Finding Manuland

The Harness Logic: Journeys and Papers Feed Each Other

The 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 Veda

So 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 eastern 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, Dharamsala

The 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 into a different linguistic family, into the Tibetan, the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, and preserved and elaborated and perfected by Tibetan Buddhists in their own language. And now it is being converted back into Indo-European languages. Just in the past couple of decades, under the patronage of the 14th Dalai Lama, who is my direct teacher, much of this Indo-European inheritance has now been translated back into an Indo-European language, and we have it again, available to Indo-Europeans. So that is very much part of our Finding Manuland Atlas, and where we range around.

And in the autumn of 2019, in the Spiti Valley near Tibet’s border, near Mane village, M-A-N-E, not to be confused with Maing village, M-A-I-N-G, in north-eastern France, where Finding Manuland all began. In Mane village, under Manirang mountain, the Man- sounds thick in that contested borderland, where parts are occupied by China today, and you need to get a special pass to travel through certain parts of the Spiti Valley because of the military element, I photographed a Yama-like painting in a monastery there. In Dharamsala, on the 16th of June 2016, I heard the Dalai Lama teach on emptiness and the Heart Sutra, and was initiated into Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ, the M that closes the Oṃ. Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ.

I have also spent time near Bengaluru, on the Dravidian line, which is where Indo-European India essentially ends and goes into Dravidian, the pre-Indo-European remnant of India, where the Indo-Europeans didn’t manage to convert them. This is where the M-N- meets a language family not its own.

The Plain of the Ganges: Manu’s Own Country

The Indian journeys still to come, in the future, are the ones I have thought about longest, because my own note on India is a single line: the sacrifice manuals of the Rig Veda are the texts closest in time to the Yamna, as indeed, I believe, are the esoteric texts of the Fifth Dalai Lama. The plain of the Ganges waits for Finding Manuland’s visit. Manu’s own country, the Yamuna, a river that runs through Delhi, and it waits with an address. Manu’s law book bounds a holy land by two named rivers, the Sarasvati and the Drishadvati, and sets Kurukshetra beside it. And a thousand years later, the pilgrim Xuanzang found the people of that same district calling it the land of religious merit. So: me-, meaning measure, and rit, meaning right. The measure of your right, your merit. Upon your merit depends your karma, and your karmic propensities and karmic trajectories. So even in an English-language word, merit, we have two of the core fundamental Indo-European sounds: me-, meaning measure, as in mēnōt, meaning moon, the measurer, as the Yamna called it 6,000 years ago, and rit, the R-T- sound, the R-T- cryptotype, which is the second cryptotype, to complement the D-N- and the M-N- and their respective axes, which we will get to.

Alexander Cunningham traced Xuanzang’s route mile by mile in the 1870s, and founded Indian field archaeology doing it. I want to follow both of them. Under the mounds of that plain lies the Painted Grey Ware culture, the archaeological horizon most scholars set beside the Vedic tribes, the footsteps of the first Indo-Europeans in India. So before we had ancient DNA evidence, it is the grey ware, the grey pottery, that manifests the existence of the first Indo-Europeans in India, at Hastinapura and across the Doab.

And in the mountains I already love, a town wears the founder’s own name: Manali, read in tradition as the abode of Manu, with the temple to Manu himself in the old village, close by the hot springs of Manikaran. The far valleys hold the family’s last living twin cult. In Nuristan, within living memory of 1896, the supreme god was Imra, whose name descends from Yama-rajan, King Yama, the death twin, worshipped under his own name until the year the axes came, recorded by the British visitor who lived a year among the worshippers just before the end. The neighbouring Kalasha valleys keep the last unconverted corner of that world.

Two Indian journeys I have named the longest. Kolkata, in Bengal, where comparative philology itself was born when a Welsh judge, Sir William Jones, sat down to translate the founder name Manu and heard the family in it. We will go there, and find the Man in the land. We will see where he did this. We will try to visit Sir William Jones’s garden, where he lived his last years. And Lake Manasarovar, below Mount Kailash, the highest great freshwater lake on earth, whose Sanskrit name means the lake of the mind, formed, the tradition says, from the mind of Brahma. The one great lake on our planet literally named Mind. Pilgrims of four religions walk around it, including the Buddhists.

The Furthest Reaches: China, Polynesia, Egypt

The family’s outer rim, the Indo-European family’s outer rim, and the non-Indo-European shores it touched. Almost all of it we will visit. Mongolia, walked in 2014, is the exception. At the rim, the discipline tightens to a single rule: where the sound turns up beyond the family, its recurrence is transmission, never an independent vote. China waits along three roads east I have not yet travelled, though I have been to China. The first is the Tarim mummies and the Tocharian tongue. The second is the Buddhist route through Nalanda, that great monastic university I just spoke about, that carried the sage word muni, and the moon-mind meld, manas meeting the heart-moon of the eastern texts. The third is the 20th-century road of Marx.

Polynesia waits across the other ocean, where mana itself sits. The great early Buddhist scholar Atisha visited Indonesia incessantly, and a great account of this is in several texts. The concept of a contagious sacred charge, mana, energy, is a genuine human universal, and that is a fundamental hypothesis underneath the entire Finding Manuland thesis. So M-N- is the archetypal Indo-European sound-meaning of energy. But this is just one signifier for what different Indo-European and non-Indo-European traditions have been writing about for millennia. I catalogued over a hundred of them in The X-Factor, including Spiritus Mundi, which The Police sing about, Synchronicity, which The Police also sing about, and chi, ki, carmen, all monikers for what is essentially something immanent in energy, prana, breath. So the word is really the question. The one dated channel runs east from India to the western islands. The Indian traders did go to Indonesia. We know that, with many accounts of it. The Malay world. And the remote Pacific leg has no evidence under it yet. The archaeogenetics do not support the idea that mana in Polynesia emanates from India. It is held as a lead, leg by leg.

So Egypt, with Amun, Amun-Ra, the great god, and the Amarna letters. M-N- again. Egypt waits, the missing neighbour, reachable through the Mitanni, the Indo-European-led people I mentioned earlier, and Amarna, where a great trove of texts from 1400 BCE was discovered in the late 19th century, and which is the evidence that Indo-European kings and monarchs were present and ruling in Canaan and Judea in 1400 BCE. So 400 years before the Jews’ ethnogenesis and the historical King David and King Solomon, a millennium before the Old Testament was basically solidified, and 1,400 years before the Roman, the Indo-European Roman, occupation of Judea gave us a self-sacrificing, culture-founding monarch, Jesus Christ. And the story of Jesus’ self-sacrifice was handed down to us in an Indo-European language, Greek. His self-sacrifice as a culture-founding king mirrors Odin’s own sacrifice. Wodan, Wednesday. Odin, who is the great All-Father in the Germanic tradition, who hung himself on a tree near the royal mounds in Uppsala, Sweden, and the account of which in the Hávamál says he gave himself to himself: I gave myself to myself, the old father. Just like Donn, again, another great self-sacrificing deity. Yima and Yama. All of these Indo-European first self-sacrificing monarchs performed the same role as culture-founding, self-sacrificing, leading all of the living along with them on the path of the dead, as indeed Jesus Christ did. Which is a clue which we will use and follow up. So Amun-Ra at the far end of a contact line in ancient Egypt.

