Yotengrit — also called Bü-ün — is an old Hungarian worldview in which everything springs from a motionless, infinite stillness, Yotengrit itself, and is set in motion by a twin vortex of two complementary forces, Ukkó and Gönüz. The spiritual path runs back along creation to that stillness; the ethic along the way is freedom with responsibility.
The shortest summary of the tradition comes from one of its practitioners:
Yotengrit or Bü-ün is the remnant of an ancient Eurasian worldview. Key values are: personal freedom and responsibility, coordinate dualism, respect for nature and freedom from any dogma. According to Bü-ün, the most important human qualities are appreciation of beauty and thirst for wisdom.
The life of the man who wrote the tradition down is told in the biography of Máté Imre, and it is not repeated here. This post is about the teaching itself: what it says about creation, good and evil, gods and festivals, how it relates to Dzogchen, why it was never written down for centuries, what is disputed about it, and what it looks like in daily practice.
Almost nothing exists about this in English. No translation of the books is known, and what appears in English is mostly a few encyclopedia paragraphs. What follows draws on the tradition’s own published material, chiefly the books as quoted by the Yotengrit Foundation on yotengrit.hu, and on one practitioner’s experience, which is set apart clearly in its own section. Where something is the tradition’s claim rather than established history, the text says so.
Stillness first: how creation begins
In the Bü-ün account there is, before anything, Yotengrit: the primordial divinity, motionless infinite stillness. The name is built on tengri, the Altaic word for god and sky. The Foundation’s site glosses it as “First Divinity” or the “Ancient Spirit of the Endless Sea” — tenger is the Hungarian word for sea, and since in the Tengri religions God is identical with the universe, the word also means the infinite, the sea-like. Among the meanings given within the tradition is also “All Good”, which becomes important further down.
This primordial One contains everything — female and male, good and bad — in one, though with a female basic character. Máté Imre calls the beginning of creation the “first stirring”, the moment the Great Wheel is set in motion. A line from the first volume, quoted on the Foundation’s site, puts it in verse (our translation):
Being born, birth, coming into being, first stirring, the beginning of time. From undying femaleness sprang transient maleness.
From the stillness comes motion, and the motion has two names. Yotengrit brings forth, from its own spirit-substance, the divine pair: Gönüz, the Sun-spirit (gön is an old word for sun, üz is spirit), and Ukkó, the goddess “with the moon on her forehead”, the Earth-mother, whose closer-to-human appearance is Boldogasszony, the “Blessed Lady” of Hungarian folk Christianity. In the summary of this tradition, Yotengrit is infinite stillness, and Ukkó and Gönüz are infinite force in motion.
One distinctive idea sits underneath this: in Bü-ün teaching, spirit is a kind of matter. It has quantity and quality, it can be divided, added and subtracted — the “spirit-quantum theory”. A god is made of spirit-substance, and so, in the tradition’s view, are people, which is why people can also create.
The twin vortex
What the two forces do together is the heart of the teaching: they form the twin vortex (ikerörvény). Máté Imre writes (second volume, as quoted on yotengrit.hu; our translation):
“The world is the Twin Vortex of two Creator Gods, Twin Whirlwind: Female Vortex, Male Vortex. Their eternal dance is the begetter of all life, all concepts.”
The formula that goes with it is Egy, egyből kettő, kettő meg egy — “One, from one two, two again one.” It is said to appear at every level of existence: in the energies, in the triad of man, woman and child, in the division of a living cell. It is also, in the tradition’s account, the basis of improving quality — of ennobling, of evolution. Even the name Yotengrit is said to be a nine-sounded word of which only four sounds are heard in this formula, five being kept in the spirit world.
Not good against evil
The most important consequence is what the vortex is not. A passage from the first volume (our translation) is blunt:
“There is no shadow without light, but there is light without shadow. Well-being does not require misery, health does not require illness, joy does not require sorrow.”
The world is not driven by a contest between good and evil. That is the Bü-ün reading of the Old Iranian, Zoroastrian model, which it calls polarising dualism: two opposed principles that weaken and cancel one another, and that, in the tradition’s view, justify hierarchy and conflict. Against it stands what the tradition calls coordinate or complementary dualism (mellérendelő, kiegészítő). The two members of a pair are not opponents but lack and surplus: each has what the other lacks, and together they make one whole. A man and a woman together are one human being.
