Isten

The Devil surfaces for the third time with nothing in his hands. Three descents through cold black water to the floor of a sea that covers everything, three times a fist closing on silt, and three times the water stripping it away on the way up. He says so, sullen about it. God looks at him and tells him he did bring some, and to go and clean under his fingernails.

That grit is the world. The mountains, the wheat plains, the ground under the village churches, all of it moulded from what was packed under a devil’s nails and then kneaded for six days. It is the closest thing Hungarian tradition has to a creation story, and the maker who gives that order is called Isten.

The name is not a title and it is not an epithet. It is simply the Hungarian word for God, and it still is. A pastor says it from the pulpit in Debrecen and a man who has just hit his thumb with a hammer says it too. The old compound for a lightning bolt is istennyila, God’s arrow, which is about as close as the language gets to putting a weapon in his hand.

Here is where the entry has to be honest. When linguists sort the oldest layer of Hungarian religious vocabulary, isten sits in it, and so do ördög for devil, bűn for sin, imád for worship, üdv for salvation, gyász for mourning and tor for the funeral feast. That layer is older than the Christianisation of the year 1000, older than the arrival in the Carpathian Basin in the 890s. You can watch three of those words working together in the earliest surviving stretch of connected Hungarian, the funeral sermon copied into the Pray Codex somewhere between 1192 and 1195: two hundred and twenty seven words of brown ink on parchment in which God grows angry, Haraguvék Isten, the devil is ürdüng, sin is bun, and the congregation is told to pray, vimádjuk. The vocabulary is pagan. The sermon is a Catholic burial.

What the language did not carry across is a single name of a single Hungarian god. Not one survives. Where isten itself came from is still open: the standard Hungarian etymological dictionary prefers an internal derivation, from is, an old form of ős, ancestor, with two diminutive endings stuck on the back of it, while others have reached east for a Middle Iranian word meaning honoured, or further back to the Hittite sun god Ištanu across a gap of eighteen centuries that nobody can bridge.

A blank that size invites filling. In 1788 the novelist András Dugonics gave the ancient Magyars a tidy pre-Christian monotheism in Etelka and a deity he called Magyarok Istene, the God of the Magyars. Three years later the antiquary Daniel Cornides went to Persian material and decided they had worshipped the sun. In 1822 the poet Sándor Aranyosrákosi Székely coined the name Hadúr, Warlord, in an epic about the Székelys of Transylvania, and three years after that Mihály Vörösmarty installed Hadúr at the head of a full pantheon in Zalán futása, opposite a villain called Ármány whose name was calqued straight off the Zoroastrian Ahriman. Then Bishop Arnold Ipolyi, working in the shadow of the Grimms, assembled Magyar Mythologia in 1854 out of documents, folk sayings and inventive etymologies, and was attacked for it by the folklorist Antal Csengery, who thought the old Magyar religion had been shamanic rather than monotheist. Much of what still circulates as the Hungarian pantheon has a publication date.

The folk material is a different matter, because someone went out and wrote it down. Lajos Kálmány, a priest and ethnographer working the villages around Szeged, read his collection of creation fragments to the Hungarian Ethnographic Society in 1891 and published it in 1893. One of them, taken at Magyarszentmihály in what is now Serbia, is a bargain. The Devil asks for the souls of drunkards: let any man who gets drunk belong to me. God refuses, on the grounds that a drunk repents on his deathbed, then offers terms anyway. Bring up a handful of sand from the bottom of the sea and the soul is yours. The Devil goes down. He comes back with empty hands, and he gets nothing.

Kálmány took a second fragment in the same place, and it is the same errand used as a curse. A man grows rich off a household spirit that fetches him whatever he asks for, then tires of having it under his armpit day and night, and is advised to send it to the middle of the sea for a rope of sand. The spirit leaves and never comes back.