The North: Uppsala, Lejre, Møn, Sápmi and the Baltic

The North awaits us with its own appointments. Scandinavia first: Odin’s mounds at Uppsala, where Máni is the moon-measurer, and Mannus, with two Ns, the founder, and Ymir the same Yemo twin as everywhere else. A world that made itself, and is in fact a downstream branch of the Dnipro. In Denmark, D-N- in Denmark, and R-K, the R-T- with the hard stop, at Gammel Lejre, the hall-town of the kings in Beowulf’s own background, the ploughland has yielded real sixth-century great halls, and, in 2009, a thumb-sized silver figure of a seated god between two birds, read as Odin enthroned with his ravens, one of them Muninn, whose name is Memory. Off Zealand lies the chalk island of Møn, one bare M-N- syllable of a name, its etymology an open question, where the folklore collectors of the 1820s recorded a hidden king inside the white cliffs whom they read as Odin in disguise.

In Sápmi, the far north, the moon crossed the family’s frontier and kept its name: North Sámi mánnu, moon and month, borrowed from the Germanic world, so thoroughly taken in that every Sámi month name ends in it. Like every day ends in day: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Dies, deus, Jupiter, Jupiter, Jupiter, Zeus, Zeus, Dyēus, dies, which is the root meaning sky. And when we say that people die, we are really just saying they are going to the sky. The first Indo-Europeans, the first progenitors of all living Indo-Europeans, called the sky Dyēus. He has gone to the sky. So we have this phenomenon again, even in our days of the week, if we pay attention to it. And every Sámi month name ends in mánnu. In 1692, an elderly Sámi drum keeper named Anders Poulsen stood in a Norwegian courtroom and explained his confiscated drum figure by figure, and named a round circle in the fourth row Manna, the Moon. He died in custody, as dominated people often do. The drum survives, in the museum at Karasjok, and we will go there. I want to stand in front of that circle and speak to you about it. Because the mana and energy of me being there, conveyed through my voice, the timbre of my voice, even across these WAV or MP3 files, wherever you are in the world, whatever you are doing, that mana is an energy exchange between you, me, and Anders, who stood in that Norwegian courtroom in 1692 and explained his confiscated drum figure by figure.

And the Baltic, the forest country that travelled least and kept the moon word, mėnuo, nearly whole. Where my ancestors come from: Polish Lithuania, as they are registered as coming from on the documents when they entered America. Even before the end of the Soviet Union, I always knew that my family came from Lithuania, and I visited their village in Lithuania in 2015 and met my cousins there. And so mėnuo, nearly whole, keeps the moon’s own story in the Baltics. In the songs collected by Liudvikas Rėza in 1825, the Moon is a bridegroom who wed the Sun in the first spring and strayed, and was cut with a sword for it. The waning moon as the wound. Rėza was born on the Curonian Spit, in a village the sand dunes later swallowed whole. His memorial stands on the dune above his buried birthplace, and the moon-wedding song can be read aloud over it. And the Isle of Man itself waits, of course, Manannán’s island.

And other greats. Maria Gimbutas, the great American Lithuanian scholar, worked out by looking at the archaeology and the linguistics, before ancient DNA demonstrated it, that these archaeological breaks, the break in the archaeological record, for instance that 95 per cent of idols in household altars all across Europe are female forms until this big break, where a patriarchal society burying one monarch under a mound emanates from Ukraine and moves westwards across Europe with the Yamna. She worked this out decades ago, but of course, because she was a woman in a male trade, archaeology, no one listened to her. Except the great J.P. Mallory, and many other greats, it must be said. And now Finding Manuland has the advantage of not only seeing this M-N- sound where we see it, but also of these giants, including Maria Gimbutas and J.P. Mallory and others, who have dedicated their intellectual lives to unpacking what it means for us to be Indo-Europeans and part of the same culture. It is often said, and we will look at this in detail, that Lithuanian and some of the Baltic languages are the closest languages we have today to Proto-Indo-European, the least changed.

The Conceptual Spine: The Shared Floor

Beneath the map of Finding Manuland runs a floor of work that anchors to no site, because it belongs to all of them. Some of it is the sound tested and measured: a blind corpus test, the M-N- behaving as a real, Indo-European-specific attractor and not a trick of the eye. The sound shapes of the Indo-European family’s oldest vocabulary, the M-N- amongst them, turn up in the surnames of roughly one in three people in traditionally Indo-European communities, about 48 million people in the United States alone. A 1970s list of about 90 of the world’s names for an invisible life force gives the sound its first test outside the family, and the test’s discipline is that most of them carry no M-N- at all: a small signal in a handful of zones that never met, held as checkable. And, with a straight face, the pattern reappears inside the very language of statistics we use to check it. The craft grew from what Galton first called reversion to the mean. M-N- in mean. Mean, measure. It is a measurement, a form of measurement, meaning average. And mean, and moon, and the M-N- are the same small handful of sounds and meanings, meaning measure. So a sound-and-meaning bundle emanating from the M-N- in mean, and mean, and moon. Mean: I intend, I mentally intend. Mens rea in English criminal law, which I studied at the University of Cambridge. Mean as in measure. Angra Mainyu, the mean spirit in ancient Iranian religion. Mean: you are mean to me, oh, you are so mean. Mean as in meant, as in signifier, as in meaning, which is the light of one word, the light of one meaning of one word, shining through another, connecting them. And mean and moon and the M-N- are the same small handful of sounds.

Some of it is the method’s own pedigree and birth: the old art of reading the consonantal skeleton beneath the word, from Vico to Saussure. There are the greats who circled this cryptotype, the M-N- cryptotype, and stopped just short. And there is the novel I wrote beside the Dnipro, where the noticing actually started. Some of it is the architecture of founders and mirrors. M-N- against its reversal, N-M-. Manu against Numa. Manas against nāma. Namo gurubhyaḥ, namo buddhāya, namo dharmāya, namo saṅghāya. The founder names read as household offices. M-N- older than Logos, which is the word in the Greek Bible, the first Bibles. And the elided female third who belongs beside the twins. And some of it is the light-and-mind mechanism itself: the light that shines through the moon standing for the mind that shines through the body, corroborated in the roots for shining and for mind. There is mana as a contagious essence, in cultural psychology, sympathetic magic, which I have written about in my Disinfolklore project. There is the R-T- rule turning into its D-R- reversal: drama, druj, deception. And there is the project keynote, Reversion to the M-N-, which noticed the founder names first, and only afterwards reached for the moon as the reason they might all be there.

The Skeleton Is Ready for the Next Vertebra

The Atlas, the Finding Manuland Atlas, is what receives them. The skeleton is already standing. And in this form, this is the fourth of my introductory speeches. This is the skeleton of the entire project, so that each new visit is a vertebra slotting in rather than a new spine starting from scratch. So the eastern edge stays open on purpose: Harran and its moon god, which I visited in January, the cliff at Behistun in today’s mullah-led Iran, the Danube road, the Tarim road, the plain of the Ganges, the mounds of Uppsala, the sea god’s own island. All of them wait as anticipation, unwalked, and the frame is built to take them. This is the frame, these four Atlas introduction papers. This is what makes this an atlas, not a memoir. It is lifelong by design. One core re-laid at every stop, and one new bone added, a frame for as many journeys as a lifetime allows across Manuland. Every time I travel to a new place connected to the M-N- sound, whole new vistas open up, which is why I think Finding Manuland is one project I will continue for the rest of my life. We have several years’ worth of podcasts and publications to make, and a lot of travels to come. I am very glad you are on this journey with me. The road runs on east, and the skeleton is ready for the next vertebra.