The Hungarian language is offered as a witness. In Hungarian, paired body parts are counted as one whole: lose an eye, and the word is félszemű, “half-eyed”, not “one-eyed”. The tradition reads that as the fossil of a very old way of seeing the world.
Udag, Ármány and what “bad” means
If the vortex is complementary, where does harm come from? In the Bü-ün account, Yotengrit casts the bad out of itself so that a nobler, “ensouled” creation can be made. The spoiling force has a name: Udag. Later folk usage, under Zoroastrian influence, knew him as Ármány — the word survives in Hungarian as ármány, “scheming” — and the tradition links it to the Iranian Ahriman. Udag is not a partner on the dual scale; he stands outside it and spoils, breaks and obstructs the vortex.
Yet the story does not end in a war. Yotengrit is the undivided whole, and in that state even Udag is included.
The definition of “bad” matters here. In Bü-ün it is not moral evil but something humbler and more practical: the silány and selejtes — the shoddy, the reject — whatever by its very quality blocks ennobling, improvement and development. A badly made thing, rather than a sinful one.
The ethics that follow are compact. The tradition’s own summary gives one rule: “Everything is permitted that does not harm another.” There is no collective guilt and no collective salvation, the individual being an independent social factor. Misfortune is not read as God’s punishment, and so does not excuse anyone from helping.
The path back: two stages
If creation runs from stillness through the twin vortex into the world, then the path of the spirit runs the other way. In the tradition’s words, the way to enlightenment is to travel back along creation: first to the state of the pure dualities, which means learning to master the forces and energies, and then to the “infinite stillness” itself, the Yotengrit state.
The human being is not, in this picture, the crown of creation. The first volume calls people “the gods’ attempt to embody the creative spirit” (our translation) — one creature among many, made of divine substance and therefore capable of growth.
The afterlife is described as a state, not a place. Ordinary souls that did not climb the “inner ladder of the soul” return into the good divinity and dissolve in it; those who developed far enough remain independent spirit beings; reincarnation exists but is not automatic. What counts, the Foundation’s site says, is the growth of knowledge, the enrichment of feeling, and good deeds.
| Term | Meaning in the tradition |
|---|---|
| Yotengrit | the primordial, undivided divinity; the state of infinite stillness; the name of the modern movement |
| Bü-ün (Büün) | the old religion’s own name, preserved in the Rábaköz; said to mean the religion of the “nine charms” |
| Ukkó | the goddess “with the moon on her forehead”, Earth-mother; Boldogasszony is her closer-to-human appearance |
| Gönüz | the Sun-spirit, father god |
| Ikerörvény | the twin vortex of two complementary forces that drives creation |
| Udag / Ármány | the spoiler of the vortex; bad as shoddy, defective quality |
| Tudó, bácsa, táltos | the “knower”, the master, the Hungarian shaman: the carriers of the tradition |
| Kormorán-rend | the Cormorant Order, said to have preserved the teaching orally for centuries |
Gods as forces, and the path of the Sun
The names Yotengrit, Ukkó and Gönüz sound like persons, but the tradition insists they are better read as forces and qualities. Máté Imre wrote that God is “a very abstract concept; a spiritual power” and that every personification was the product of human imagination. The one partial exception is Boldogasszony, who is said to be Ukkó’s earthly appearance. Alongside the Old God the tradition also knows “little gods”, such as the Magyarok Istene (“God of the Hungarians”), a hero-ancestor made into a protective spirit by the combined spirit-substance of his people.
If the gods are forces, the calendar is where they are met. The Bü-ün year has four major and four minor festivals. At each of them a ceremony was held, and offerings were made to the ancestors, to the guardian spirits, to the creator gods and to the God of the Hungarians. The four major festivals belong to the solstices and equinoxes:
- Karacsán (Christmas), 21 December — the beginning of the year and the birth of light. A three-day festival.
- Gyümölcsoltó Boldogasszony, 21 March — the first creation, the bursting of buds, birth and the feast of the first gate. A three-day festival.
- Ispiláng, 21 June — the feast of the spirit. It celebrates that the creator gods gave people, beside their breath (szusz), spirit (iszt) as well.
- Sarlós Boldogasszony, 21 September — the ripe harvest, fulfilment, and the feast of death.
The four minor festivals fall between them:
- The Feast of the Law (Törvény ünnepe), 1–2 February — a celebration of the teaching of Truth and Mercy. Gönüz gave men the law of Mercy, and Ukkó gave women the law of Truth.
