Spirituality Studies 9-2 Fall 2023 21 Sára Eszter Heidl it”, stresses that the official/folk distinction is derogatory to forms of vernacular religion. While McGuire prefers the term “lived religion”, Ammerman uses “everyday religion” instead. Vernacular or lived religion suggests a way of redefining the concept of religion, but the perspective is still “from within” religion, excluding those who do not see themselves in this category. Contemporary research, especially in Central-Eastern Europe, links the problem of indefinable concepts mainly to temporary events, such as festivals and carnivals as one of the main driving forces of alternative, muddled beliefs. Some scholars call this phenomenon “re-enchantment”. This approach suggests, first, that the revival of pagan habits and folkloric national beliefs and rituals brings enchantment back into the modern world and, second, that the Weberian concept of disenchantment needs to be revised (Moore 1997; Jenkins 2000; Graham 2007; Stiegler 2014; Josephson-Storm 2017). The concept of re-enchantment began to gain popularity in the 2000s, and it has not yet to be given a common definition. Alessandro Testa uses the term as a typology for (re)emerging alternative religious forms. He distinguishes “five different types of religious or pseudo-religious phenomena… from both institutional religions and new religious movements” (Testa 2017, 26). These types are: (1) forms of “vernacular” religion; (2) forms of magic; (3) the religious aspects of the production and consumption of cultural heritage; (4) new forms of ritual and social memory that have religious features but are not necessarily seen as religious; and (5) claims to believe in “something”, or to have “spirituality” without being a member of a church or an organised religious movement (Testa 2017, 26). Research on re-enchantment in European carnivals and festivals is attracting scholarly attention. Testa (Testa 2017; 2019; 2020) and other scholars (Povedák 2018; Teisenhoffer 2018; Van den Ende 2022; Illés and Nita 2022) are active in this field. Ongoing research on re-enchantment is a promising project to formulate a typology of contemporary non-institutional, non-traditional religious forms [2]. One could suggest that the phenomenon under study should simply be called by its name, such as esoteric, neo-pagan, or mystical practices and beliefs, but the typology seems more appropriate to categorise the many different interpretations of the alternative forms discussed. Testa’s work should also be influential for its use of the term pseudo-religion: not as a movement or institution but as a phenomenon. It should not be forgotten, however, that re-enchantment is a description of a social and cultural process which is derived from the Weberian concept of disenchantment. Another angle of contemporary research is simply to call such phenomena “religion-like” (Taves 2009; Sulmasy 2013) or “sacred” (Gilliat-Ray 2005; Pike 2022). This seems to be the easy way out: the simple and clear wording assumes that it does not need any explanation or definition. Moreover, the term “sacred” seems to have been resurrected in recent years, replacing the term “religious” or “spiritual” with just another word that comes from the emic religious environment. The term “sacred” can refer to something associated with religion, such as a sacred place (Chidester and Linenthal 1995) or a secular place that has been “sacralized” (Gilliat-Ray 2005, 358). However, it can also mean a sacred place outside religion, “an inversion of the ‘default’ world… a sacred space apart from ordinary life” (Pike 2022, 201). In addition to spatial approaches, it appears, for example, in the reinterpretation of collective effervescence (Durkheim 1964), as a “sense-ofthe-sacred”, independent of traditional religions (St John and Gauthier 2015, 5). “Spirituality”– another confusing concept in the modern European context – mainly covers a shift in the 19th and 20th centuries from traditional Christian religion to inner spirituality. Originally, the term “spiritual” meant a “deeply religious person” (Koenig 2008, 349), but it slowly became associated with a post-Christian/New Age spirituality. This shift began to be interpreted differently by scholars, and was understood, for example, as a shift from traditional religiosity to a holistic worldview or the Easternisation of Western worldviews (Tromp, Pless and Houtman 2020, 511; Van Niekerk 2018, 9). The different interpretations have led to a wide range of understandings of the term “spirituality”, which has remained without a common definition. The emergence of the spiritual, but not religious (SBNR) and similar categories made a clear distinction between “spiritual” and “religious”, implying that the two terms are incompatible, and suggesting that religiosity means a traditional, institutionalised form where individual thinking is suppressed, whereas spirituality means a non-institutionalised, individualised, experience-oriented worldview (Tromp, Pless and Houtman 2020, 511–515).
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