First in series:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

A haven, and two objectives

Normally 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 call

Herder 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 Moon

All 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 it

I 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 source

The 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.

So the sound we use to describe what we call the moon could be anything. The sign for the moon, which is the M-N- sound immanent in the word we use for moon, could have been N-N-. It could have been A-B-. It could have been F-C-. It could have been anything. But the Yamna took this arbitrary sign, the M-N-, and attached it to the moon. So my hypothesis goes. At that moment it stopped being arbitrary.

Then, for one reason or another, this particular sound-meaning bundle of M-N- really took off. So did its meaning of energy and light shining through a different object. That is light shining through meaning, or through the human, to differentiate us from the stone. It colonised every single living Indo-European language. So much so that we are the inheritors, the cultural inheritors, of this tradition. That is so even if you speak an Indo-European language and have no steppe ancestry inside you, no Yamna genes inside you. Which is probably a bit unlikely. Most of us between Ireland and India do have steppe ancestry inside us, from ancient Ukraine, from the Yamna. That in itself is pretty amazing.

Europa and Asia meet at the Don

There is the question of how this came about in all of these countries. All of these places in this massive area, which I now moniker Manuland, between Ireland and India. No one before has ever had a signifier for it. They talk about Asia and Europe. I am uniting Europa, the goddess Europa, and Asia, the deity, whose writ ran, again amazingly coincidentally, according to Isidore of Seville. He was kind of the Wikipedia of the ancient age. Isidore of Seville marked the border between Asia’s jurisdiction and Europa’s jurisdiction as the Tanais, the Don River. The Don was and always will be part of ancient Ukraine. It was part of modern Ukraine until the 1920s. Then that whole area was taken away. Maybe one day it will be part of it again.

In any event, the point I’m trying to make here is this. The Yamna chose a sound, M-N-, and they attached it to a meaning, the moon, at source. That was in Mykhailivka village and on the steppe around Mykhailivka and Zaporizhzhia. The ancient DNA tells us that this is more likely than not to have happened. They did it so intensively, and it was so important, that that meaning and that source travelled over the next 6,000 years. They travelled into every living Indo-European language. So it’s arbitrary at source, as all modern linguistics establishes. But after it is established as arbitrary at source, there’s something so strongly bonding these signs and meanings, these signs and signifieds. It is strong and powerful enough to attract, like the moon attracting the tides. It continually regenerates itself in the minds of the more than half of humanity today who speak an Indo-European language.

Then we teach it to our children. They use this sound-meaning bundle in these different ways over the course of the next 6,000 years. All with this same sense of energy and affective charge inside it, or light shining through something other than itself. That in itself would be my response to my friend who said to me in the Christmas of 2022, “Well, so what?” This is amazing. It’s absolutely amazing that we have these. We have about 1,000 words which are reconstructed back through all the living Indo-European languages, back to so-called roots, which is wonderful. But as far as I know, I’m the first person to notice sound-meaning bundles in Indo-European languages. I call them cryptotypes. I have written about them before. I will continue to write about them and explain what I mean by that.

The empirical fact

So we start with the empirical fact. Those of you who have been listening to Finding Manuland by now totally understand it. The M-N- is immanent. It is in the word immanent itself. And the attached meaning: it is in the word meaning as well. So it is not just about the sound. It is M-N- and attached meaning: moon, measure, human, name. There is a whole set of meanings attached to this M-N- sound. Conventional linguistics parries them into different etymons, moon, measure, human and name, for instance. It is even in the moniker etymons. This M-N- is in there. You cannot even use the language of linguistics. Noun is nomen, coming from name, the N-M-, the reversal of the M-N- consonantal skeleton. You cannot even talk about these matters without using that vocabulary. M-N- and N-M-, the moon-based semantic metaphorical signalling system, has colonised it.

That is a phenomenon I have been looking into since I first saw it. It is pretty amazing. But it is not magical. If we did not know about the Yamna, then it might be magical. If we did not know we all spoke the same language between Ireland and India. From the same language family, from the same common source. I am able to trace it back 6,000 years to the Yamna, with the help of archaeogenetics published in peer-reviewed research. For instance, the Nikitin et al. paper from February 2025 in Nature, which I have spoken about before. It establishes that the Yamna community was centred in Mykhailivka village on the right bank of the Dnipro. That is just south of Zaporizhzhia, just south of Dnipro city, where I lived for three years.

The meme

So we go back to yesterday. In the meme posted yesterday, the Earth is in a corner, a blue crescent the size of a coin. It came in a run of three dozen posts in two hours. Donald on a horse beside the first president of the United States. The United States state of New Mexico, re-archetyping as New America. A uniform of the Space Force, which is part of the US military. Some people say it was actually inspired by the Nazis. Then he posted the moon and made a claim for the moon.

Everyone commenting on this post is doing so at a superficial signifier level. Some of this set of people go: well, the Outer Space Treaty 1967. As many listeners know, I am a trained international lawyer. I studied international law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, the pre-eminent law college at the University of Cambridge, founded in 1350. So you might expect me to go for the Space Treaty of 1967. However, I was a diplomat in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018. (This is mainly dealt with in my disinfolklore.eu project.) That experience means we must look beyond what is immediately given, to look for the mana in the meme. So we are looking beyond names. We are looking into the energy of what is being named.

In this podcast I am not sharing Donald’s actual post unadulterated. I do not want to keep this meme in circulation. I am trying, without the risk of promoting the meme, to elucidate, to illuminate, what Donald is doing. I want to explain the level at which he is doing it when he talks about the moon. I do not want to promote him. So I do not use his second name, which is the name he uses to promote himself. He tweets about the moon and claims the moon for the United States. I think very carefully about how I do it, so that we understand more about the stories impacting our daily lives. I do not want to be part of the problem.

I have written before about how the energy in memes, the mana in memes, keeps going when you share them. So many people shared various of Donald’s memes yesterday, for instance, the memes I have just described in natural language. They shared them while going, oh, this is terrible, this is shocking, a US president has done this. As they are doing that, they are wrapping it in their negative evaluation of it. Even so, they are contributing to the reasoning and the intentionality of Donald and his team to actually create these memes. They create them because they know lots of us will share them. So I want to be outside of that. That is very much part of my practice, as in my Disinfolklore project. The project is trying to look at ways we can confront the adulteration of our information space with these terrible memes. Including in our minds. They can adulterate them even when we share them unintentionally.

This is lunacy

The Space Treaty, of course, does say that no nation may claim the moon. But that is not stopping Donald tweeting about this on the Sunday afternoon. That is when he is trying to distract from this, that or the other. A defence analyst straight away posted (and that is the frame I used for this post): the moon is for all humanity. Then, hilariously or ironically, perhaps knowingly, someone else posted: this is lunacy.