- The Tree of Life feast (Életfa ünnep), 1 May — the marriage of Sky and Earth, the season of blossoming and fertility.
- The feast of Mátün, early August, when the Sun passes from the constellation of the Lynx (Hiúz) into that of the Iris (Nőszirom) — the feast of Mátün, the God of the Hungarians.
- The Feast of the Threshold (Küszöb ünnepe), early November — the remembrance of the ancestors.
Several of these survived inside the Christian calendar in altered form: the Foundation’s own articles note that Ispiláng was folded into Pentecost, and that Sarlós Boldogasszony landed on 2 July.
The Foundation’s liturgy page also describes a dance that acts out the cosmology, the double vortex dance (kettős-örvénytánc): a woman and a man set out from two different points along spiral lines, meet, exchange a kiss, and continue together as a pair — the twin vortex, performed.
Why it was never written down
For most of its history the tradition was deliberately kept unwritten. The reason given is not secrecy alone but life. A written text freezes; an oral one stays alive and fresh. The principle is quoted in the community as: “what was good a hundred years ago may no longer be applicable.” The Foundation’s account adds a historical layer: after the Mongol invasion, the Cormorant Order is said to have gone into internal exile and passed the teaching on by word of mouth to avoid book burnings.
The line passed mostly from father to son or grandson. There was also a female line, the midwives (bábák), in which the teaching usually went from grandmother to granddaughter.
Writing was an exception, allowed only in an emergency. According to the Foundation’s site, the inheritance contains an instruction to bring the ancestors’ faith back into public awareness when its keeper judges the nation to be in great danger. That is why Máté Imre wrote it down in the early twenty-first century; the first volume appeared in 2004.
“It could have been so”
The same attitude explains something that surprises newcomers: the contradictions. The sources contain several creation stories, and they do not always agree. Bü-ün does not say “it was so”; it says “it could have been so”. The multiple accounts, with their conflicts and parallels, serve contemplation rather than dogma, much as in Buddhism, where every philosophy is part of a practice. The tradition’s own motto is the same instruction in four words: Ne higgy, kételkedj, győződj meg — “Do not believe, doubt, convince yourself.”
Yotengrit and Dzogchen: two names for the All-Good
For readers who know Tibetan Buddhism, the most striking thing about Yotengrit is a coincidence of names.
Yotengrit can be understood, among other things, as “All Good”. Samantabhadra — in Tibetan, Kuntu Zangpo — also means “All-Good”. In the Nyingma school he is the primordial Buddha and the source of all Dzogchen teachings. Chögyal Namkhai Norbu is quoted as explaining that Samantabhadra is not a creator being but a way of pointing to our own potentiality, one that “has never been conditioned by dualism.”
Put side by side, the two descriptions are worth a pause:
| Aspect | Yotengrit / Bü-ün | Dzogchen / Buddhism |
|---|---|---|
| The name | Yotengrit; among its meanings, “All Good” | Samantabhadra / Kuntu Zangpo, “All-Good” |
| The ground | motionless infinite stillness, before the first movement | the primordial ground; Samantabhadra personifies it |
| The dualities | first mastered as pure dualities, then transcended | the primordial state is “never conditioned by dualism” |
| The aim | to become a free spirit, to “become divine” | nirvana, final liberation (as the tradition frames the contrast) |
In the Yotengrit state the dualities are transcended and everything has one taste; there is no difference between good and bad, and even Udag, the harmful one, is there.
The tradition also makes a claim about the relationship itself, and it is one that the practitioner quoted later in this post shares from his own experience: Buddhism is one of Bü-ün’s “children”. The Foundation’s history page says the Bü-ün religion springs from a root shared with Tibetan Buddhism, and that the name, preserved in the Rábaköz, is still practised in Tibet as Böön — presumably Bön, Tibet’s pre-Buddhist tradition, whose senior teacher is profiled in the life of Lopön Tenzin Namdak.
On this view, the two inheritances complement each other. Bü-ün keeps some knowledge that Buddhism has lost; Tibetan Buddhism, for its part, preserved a great many yoga and meditation practices. The goals are phrased differently: the Buddhist practitioner aims at final liberation, nirvana, while the Bü-ün practitioner aims to become a free spirit and to become divine, in the tradition’s phrase — “to deify oneself”. It is the tradition’s claim, offered here as such. Readers who want the wider picture of how the world’s mystical lineages echo each other can start with Bridges Between Worlds.
