Podcast | India’s gods before India

The gods before the VedaSo, we go to the crossroads, in the middle of the second millennium before the common era. The great power of upper Mesopotamia was a kingdom called Mitanni. The M-N- is in Mitanni. Its people spoke Hurrian, a tongue that is, as the handbooks put it, “neither Indo-European nor Semitic.”But the Mitanni kingdom was ruled, and this is the thing, by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy. Indo-Aryan here means, in effect, Indo-European. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology says it without fuss: the Mitanni Hurrians “were themselves ruled by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy with some allegiance to Indian deities.”This is 1400 BCE. The Rigveda was properly systematised around 1200 BCE. It was not written down for centuries after that, and was carried in song and prayer. So from the Mitanni we have a treaty of around 1400 BCE. The earliest writing from India comes centuries later. The best guess we have is that the Indo-Europeans reached the Indian subcontinent around 1200 or 1300 BCE. So the Mitanni Hurrians left written artefacts, which I have seen with my own eyes in the museum in Istanbul, a hundred or two hundred years before the first Indo-Europeans reached India.Parity of esteemThe Oxford Companion calls the gods named in that treaty Indian gods. Yet our evidence that these gods are Indian comes from a later period.People sometimes tell me I am being anachronistic when I call Proto-Indo-European ancient Ukrainian. The Yamna, the community from which all living Indo-European languages come, lived six thousand years ago in Mykhailivka, in what is today Ukraine. Linguists call the language they spoke Proto-Indo-European. I say we can now carry the proper name back: ancient Ukrainian. We do that for ancient Greek and ancient Indian. People say, that is anachronistic, you cannot do that.Well, here is the Oxford Companion to World Mythology doing it. It carries a category back onto deities we know the Mitanni worshipped, because they swore oaths on their names, centuries before India became India.So it is legitimate to carry a name back this way. It may be anachronistic. I will not quibble with the Oxford Companion when it calls these Indian deities. But I will explain, as I just have, what it is doing. It is an anachronism. It calls these gods Indian centuries before India existed, before the first Indo-Europeans reached India and set up their culture there.Some Indo-Europeans may have reached India earlier. But we know from the genetic evidence, in a 2019 paper in Science, that a group associated with the Painted Grey Ware culture brought steppe ancestry into the aristocracy there. They became the Brahmins, who systematised the Rigveda and finally wrote it down. We have written evidence of these gods’ names from the Mitanni long before any of that, long before India became India.So parity of esteem demands this. If the Oxford Companion to World Mythology may call those gods Indian centuries before they became Indian, when we have this treaty from before then, then strictly we should call the Indian deities Mitanni deities. That would be ridiculous, because they truly caught fire in India. They gave their name to India: the N-D-, the Indra in India.We will come back in future episodes to that N-D- sound, the reversal of the D-N- in the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dnister and the Danube. By the rule of first attestation in writing we could even call these Indian gods Hurrian gods. Of course we do not. Like Timothy Snyder, we have learnt that many lines of evidence besides writing help us understand our past, our identities, the origins of our language and culture, and why we say what we say today.So we will not call them Hurrian. But parity of esteem demands this much. If you may do it for Indian deities, then at the very least we may use the name ancient Ukraine for Proto-Indo-European. That is all I ask there. I leave aside, modestly and humbly, the fact that all of these emanations, Indian, Irish, Celtic, Germanic, and the Mitanni gods themselves, come from the steppe, from this Yamna community. So a fortiori, we should be allowed to speak of ancient Ukraine.That is a theme that runs through Finding Manuland. The objection usually comes from people whose mental models have not yet caught up with the latest archaeogenetics, linguistics and history. They have no mental model of Ukraine, because they have not listened to Finding Manuland.I had no mental model of Ukraine either, until by accident I came across that Yamna burial mound in Dnipro, removed by property developers in May 2021. I tell the story in my first Finding Manuland episode. So I blame nobody for not knowing. I myself knew nothing of Ukraine and all of this until around my fiftieth year. I am doing my best to bring it into our awareness.So when I use the term ancient Ukraine, I am not just trying to provoke you, or to provoke thought. I am giving the parity of esteem that great cultures owe to others who have achieved statehood.Chariots off the steppeThe Mitanni war-nobility, the chariot-fighting caste named in the treaties as the maryannu, drove the same light spoked chariot the steppe had made. I have seen those treaties with my own eyes. The M-N- is in maryannu too, though that may be a coincidence.I am calling this a crossroads, but it also radiates out like a wheel, from Van down to Mardin and along to Urfa. The wheel is a metaphor I use in Finding Manuland. It is also a central metaphor in all Indo-European languages. It became solid in the chariots and carts found on the steppe. I have seen those carts with my own eyes in the Dnipro museum, and in the photographs of the Sintashta community in today’s Kazakhstan, from whom the Iranian, the Indian and the Mitanni deities would have come.So we have the one road I have spoken about, from the lower Volga through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia and across to Arslantepe. I have visited there too and we will go again. The museum in Malatya should reopen soon after the earthquake, and I really want to go back. That road becomes the Hittites.The other road runs from Mykhailivka, in Kherson Oblast, on the Dnipro. I will use the World Labs model to help us picture it. It goes from there up to the Sintashta community. In the Sintashta graves, the setting out of horses’ heads and the remains of the funeral feast match the account in the Rigveda exactly.The Sintashta date from about 2000 to 1900 BCE. So they took around two thousand years to go from ancient Ukraine to there. It then took them several centuries more to reach the Indian subcontinent, where the songs of the Rigveda describe exactly the rites we have physical evidence for at Sintashta. Centuries after that, the Rigveda was first written down. In the Sintashta graves we have actual chariots, so we know the chariot was there. Among the Hurrian-speaking Mitanni we have accounts of chariots. The maryannu, their chariot-fighting caste, drove the same light spoked chariots the steppe and the Sintashta had made, and we have the archaeological evidence for them.Their kings, their rex, their raja, bore Indo-Aryan names. Their gods were the gods of the Rigveda. So they were Indo-European.The treatyWe know this because of a treaty. Around the middle of the fourteenth century BCE the Hittite king Šuppiluliuma made a pact with Šattiwaza of Mitanni.Remember that the Hittites came by the road from the Volga, through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia and Arslantepe. They brought the Indo-European languages that became Anatolian, all of which died out. Hittite was the language of Tarmana, whose contract to buy a slave, from around 1900 BCE, I saw in the Ankara museum. I also visited the site of his house at Kültepe, near the modern city of Kayseri. Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe

The first of the Atlas journeysI introduced you to the Atlas series of Finding Manuland in five podcasts, published over the last while. This is the very first of the Atlas journeys proper. I saved one of the best for it. Radiating out of this one is a series of pathways through the Anatolian side of Manuland. We will use them to show the method, the linguistics and the organising focus for the journeys still to come.Someone posted on Substack today that their mind was being blown by this series. That is a wonderful thing to hear. My own mind is, frankly, blown by it too.Today I also gained beta access to one of the first world models open to early adopters. I saw a month or two ago that it would come out in beta, and that people were invited to send in their use cases. I made mine about Finding Manuland and the Atlas papers.A world model is a neural network that builds spatial images and camera-controlled video, up to a minute long, from photographs, films or drawings. The very first proper vision network depended on ImageNet. The creator of ImageNet is the person behind this new world model, made by World Labs.I am very excited about it. Over the weekend I will play with it. The first thing I will try is a journey around Mykhailivka, the village on the Dnipro from which all living Indo-European languages set out. I have the archaeologists’ drawings of the excavations there, and I will test World Labs on them. There are conditions attached to the beta, so I will have to be careful about what I post. But we will see what I can do. So stay tuned.Where the crossroads isSo, the crossroads. Bring your mind to the modern state of Türkiye.Many of you will have been there on holiday, probably on the westernmost coast, near Smyrna, or Kaş. I spent two wonderful weeks camping down in Cilicia, opposite Cyprus. That is not where we are going. We are going east.You may not have a mental model of this part of the world. I certainly did not, before I began all of this work a few years ago. So if you have a chance, now or later, open Google Maps or Apple Maps, or an atlas if you have one in your