts, but through embodied culture, ritual, and communal ethics.

The Primordial Covenant has been preserved in fragments by many ancient peoples; however, it survived with exceptional continuity and coherence within Hungarian organic culture, where it remained embedded in language, folk customs, moral codes, and communal structures long after it had hardened into institutions elsewhere. Hungarian tradition did not merely remember this covenant—it lived it.

In this sense, the Primordial Covenant is not a symbolic forerunner of the New Covenant, but its ontological ground: the living soil from which later revelations could emerge. Where the Primordial Covenant remains active, renewal does not require revolution—only remembrance and practice.

The bond of arkadaş / háttárs is one of the clearest human expressions of the Primordial Covenant. It translates cosmic order into lived human loyalty. Where such bonds exist, covenant is not preached—it functions.

A community built upon háttárs relationships does not need heavy institutions, external enforcement, or ideological control. Its order arises from within, sustained by trust, truthfulness, and shared responsibility.

Where these bonds disappear, covenant collapses into law, and law into power.

New Testament vs. New Covenant

In most international usage, New Testament is understood primarily as a canonical book collection—a defined body of texts forming the second part of the Christian Bible. The emphasis lies on scripture, authorship, and doctrinal continuity.

Within Hungarian organic culture and its spiritual inheritance, the emphasis has traditionally been different. What is central is not the Testament as a written corpus, but the New Covenant as a lived reality. For us, covenant (szövetség) precedes text. Life precedes law. Relationship precedes doctrine.

Thus, what many cultures primarily approach as the New Testament, Hungarian tradition has most deeply received as the New Covenant: a renewal of the primordial love-based alliance between human beings and the divine order, enacted through lived faithfulness rather than textual adherence.

This difference is not theological opposition, but difference of emphasis:
Testament points to what was written.
Covenant points to what is lived.


Primordial Covenant and New Covenant

From this perspective, the New Covenant is not a rupture from the past, nor merely the fulfillment of prophecy, but the reactivation of the Primordial Covenant under historical conditions of crisis and distortion. Jesus does not introduce a new moral system, but restores covenantal life: trust, love, inner law, and responsibility lived among people.

The New Covenant, therefore, does not abolish the Primordial Covenant—it brings it back into conscious visibility.

In contemporary usage, religion is commonly understood as an institutional system: doctrines, hierarchies, moral regulations, and formal affiliation. This meaning, however, is historically secondary.

The older and deeper concept is religio—from the Latin re-ligare, “to bind back” or “to reconnect.” In this original sense, religio refers to a lived attentiveness to sacred order: a careful, conscious orientation of life toward truth, responsibility, and meaning. It describes practice before belief, relationship before system.

What later became organized religions were originally closer to what we might today call confessions: shared ways of acknowledging and living according to a perceived sacred truth. A confession was not primarily a structure of control, but a communal form of faithfulness—embodied in custom, ethics, and daily conduct.

Hungarian organic spirituality historically aligned far more with religio and confession than with institutional religion. Faith was not administered; it was lived. Covenant was not enforced; it was kept. The sacred was not separated from life, but woven into it.

Understanding this distinction helps clarify why, in this tradition, covenant takes precedence over testament, and lived alliance over formal belief. What matters most is not adherence to a system, but fidelity to a relationship—between human beings, and between humanity and the sacred order itself.

When covenant is reduced to testament, life becomes doctrine.
When religion becomes institution alone, confession loses its voice.

Reclaiming covenantal language does not reject Christianity—it clarifies it. It brings the focus back from systems to relationships, from enforcement to fidelity, from belief about truth to living in truth.

This is not a return to the past, but a recovery of depth—one that many ancient cultures remembered in fragments, and which Hungarian organic culture preserved with exceptional continuity.

What is commonly called the New Testament internationally is, in Hungarian organic tradition, understood most deeply as the New Covenant: not primarily a collection of texts, but a lived renewal of a love-based bond between human beings and the sacred order of life.
This covenant precedes scripture and institutions; it is enacted through faithfulness, responsibility, and lived truth.
Religion here does not originally mean a system of control, but a shared confession—a way of living in conscious relationship with the divine.
The New Covenant restores the primordial covenant that many ancient peoples remembered, and which Hungarian culture preserved with exceptional continuity.