And what about shamanism?
Yotengrit is usually placed within Hungarian neopaganism and its táltos (shaman) movement, which draws on research into Siberian shamanism; most contemporary scholars accept that the old Hungarian religion had a shamanic character. Two things set Yotengrit apart. First, Hungarian neoshamanism is, as the research puts it, an ethnic religious technique, centred on ecstasy and on the figure of the táltos, while Yotengrit is, in the words of one overview, more religious-philosophical in its message: closer to a worldview and an ethic than to a trance method. The tradition itself says that nobody can learn to be a táltos — one is born one — although the gift can and must be trained, hence master and pupil. Second, Bü-ün describes itself as an “open”, summing-up religion that never closed itself to new teachings, and whose basic tenets nonetheless stayed the same through the millennia. English-language overviews note that it shows various non-indigenous influences; the tradition’s own answer is that a summing-up religion would. Its kinship with the wider Hungarian spiritual landscape, and with Steiner’s anthroposophy, is explored in Hidden Kinship.
Authenticity: what is known, and what is claimed
Every honest introduction to Yotengrit must face the question: is this really old? The answer has layers.
The claim. The Yotengrit books present themselves as the faithful transmission of knowledge preserved by the knowers (tudók) of the Rábaköz region in western Hungary, the heritage of the “Büün religion”, said to be the persecuted original faith of the Hungarians. Overviews of the Hungarian Native Faith movement, which lean on the research of scholars such as Réka Szilárdi, describe it in just those careful terms: the work claims to represent that transmission.
A nineteenth-century trace. One written echo of a similar worldview is the manuscript A még pogány magyarok őshite és szertartásai (“The Ancient Faith and Rites of the Still-Pagan Hungarians”) by Hetényi János (1786–1853), a Reformed pastor and philosopher from Ekel, today Okoličná na Ostrove in Slovakia. Hetényi was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences — a corresponding member from 1836 and a full member from 1840 — and the manuscript is preserved in the Academy’s library. It is cited as an 1846 prize essay; 1846 is the year the Kisfaludy Society set a prize question on the faith and rites of the pagan Hungarians.
This should be read for what it is: a nineteenth-century written trace of the same worldview, not independent proof. Because the text exists, a later author could have read it, so it cannot settle whether the tradition survived orally or was reconstructed, and it is not used that way here.
One source to be careful with. The Kassai kódex is sometimes mentioned alongside this material. It is known only from the publications of Fehér Mátyás Jenő from 1967 onward, its original has never been shown, and it is widely considered disputed or a forgery — nothing here rests on it.
The practitioner’s position. The position taken on this blog is a simple one: the teachings feel fully authentic, because people living in other places and at other times, independently of Máté Imre, also taught this same worldview. The test it proposes is not a document but a way of living: whether the teaching makes a person freer, more responsible and more attentive to beauty. The more politically charged readings that have grown around the Prophecy of Nyirka are touched on in the biography; they are not what this post is about.
How I live it
A personal note. Everything above comes from sources; this section comes from one practitioner’s experience, written in the first person and not in the tradition’s voice.
I never met Máté Imre in person, sadly, but I heard his name from several directions around 2013–2014. I know his pupils personally, and what I know I learned from them and from the books. They also told me stories: that he could move a glass on a table with his will, and that he could take his surroundings to any landscape he liked — people would be sitting at a table in a room, and then the conversation simply continued outside in a grove.
What drew me first was a worldview built on freedom and freedom from dogma. Freedom has been the highest value in my life, and I have always tried to increase my own degrees of freedom. I have also been engaged with Buddhism, and within it Dzogchen, for more than ten years, and the teachings of Yotengrit helped me understand Dzogchen better.
I have read all four volumes several times over the past ten years. I could not single out one book or one part, because together they form a whole. I keep in touch with the community and with the pupils, and I completed the Yotengrit Academy organised by the Yotengrit Foundation. I have been at shared ceremonies several times, and at home we always keep the festivals: for all eight there is a ceremony, either with the family or in a larger community.
Gathering the senses
The practice I do regularly is one that has survived in Bü-ün: érzékek nyalábolása, which I render as gathering the senses. (Nyaláb means an armful or bundle.) The sequence:
- Sit cross-legged and close the eyes.
- Attend to the sensations of the body.
- Attend to the breath.