Because, of course, there are two words in Indo-European language for the moon. They go right back to the beginnings of Indo-European languages. One has an L in it. It is lun-. That is about the light element of the moon. Indeed, the light element is in element itself, and the M-N- is in element itself. The other is the functional use of the moon. That is what is really relevant to the M-N- project, because méh₁nōt meant measurer. This is how women measure their months, how we measure our months. My cat came in today. They are twelve months old. I said, you are twelve months old today, congratulations, it is your birthday. Then I realised I am basically saying, he is twelve moons old.

So we use the word month every day. We look at our calendars, our Microsoft calendars, our Apple calendars on our computer. The moon is right there. It’s month. It’s in month. The M-N- is in month. That’s the functional use of moon as measurer. That is what the Yamna used back on the steppe, 3,600 years before the Common Era. They used it to determine when to plant, when winter was coming, when women’s monthly menstruation was coming. It’s in menstruation as well. So the moon as a measurer is functional, as distinct from lun-. It is very arch and quite funny to me that someone would say “this is lunacy”. Because it quite literally is lunacy, in that sense. We’ll get to that at the end.

The post was built to get that reply. That’s why Donald’s team posted it. Every patient correction carries the image, the mana in the image. The name is the image, and then inside it the energy. One share further, and it wraps it in a different opinion. Then it keeps on going. I’ve written about that energy, that mana, keeping the energy of memes going. This is exactly what they’re doing. I’m aware of this. I’m self-aware of this. As I’m commenting on it, I’m attempting to use the power of mana and Finding Manuland. My entire work in linguistics, in fact, to help us understand precisely what’s going on.

The ground

The moon in English, that’s what we call the moon. Mond in German. Mās, M-A-S, in Sanskrit. Mēnē in Greek. Mí in Irish. Amis in Armenian. A month in Greek is mēn. So when you say someone is 12 months old, you’re basically saying you’re 12 moons old. As I just mentioned to my cat. That sounds very archaic. But that is how it used to be. It was such a commonly said word. Eventually it managed to colonise all the speech and the descriptions of that Yamna community. Their migrant community seeded all the communities that would become all the Indo-European language-speaking communities we have today.

So again, I’m saying this is not magic. This is not lunacy. This is not spiritual awakening. There’s a whole area of moon studies and moonology and what have you. That is not part of what I tried to do with Finding Manuland. Because what I managed to do was trace it back to the steppe, standing on the shoulders of giants, to Mykhailivka village. The ancient DNA published in Nature in February 2025, the Nikitin paper, establishes that the Yamna community lived there on the steppe. They were the ancestors of all living Indo-European languages. Modern linguists have reconstructed the language they spoke. They moniker it Proto-Indo-European. I call it ancient Ukrainian, to afford parity of esteem with Ukraine, the modern nation state. That is, if we are to use the same moniker, Greek, for the modern Greek state. That state emanated out of the same folklore movement that I’ve mentioned before. But it used the history of ancient Greece to justify and explain why their modern state was a proper state. Ancient Greece is a great Indo-European tradition, one of many. We talk about ancient Greeks. So why shouldn’t we also talk about ancient Ukrainians?

As far as we know from modern linguistics, when the Yamna looked up at the sky they saw the moon. They didn’t call it X or Y. They called it the moon, méh₁nōt (m, e, h, one, then nōt), the measurer. Linguists use this term for the moon, méh₁nōt. You’ll see this in Mallory and Adams’s Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European. Moon in English, mās in Sanskrit, mēnē in Greek, mí in Old Irish, Mond in German. All of these words descend from one word, one etymon, méh₁nōt. It was spoken in Mykhailivka village on the Ukrainian steppe 6,000 years ago. That is the language that Persian, Hindi, Ukrainian and English all come from. Our ancestors did not name the moon for the light, for Luna. They named the moon for its function. The moon was the measurer, the first instrument anyone had. Month, Monday, measure and menses are the moon’s day job.

The sound runs on, whatever a dictionary says. Memory, meaning, man, mind, human, money, monarch, mandate, mantra and mana. And all of those other words. Those who read and listen to my work will know I’ve been talking about them for many years at this point. Including many, by the way. So this is an old word for power, this M-N- sound. The power of the moon, the power of mana, the energy in it. The light in it shining through a stone in the sky. The consonants M-N- run through all of our words for whatever lights a person from the inside, a human. Once you get your ear in, you hear the M-N- everywhere.

That’s part of my task, to help you get your eye in so that you hear it. You focus. You pay attention in normal everyday talk to the language and the sounds and the meanings that we use in everyday language. You wonder about where they came from. I found the M-N-, and the sound-meaning bundle, the M-N-, the N-D- and a few others. I’ll continue to talk about them in the Finding Manuland Atlas series. But there are possibly and probably others, which maybe you will be inspired to find.

The moon is a stone in the sky. It seems lit from within. Like light shining through the moon, mind shines through a human. That metaphor sits at the foundation of how we name a mind. Everyone who says moon or meaning still uses it, in any Indo-European language.

My hypothesis

So, my hypothesis. I state this clearly. My moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system is merely a hypothesis. We start from the point today and go back through different Indo-European traditions. We see this M-N- sound immanent in so many different words and meanings. Traditional etymology put them into different roots. People say, gosh, that’s the same sound and meaning, if they even notice that at all. Our traditional etymology goes, oh, that’s just a coincidence. That’s just chance.

So we start with the empirical fact today of the M-N- sound being ubiquitous across every sentence we speak. We try to look at how that could have happened. The moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system is just my hypothesis. You might have another. I’d love to hear it. The moon is the metaphor. The light shining through the moon is the foundational metaphor in our Indo-European communities.

The measurement

The sound is in fact M-N-. It is associated with measurement. Linguists have a word for a pattern speakers use without knowing it is there: cryptotype. I’ve measured this one using state-of-the-art data analytic techniques. I’ll talk about those in future episodes of the Finding Manuland Atlas. Across thirty-seven living Indo-European languages, words for mind, moon, measure, man and name have M and N keeping company inside them. Name is N-M-, the M-N- reversal. They keep company in any order, 20.8 per cent of the time, against 3.46 per cent for words in general. That’s an odds ratio of 8.0. That means it’s eight times chance.

Someone points out that mind, moon, measure, man and name have M and N keeping company inside them. In one or more of their appearances in different Indo-European languages. Linguists claim it is just chance. I spent July using state-of-the-art data analytics techniques and various different instruments like the NorthEuraLex lexicon. So I’ve been able to establish that it’s actually eight times the chance. That means there is an eight times greater chance that M and N keep company in those words than in a word taken at random.

It’s the first of 182 sound pairings tested. A word for one of those five things is eight times more likely to carry the M-N- sound. Eight times more likely than a word taken at random. The chance of that happening by accident is a decimal point, sixty-five zeros, and then a five. Basically, you could run that test from the beginning of the Big Bang every second. You still wouldn’t get there by chance.