library. Look at Türkiye and go east. You will find Lake Van. It is always big on the map, on any depiction of Anatolia from ancient times onwards, because it is a huge saltwater lake. Just below it is the place I am calling the crossroads.Each episode of Finding Manuland has three parts. There is the M-N- sound. There is the linguistics. And there is the journey, the itinerary. Calling these episodes an Atlas does not mean giving up any of the three.The roads that crossThe Ukrainian Yamna steppe inheritance did not only run east, to India or to Tajikistan. Picture a wheel with spokes radiating out of it. At the great crossroads of the ancient world, just south of Lake Van, the Indo-European family’s deepest sounds crossed too.This is where a treaty swore the Vedic gods centuries before the Rigveda. The Rigveda is the oldest surviving holy book in Indo-European culture. Modern scholars believe its poems, songs and prayers were settled into their form around 1200 BCE. Centuries before that, we have this treaty, sworn under the moon-god of Harran.I visited Harran last January. I had to hurry through it, unfortunately. It was late in the day, and I had been in the Tektek Mountains looking for another ancient shrine to the moon-god. We will return to Harran, on the podcast and on the ground.This is also where a monarch named Menua built his realm, at Ararat. Its own people called it Biainili. It was based at the modern city of Van. You may remember the video I filmed there last January, on an amazing blue-sky, snowy day. I was the first to go up to Van Castle that morning.In biblical times the Biainili people were known as Urartians. Menua, with the M-N- in his name, was the son of one of its founders and a founding figure himself. Just south of Van is Menua’s Canal, still called by his name today. That is where the crossroads begins, the roundabout this episode is about. And all of these things are caught together on one clay tablet, before the East had written any of them. By the East I mean Iran, and India.In earlier episodes I followed the road east to India and Iran. We will travel that road again. This road turns south-west, to the place where all the roads cross. It is the upland where Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the steppe and Iran all meet. It is the country of Van and Mardin, of Urfa, the modern city of Şanlıurfa, glorious Urfa, and of Harran. I have stood in all of those places. And that area holds something that ought to be on the first page of every history of the West, and somehow never is.Selling the inheritance down the riverThis week the US Secretary of State made a video, and an appalling speech, in front of the Acropolis. He was trying to tie his undergraduate course on Western civilisation to the beginning of Greece. Those of us who have listened to Finding Manuland know that what we now call Western civilisation began in ancient Ukraine.Marco Rubio and his administration are trying desperately to sell Ukraine down the river. In doing so they are selling the very inheritance they claim to promote.The Nazis did something similar. They went in search of the homeland of the Indo-Europeans, and assumed it was up in Norway, in the Nordic countries. All the while they occupied the very ground around the modern city of Dnipro, the Dnipro River and Zaporizhzhia, which the russians are relentlessly bombing now.Rubio and his MAGA adherents are promoting the surrender of Ukraine under this peace troll, which they have inherited from their communist and russian hypnotisers. They could have befriended Ukraine. They could have helped Ukraine drive the russians out of all of its territory, as will inevitably happen. Instead they are trying to troll Ukraine into defeat. They are not only losing their own country. They are losing the very germ of the civilisation they claim to promote. And in Finding Manuland we know that germ has a place on the map.Two roads to the crossroadsThe Yamna made a journey to Anatolia around 3600 BCE. It was matched by the journey of the Yamna’s brother and sister culture, which established the first Indo-European languages there. I have said this before, and I will say it again because it matters so much. The first attested Indo-European language is Anatolian, Hittite.You may remember my visits to Kültepe, near the modern city of Kayseri, where the earliest Indo-European writing was found. I have also brought you my discovery in the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara. It is among the first Indo-European writing anywhere: a contract in which Tarmana bought a slave, set down in cuneiform on clay.It shows that the M-N- sound, Mana, the sound of energy and charge, is immanent even in the earliest Indo-European writing. So the M-N- sound was not only present among the Yamna in eastern Ukraine. Tarmana’s ancestors had come by another road, through the Areni-1 cave in Armenia, from the upper Volga and the Volga bend.These are parallel tracks. All living Indo-European languages come from the Yamna at Mykhailivka. The dead Indo-European languages, attested first, came by the other road. They include Anatolian, and we have the Hittite libraries of Boğazköy. I visited there in late September and October 2023, an amazing visit.So the journey to the crossroads has two starting points, as far as modern archaeogenetics can tell. One is by the Dnipro, where I spent four years as a diplomat, from 2018 to 2022, and where the Finding Manuland story began.The other road comes from the lower Volga bend. It crosses lands where everyone spoke Ukrainian until the Ruschists murdered, genocided and destroyed their culture, and occupied them. Ukraine is relentlessly striking those lands today. Today it hit the loading bay of the Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery, in Rostov. Everyone there spoke Ukrainian until very, very recently. From that area came the dead Indo-Europea… Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe

The Harness Logic: Journeys and Papers Feed Each OtherThe journeys and the papers in the Finding Manuland Atlas series feed each other, and the Atlas grows out of the exchange: Atlas Intro Episode 2, Episode 3, and Episode 4. A journey grounds a paper. A real place, object or photograph gives the M-N- argument something tactile to stand on. The Sura crossing, on the outskirts of Dnipro, where those property developers tried to destroy that Yamna mound so they could build a fancy house on top of it, but instead found a stone circle, which prevented them from building the fancy house, and which lies by the Sura River. The 64 stones of that stone circle. Menua’s canal (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua), which I have stood by, on the great saltwater lake of eastern Turkey, which was the capital of the Urartian Empire, and of Armenia, until the russians gave this part of Armenia to the Turks, the Turkic language speakers. The crescent on the Göbekli Tepe (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/video-podcast-edessa-and-gobekli) bench, which I have written about and will write about again, the moon crescent on the bench which bore the painted boar that was found last year, and had lain under the stones which had buried the Göbekli Tepe site near Urfa, Şanlıurfa, in eastern Turkey, in part of northern Mesopotamia, since 9,000 years before the Common Era. The son of Manu that I saw on a column at Edessa, modern name Urfa, or Şanlıurfa, with its great, great museum, if you ever have the opportunity to visit. The museum at Urfa, where the oldest depiction in statue form of a human-sized human, with his obsidian eyes, is the first thing that strikes you as you enter this incredible museum, where many of the treasures from Göbekli Tepe rest. And the signage photographed at a site becomes primary-source corroboration in its own right, the museum’s own label stating the case. We must, and we do in Finding Manuland, balance the scholarship from the great universities of Tübingen, of Oxford and Cambridge and Dublin and Yale and Penn and all of those places. But we also don’t ignore the archaeologists who work in place in Türkiye. So if they state something, then we use that as weighty evidence. The papers, once finished, feed all of this Atlas in their turn. Each becomes a part of the frame the next journey grows from. Each is at once a finding and a seed, so every one is held to the same grounding bar. And this, I hope, will inspire you too, because Finding Manuland is also an iterating itinerary of infinite journeys, and as long as I live, I hope I will continue on these journeys. I have many hundreds of journeys to report to you as of today, and I hope that in the future I will have many hundreds, perhaps thousands more. And that they will inspire you, if you are lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit places, or you have spare time, or you are just divorced, or you are looking for somewhere to bring the children in the summer. You are looking for a theme for a holiday. You don’t want to spend two weeks on a beach. You want to explore. If you want to learn about the sounds and the meanings in the words you use in your everyday world, then I am going to help guide you to the places where these words lived, live, and, as long as there is an Indo-European culture, will live.To India with the Rig VedaSo then, if you can get your mental model from... So, we were in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, moving across Tuva, Afghanistan, and the route which those Sintashta migrants took all the way to India. And we know this because of the Rig Veda, which was standardised around 1100 years before the Common Era, and is traditionally cited as the oldest book in an Indo-European language, and the holiest book in an Indo-European language. Slightly complicated, because Zarathustra was probably three centuries before that, but the Zoroastrian corpus had to be reconstructed much later. We will get to all of these complications later. But in the Sintashta culture we have, and this