- Attend to the tastes in the mouth.
- Attend to the smells.
- Attend to the sounds.
- Open the eyes, and relax into attending to all five senses at once.
I do this about three to five times a week, for 20–30 minutes, usually in the morning or late morning. To me it feels more effective than any other meditation: relaxed attention helps the mind become spacious, relax, and settle into a mirror-like state.
One example shows what I mean. Sometimes a question is occupying me, and I sit down intending to put it there and receive an answer. But when I am in that state, there are no more questions.
Bü-ün has no explicit dream-yoga practice, but gathering the senses builds the awareness and presence that dream yoga needs. For the practical side of becoming lucid in dreams, see the techniques compared there.
When the teaching comes alive
For me the path is a process — or rather a vortex, a spiral — in which one keeps deepening and developing. There have also been spontaneous moments in which the feeling and the experience of sacredness and blessing appear, for longer or shorter times. These moments have no precondition; they arise and pass regardless of circumstances.
In Hungarian
These teachings are much easier to understand in the mother tongue than in translation, because every translation distorts the original texts in some way. Hungarian also keeps the finest shades and word roots, and they help with abstract concepts and teachings.
(End of the personal section.)
Common misunderstandings
Most misunderstandings about Yotengrit are the general kind, not peculiar to it. Two are worth naming.
Gods as persons. Yotengrit, Ukkó and Gönüz have names, and a reader trained by other religions hears persons. In the tradition they are closer to forces and qualities: the stillness, the movement, the Sun-spirit, the Earth-mother. Boldogasszony, Ukkó’s earthly appearance, is the exception.
The solstice festivals as anachronism. Celebrating the solstices can look like a costume in a technological civilisation. Yet the movement of the Sun and Moon still governs our lives, whether we notice it or not: the day and the year follow the Sun, the month follows the Moon, and the Sun’s path — the path of light — runs through everything.
Even the week is a sky calendar. In English, Monday is the Moon’s day, Sunday the Sun’s day and Saturday Saturn’s day, and the other names substitute Germanic gods for the Roman ones. This is the planetary week, a Hellenistic scheme built on the Babylonian and wider Mesopotamian tradition of observing the seven wandering bodies of the sky; historians still debate its details. Hungarian weekday names do not follow it, and most of them are loanwords. Two old Hungarian names survived, the first and last days of the week: hétfő, “head of the week”, and vasárnap, “market day”. Some old names of the sky survived as well. The Yotengrit books keep two zodiac constellations, the Lynx (Hiúz) and the Iris (Nőszirom). Hungarian folk astronomy keeps Göncölszekér, the Big Dipper, which the tradition reads as the Sun’s wagon, the wagon of Gönüz. It also keeps Esthajnalcsillag, the “evening-dawn star”, Venus, and Hadak Útja, the “Road of the Armies”, the Milky Way. How much more could be recovered from what is digitally available is a research project still waiting for someone. They would make a worthwhile research project for someone.
Where to start — and what not to do
No English translation is known, and one would be hard to make well. Translating into Hungarian is generally easier than the reverse, whether the text is literature, poetry or philosophy, and the fine shades of the Yotengrit books would inevitably suffer. The main values can still travel to other languages.
A sensible route for an English reader:
- Read the summaries on this blog. Start with the life of Máté Imre, then this post, then Hidden Kinship.
- If the ideas catch, look for the source. The Foundation’s site yotengrit.hu is in Hungarian; its Academy (a nine-weekend foundational course built around the Yotengrit books) and its festivals are held in Hungary.
- If the interest is serious, find someone in Hungary who can pass the teaching on in person and explain it live. A tradition that lived for centuries by word of mouth is best met that way.
And three things not to do, as the practitioner puts it:
- Do not approach it with bias. Neither a convert’s enthusiasm nor a sceptic’s armour reads it well.
- Do not read it as a religion. Take it as a worldview and a practice first.
- Do not look in it for “the truth”. Good teachings do not hand over the answer; they help you discover it. The tradition’s own formula, once more: do not believe, doubt, convince yourself.
If one image stays from all this, it is the vortex: stillness that sets itself in motion, two forces dancing, a spoiler who is also held within the whole, and a path that winds back through the middle toward the All-Good. Whether that is a memory of something very old or a modern synthesis, it is a worldview worth meeting on its own terms — and, for those who sit with it for a while, an invitation to relax, attend, and see what happens when the questions run out.