The complete story was still being told within living memory. In 1968 the ethnographer Sándor Bosnyák took it down from György Máris, a Csángó Hungarian born in the Moldavian village of Klézse in 1903. God and the Devil work together. Three dives, the sea washing the floor of itself out of the Devil’s fists each time, and then the fingernails. They knead what is there for six days, until the earth is broad enough for God to stand on with one foot, and he says they will rest. After six more days it is broad enough for the two of them to lie down. That night the Devil starts shoving the sleeping God towards the edge, meaning to roll him into the water and be rid of him, and cannot manage it, because the ground grows outward under God’s back exactly as fast as he pushes. By morning the world is enormous. God asks what he was doing. The Devil says he could not get comfortable and did not sleep. God tells him to look at the size of the earth. Then the Devil kicks a clod and it hops away as a frog, and he is pleased with himself, and God kicks a clod and it stands up and starts talking, and that is where people came from.

These are not strays. Bosnyák went on to collect twenty-eight more Hungarian versions and fragments over the next twenty years, four among the Hungarians of Bukovina, twenty-three in Moldova and one complete short telling from Hollókő in northern Hungary, and later collectors added more than forty again from Transylvania and the southern territories. Where the shape came from is argued. The nearest neighbouring versions are Romanian and Bulgarian, and the Bulgarian ones sit close to Bogomil dualism, but the most complete Hungarian and Romanian tellings were all collected in the same corner of northern Moldova with nothing complete in between, which is why Attila Mátéffy, who has charted the motifs against Altai Turkic, Mongolian and Siberian material, argues the Hungarian branch was carried in from the steppe in the ninth century rather than picked up from the Balkans.

Nobody ever described what he looks like. There is no idol, no attested image, no ancient description to work from, and the legends allow him only a voice, a set of hands that work clay, a foot that tests new ground, and a body solid enough to be pushed at in the night. That is the whole portrait. He is a god defined entirely by what his hands are doing.

His powers follow from it. He makes a world out of a fingernail’s worth of silt, and the matter obeys him, swelling overnight until it will not fit under a sleeper. He speaks and the clod becomes a man. The lightning is his arrow.

His limits follow from it too, and they are strange for a supreme being. He does not fetch the mud himself. Creation is a joint operation with something that despises him and would happily drown him in the small hours, and the Devil never stops pressing his claim on some corner of the result. The larger limit is the one the record imposes. Whatever the Hungarians called their highest god before the priests arrived, that name is gone, and what came through the conversion was not a pantheon but one ordinary word, which the villages then filled back up with stories no church had authorised.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Isten in Hungarian mythology?

Isten is the creator God of Hungarian folk legend and, at the same time, the everyday Hungarian word for God. In the collected legends he makes the world by moulding a scrap of earth that the Devil brings up from the bottom of the primordial sea, and he later creates the first man by kicking a clod of soil.

Did the pagan Hungarians worship a god called Isten?

They had the word. Isten belongs to the layer of Hungarian religious vocabulary that predates both the conversion to Christianity around the year 1000 and the arrival in the Carpathian Basin in the 890s, alongside ördög for devil, bűn for sin and imád for worship. But no name of any pre-Christian Hungarian god survives in the record, so nothing is known about who or what Isten was before Christianity.

How did Isten create the world?

In the Hungarian earth-diver legends, Isten sends the Devil to the bottom of the sea for earth. The Devil dives three times and the water washes the silt from his hands each time, until Isten tells him to clean under his fingernails, where enough is left to work with. The two of them knead that scrap into the earth, which grows for days until it is large enough to hold them both.

Is Hadúr the same god as Isten?

No. Hadúr, meaning Warlord, is a modern invention: the name was coined by the poet Sándor Aranyosrákosi Székely in 1822 and popularised by Mihály Vörösmarty’s epic Zalán futása of 1825, which supplied the ancient Magyars with a pantheon they are not recorded as having had. Isten is a genuinely old Hungarian word for God, attested in the earliest surviving Hungarian text.

Why does the Devil help Isten create the world?

He is put to work rather than invited. In the fragment Lajos Kálmány collected at Magyarszentmihály, the Devil asks Isten for the souls of drunkards and is told he can have them if he fetches a handful of sand from the sea floor, which he fails to do. In the fuller Moldavian version he dives on command, and his one solo act of creation produces a frog.

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