Linguists and etymologists say that the M-N- in mind, man and human, and in measure, and in name, is just chance. It is just chance that these same consonants are in these different monikers. You might even persuade them to say, oh, the Yamna used these different sound-meaning bundles for different things, for different phenomena. And it’s just a coincidence that they used the same one. Perhaps they were very parsimonious. Because these conventional linguists, whose work I rely on a lot, and many others, trace each of these back to individual etymons. And that again, M-N- in etymon.

When the linguist says this, we can now say: I’ve done this test. I spent July going through all of these state-of-the-art statistical tests. M and N keep company in words for mind, moon, measure, man and name. The chances of that by accident are a decimal point, sixty-five zeros, then a five. So you could run this test every second since the Big Bang. You’d still not reach the fact of having M and N keeping company in those five words, and what they mean. In different Indo-European languages, thirty-seven living Indo-European languages.

Having established that, my hypothesis for what explains it is, okay, they come from méh₁nōt. The Yamna used the moon-based metaphor. They looked at the moon. They saw the light shining through what seemed like a stone in the sky sometimes. They said, okay, well, how do I distinguish a human from a stone? Well, I’ll use this metaphor. We have light shining through us. How do I describe that this signifier means this? Well, I’ll say that the light of this other signifier shines through this. This is its meaning. So that’s my hypothesis.

Maybe there are other hypotheses. But it makes sense if you have a theory of cryptotypes. If you don’t have a theory of cryptotypes, you think there cannot be this hidden grammar inside our language. Not until it’s elucidated by researchers like myself and linguists like myself. Put brackets around this idea that these different sounds and meanings happened by chance. Imagine that it didn’t happen by chance. Then, for me, the idea that they emanate from méh₁nōt is plausible. Even if you don’t agree with any of that, hopefully you’ll stick around for the journeys. We’re discovering lots of different interesting stuff. But it’s particularly relevant to today.

Six founders

Anyway, six of the eight living Indo-European branches give their founding figure on that sound. Manu in India. Aryaman in Iran, or Aryānām in Iran, depending on who you take. Or Bruce Lincoln thought there was also a Manuš in Iran as a founder. He saw Manuščihr, the son of Manuš, as a founder in Iran. Minos in Greece, and Rhadamanthus, his brother. Menua in Armenia and Urartu. And Mannus among the Germanic people.

Some of you might remember listening to my sixth part on Manu, on which came first, Manu or Mannus. Manu in India, or Mannus among the Germanic people. Mannus had three sons, one of whom was called Irmin, again with the M-N-. And Manannán and Érimón in Ireland, the only Celtic-language-speaking nation state that has full status as a state. Maybe that will change in our lifetime. Maybe Wales and Scotland will become independent sovereign entities. But for now, Ireland is the remnant of what, 300 years before the Common Era, was the Celtic-language-speaking empire. It stretched between what we now call Czechia, the Hercynian forest, across to Ireland, down to Spain. They were getting into parts of Italy, and across Anatolia to Ankara. Some of you might remember my posts from Ankara, a city founded by the Phrygians. I visited Midas’s tomb. Midas was a Phrygian, Celtic-language-speaking probably.

One name like that would be an accident. But six, at two ends of the family, Ireland and across to India, the whole of Manuland. That means it could not have been borrowed from each other. So it is inheritance. I look at the linguistics. I look at NorthEuraLex, 43,251 word forms across 1,016 concepts. Then I also look at the founder names. These are two separate vectors of evidence that something is going on beyond chance. I am able to measure the chances that Germany and India would end up with Mannus and Manu respectively as their founders. That is one chance in 2,500.

Mykhailivka, across the river from Enerhodar

The Yamna, the herders who spoke that common source language, made the word. We know that. That is beyond all reasonable doubt at this point. The word is méh₁nōt. In 2025 Nikitin and his colleagues traced the Yamna, as I mentioned, to Mykhailivka, very close to the Enerhodar nuclear power plant. The Russians are occupying it, across the river from Mykhailivka. As I speak today, it is running out of diesel for the nth time. Anyway, humanity can begin somewhere and end in some place. What an arch coincidence. But we are now enveloping ourselves in an eiderdown of really interesting stuff. So we are going to try and stay away from that geopolitics. We do have to get to Don and that darkness, though. Maybe I can elucidate some of that darkness.

Half of humanity today speaks a language that descends from theirs, from the Yamna, spoken in 3600 BCE. The ancient DNA tells us this. The word, the moniker for moon, is the signifier. What it signifies is the actual moon. The word does not belong to any state. It does not belong to America. Donald cannot tweet “the moon is ours”. The moon never has belonged to anyone. It belongs to all of us. And the signified belongs to all of us. We legislate through the language we use.

A demon of the moon

In January the Kremlin’s house philosopher Dugin wrote that Cheburashka is a demon. I have spoken about this in my Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut series, which I started a few weeks ago on disinfolklore.net. Cheburashka is kind of the Soviet era’s Mickey Mouse, a big-eared puppet three generations of Russian-language-speaking children have loved. The Kremlin’s house philosopher, I maintain, is a security service operative. He is an actor, acting the part of a philosopher. This is to provide a justification for the terrible activities the Soviet Union and today’s Russia are involved in. On the continent of Europe and elsewhere. He provides the philosophical justification.

He wrote a piece where he archetyped Cheburashka, who is Russia’s Mickey Mouse, as a demon. And of course there is the M-N- in demon. A demon of the moon. That is what Dugin called Cheburashka. In another universe I would say: can you imagine the US president calling Mickey Mouse a demon of the moon? But we don’t live in that universe any longer, sadly. Part of my job, and part of all of our jobs, is to stay positive. And to find means of understanding what precisely these ne’er-do-wells are doing. Not just to our minds, to our communities, but to our inheritance and to our chance of a peaceful future. That is also part of what I do in Finding Manuland.

That Kremlin house philosopher, Dugin, gave the demon a made-up name and made-up pentacles to prove it. He used a made-up, Semitic-language-sounding origin for the term Cheburashka. But I have looked into it very deeply. It is completely fake. He falsified it. He wants to create in the minds of Russians the idea that their dearest big-eared puppet is a demon of the moon. Three generations of Russian-language-speaking children loved that puppet. Then he adds in a pseudo-scientific, fake, Semitic origin for the term Cheburashka.

When I talk about the meaning and the purpose of Finding Manuland, I am really serious about outflanking people like Dugin. Many of us don’t pay enough attention to what they are doing. They are using the moon, for instance, in this case, to qualify the idea of demon. A demon of the moon. A demon, M-N-, of the moon. Then he is creating a false Semitic linguistic etymology for the term Cheburashka.

You need to be operating on this linguistic level. Or at least to have a module in your brain where you can interrogate what these people are saying. Otherwise we just go: oh, that’s really funny, that’s a bit weird, what’s he going on about? Oh, I’m just getting on with my day. To really understand how the Russians and MAGA and other disinfolklorists are operating, I maintain this. (Disinfolklorists is what I call them in my other projects.) One can invest a lot more understanding into one’s own mind. That comes from looking into the linguistic aspects of the deceptions which they are playing. That is why I focus on this, and on Donald talking about the moon.

