A táltos is the knowing person of Hungarian folk belief: someone born with a sign, chosen by supernatural beings, who foretells, finds hidden treasure and fights for the weather. Whether a táltos is a “Hungarian shaman” is exactly what scholars dispute, so this post keeps what the sources record apart from what the tradition claims.
This post is about the figure, not the teaching. What Yotengrit teaches is set out in Yotengrit and the Old Hungarian Way, and the man who wrote it down is in the life of Máté Imre. Here the questions are narrower: who is the táltos, what do the sources actually record, why does the label “Hungarian shaman” divide researchers, and how does the Yotengrit tradition keep the figure?
The main sources are the entry on the táltos in the Hungarian Ethnographic Lexicon (Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon), the folklorist Éva Pócs’s 2017 study in the journal Ethnographia, which re-examines the life’s work of Vilmos Diószegi, and the pages of the Yotengrit Foundation. Where something is the tradition’s claim rather than the documented record, the text says so. One practitioner’s own experience is set apart in its own section near the end.
What the word táltos means
Táltos is a Hungarian word, recorded in dialect speech also as tátos. It is written down as a personal name from the thirteenth century on, and some fifteenth- and sixteenth-century codices use it for various magic specialists; a text collection by Péter Tóth G. follows its written traces from 1211 to 1854. Where the word comes from is still an open question:
| Proposal | Origin suggested | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Ugric inheritance | A Hungarian formation from a noun that goes back to an Ugric root, glossed “sorcery, magic power” in the Uralic etymological dictionary as quoted by László Honti, and “light, fever” in the Ob-Ugric relatives | Defended by Honti; András Róna-Tas calls it possible but not beyond suspicion |
| Turkic loan | A Turkic verb tal-, “to faint, lose consciousness”, with a form such as taltuči | Róna-Tas and Árpád Berta, West Old Turkic (2011): possible, “further research necessary” |
| From tát- | The verb “to open the mouth” | Rejected by Róna-Tas on grounds of meaning |
Róna-Tas’s own summary, written in 2017, is that the debates around the word táltos are not yet closed. The folk language had other names for similar figures as well: Pócs mentions village specialists called javas or tudós, the “knower”, and, among weather-workers in Székelyland, Gyimes and Moldavia, names such as időigazító (“weather-straightener”), jégőrző (“hail-guard”) and jéghordozó (“hail-bearer”).
The táltos in folk belief
The Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon gives the classic picture, collected from folk belief and legend over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
| Motif | What the lexicon records |
|---|---|
| Birth sign | Born with teeth, or with more than ten fingers: an extra bone as the mark of the chosen. Pócs adds double rows of teeth, the caul, bristles on the back and small wings under the arm. |
| Childhood | Nurses for a very long time, speaks little, quiet and withdrawn, sometimes melancholy, but unusually strong in nature for his age. |
| The seventh year | A turning point. Before it, the teeth could be stolen and the gift would never come; at seven the child disappears from the parental home, taken away by the táltos, and so becomes one. |
| Tests | In places a test: climbing the “branches and boughs” of a tree (Hajdú-Bihar) or a ladder (Nagyszalonta). |
| Food | Lives on milk, secondarily on eggs. |
| Knowledge and powers | Knows everything, foretells, tells where treasure lies in the earth, raises and disperses hail and storms; a bullet cannot hurt him. |
| The fight (viaskodás) | The characteristic act: táltos fight as wheels (iron and fiery), as flames (blue and red), as stallions (grey and bay) and above all as bulls (black, smoky and white-blond). The purpose is to steer the weather towards good or bad. |
In the legends the fight has typical scenes. A white bull asks his fellows to strike the hooves of his opponent, and if they help he wins; if not, the black bull drives him off and hail falls. Wandering táltos ask for lodging and milk, announce that they are going to fight, and mark the place where the household later finds treasure. The táltos also has his tree, which he climbs to pray for rain, to speak with dead shepherds, to find strayed cattle or to foretell.