was only discovered a couple of decades ago, the burial customs, for instance the placement of horses’ heads and the remains of funereal feasts, which match exactly what is in the Rig Veda. We know now, with genetic evidence, that the Yamna, who travelled from Ukraine, established the Sintashta culture, ran through these burial customs and buried their chariots, and their descendants would end up in India.India is really where this project was seeded, in some respects. The family’s root it is not, despite 19th-century people, and a lot of people who have this kind of sketchy view: oh, Sanskrit was the first Indo-European. But India is a parallel branch, the founder sound, M-N-, arriving there from the Dnipro, or here from the Dnipro. Imagine I am in India right now. We will go there again. I have been there a lot in the past. Arriving with the language and the chariot. And India kept manas, mind, at the very centre of its archive. So we have the Brahmin, who are the priestly caste, like the flamen. Again, M-N- in flamen, M-N- in Brahmin. The Brahmanas, which are the holy songs, are in the Rig Veda, and they are sung by the Brahmin, and they are arranged in mandalas, M-N- in mandalas as well, in the Rig Veda.I travelled in India in the 90s, and learned, probably from a guidebook, that India’s first man was called Manu, and it was the coincidence with the Germanic first man, Mannus, with two Ns, one N in Manu, and that is the Manu of Manuland. Though, as listeners will know, I actually took the word Manuland from the side of a shed near Maing (https://www.powerofmana.net/p/finding-manuland-i) in northern France. It was the coincidence with the Germanic first human, Mannus, that first set this inquiry going. Earlier still, six months across India and Nepal in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was visiting schools. They all became a part of me as I worked for a charity, trying to identify poor and clever, and mainly female, children, and put into place systems that could identify them, to qualify for scholarships paid for by a very munificent English couple.The Himalayan North: Ulaanbaatar, Spiti, DharamsalaThe Himalayan north is where the sound and the moon-mind come back together, in places I have actually stood. And once, far north of the Himalaya: in January 2014, in Ulaanbaatar, I spent 14 freezing days keeping hypothermia at bay by mimicking the pilgrims’ circuits around the Gelug temple, the Gelug being the Dalai Lama’s tradition, spinning the maṇi prayer wheels. A nun there led me to practice on the sixth of January, and I encountered the figure of Yama, the death twin, for the first time, in that warm temple in Ulaanbaatar.In the autumn of 2019, in the Spiti Valley near Tibet’s border. The Spiti Valley, I have spoken about it before, but I will just remind you, is in the Himalayas, and it is the extent of Indo-European India. It is where, on one side of the valley, you have got Indo-European, and on the other side you have got Tibet, now occupied by China. When you visit Spiti, as I have a few times, and you look really carefully, you will see how people often are ethnically Indo-European, so they look like me, they have just got slightly darker skin, but culturally they are Tibetan. They have got Tibetan names, they speak Tibetan, they act with the same body language as Tibetans, and they worship in Tibetan Buddhist temples there. So it is a wonderful melting pot of the Indo-European with the Tibetan. But of course the Tibetan Buddhist memory is Indo-European itself. The Sanskrit tradition of Buddhism was solidified over eight centuries in the great monastic university of Nalanda, in Bihar in India, ending around the 11th or 12th century into the Common Era. That intellectual and religious inheritance had begun in the Sanskrit around 300 BCE with Shakyamuni Buddha and Ananda, his last disciple and the name of my cat, Ananda. That tradition was lost, really, in India until lately, and transmitted … Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe

A haven, and two objectivesNormally I find Finding Manuland a haven, a Garden of Eden, a means of escaping the world of geopolitics. Hardwired into Finding Manuland, at its very core, rest two objectives. One: I want to re-centre Ukraine in our species’ story of origins and in the Indo-European origins. I want to make it consistent with the truth, and with what archaeogenetics and other matters tell us today. I also want to remodel the last 6,000 years of history, as we mentally model that history. This is very central to Finding Manuland.I have spoken before about how we can outflank a kind of ideologue. These are the ideologues who provide a philosophical justification for russia’s activities in Ukraine. Justification is doing a lot of work there. That was in Outflanking Dugin. But I mainly keep that to my Disinfolklore project. That project is umbilically tied to Finding Manuland. Not least because mana as energy, the charge, the affective charge in memes, is very central to the Disinfolklore analytical method. It is also central to the method I try to use myself in making sense of our information space.All that aside, I find a great sense of harmony and peace when I am on the road. When I am visiting archaeological sites. When I am looking at Hittite monuments. Recently I saw the most amazing Urartian monument. I have yet to talk about it and process it properly. And to be in spaces that were very important millennia ago. When I was in Kaneš, I looked at the place where the first writing in any Indo-European language was found. That writing is from 2000 BCE. I cannot communicate quite how that makes me feel. But I do try. That is the purpose of these podcasts.So what?There is also another aspect of Finding Manuland, and indeed the whole Power of Mana project. It goes right to its beginning. I was explaining this pattern that I had noticed to a friend of mine. I did not really understand the M-N- pattern in so many ordinary everyday words. This was around Christmas time in 2022. And they said, yeah, but so what? What use is it? The use I put to it is this idea of creating an entity, a mental entity, called Manuland. Manuland is a geographical space between Ireland and India containing all of those countries. Even those in my Turkic-language-speaking Finding Manuland episodes, as you might have noticed. All of those different countries have fought for all sorts of various different reasons. They have fought about differences over particular religions, which I might archetype as Indo-European religions. If they have a sense of collective identity, then perhaps we might find more reasons to unite and be in harmony. A collective identity which goes beyond the West or Christianity or the winners of World War II or Asia or Europe.But of course I do not do this at the cost of truth, or historical truth. I do this using the truth as we find it. From archaeogenetics and archaeology and history and texts, whether those texts are in cuneiform on stone. Connecting us all genetically, culturally, linguistically through the Manuland project has an idea at its core. We can create a more harmonious community of individuals, defined by something positive. The analogy here is with the positive nationalisms that grew out of Herder’s insight in 1777. That was while the French were occupying part of Germany. The Franks were occupying part of Frankfurt. Ironic, of course. Originally the Frankish aristocracy from Germany had gone to what we call France and occupied it. Although the French kept their Romance language, which grew out of Latin, they took the name Frank.Herder’s callHerder called: where is our Shakespeare? With this call he said, look, let us unite the historic Germanic tribes. Tacitus, the Roman historian, had written about them in 98 CE. To do this we need songs. We need common songs celebrating our common culture across the Germanic tribes that Tacitus had written about. This call launched the folklore and folk-song collecting movement. It eventuated in this great flowering of the 19th century and the 20th century, until today, whereby certain cultures won the lottery. They managed to get protection and status as sovereign states. And of course thousands of amazing cultures lost in this. But let us celebrate the countries that did manage to solidify around a common identity. It is formed of these stories and of these songs and of these cultures. So that is a very serious objective in Finding Manuland. Some might say it is impossible to achieve. But I am trying my best.Yesterday Donald posted a picture of the MoonAll that said, when Donald posted about the Moon yesterday, I considered very carefully. Which of my three projects: decodingtrolls.net, disinfolklore.net or powerofmana.net, and really this particular aspect of it, Finding Manuland? Where should I post about this? Because the Moon, as you listeners will understand, is very central to Finding Manuland. It is a central hypothesis. Yesterday Donald posted a picture of the Moon. As many of you know, the Moon is a central hypothesis. It explains, perhaps, why the M-N- sound is so immanent in our languages.We know, for instance, or I now know, that M-N- is in the founders’ names. It is there in six of eight living Indo-European traditions today. I started going backwards from that empirical observation. Then I noticed it was in almost every sentence we speak, in many different words. Traditional and conventional and brilliant etymology considers those words to emanate from different roots. Any sound-meaning correspondence between these different etymons, as it were, is coincidence. It is just chance. So going backwards, I went on this journey from today back. I ended up on the steppe, in this village, Mykhailivka, in southern Ukraine. It was completely random. This journey had really begun when property developers were trying to destroy a Yamna mound, a burial mound, a kurgan, a mane, outside the city I was then living in and working in as a diplomat. ## The kurgan that started itI was more