I don’t just speak about these things because they are interesting to nerds like myself. And they are interesting. Fascinating. I speak of these things incessantly. I think of them all day long. I try to communicate them to you because I am interested in them. I hope I communicate my energy and my enthusiasm to you. But it is not just about that. I want to better understand what is going on in today’s world. I want to help you see how I see what’s going on in the world, what’s affecting today’s world. You go and you discover, for instance, that diesel is costing X amount of money when you try to fill up. Or the food you’re buying for your family, or your children are buying for their families, is going up in price. Then you realise, okay, that’s because Russia invaded Ukraine. Or that’s because Donald is involved in this catastrophic war in Iran. And why did Donald invade Iran? As a distraction. All of this stuff. This is because the Russians got Donald elected. All of these different root causes. If we want to understand how our lives are being impacted by these matters, it’s worth understanding what they’re doing with language. And how they’re affecting our minds.

The Russians themselves, their security services, hired an actor, philosopher Dugin. He is hacking the substrate of our very language and our very foundational civilisation. The only way we can outflank this is by going backwards 6,000 years to the beginning of Indo-European civilisation. And saying to them: no, that is wrong. That is a fake Semitic etymology. The reason you are postulating that Cheburashka’s name comes from pentacles is because you’re trying to mystify us with nonsense. Meanwhile you’re justifying your state destroying the very space where our language came from and emanates from. The language you’re trying to brainwash us with came from there too. So stop. I’m outflanking you. I’m not taking any of this nonsense.

So this is the purpose of Power of Mana. I’m trying to entrench in our minds a means of outflanking these ne’er-do-wells. Their cynicism, their just sheer awfulness, has an impact on almost every single moment of our lives at the moment. In our family’s lives. On our family budgets. On how our minds compute the data when we turn on the so-called news or we see Disinfolklore. The conversations we have in work. Whether in fact we have work. Whether our jobs continue.

Reversion to the Moon

Dugin could have made a demon of the river, or of the fire, or of the field. But he went for the Moon. The Russian security services create a house philosopher. He’s the actor. He’s not a real philosopher. He’s writing about Cheburashka. Did Kant write about Mickey Mouse? No. So this guy, this clown, Dugin, is an actor for the Russian security services. They chose the Moon. When an operator of the Russian security services needs the authority of old ground, they refer to the oldest ground there is. The foundation. I call this Reversion to the Moon, after the reversion to the mean phenomenon in data analytics.

Neural network algorithms power all of the AI that we see around us. They are affecting our daily lives, or making choices for us, finding flights for us. Those who have a vocabulary understanding of neural network algorithms, like I do, will understand this. The artificial neurons driving them are expressed in terms of weights. Those weights themselves are set using the standard deviation from the mean. Reversion to the mean is a phenomenon from the same data analytics. And M-N- is in mean. So the standard deviation is part of how the weights of any particular artificial neuron are set. There are billions of those weights in a particular artificial neural network algorithm we’re using, if we’re in a chatbot or something. And this is not just an arch play on words.

When I talk about Reversion to the Moon, I talk about reversion to the M-N- based metaphorical semantic signalling system. It is in almost every sentence we speak. When we go for the founders’ names, whether it’s Manu, Mannus, Manannán, Érimón, Menua, and all of those founders. Then we can empirically see it in almost every sentence we speak. And we can see it in the foundations of our cultures. Every time we say Germany, we are talking about Mannus.

So it’s also actually a way of communicating reversion to the mean. That is quite an arch play, because Disinfolklore is about mean stories. It communicates the energy of mean stories, the manner of mean stories, into our minds without us even noticing, using folklore-like archetypes. But the reversion to the mean in data analytics is about measurement. When the Yamna spoke about measurement, they used this term modern linguists call méh₁nōt. It then became attached to the Moon. That is powering our world today. And it powered the world on the steppe. Dugin and the people he works for are trying to justify the annihilation of that steppe. For instance, right across the river at the Enerhodar nuclear power plant. Mean, of course, carries the M-N- sound too. So the foundation of what I mean is what I mean by the substrate. Planting a claim on it is a substrate hack.

Dugin claims Cheburashka is a demon of the moon. That is because, for whatever reason, they want to tarnish this Mickey Mouse character as being a rootless cosmopolitan. He is beloved of three generations of Russians. They tarnish him by saying he’s a demon of the moon. A demon of the moon, with a fake etymological substrate claim for it. So they use the Moon. And that hack reveals the power of the cryptotypes we’re talking about.

Two operators, one object

It’s the same trick that Donald used yesterday. So Donald says the Moon is ours. Nobody in Washington needs to have read Dugin. But we know people like Peter Thiel and others have, and their followers, and Vance’s followers have. So we do know there is contact between these two sets of people. Two operators emanating from the same Russian mafia entity, according to one interpretation. But two operators, Dugin and Donald, with no material link between them. This may or may not be true. We don’t know who drafted that text for Donald. Maybe they had read Dugin. Maybe they were hired by Sergio Gor, the Soviet-born head of personnel in the White House. So he is responsible for hiring. As far as I am aware from public reporting, he has not undergone a security check himself. So maybe they are in contact. I don’t know. But let’s assume that they’re not in contact. Just like the Indians, who called their first man Manu. They were not in contact with the Germans, who called their first human Mannus.

Everything that the current administration (M-N- in administration) does, the Russian mafia state, let us put that aside for a moment. The moon, because that is where the oldest ground in Indo-European civilisation is. That community of Yamna, sitting around their fire, looking up at the moon. Forging these metaphors and planting them in language, in ordinary speech and in founders. Like Manu, like Mannus, like Manannán, like Érimón, like Menua. When a human who wants to look like a founder goes looking for foundations, the moon is where their minds go.

The letter

For months, Donald has been telling people that most people do not know that there is a B in dumb. Anything dumber than that, it is hard to imagine. But remember that I try to be really parsimonious in sharing these memes, whether they are linguistic or visual. Because, of course, the point is that we’re talking about Donald. And gosh, I really look forward to a world where it’s impossible to talk about him in the present tense. Because it’s ruining so many lives and infecting so many of our minds. All I’m trying to do is get into the substrate of what’s going on. These odd things are occurring in our world. Really terrible things are occurring in our world. This is my small contribution, with my various projects.

Donald uses this terrible term where he denigrates the Democratic Party. He others them and turns them into the Outer Realm, taking the B out. I’m not actually even going to tell you what it is. All we need to know is that most people do not know that there’s a B in dumb. That is something Donald has been talking about for months. There’s lots of reporting on this. Google it if you would so choose. A man, a human, Donald, fixed on one letter, the B. And yet his own name, Don, has letters in it he’s probably never looked at. But maybe they have. I don’t know that.

It’s just, everywhere I go, there’s more meaning in what they do than one can see. That is, using what normal people understand as normal knowledge. I’ve just happened to have spent years looking into all of this. Everywhere I go, I find aspects like this. So it’s entirely plausible someone has explained this to him, what I’m about to explain to you. Who knows? All I can do is draw attention to this.

Donald is on the surface a D-N- word. That is the sound of the five great rivers of the Indo-European homeland. The Don. The Donets, where I worked for three years. The Dnipro, where I lived for a further four years. The Dnister, which I crisscrossed many times. And the Danube, which I’ve also crisscrossed many times, along its full length. All the way down to where it meets the sea, the Black Sea in Ukraine. Inside the river names, Don, Donets, Dnipro, Dnister and Danube, sits the older thing.