The táltos horse
The helper horse is a widespread motif in Hungarian folk tales, and historical figures, above all King (Saint) László, have a táltos horse that leaps from mountain peak to mountain peak. Pócs makes a careful point: in the twentieth-century accounts of real táltos fights the horse does not appear as a helper. Yet two 18th-century trial records connect a helper horse with a fighting táltos, and some legends mention a táltos looking for his horse. Her reading is that these are separate threads of tradition that touch only slightly. For the practitioner’s own account of the horse in Yotengrit, see the personal section below.
Two portraits: the legend and the court record
The twentieth-century legends mostly show a fighting man who works the weather. Another picture appears in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century witch-trial records, where Pócs counts thirty-five mentions of a táltos. These are community specialists who heal, foretell and “see” treasure, are sometimes accused of harmful magic, and often act as counter-witches who cure harm done. Weather-working appears in only three or four of the thirty-five, and Pócs notes that the trance-working and weather-working táltos of these records are women, while the fighters of the later legends are men.
Two cases give the flavour. In a 1740 trial at Miskolc, one of the accused confirmed that when the time comes, táltos must go to the heavenly battle, regularly at Pentecost and on St John’s Day. Another, a young táltos woman, entered trance by gazing into a tub of water. Pócs suspects that the twentieth-century stories are above all the voice of an old epic tradition, not a direct mirror of ritual practice. The two portraits do not contradict the figure; they show how many roles one word has carried.
Is a táltos a shaman?
Where the word “shaman” comes from
Shaman is not a Hungarian word. It goes back to Evenki šamān, a Tungusic language of Siberia, and reached European languages through Russian and German in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; its deeper origin is itself debated. In the folk records that scholars work from, the people’s own words are táltos, tudós, javas and the weather-worker names above. We found no record of folk speech using sámán as its own term: the identification is a scholarly one.
How the identification was built
Pócs traces the history. In the nineteenth century the táltos first appeared in research as a sacrificing priest of the pagan Hungarians. Ferenc Kállay (1861) and Antal Csengery (1884) already linked him to the drum of the Turkic shaman, and Gyula Sebestyén’s 1900 article on the “magic drum” set off a search that lasted for a century. Géza Róheim (1925) and then Vilmos Diószegi, in his books of 1958 (A sámánhit emlékei a magyar népi műveltségben, “Memories of Shamanic Belief in Hungarian Folk Culture”) and 1967 (A pogány magyarok hitvilága, “The Belief World of the Pagan Hungarians”), reconstructed the táltos as the keeper of a Finno-Ugric-based, Turkic-tinged shamanism of the Hungarian conquest age. Diószegi drew on an immense body of folk-belief collections, on the Hungarian Ethnographic Atlas, and on his own fieldwork aimed at the táltos; he also collected among the Tuvans of Siberia in 1958. His work became a canon, and most researchers after him accepted its results. Pócs adds that the search was bound up with Romantic national identity-seeking, a wish for the Hungarian religion to carry a distinctive eastern trait.
What the critics say
The critique came in steps. Gyula László accepted only the fight, birth with teeth and the predestined fate as genuine táltos attributes, and wrote that for imagining the former Hungarian táltos “we cannot very well use the Siberian shaman”. Lajos Vargyas read the táltos duel and the táltos horse as motifs of epic tales, not of rituals. Vilmos Voigt, according to Pócs, no longer considered a large part of Diószegi’s theses proven by 2012. Pócs herself, in 2017, calls Diószegi’s reconstruction incoherent: it brings together motifs that belong to other belief complexes, and for the drum and the shaman’s dress she finds no serious evidence. She also finds no source from the conquest age that shows a táltos working as a magical or religious specialist; every conclusion about that age must be drawn from later documents. Her own alternative points to the Balkans: Bulgarian and Serbian weather-wizards with a Turkic past are closer relatives of the táltos than the far-off Siberian parallels, and a táltos-like mediator may have worked around the conquest age.