surprised than anyone to discover the existence of this community of people called the Yamna. Then to discover that they actually come from the area I used to travel around for three years, every day. It’s not a complete coincidence, because their residues, what they left there in Ukraine, are 100,000 to 150,000 burial mounds. It was a burial mound which precipitated this journey. That journey has emanated, or projected, me into this position, where I’m now talking to you through a microphone. So it’s not a complete coincidence. But it’s pretty mad.Uncovering this story is probably the most significant, interesting and organising focus for my life. I tried to communicate that sense of excitement. As I mentioned, it is a bit of a haven for me in a world of disinformation and Disinfolklore. Really sad things, avoidable things, are happening a lot. We press on. Finding Manuland is trying to build a positive identity for all of us who speak Indo-European languages, and indeed Turkic languages. That is in Manuland, the space between Ireland and India, where we traditionally speak Indo-European languages. That’s my response to the state of chaos that we’re in.Arbitrary at sourceThe Yamna were a community of ancient Ukrainians. We can now analyse their ancient DNA. It demonstrates and corroborates and evidences that they are the ancestors of every living Indo-European language. Therefore you can chase a particular sound-meaning bundle, which M-N- is, and the meaning attached to it. I’m not just interested in the sound. I’m interested in the meaning. The meaning of M-N- as a charge, as an affective charge, as energy. It crosses the different etymological boundaries for the different worlds that they correspond to. So I adhere to the premise of de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics. It is the premise of all modern linguistics, and I refer to it, even obliquely, every day. The foundation of the sign is arbitrary.… Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe

We went in the first episode from Ireland to the island of Britain. Then we went on to the continent of Europe, through France to Germany, down the Danube, across to Romania and Bulgaria and into Greece. And see what I’m doing there. Those are all countries most listeners will probably be able to visualise on a map. Although, as my listenership goes beyond Europe and beyond America, I want to perform the same trick in people’s minds.I want to create new mental models, mental geographies, psychogeography if you like, of the area I call Manuland, which is the area where we traditionally speak Indo-European languages, between Ireland and India. And if that sounds a bit like gobbledygook to you, well, by the end of listening to the Atlas series and the orientation series, you will totally understand what I mean by Manuland, and the ambition I have for reworking our mental models of the past 6,000 years: populating our mental models of the past 6,000 years with a lot of different development and evolutionary trajectories, all mainstreaming the linguistic element, but also the cultural, the religious, the migratory, the historical, and so many other dimensions across this geographical area.Populating Our Minds with the GeographySo I also want to populate your minds, our minds, with the geography that for me, before I started this project, was really sketchy. I now realise that we as humans have an amazing capacity to fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we know. And I remember, for instance, meeting and befriending my first real friend from Central Asia. It was, and it is, a real experience for me. Because previously, before I arrived in Ukraine on a January night, around 11 o’clock at night in January 2015, I had a very sketchy view of Ukraine itself. I had seen it from the border in what was then Czechoslovakia, back in the early 90s, when I and a friend had made our way by train to the border. We wanted to see Ukraine. We wanted to see what by then was the former Soviet Union. And then, while I spent seven years in eastern Ukraine as a diplomat, obviously my mental model of Ukraine expanded enormously, and my geographical mental model expanded enormously. But really, what was east of the border of Ukraine, between there and the coast of Japan, between there and Afghanistan, was quite sketchy, and still is quite sketchy, I don’t mind admitting to you.However, in this particular episode we are going to be talking a bit about that area of Central Asia. And that is just one example of how Finding Manuland and the Atlas can help expand not just our temporal models of where we come from, but our linguistic models, our understanding of the words we say, the meanings and their evolutionary trajectories from the first Indo-European language speakers, but also about geographies.And when I talk about the places, and visit places, and connect those places with the words and meanings that we use, which emanate from those places as Indo-Europeans, then we are exchanging what I call Mana, which is an energy. I could have used another word for it. Mana was just one moniker I decided to settle on.The second aspect of every episode is the linguistic aspect: the M-N- sound, which is immanent, I-M-M-A-N-E-N-T. And you will notice the M-N- sound is also in immanent. It is immanent in immanent, if you like. One of the three of what I call cryptotypes that we look at. And again, we will explain these terms, and the necessity for them, because I don’t use these fancy words just out of fanciness, trying to make you feel as if you don’t know as much as I do. I arrived at a term, say, cryptotype, because I really needed it. Long-term readers of Finding Manuland, which you will find on powerofmana.net, will note the 2024 post when I first spoke about cryptotypes, because a reader had written to me and said, I think what you are talking about is cryptotypes. I went away to the library and I started reading Benjamin Whorf’s theory of cryptotypes, which he confined to grammar. And I thought, wow, that is kind of what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something slightly different, but he is the closest thing to what I’m talking about, the cryptotypes.Ancient Ukraine and the Parity of EsteemSo today, as ever, you might notice I talk about all living Indo-European languages emanating from ancient Ukraine, what the ancients called Scythia. We will call it ancient Ukraine, because if you have read my In Defence of Ancient Ukraine post, and indeed the posts from last year and the year before, on Timothy Snyder and Eurasia, on remaking ancient history, and on illuminating the ancient in the everyday, you will understand why I think and believe that Ukraine and ancient Ukraine deserve a parity of esteem with ancient Rome and ancient Greece, and indeed ancient Ireland, ancient Germany, ancient Armenia, ancient India. These are all emanations of the same community of Yamna, from southern Ukraine, from Kherson Oblast, on the right bank of the Dnipro River, just across from areas where the Russists today are occupying.And in terms of the great cultures which have managed somehow, through lots of different historical contingencies, to get acceptance as a nation state, which basically, from the international law perspective, demands a seat at the United Nations and recognition as being a state as such: there are, I think, last time I looked, about 184 in my mind, or maybe 194, sovereign states on planet Earth. These are the winners in a race which began when the first human breathed. And at the moment we have this set of great cultures which have become nation states, and behind them, and immanent in them, are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of other great cultures which for one reason or another didn’t make it.But our unit of analysis is in many respects the post-World War II legal order, and Ukraine is just as much a nation state, and deserving of a parity of esteem, as Germany. The first united German state was in around 1870. France has been through several republics. Belgium was founded upon an idea of an ancient past in the 19th century, and so on. So many other of our nation states emanate from this great model for creating a common culture that I have spoken about before, which emanates from Herder’s call in 1777 to unite the ten German tribes. He asked, where is our Shakespeare? Using the example of England, which became an entity and a country and a state from the time the first German migrants arrived there, but really properly using this massive dividend from the wool trade in East Anglia, which takes its name from them.There are many other views of this, but Mannus, son of Tuisto, founded the Germanic peoples according to Tacitus, writing around 50 years into the Common Era. And he, Mannus, two Ns, had three sons: Ing, Irmin and Ist. The Ing were the sea-dwelling Germanic community. They were called the Ingaevones, and they worshipped Ing as their founder. And it was from that community that the migrants arrived in East Anglia, in Suffolk and Essex, in a place I visited first. And gradually they took over the whole island. They pushed the Celts, the Celtic dwellers of the island of the Pretani, back towards where, really, they are today, which is in Wales. They basically wiped out the Cornish language. I think the last native Cornish speaker, a Celtic speaker, died out in maybe the 18th or 19th century. Cornish survived Rome, survived the Roman invasion and occupation, but didn’t survive the Angles, or the Ingles, the worshippers of Ing, the Ingaevones.The Three Elements, and the UrgencySo I suppose this episode, really, we are going to focus on, as ever, the exchange of energy, which I am doing right now with you as you are listening to this, with the linguistic element, which is the M-N- sound, which is immanent in almost every sentence we speak, and in the monikers of six of the eight living Indo-European traditions. And also the third element, this travel, … Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe

Welcome to Finding Manuland. This is the third episode of our new Atlas orientation series, which will last, hopefully, for hundreds of episodes. So this is the third episode. We went from Ireland to Britain, then on to the continent, through France to Germany, down the Danube, across to Romania and Bulgaria, and into Greece — and Ukraine, where I spoke about the Yamna emanating from there, carrying the ancestor of all living Indo-European languages, in the first two pilot episodes of the Atlas.So, what we’re doing in Finding Manuland: each episode integrates Mana, meaning energy — the charge we exchange as a function of being sentient beings and human beings. And when we talk about places, and visit places, and connect with the words and the meanings we use which emanate from those places as Indo-Europeans, then we’re exchanging what I call Mana. I could have used another word for it; Mana was just one moniker I decided to settle on.And the second aspect of every episode is the linguistic aspect: this M-N- sound, which is immanent — one of the three cryptotypes we look at, the others being RT, Rit, that sound, and D-N-, the D-N- sound of the Danube, the Donets, the Don, the Dnipro, the Dnister — the great rivers of ancient Ukraine, where, genetically, most of us who today speak Indo-European languages emanate from. It’s in our genes, as demonstrated by the Alexey Nikitin paper, which was published in Nature in February 2025. We’ll come back to that. I write most days on Bluesky, Mastodon, and X, as well as on Substack.The Mental Model, and the UrgencySo today: you might notice I talked about how all living Indo-European languages emanate from ancient Ukraine — what the ancients called Scythia, but which we’ll call ancient Ukraine. And you might notice my piece recently, In Defence of Ancient Ukraine. I won’t go into that at the moment, because I’m going to try and stick to this geographical survey.What I’m trying to communicate into your minds, and all of the listeners’ minds, is this new mental model, which has gradually grown over me since I began the Finding Manuland journey consciously and intentionally in November 2021, in Maing village in northern France. I usually say eastern France, for some reason — but that’s actually northern France, where the Menapii tribe lived, by the Manche, near Mons in today’s Belgium, near Frankfurt-on-Main, and Mainz, and various other M-N- places and rivers.And so what I’m trying to communicate is this mental model, which has been disrupted by my travels. Finding Manuland is about finding and identifying a unifying force in all the areas between Ireland and India where we speak, traditionally, Indo-European languages. By monikering it Manuland, I’m giving us a collective identity, and I’m trying to disrupt the type of mental models we imbibed at school, which are old-fashioned, and the product of a time before we had archaeogenetics and scientific linguistics — the comparative method and comparative methodology. They are artifacts of a time when we thought history, and myth, and Finding Manuland, and language, honestly, didn’t matter that much. But because russia uses the bogus history as an excuse — to disarm us, and to persuade us that Ukraine is not a real country — there is a certain urgency, and a meaning, to Finding Manuland, which in more innocent ages perhaps didn’t matter so much. So I do have a sense of urgency.Anatolia: The Palimpsest — First to Write, Not First to BeSo today, this is the Anatolia edition. I talked about living Indo-European languages emanating from Ukraine. Anatolia is the palimpsest where seven Indo-European layers are stacked, and where the oldest Indo-European writing survives. First to write — not first to be. The homeland is still the steppe. And I’ve walked hard, to and fro, across Anatolia.I’ve told you in past episodes — pre-Atlas episodes, let’s call them — about some of my journeys in Anatolia. Some of those journeys I have not yet told you about, and I have many more journeys planned, crisscrossing Anatolia, which we know today mainly by the country of Turkey. So part of the mental-model aspect is: we start in Ireland, we cross onto the island of Britain, then we hop across the Manche — M-N- in Manche — into France, and the Netherlands, and Belgium, and then gradually move across. So this is what I’m going to try to do — and forgive me if I miss doing it — using the geography.So we swing back south of the Black Sea, into the peninsula where the Indo-European family first learned to write. This is a place I’ve walked hard across, over three journeys so far, between October 2023 and January 2025. It is the first attested Indo-European language, but not the first: the oldest Indo-European text only marks the branch that wrote first, and that branch is the family’s elder sister — the one that split off before the rest.The Hittite Miss: The Branch with No M-N- FounderThe Hittite founder monarchs carry no M-N- — unlike Manannán of Ireland; Manawydan of Wales; Mannus, the founder of the Germanic peoples according to Tacitus, the Roman historian writing about Mannus fifty years into the Common Era; Menua in Armenia; Minos and Rhadamanthus in Greece — and Orchomenos, and angry Manyu; the gods and the Achaemenid Empire in Iran; and Manu, the founder of the Indo-European part of the history of India. So, formally, six of eight living branches have M-N- founder-monarchs. But the Anatolian branch is dead — that’s why I talk about living Indo-European languages. The Hittite founder monarchs carry no M-N-. It’s a miss the Finding Manuland method keeps on the page: the one branch with no founder on the frame — the M-N- frame, the continental frame, the continental skeleton, immanent in so many words, including immanent, which Finding Manuland is exploring — is the one that split first.Ankara: Tarmana in a Glass CaseI spent days and days and days in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara — a city founded by the Celts — using it as an index to every site I meant to reach. And it was there, in a glass case, that I stood before some of the very first writings in any Indo-European language: a clay contract from around 1900 BCE, before the Common Era, by which a native Anatolian named Tarmana — M-N- in Tarmana — bought a boy. So among the first writing in an Indo-European language, from 1900 BCE, a native Anatolian named Tarmana — we know that because it’s written in cuneiform — bought a boy: the M-N- already inside a man’s name, in the oldest tablets we possess. I ran up that day to Ankara Castle, to find the castle rock had been a stronghold of the Celtic Galatians.Kanesh, Kültepe, and the KarumThen I went to Kanesh, Kültepe, near Kayseri — named for Caesar — a couple of times, to stand where those tablets were dug: the karum, the merchant suburb. And I wanted to exchange my Mana, my energy, with this site — to go there, to see if, by being there, I could pick up some energy and exchange mine, and try to understand, so that when I read about these places on a page, or I speak about them, I’ve been there and I felt it. I remember the day; I remember what I ate that day; the dogs I might have fed; the kindly watchman who might have helped me out and let me into a museum which was closed. These are the stories I will tell, a bit of them, in Finding Manuland, because they add to my own mind, my own memory.I could just sit in a library — as indeed could you — and read all of this. You could put all of this together. I could share, as I will, on archive.org, my library of 7,000 texts, which I’ve read, and which are immanent in every one of these podcasts — which I’ve read since 2020, when I really, full-time, started focusing on what would become Finding Manuland.So I wanted to stand where those tablets were dug. There are none of them left there, because they’ve all been moved to the safety of this extraordinary museum — if you ever have the opportunity to go to Ankara, please go; it’s … Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe

You’ll remember I spoke about how each episode of Finding Manuland looks at Mana, as the energy we exchange, as a source — the function of being human; the linguistic aspect, the miracle of M-N- being immanent in so many words we use, and places we go, and the founder figures, and so much else beside, and as an organising focus for this journey; and the third element, the journeying element, of every Finding Manuland episode. In the last episode I brought you on a quick survey of Ireland and Britain, and now this is the Western European Corridor atlas survey.The idea here is: I’ve got hundreds of papers and journeys to talk to you about. In each of these podcasts will be immanent those three elements — Mana, language, and journeying. These are the introductory episodes, just to give you a flavour of what is to come next.Maing: Where the Project Got Its NameSo, the Western European Corridor. This is the drive home from Ukraine in the autumn of 2021 — or rather, the drive back to Ukraine. Now we cross the continent, and the map starts to move under us. This corridor is where the project Finding Manuland got its name. On a drive back to my diplomatic posting, just prior to russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — I was driving back to my diplomatic posting in Dnipro, in the autumn of 2021, at the very start of a three-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre run from my home near Emain Macha in Ireland to Dnipro — I was already noticing that my route threaded through MN- and M-A-I-N-sounding place-names, when I followed the word Maing off the satnav into a village in northern France. And there it was, on the side of a shed: Manuland.It was getting late. I photographed the shed. The next morning I doubled back and, without quite deciding to, invented the method I have used ever since. So when I go to a place on this journey, I start at the church, or somehow in the centre of a village. I don’t know what I’m looking for, why I’m there, or if I’ll find anything. And that day in Maing, I