I’ve spoken before about Donn, who is the grandson of the monarch of Scythia, ancient Ukraine. He is the Irish lord of the dead. But here we’re talking about another Don, another Donald. The word, the name, the moniker Donald comes from the Scottish Gaelic Dòmhnall. And of course Donald’s mother was an immigrant from Scotland. Dòmhnall, D-O-M-H-N-A-L-L. Before that, from a Proto-Celtic word, Dumno-ualos. There’s an M-N- in that. Dumno, D-U-M-N-O-U-A-L-O-S. Ruler of the world is what it means. So Donald’s name means ruler of the world. It’s no relation to dumb.

That dumno, signifying the world like monde in French, is the element in Dumnorix. The Gaulish chieftain who defied Caesar, the Roman. Many of us will have read Asterix. So he’s in there. That’s what’s going on there. Dumnorix. Again, we’ve got the M-N- sound in there. Wolfgang Meid, the great Austrian Celticist, glosses the name king of the world. Universal sovereign, if you like. It carries an M-N- at its heart, as Latin mundus and French monde do.

Donald has spent a summer on the missing B. The M-N- word was immanent in his name the whole time. He has been ruler of the world, at least in his first name, since 1946. And he went to the moon to say this out loud, when he claimed sovereignty over the moon. He’s right about the pronoun. And again, the word noun comes from nomen, with the N-M- reversed in it. So you cannot talk about our language without referencing M-N- or their reversal words. That’s its ubiquity and its curiosity. That is what the Power of Mana is about.

Ours

So the moon belongs to everyone, in the sense that I’ve been talking about today. Because the Yamna, who forged the first Indo-European language, used the word méh₁nōt to signify the moon. They bequeathed that moniker and its associated meaning to us. It travelled up all the various branches, living and dead, to all of us today. If you’re listening to this podcast or reading it in text form, in an Indo-European language, you are included in that “we”. Even if you’ve migrated from a different linguistic group, or you were born speaking a different language. Today you speak an Indo-European language. You’re part of that Yamna inheritance. We’re all part of this same community.

The moon is inside the language of all of us Indo-Europeans. So the Ukrainian, the Iranian, the Irish, the Indian are all part of this. Everyone in Manuland. The moon was measuring our ancestors on the Dnipro River long before there was an England, an America or a France.

The month was measured. A puppet was made a demon by the Russian state philosopher. Once you know what the moon is and who named it, there is no claim left to answer.

Lunin

Three months ago, in June, a video appeared on the network. Everyone in Ukrainian and Russian internet space was suddenly sharing it. I wrote about this on the Decoding Trolls Substack, decodingtrolls.net, back in June. The person who created this video was called Lunan. This was a curiosity to me, because I had noticed this pattern. Those I suspect of working for the Russian security services also reach for the light meaning of the moon. Functionally the moon is a measurer. But its quality is light. Out of that particular signifier comes the L in illuminate, for instance, or in light, or in lux. This all emanates from the idea of light being the quality of the moon.

I had noticed this pattern before, because I spend my days reading Russian Disinfolklore. Often their Telegram channels, or the characters they invent, have the moon in them. Either as in the case of Cheburashka being a moon demon. Or, as in this case, a lune or a luna or a Lunin in the name. So my ears perk up when I see that. Is this particular meme genuine or not, for instance? Is it inorganic? When I am trying to determine that and I see this term, this moniker, Lunin, my ears perk up. I do a bit of research.

Lunin, of course, comes from luna, which means the moon. The Russian security services reach for the moon again and again and again. That is because the moon is where our oldest words for the mind began. The reconstructed name for the moon, méh₁nōt, the measurer, is the root of monarch and mandate, mind, meaning, numen and immanent.

Numen, I noticed, is the name of the firm of Donald’s former website designer, Brad Parscale. Parscale appeared in Romania just before the cancelled election. He has now appeared in relation to a big scandal in South America, which is ongoing. I noted the name is Numen, from archaic Roman religion, also with M-N- in it. I did a piece on that about a year ago. But I digress.

For 6,000 years the moon has been our master metaphor for the medium that carries meaning. To feel foundational is to sit underneath everything. The apparatus, the Russian state security apparatus, seems to reach for it repeatedly, again and again. Now Donald has reached for it. We have reached for it for the past 6,000 years, as the founder names determine.

Sign-off

I am not going to draw all of these different strands together. But I hope you have enjoyed this podcast. My name is Decoding Trolls. I blog mainly at disinfolklore.eu, but also here, powerofmana.net. I am engaged in the Finding Manuland Atlas project at the moment. I will post the fourth introductory episode, the framing episode, very soon. Please subscribe to my work if you like. It is free.

Those of you who pay for my work, you are absolutely amazing. I do not thank you enough, or really at all. But frankly, I find podcasters who ask for money every single episode, or thank people for support, are not really my thing. I support many podcasters who ask for money. But it is just not my thing. I do not like to interrupt my art, as I see it, with that.

So I do not speak of it very much, but it is immanent in everything I do. I do not thank you enough. But you are amazing, and thank you for reading and listening to my work. That is the true exchange of our mana, whether you pay for my work or not. It does not matter. My job is to try and get these ideas out there, to as many people as possible. Into as many minds as possible. And to engage in as many conversations about these issues as possible. I’ll leave it there for today.

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 Geography

So 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 Esteem

So 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 Zaporizhzhia, 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 Urgency

So 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, this remodelling of our minds, learning about all these different places that perhaps we have never even heard of. Or perhaps, like Turkey, everyone has heard of Turkey. I didn’t know that Turkey was basically dropped on top of Anatolia, where the first attested Indo-European language was spoken. And the Turkic people, the Turkic-language-speaking people, arrived there about 800 years ago and gradually conquered the whole of Anatolia, which is a prime piece of real estate. But it has millennia of attested history, and much of my time, as much time as I can, is spent in Anatolia visiting these amazing museums.

The Turkic people are great preservers and conservers and researchers of the traditions that they inherited. I’m thinking of Göbekli Tepe and the Taş Tepeler area, and very many other places. There are the great museums, and the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara, which I visited and talk about a lot because of the artefacts I saw there. Recently I visited the Istanbul Museum in Istanbul, which has some fantastic artefacts from an area, northern Mesopotamia, in the south-eastern part of Turkey, that I visited in January and talk about a lot. And many other amazing artefacts, which we will get to again.

But Finding Manuland also has a very serious aspect to it. And this is just the latest example, but it goes on through history and has gone on since the beginning of the Indo-European world. Marauders come from different territories. In the current time, Russia uses the bogus view of history as an excuse to disarm us, as a community of Westerners, and to persuade us that Ukraine is not a real country. So there is a real urgency about what we do in Finding Manuland, and a meaning to Finding Manuland, which I think in more innocent ages perhaps didn’t matter so much. But it does today, and I have that sense of urgency.

Where to Find Me

So, somewhere on the Iranian plateau. Well, first let me just say: I’m Decoding Trolls. I write mainly at disinfolklore.eu. I also write the Finding Manuland series and do the podcasts, which you will find at powerofmana.net, M-A-N-A, or Google Finding Manuland, and at decodingtrolls.net and disinfolklore.net. These are all connected cultural projects. I also microblog on X at @disinfolklore and @decodingtrolls, but my main site, as I say, is disinfolklore.eu.

