We turn from Finnic to the closely related Magyar tradition. The Magyars came to the Hungarian plain in the late 9th century from the steppes east of the Volga, where they had lived in close contact with various Turkic and Iranian peoples and where their religion had taken on the broadly Eurasian-shamanic character common to the steppe peoples of that period. Their conversion to Christianity, accomplished under Saint Stephen I about the year 1000, was thoroughgoing; the pre-Christian Hungarian religion was more fully effaced than perhaps any other European pagan tradition, with very little of its detail surviving the conversion.

Isten was the Magyar pre-Christian sky-god — the high god of the heavens, presumably parallel to the various Turkic and Mongolian Tengri-figures (the Eurasian-steppe sky-god whose cult was widespread among the peoples of the Magyars' pre-migration neighborhood). The original Magyar Isten is largely unrecoverable; we know he existed (the modern Hungarian word for "God," Isten, preserves the name, just as Lithuanian Dievas preserved its pre-Christian sky-god's name through the conversion), but the developed theology and mythology that surrounded him in pre-Christian Magyar religion were not preserved in the Christian texts of medieval Hungary. The name's etymology has been variously proposed: a connection to Iranian *Iśtana (a borrowing from the Magyars' Iranian-influenced steppe-period); a native Uralic etymology; a substrate borrowing from earlier Carpathian-basin populations. None of these is securely established. What can be said is that the Magyars' pre-Christian religion was of broadly Eurasian-shamanic-and-steppe-pastoralist character (as evidenced by the surviving táltos-tradition, the Magyar shamanic figure who survived in folk-belief into the early modern period and whose practices parallel those of Siberian and Central Asian shamans), with Isten as the high sky-god at the head of a pantheon whose other figures are largely lost to us.