Pócs does not say there is nothing shamanic in the táltos. She leaves open that relics of shamanism survive in the animal helpers, the initiation and the fight motifs, and that if the weather-wizards are called shamans, a conquest-age shamanism looks more probable in the light of the Bulgarian data. What the sources do not prove is the classic Siberian shaman. She measures this against the narrow definition used by Hungarian researchers following László Vajda, to which she adds the public, ritual character of the shaman’s work:
| Trait of Siberian shamanism (narrow definition) | The táltos in the documents |
|---|---|
| Ecstatic journey to the otherworld | Present in a few trial records (water-gazing trance, the “heavenly battle”); the legends narrate physical fights, not trance. |
| A drum with a central role in producing ecstasy | No serious evidence of a Hungarian shaman drum (Pócs). |
| Fighting in many forms, with a set motivation | The viaskodás: richly documented in legend, with the weather as the aim. |
| Initiation through sickness and symbolic death | An echo in the child who is carried off at seven and “dies” before returning; the dismemberment motif added by Diószegi was doubted by László. |
| A public, ritual performance | Not documented. |
The fair summary is that kinship with the world of Eurasian shamanism is plausible, identity is unproven, and the label “Hungarian shaman” carries more than the sources can bear. That is also the position this post takes. The practitioner quoted below goes one step further and rejects the label as a translation altogether.
The táltos in the Yotengrit tradition
The Yotengrit Foundation’s pages speak about the táltos in the tradition’s own voice. What follows is the tradition’s account; no independent source corroborates it.
- Born, not trained. On the page of the Cormorant Order, the Foundation writes that a táltos cannot be learned but has to be born as one; the inclination, however, can and must be developed, which is why there is master and pupil. Yotengrit and the Old Hungarian Way covers that line of transmission.
- Named táltos in the line. The Foundation lists Lápkumánja (Csépi) as a táltos who lived in the time of King Béla IV and was the thirteenth head of the order, and “Tudós” Ferenc Nagy (1883–1970) of Rábapatona as the 47th. Nagy is described as primarily a healing táltos whom the people called tudós, a “knower”; although he also used herbs, he is regarded rather as a spirit-healer.
- The three reeds. The Foundation’s motto is “The táltos stands on three reeds: love, truth, wisdom”, and its lecture club is named after them, the Three Reeds Club (Három Nádszál Klub).
- Drum and dress. The Foundation’s liturgy page says that it is not the costume that makes the táltos; what matters is “the drum, the cap or crown, the chained staff and the táltos’s power”. The same page says that in the old Hungarian liturgical ensemble the drum originally played a subordinate role. Set beside Pócs, this is a good example of claim and record: the tradition counts the drum among the táltos’s tools, while the documents the scholars have do not show a Hungarian shaman drum.
What is left of the táltos today
Pócs’s survey of twentieth- and twenty-first-century folk memory is sober. Named táltos serving their communities can be traced only in Székelyland, Gyimes and Moldavia, and the few remembered there were diviners; the living weather-workers there are not linked to the táltos by name or practice. On the Great Plain, táltos survived into the mid-twentieth century as treasure-seers, the best-known case being “Pénzásó Pista” of Tiszafüred, who was held to be a táltos around the village, dug a mound obsessively for buried money, and had, as Pócs notes, no other táltos attribute.
Beside the folk record there is the living movement. Yotengrit keeps the figure in the festival cycle, in its Academy and in clubs; the Academy’s syllabus lists healing among its higher “summing-up” teachings, built on the nine foundation weekends. Whether this is a continuation, a reconstruction or a new synthesis is the question the previous post sets out under “Authenticity”; for the folk figure itself, the record above is what can be documented.
A practitioner’s view
Everything above comes from sources. This part comes from one practitioner’s experience and opinions, written in the first person. It is not the tradition’s voice and not scholarship.
How the táltos came into my life
My first picture of the táltos came from folk tales in childhood: the táltos horse, and the táltos as a knowing person. Through Yotengrit I came to know the link between the táltos and the táltos horse: the knower is often led by the táltos steed to the heavens and the spirit world.
I have not met a táltos in person, sadly, but I am looking.
Táltos or shaman?
In the Hungarian folk tradition, as I know it, the word shaman was never used; the knowing, healing, magic-working person was always the táltos. For me the táltos is not a shaman. The táltos is a tudó, a knowing person, not just a village sorcerer.