ran in ever-increasing circles out from it, around the village, up one street and down the next, until I reached the edge of town and a cobbled road — an ancient road — climbing up a hill. Off the hill sat a mound with a herdsman on it, who, when I reached him, pointed me towards Cassels, the old capital of the Menapii, the same Manannán-worshipping sea tribe, now inland in France. I set off for Cassels, and that circling, born in Maing, is the recurring shape — like a chariot wheel — the recurring shape of every journey since.The exchange of Mana with the herdsman; a sound heard in a place-name — the language; a hand on actual ground — the journeying. All three elements were already there, in what would have been a nondescript but altogether beautiful French village I would never have stopped in. And the name, Manuland, taken off a shed.The Main Corridor: Goethe, Herder, and the Making of a National CultureThe corridor is a string of MN-sounding names: Mons, Mainz, Frankfurt-on-Main. I stopped along it at Goethe’s house in Frankfurt — occupied by the French when Goethe was a child. And it was at that moment that the great Herder decided: we must create a national culture, a German culture. We must unite the German tribes, by finding our Shakespeare, by creating our Shakespeare, our culture. Herder wrote, as I have said in previous episodes, which you will see and we will come back to — he said, in 1777: where is our Shakespeare? We need a Shakespeare, like England has a Shakespeare, to unite around.And Goethe — whose house was literally hosting a French occupying general, who would eat and drink and live in that house — Goethe then became Germany’s Shakespeare. And the Grimm Brothers then became the great linguists, the first of the great philologists and linguists of the Germanic languages, and collected folk tales, and looked at the language and the meanings inside them. And then, of course, Wagner, 90 years later. The tales which Tacitus had told about the Germans, and Mannus, the founder of the Germanic peoples, and his three sons, became operas, and became stories — like Faust, like The Sorrows of Young Werther — which Goethe and Herder and so many great writers used to unite around, and create the first unified Germany. And that model of nation-state formation, around national cultures grounded in folklore, song, and culture — that is part of the heritage Finding Manuland uses to explore all the spaces between Ireland and India, which I archetype as Manuland.The Museums: Halle, Wrocław, and Enheduanna in BrusselsThe museums on that journey are where the moon and its measuring keep surfacing in bronze — in Halle, in Wrocław in Poland, where in October 2021 I photographed a Bronze Age sun-chariot. In February 2022, in the last weeks before the full-scale invasion, driving back, leaving Ukraine with my cat, anticipating the invasion, I stood in Halle, in the great modern museum there.And in the dusty corner of a museum in Brussels, I found the thread: a cuneiform tablet, in a dusty corner, holding Enheduanna’s hymn to the moon god Nanna. The first named author, from 2400 BCE — the first named author in human history, already signing her name: a moon priestess, M-N-. Her alabaster, still, after 4,000 years, as luminescent as a full moon. And we will go to the Penn Museum in Pennsylvania — Penn, the great Ivy League university where my grandfather studied. We will go there, and that is where Enheduanna’s luminescent disc, which was created in her own lifetime, now abides. I photographed her, and the cuneiform text, almost by chance, and she turned out to be a doorway to Mesopotamia, which is very, very far to the east, and somewhere we’re going.Domburg and Nehalennia: The Menapii’s Last SurpriseThe Menapii have one more surprise waiting for us, on their own coast. In January 1647, a storm stripped the dunes at Domburg, on the Dutch island of Walcheren, in the old country of the Menapii, and exposed dozens of Roman altars to a goddess nobody had heard of: Nehalennia, a protectress of sea traders. Within weeks, a Leiden scholar, Boxhorn, responded — and in his pamphlet of the same year, he argued something bigger: that Greek, Latin, and the Germanic tongues descend from one older language, which he called Scythian. Scythia: ancient Ukraine. The common origin we now know from the analysis of ancient DNA, published in our species’ preeminent journals. I want to walk that dune-front with Boxhorn’s pamphlet in hand and in mind, and bring you on that journey. There we will exchange Mana with him, and with the first intimations that our entire Indo-European culture, from Ireland to India, emanates from Scythia — ancient Ukraine.The Mediolanon Towns and the LG Shadow AxisAnd deeper into France waits a field of M-N- names, from a map in my own notes: the Mediolanon towns, the Celtic middle-places — one of which, Châteaumeillant, some historians read as a meeting place for Druids. The corridor keeps going into country I’ve not yet crossed, but we will cross it together, and we will visit the little museums and the places, and we will see if we can feel the Mana. Sometimes you go places and you feel nothing.The lunar calendar sites all wait: the wooden ring at Goseck, which I did visit; the bronze Coligny calendar plate, which no one has yet fully deciphered, with its months cut into metal — month and measure and menses, all one word. So do the towns strung along a second sound I’m following: the LG of Lugus and Lug — Lyon, Léon, Loudoun, Carlisle. It’s a lead, not yet a result. And Lug himself — solar, LG, the founder slot — is one of the great gods of Irish mythology.Grail Country: From Manannán’s Cauldron to Monty PythonThe grail country of Chrétien de Troyes waits too, where Manannán’s Cauldron of Plenty surfaces centuries later as a French romance vessel — one and the same Indo-European bowl, which the great Indo-Europeanist John Carey demonstrates: the Grail emanates from Irish mythol… Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe

Stonehenge, where I am standing this Saturday morning, is the answer to a question I have been carrying since May 2021 - and it has taken me five years and three thousand kilometres to carry the question back to these stones. I want to say something at the outset that will only be fully earned by the end: I feel Ukraine’s presence here. Not as metaphor. As ancestry, as language, as the later courses of this very monument. By the close of this piece I intend to have shown you exactly where to look for her.The coach parks are already filling. Jackdaws are working the wind above the lintels. Several hundred people are filing along the rope walkway, photographing the most famous stone circle on earth, and nearly every one of them - I have been listening - is doing so in a daughter language of a mother tongue first spoken on the steppe of what is now Ukraine. They do not know that. Most of them also do not know that when the great sarsens in front of us were being raised, a stone circle beside the Dnipro river had already been buried, deliberately, under a mound of earth, for something like a thousand years.I have touched that older circle. This post is about who built it, who buried it, and why the answer runs in a single thread through three monuments: Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, Tara in County Meath, and the cromlech at Novooleksandrivka, fourteen kilometres south of Dnipro. What I have noticed - and it is a pattern I keep testing, not a verdict I am handing down - is that all three circles were raised by Old Europeans; that the people who buried the third one were, in the most literal genetic sense, their own descendants; and that the burying itself may have been the wisest thing anyone ever did for it. The wisest people I met in Ukraine thought so. We will get to them.Let me take you to the Dnipro first.The Uncovered CircleIn May 2021 a five-thousand-year-old burial mound was torn apart by housing developers in Novooleksandrivka, a wealthy suburban hromada south of Dnipro, Ukraine’s third city. News of the vandalism found a global audience - it made the front page of the New York Times, and Ukraine’s chief mound guardian told that paper: “It’s genocidal. Erasing our culture like that.” Residents blocked a road in protest.After the kurgan - as such mounds are known in Ukraine; Mane, as I have come to call them, for reasons that will surface below - was removed, a much older stone circle was, unexpectedly, discovered underneath. Five thousand years for the mound; five and a half for the circle beneath it. Hold that five-hundred-year gap; it is very important, and it is in the contemporaneous record, not just in my memory.At that time I was an Irish peacekeeping diplomat serving with the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, posted to Dnipro, in my final year before compulsory retirement, watching for early warnings of russia’s meddling in a war then already seven years old. Anything that made international front pages in my city was my professional business, so I crossed the Sura River to investigate. What I found rearranged my mental furniture, and eventually my life.Sixty-four stone boulders, set in a ring. Touching them felt like caressing the Delphic Omphalos - except that this rondel was older than any material reminder we have of the oracle at Greece’s cultic centre. Through that summer and early winter, as russian forces massed beyond every one of Ukraine’s borders, I kept going back. I photographed each of the sixty-four stones, carefully, on every visit - it was the one thing I could do, since a minor Irish diplomat has no mana with which to counteract a property developer. And the stones began to resolve themselves into human-like forms. Stelae. The deities they had represented to the people who levered them into position. I had a favourite: a broad-shouldered stone god. Sometimes, when I arrived, there were fresh flowers in the centre of the circle.Inside the mound that had covered the stones, the bulldozing archaeologist working