Ördög

Also Known As: Old Hungarian ürdüng, ördöng
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Hungarian Mythology, Christian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: He is the name Hungarian peasants gradually attached to almost every kind of harm, from soured milk to the earthworks running across the plain.
Role in Mythos: He is the devil of the late medieval church as Hungarian villages absorbed him, taking over the roles of older beings as those beings faded.
Relation to Humans: He bargains, tempts, guards buried treasure and works as a hired spirit, and in the folktales he is always cheated by a poor man who walks away rich. He is feared at crossroads and in graveyards, and the protections used against him are the same ones used against every other harmful thing.

There is a bank of earth on the Great Hungarian Plain that runs for kilometres, low and straight and grassed over, with its ditch beside it. Nothing about it makes sense at ground level. It is too long to be a field boundary and too old to belong to anyone’s grandfather, and it crosses country where there is no stone to build with and no reason to dig. By the thirteenth century it already had a name. People called it ördögszántás, devil’s ploughing, or ördögbarázda, the devil’s furrow, on the plain understanding that something had come through in the night dragging a plough no team of oxen could have pulled. The same name was given to gorges, to washed out gullies, to the ancient defensive dykes thrown up long before the Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin. Whoever had really moved that much earth was gone. The devil was available.

The word for him is older than almost anything else in the language. It sits in the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, written into the Pray Codex somewhere between 1192 and 1195, which is the oldest continuous Hungarian text in existence. The preacher tells his congregation how Adam fell: engedé ürdüng intetüinek, he yielded to ürdüng’s tempting. Forty lines later the prayer asks that the dead man be delivered ürdüng ildetüitül és pukul kínzatujátúl, from the devil’s persecution and hell’s torment. The first Hungarian sentences anyone bothered to write down are about a man dying, and the devil is in them twice. Where the word came from before that is a question philologists have never settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

What the ethnographic record will not give is a Hungarian devil who is properly Hungarian. The standard reference work on Hungarian folk belief says it plainly: the figure was known everywhere, but the ideas attached to him were heterogeneous, and there is no distinctive, unified Hungarian devil tradition. The hooves, the iron pitchfork, the sulphurous stink are not survivals of anything pagan. They are the features of the church’s devil, itself already tangled up with ancient and Near Eastern demon belief, changing steadily across the centuries in which he was being painted, carved and preached at people.

The clergy pushed hard, and the push worked. Priests believed in the devil and fought him, and villages took the lesson. From that came the great flattening generalisation that all evil is his work. Sixteenth and seventeenth century church writing treats anything frivolous or worldly as the devil’s prompting, the carnival masks and the horseplay in the spinning house included, and Péter Bornemisza’s Ördögi Kísértetek of 1578 is the monument to that habit of mind. Every magical procedure that ordinary belief had assigned to some other supernatural being was reassigned. The being either became the devil’s ally or became the devil.

Inside peasant belief the same slide happened from the other direction. Rontás, the impersonal notion of being harmed by something unnamed, wanted a face, and the devil had one going spare. Older malicious beings faded out of memory and he stepped into their vacancies. In many districts the thing to fear at a crossroads or in a graveyard was no longer nameless harm or the witch but him. He, and not some vaguer wickedness, could take an unbaptised child out of the cradle and leave something else. He could spoil the cow. Where Luca asszony or the Tuesday woman had once punished a woman spinning on the forbidden night, it was the devil who punished her. The whirlwind that used to carry the garabonciás carried him instead. In certain jobs the name simply stuck and stayed: the lidérc is called ördög or lucifer in some places, the devil sits on buried treasure, the devil is the helper spirit that makes a wise coachman’s horses uncanny, the devil is a dwarf. None of these has any connection to the church’s devil beyond the borrowed label. For all that, he never conquered as thoroughly as the witch did.

The witch trials brought their own furniture with them and left most of it at the door. The pact, the intercourse, the devil’s mark on the body all arrived in Hungarian material from Western Europe along with the legal procedure, which is to say they arrived in courtrooms. They never took root in the villages.