I do not call the táltos a shaman, and I still place the táltos within fighting shamanism, a term from the Yotengrit books. These fit together if the label is kept apart from the kinship. Táltos cannot be translated into English. Shaman, the word known in every language, is at best a stand-in, and it makes the táltos a local variety of something defined elsewhere, so I keep the word untranslated. Kinship is another matter: the Siberian shaman is similar, but not the same. And “Siberian shaman” is itself a broad notion, since many peoples live there and the knowledge and role of the shaman differ everywhere.
Máté Imre’s Yotengrit books describe two broad currents of shamanism. In the fighting kind, the shaman, or the fighting táltos, contends with opposing forces and relies on his own strength. He is a free person who tries to master the spirit world. In the appeasing kind, the shaman is often strongly tied to a particular locality, and achieves results mainly by asking and by propitiating. The Hungarian táltos, as I see it, belongs to the fighting current.
Which sources I trust
The most authentic and complete sources for me are the Yotengrit Academy, Zoltán Cser, who teaches there among other places (more about him in Bridges Between Worlds), the folk tales and the Yotengrit books. Diószegi is heavy reading.
What lives in our practice
The festival cycle, the four major and four minor festivals of the Yotengrit/Bü-ün tradition, is an organic part of our family’s life; the eight are listed in the post on the teachings. When it is needed, we also use oknyomozó gyógyítás, cause-seeking healing, which appears in the Yotengrit books. It means uncovering the causes of an illness by questioning and observing the patient and those around them. When did the symptoms begin? When does the condition improve, and when does it get worse? Has there been anything similar in the family? How does the patient live, what do they eat, what is their work, what are their habits? The aim is to bring individual, family and environmental patterns to light. This describes a way of inquiring, and no claim about cures is made here.
Two misunderstandings I have met
The mixing of traditions. This does not concern the táltos tradition alone, but every spiritual current. There are many self-appointed teachers and healers who mix different traditions as they please. In my experience the result is usually complete mental confusion and, in worse cases, psychiatry. I have seen that personally. That is my observation, not a study.
The “ancient Hungarian” táltos. Many self-declared “ancient Hungarian táltos” figures appeared in the 1990s, alongside many Sumerologists, as I know it. They did not like Máté Imre and the Yotengrit books, because, in my words, he pulled the rug out from under them. I heard this by word of mouth, and as far as I know there is no written trace of it.
To keep the record straight beside that personal account: the Sumerian-Hungarian kinship theory, which holds that Hungarian and Sumerian are related, is treated by mainstream linguistics as a fringe view, and Hungarian is placed in the Uralic (Finno-Ugric) family. The theory was spread among lay audiences by amateur authors and émigré circles, and recent research on it looks at its effect on identity formation. Pócs, for her part, observes that the quest for an eastern trait in the pagan Hungarian religion has long carried a national-identity charge.
Why it matters
Modern people have lost their connection with nature, and every tradition that can restore this connection, or at least improve it, is needed.
One more thought, entirely my own. I think world religions were also built on the fighting and the appeasing patterns. There are religions in which people ask God for mercy and wait for compassion, and there are religions in which the practitioners take “enlightenment” and “liberation” into their own hands and believe neither in collective salvation nor in collective punishment.
Where to start
The Yotengrit side of the táltos exists in Hungarian only; no English translation of the books is known. The practitioner’s own list of the most trustworthy routes is: the Yotengrit Academy and its teachers (see yotengrit.hu), the folk tales, and the Yotengrit books. The folk and scholarly side is also in Hungarian: the Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon entry on the táltos for the classic picture, Éva Pócs’s 2017 article in Ethnographia (volume 128, issue 1) for the critical view, and Vilmos Diószegi’s books of 1958 and 1967 for the reconstruction that shaped the century.
For an English reader the sensible order is this post, then Hidden Kinship, which sets the tradition beside anthroposophy, and then, if the interest holds, a teacher in Hungary who can pass it on in person. The figure of the táltos is best met the way the tradition itself proposes for everything: do not believe, doubt, convince yourself.