for the developer had found the bodies of twenty-seven people, buried there between roughly 3,500 BCE and 1932. Many were covered in red ochre. Most were crouched, knees bent. One was mummified. The 1932 interment was the manager of the Soviet collective farm that the Muscovite colonisers of Ukraine had planted on the site - a functionary laid down where the high kings of the area had lain five thousand years before him, in the very year Moscow’s engineered famine began killing millions of Ukrainians. Talk about delusions of grandeur! And, in a darker key, about continuity: the mound never stopped doing what mounds do, which is to announce whose the past is.One afternoon I found a pair of teeth sitting on one of the stone gods, champing into a tube of what looked like fossilised wood. Research settled it: horse teeth. And some of the earliest evidence anywhere on earth for the ritual use and keeping of horses comes from Ukrainian sites near that very circle - Dereivka, on a promontory of the Dnipro, a name to hold onto, because it is about to become the hinge of this whole piece. One of the three oldest wheeled wooden carts ever found in Europe came out of a Mane in the grounds of Dnipro airport in 1949, ten kilometres away.Hold the dates. The Dnipro cromlech had already been buried for a millennium when Stonehenge was being assembled. Newgrange was built around five hundred years after the Dnipro stone palisade. Emain Macha, Ireland’s holiest site, near which I grew up, came later still.The Mound GuardiansNow I owe you the origin of this whole quest - the origin, really, of Finding Manuland - and it is a Zoom call.On 23 June 2021, in the Covid manner of the time, the Mission spoke from our separate locations with four members of the All Ukrainian Civil Society Organisation “The Mound Guardians”. I had read the New York Times coverage; I had crossed the Sura and touched the stones; but it was at that meeting that the mounds acquired their people, and I acquired my teachers.The Chief Mound Guardian - the man quoted in the Times calling the destruction a national security issue - confirmed the quote and then, unprompted, gave us his reasoning, and it deserves to be set down carefully because it is one of the finest arguments about memory I have ever heard from anyone, professor or peasant, in any country. Article 11 of Ukraine’s Constitution, he explained, places a duty on the State to protect the cultural heritage of its citizens, and their right to learn their own history. A nation is established on a bedrock of knowledge about its past. When a five-thousand-year-old tomb complex is destroyed to build houses, children are denied that bedrock. While the kurgans stand, he said, children can visit them and connect with them tactilely - his word, through the translation - with their hands; destroyed, they survive only in the papers of a small circle of elite archaeologists. A child’s right to know their nation through touchable things, he concluded, is a matter of national security. (Note the shape of that argument. We will meet it again shortly, coming from a scholar in Australia who has never heard of Novooleksandrivka.)The Guardians told us there are more than one hundred thousand kurgans in Ukraine, and that each Guardian is assigned a specific set of mounds to watch over - they are building a movement, they said, not an organisation. One of them, responsible for eighteen kurgans in Kirovohrad Oblast, told us that in 2006 his project won legal protection for four of them; the other fourteen remain unprotected to this day, and in his view the authorities frustrate the very civil society groups who step up where the State fails. On paper, everything is safeguarded. In truth, a handful. That same week, the developers at Novooleksandrivka laid cables across the sacred site, through ground where human remains had just been lifted.I left that call changed. In the weeks after it, working from my flat under Co… Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe

Finding Manuland is not just one trip. It’s a programme for a lifetime of journeys. I will bring you on the journeys — intellectual journeys, but mainly geographical journeys — across the lands which stand between Ireland and India. So let’s call it an atlas. It’s an atlas of Manuland, that area between Ireland and India — an atlas which is organised by sound. West to east is only the order of walking, or driving, or thinking. The moon is a hypothesis held inside it.And it’s an atlas and a harness at once — a permanent skeleton meant to outlast any single journey. A skeleton that runs between Ireland and India, with infinite journeys in between. It could be a travel agency; it could be tour guides. If you’re interested in linguistics, it could be about linguistics, bringing you to the places which are of interest to you. If you’re interested in archaeology, or just a particular country which is or was an Indo-European country, then Finding Manuland is for you.So this is a frame which is already standing, so that each visit made is one vertebra slotting into it. Not a new skeleton every time, but one spine growing a bone at a time, across a lifetime, with no fixed end. That’s the point of calling it a harness. Finding Manuland is a harness, not just for my life, or my artistic practice, but for yours. It’s an itinerary. The shape holds whether the next journey happens next spring or in ten years. And the eastern edge of the journey, and the western edge, and the southern edge, and the northern edge are all part of the same journey.The Three Elements: Mana, Language, and JourneyingEvery episode of Finding Manuland has three elements. I say them at the top of each episode, and throughout the episodes, so they become like a mantra — and they are also the method.Mana, meaning energy. I’m exchanging my energy with you. You can hear it in the timbre of my voice. You, by listening and interacting, are taking it in, and you are giving back. We are exchanging our Mana. But I am also exchanging my Mana with the places I’m talking about, and the ideas I’m talking about, and the last 6,000 years of our language.The second element is the language: the M-N- sound and its neighbour sounds, followed across the Indo-European family from Ireland to India, and back to the ground where the family began, in ancient Ukraine.And journeys — voyages, mental and physical. The uprooting and rebuilding of mental models. My aim is to change your mental model of history, of human culture, of our culture, in the way that mine has been. Or let me put that another way: my aim is to communicate to you how my mental models have been transformed, as I have been on this infinite journey, which began in Maing in northern France in November 2021 — which I’ve written about in the first Finding Manuland non-podcast episode.The Sound the Language Element Follows: M-N-The thing the language element follows across half the world is a sound. I began with the sound M-N-, in Maing in northern France, in November 2021. MN, M-N: the pair of nasal consonants that recur in word after word from Ireland to India. Human, mind, moon, meaning, karma, measure, memory, month — all have M-N- inside them. And, most tellingly, the name of the founding figure in branch after branch of our language family.The founder who carries the sound turns up in six of eight living Indo-European branches: Indic Manu; Iranian Airyaman; Hellenic Minos; Germanic Mannus; Menua, the great builder-king of Urartu, the kingdom under Ararat, whose successor state is Armenia; and at the western sea edge, Celtic Manawydan from Wales, and Manannán — and Éremón, Ireland’s first High King.Rome’s first lawgiving monarch — M-N- in Roman and in monarch — Numa, is not a seventh. He is the same sound run backwards, N-M-: the mirror, rather than another copy. And Numitor, his grandfather — grandfather of Romulus and Remus — carries this reversal too. The mirror struck twice. One name like this could pass for chance. Six of the eight branches landing on the same sound does not. And Nemed, who is Ireland’s originator, pre-Indo-European originator — that is inheritance, not accident.The reason to trust that it is a system, and not the mind finding faces in clouds, comes from how far apart the witnesses stand. A feature shared by the Indic East and the Celtic West — Manu on the Ganges and Manannán on the Irish Sea — cannot have been borrowed from one to the other. The distance is too great, and the contact never happened. When two witnesses so far apart say the same thing, the thing they share was already there before they parted. Manu and Manannán carry the whole span between them — the whole span of Manuland, the land between Ireland and India.The Moon: A Hypothesis, Not MagicSo where does the moon come in? The moon — another M-N- word — is my best guess at why that sound first got its sense. It’s not the object of the search, but a hypothesis inside it: an organising focus, a journeying focus. Of all the bodies in the sky, the moon is the one that seems lit from within, and the one that dies and comes back each month — M-N- in month. That makes it a natural picture of the mind — M-N- in mind — the thing that shines through a living body, like the moon, and tells a breathing being from a stone; that goes out at death and, in the stories, returns. The M-N- words cluster around exactly this: mind, moon, the measuring of months, the founder who first thought.The moon hypothesis says a moon-based way of signalling meaning — the light of another concept shining through a particular word is meaning — was built into the language early by the first Indo-Europeans, and that it explains most, though not all, of where the M-N- sits. The empirical pattern is the object; the moon is one account of its cause. And yes, it is a mysterious phenomenon. But we do know that we do, by tradition, speak one of the living Indo-European languages between Ireland and India. We have archaeogenetic evidence, now published in Science and humanity’s preeminent journals, which determined