He fared better in stories. Hungarian has a whole comic tale genre built on cheating him, the ostoba ördög meséje, the tale of the stupid devil, in which a poor man competes with him, or enters his service, or sells him a soul for wealth, and then invariably comes out on top and rich. The plots are often shared with the animal tales about the fox and the wolf. The poor man and the devil harvest and thresh together and the devil is robbed blind at the division. The poor man offers to make him stronger and gelds him. There is a devil’s church in hell, a valiant furrier, and a chapbook hero called Koplaló Mátyás who was still being printed on cheap paper in the middle of the nineteenth century. The devil in these stories has enormous power and no wits at all, which is the arrangement peasants preferred.

The strangest thing he does he does in a creation story. In 1968 a folklorist recorded a complete dualistic cosmogony from György Máris, a Csángó Hungarian born in 1903 in Klézse in Moldova, and it begins with God and the devil simply working together. God sends him to the bottom of the sea for earth. He dives, grabs a handful, and the water washes it out of his fingers before he surfaces. He dives again, and again, three times, and comes up empty each time. God tells him to clean his fingernails, because there is earth under there. From that scraping the two of them knead the world. It grows for six days until it is large enough for both of them to lie down on, and that night the devil starts shoving God toward the edge to tip him into the water and drown him, and cannot, because the earth grows outward on that side exactly as fast as he shoves. By morning it is enormous. Then the devil kicks a clod and makes a frog out of it and says, you see, I can create too. God kicks a clod and it turns into a man, and the man starts talking. More than forty further Hungarian variants and fragments have been collected since, in Moldova, Bukovina, Transylvania, the southern territories and one complete telling from Hollókő in northern Hungary, and the whole family belongs to a diving myth that runs across Central Eurasia and Siberia, where the diver is often not a devil but a bird.

His powers are the powers of a stand in, which is to say they are unlimited and borrowed. He can move earth on a scale no human agency can match, hold treasure, hire himself out, buy a soul by contract, sicken an animal, steal a child. His weaknesses are more interesting. He is beatable by an ordinary poor man with no equipment beyond nerve, and in the tales he always is. The countermeasures against him are not his own either; the gestures, words and objects taken from church exorcism were used indiscriminately against every kind of harm. And underneath all of it lies the flaw the record keeps exposing. He has no shape of his own. He is a late medieval European figure who arrived, absorbed the beings already there, and never quite became a native.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Ördög in Hungarian mythology?

Ördög is the Hungarian word for the devil and the name of the devil figure in Hungarian folk belief. He appears as a tempter, a bargainer, a guardian of buried treasure, a helper spirit and a cause of illness and misfortune, and the word is attested in Hungarian from the end of the twelfth century onward.

Is the Ördög a pre-Christian Hungarian god?

No. Hungarian ethnographic scholarship treats him as the late medieval Christian devil absorbed into peasant belief rather than a survival of pagan religion, and notes that there is no distinctive, unified Hungarian devil tradition. His familiar attributes, including the hooves, the pitchfork and the smell of sulphur, come from church art and preaching.

What does the Ördög look like?

He is depicted as a black, horned, cloven hoofed figure carrying an iron pitchfork and smelling of sulphur. These features are the ordinary European iconography of the devil as it developed in church art, rather than details preserved from any older Hungarian source.

What is the Hungarian creation story about God and the devil?

In the dualistic creation myth recorded from Csángó Hungarians in Moldova, God and the devil make the world together. God sends the devil to the bottom of the primeval sea three times for earth, the water washes it from his hands each time, and only the scrap left under his fingernails survives, from which the two of them knead the world.

How is the Ördög defeated in Hungarian folktales?

He is outwitted. A whole genre of Hungarian comic tales, the tale of the stupid devil, turns on a poor man competing with the devil, serving him or selling him a soul, and then tricking him and coming away wealthy. The devil in these stories has great power and very little intelligence.