that the Yamna — M-N- in Yamna — from ancient Ukraine, in Kherson Oblast, downriver from the cities of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, in a village called Mykhailivka, are that origin.So the idea that something they said, and a meaning they attached to a particular sound, would travel with them and persist through all these different cultures, to be attached to the founder figures of all of these great living Indo-European cultures — we’ll also explore some of the non-living Indo-European cultures, of Anatolia in today’s Türkiye for instance — the idea that they may have planted a sound and a meaning in the language, the core fundamental language they used to describe such ideas as mind, as human, as moon: the idea that they might have done that is completely plausible. And it is mysterious, and it’s amazing, that this immanence in what they said may well have travelled through places and become attached to toponyms — the names of places, of gods, of cities, of islands, of rivers. That mystery is part of what we’re going to explore in Finding Manuland.But don’t get me wrong: this is not magic, and nor am I challenging the orthodoxy of conventional linguistics. The sign and the meaning are arbitrary when they’re forged together — in this case by the Yamna. But after that, it becomes a matter of evolution and natural selection. And it just so happens that I’m the first writer to have noticed this phenomenon at its true extent. We’ll be talking about many of the other writers and researchers and linguists and historians — starting with the first, with the Welsh discoverer, Sir William Jones, of the Indo-European language family, in the late 18th century. It just so happens that I’m the first person who’s seen it in all of its vast scope.I’ve spent the last years — basically since February 2020, when I started intuiting there was something going on, and then making a conscious decision in Mons village… Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe

I write, I speak from a very, very remote place - Ani. It’s very, very beautiful, as you see with the mountains. I thought I would just muse a little bit on what I do as a writer as Decoding Trolls and how I see my role as a writer and where my substacks fit into it, what I’m working on now, what my plans are, and how you helped me by responding and reading and reacting to my work.I wrote about Enheduana, who is the first known named author in human culture. I discovered her in a very forgotten corner of a museum in Brussels, where a poem, a song she had written to the moon god Nanna, in cuneiform text had been preserved. She lived around 2500 BCE and was the daughter of Sargon the Great, who was a great emperor in Assyria and Babylon. This particular song, which she had written to the moon god Nanna, was preserved in this forgotten corner of a museum in Brussels and had been written or copied about 700 years after she died. It was a little bit of a connection to her.It really interested me that she was dedicated to the moon god Nanna. As you probably know by now, my hypothesis for why the M-N- sound is so common in the English language and Indo-European languages is that the M-N- sound is a remnant of what I call the moon-based metaphorical semantic signaling system that was implanted by the first Indo-Europeans. It was so important to them that it became implanted in all of the daughter Indo-European languages.As you may remember from my hypothesis about Osman the Great, who was one of the Central Asians, Turkic language-speaking Central Asians who came to Anatolia as part of the conquest, his name became part of the dynasty, the Ottoman dynasty in Osman. My hypothesis was that since he and his dynasty arrived in Anatolia around 11 or 1200 years into the common era, they eventually conquered the whole area.As we saw from my work in the Hittite a year ago in the Ankara Museum, seeing Tarmana, his name was written in a cuneiform text from about 1800 BCE, which is 2,900 years before Osman the Great came. Modern-day linguists use the M-N- sound, the Uman suffix, and other suffixes, but mainly the Uman suffix in these documents. In these 23,000 cuneiform texts written, I found in a place I visited the summer before last, Kanesh, which was the actual and the mythological founding community for the Hittites, for the first Indo-European.Modern linguists use this Uman suffix to distinguish between texts. All the texts are written in Assyrian, but there are local Anatolian Indo-European words in there. Modern linguists use this Uman suffix to distinguish the Indo-European from the Assyrian.Flash forward 3,100 years later, 3,000 years after these texts. Osman arrives here on his horse, Osman the Great, and finds the Ottoman Empire, which would rule Anatolia until the First World War, basically. Three thousand years later, he arrives here with the M-N- sound. The first person who is appointed as a leader here is Manuchihr with an M-N- sound to replace the Armenians, who also have the M-N- sound. You begin to see the potential of Manuland to unite.We put a huge play in communities to find the differences between communities defined by different languages, especially by different language families, particularly the Turkic language-speaking family and Indo-European, say the Armenians. My conception of Manuland is to unite us and unite the Turkic language speakers who today occupy this land. It is replete with their MN-sounding names and words, which they or their ancestors brought from Central Asia when they first started arriving here about a thousand years ago.This is a sign of how I see my job as a writer. I do not merely describe the world; I intervene in the world and try to make it right. This is what Enheduana did in her dedications to the moon god Nanna. She composed songs, which were prayers, learned off by heart, and eventually recorded in cuneiform text so that I could see them. That is a form of writing, of course. The substance of what she did as the first known named author in human culture was independent of the form in which it was recorded and transmitted. It’s that substance I got to in this piece I wrote as part of my Decoding Trolls project, which is on recoupling the political right with moral rightness. I wrote a piece talking about how Meloni, Macron, Merz, and President Zelenskyy in Ukraine have the potential and are actually doing it by helping rescue the project that has been hijacked by the far right, who are doing very wrong things. For instance, President Trump threatened to invade Greenland and disturb the European Union, Greenland, and the state of Denmark’s territorial integrity. This is very unright from a legal point of view, as defined by the post-World War II legal order, which makes territorial integrity sacrosanct. It is also wrong from a moral point of view, and I am not afraid to say that.The second element in the six-element code of positive trolls distinguishes what is right from what is wrong, what is positive trolling from what is negative trolling. This standard is set by the post-World War II legal order. When the current American government says it doesn’t care about international law or the far right talks about not caring about international law, that right is there. I am not afraid to say that is wrong. That is unright. You are trying to usurp what is right and replace it.My job as a writer and an artist, and the clue is in the “writ” element in writer and also in artist. Arta in ancient Iranian, a Western language, means truth, and Rta in Vedic, an ancient Indian language, also means truth. We have this idea of truth and what is right hardwired into these Rt- sounds. My job as a writer, through whichever medium I use, identifies me as a writer because in our culture, people doing what I do traditionally wrote. Of course, now I’m experimenting, as you see here, with video and podcasts. I’m also doing my website, which involves learning, so I’m completely independent and can just write things. I can create and then be responsible for uploading it and putting it into a form that you can read to complement my substacks and podcast platforms where my podcasts are, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. OnX is where most of my raw writing work appears, but I do use images as well.I’m not a pure writer in that traditional sense. By learning these different mechanisms, different mediums, and ensuring that there is something unified about my content in terms of the Power of Mana, Finding Manuland project, the Decoding Trolls, more journalism, and then Disinfolklore, which I’m very excited about as well. This is the medium through which Donald and the far right are attempting to usurp and replace the post-World War II legal order with their vision of legal and social order, which is quite akin to the Nazis.My discovery of Disinfolklore as a narrative form is something I also write about. I help teach myself and embed myself and others to interpret data, the kinds of data we use before we decide who to vote for, whether to go and demonstrate, or whether to participate in public life. Whether to resist those kinds of decisions are made on the basis of data. The very people who promote free speech are actually those who wish to shut it down and turn what is wrong into what is right, suppressing artists like me and others so that we can’t communicate our truth and give others the opportunity to hear how we interpret the world.That is my job as a writer, and that’s how I see myself. If I’m feeling pretentious, I’ll call myself an artist, which kind of takes in different media forms. I’m happiest being a writer, even though I also create content with video and am learning. As you’ll be seeing over the next year or two, you’ll see how I develop my technical skills using these amazing facilities we have now with iPhones and Substack itself. As I develop my technical abilities into different formats and forms, the substance of what I teach… Get full access to Power of Mana at www.powerofmana.net/subscribe