All these podcasts are available on all major podcast platforms, so just search for Finding Manuland and you will find me. I also podcast once a week with Disinfolklore, and every few weeks on Decoding Trolls. They are based and hosted on the Substack platform, accessible through decodingtrolls.net, disinfolklore.net and powerofmana.net. But they are also available on all major podcast platforms. If you prefer to get your content through words, I also convert these podcasts into text. So I write the scripts, then I speak them, and then I convert them back into text according to the changes which I make in real time.

From Paris to the Iranian Plateau

So, somewhere on the Iranian plateau. Let’s place ourselves in Paris, France, and we are moving south and east. I drove recently from Brussels, actually, to Germany, then down through Austria into Serbia, into Bulgaria, over the mountains which Constantine the Great, who was born in Niš in Serbia, would have crossed. It is now a great motorway. I then crossed the border into Türkiye. So see what I’m doing here. Whichever way you are listening to this podcast, I’m trying to bring you on this mental journey into an area which might be a bit sketchy. Maybe you went on holiday on the west coast of Türkiye. Maybe you went to Izmir, which was known in ancient times as Smyrna, where Herodotus, the great historian, was born, or various places along that coast, which I’m really looking forward to visiting soon. And I drove all the way across Türkiye, which is just a giant country. I think it is about 4,000 kilometres across, if you are going from the border with Greece and Bulgaria to the border with Georgia, or down a bit to the border with Iran.

So this is where I’m locating us right now. Having whooshed your mental model right across Europe from Paris, which is hopefully somewhere that most listeners can visualise, we are now down by the Iranian plateau. And somewhere on the Iranian plateau lies the ground where the bridge that judges the dead was first described.

This bridge is not just analogous to the bridge over the Donets River in eastern Ukraine, where I spent three years as a diplomat negotiating many ceasefires and helping people, ordinary people like you and me, cross the bridge from Russian-occupied Ukraine into government-controlled Ukraine, where the people could collect their pensions and then return, hopefully, across the bridge. Part of my job on that bridge was about helping to manage the situation in which the Russian occupiers were acting as bridge trolls. Because of that situation there, and its folkloric resonance, that really has generated, and I tell the story a lot in Disinfolklore, the power and the energy and the meaning for all of my work since.

The Chinvat Bridge, and Timothy Snyder’s Journey

And the Chinvat bridge, the Chinvat threshold, is from the Zoroastrian religion. If Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, either word works, was a real person, he would have lived around 1400 BCE. So when I talk about rearranging your mental models, it is also the temporal. Geographical, temporal, linguistic and many other dimensions besides. In the temporal aspect, I’m trying to transform your mental models in the same way mine have been, to see that the past 6,000 years really can be populated with many more details than we perhaps might have thought.

When I wrote, for instance, about that great American historian, I think he is at Toronto now, Timothy Snyder, I wrote about when he had suddenly rearranged his mental model of the temporal history of Ukraine. He had previously begun his history of Ukraine with the Greek colonies on the coast, the Azov Sea coast and the Black Sea coast and the Crimean coast, where the ancient Greeks had several different colonies around 300 or 400 years before the Common Era. Then suddenly he was clearly on the same journey that I was on, and he realised, whoa, the ancient DNA evidence demonstrates that the forebears of the ancient Greeks are a cultural, a linguistic and a genetic emanation of migrants, Yamna migrants, who left ancient Ukraine, Scythia as the Romans would later call it, over a thousand years before their descendants would return and establish colonies and go, well, this is a nice place, it feels somewhat familiar, I don’t know what it is.

And the Scythians themselves, the people the Romans called the Scythians, we now know really were returning migrants from Iran. So the Yamna left Ukraine before 2500 BCE. They travelled up to today’s Kazakhstan, to the Sintashta culture, and then out of the Sintashta culture emanates this Andronovo cline, which brings Indo-European culture, religion and language to Iran, and eventually to India. Then they return the same way a millennium later, as Scythians. And we have this principle in evolution and in migrations: basically, over time, where in one period people travelled from A to B, then we find again and again and again, over the millennia, for different reasons, people without memory travelled the same path.

So we have this idea that Ukraine’s relevance in world history begins with the Greek colonies, and there we attach Ukraine to ancient Greece, and some of the magic of ancient Greece gets allocated to Ukraine, and that is how we begin all the traditional histories of Ukraine and Ukrainian culture. But Timothy Snyder is on the same journey as I was, and I noted this when he first did this. There are a couple of posts on Finding Manuland about it. Because of course history and historians, and I studied history as an undergraduate, deal with texts, with written sources. Whereas in Finding Manuland we deal not only with written sources, say Greek writers writing about these colonies, or inscriptions found on the Azov Sea coast or the coast of the Black Sea commemorating that this town or that town was an ancient Greek colony. We also look at texts like the Amarna letters, 1400 BCE, in Egypt. We look at Darius the Great’s inscriptions from 600 BCE, from the Achaemenid Empire in Iran. We also look at ancient DNA, and we look at isotopic analysis. We look at the whole range of sources available today to what I call myself, a cultural archaeologist.

And Timothy Snyder himself, as a historian who was confined to written sources, is also on this same journey that we are on in Finding Manuland, realising that actually you only get a very partial view of where we come from, and in this narrow case of what Ukraine is, if we confine ourselves to the traditional written sources. What we do in Finding Manuland is surface the peer-reviewed, pukka, archaeological, archaeogenetic, cultural, religious, linguistic and all the other different dimensions of the modern academy in every particular region we go to. And by region I mean geographical region, but also academic region, when we get into Assyriology or biblical studies, or, in this case, ancient Iranian religion, which then pops up, this bridge pops up again, in Islam, because Islam was standardised and articulated via Iranian scholars who created the first Arabic dictionaries. So they had an influence on it which perhaps is not always recognised. This is the kind of thing we do in Finding Manuland. We surface all of these links from all of the different places.

Daēnā on the Bridge, and Northern Mesopotamia

So the Chinvat bridge. The Chinvat threshold, in the ancient Zarathustrian religion, is where the soul is met at the crossing by Daēnā. Note that: D-N-. Daēnā, Don, Donets, Dnipro, Dniester, Danube. Daēnā stands on the bridge. Her name is on the bridge. Her name is on the D-N-, which we will talk about a lot in the D-N- cryptotype. And that is where the anti-blood-sacrifice current begins.

So, Mesopotamia’s own country: Sumer, Akkad, Babylon. So again, that is northern Mesopotamia. We are in Iran. Now we move across the border, from the Iranian border, into what I call northern Mesopotamia, what was called by 19th-century scholars North Mesopotamia. Gradually Turkey exerted its control over this area where the Kurds ruled, where the Assyrians ruled, where the Armenians ruled, where we have this whole concatenation of different empires: the Hittites, Akkad, Babylon, now the Turkic language speakers. There, the Umman-manda, M-N- in Umman and in Manda, the M-N- horde written down by outsiders. There the great word, the sound of mahā and mégas and magnus, reached the tablets of Sumer as a loan a scholar can date. So mahā, as in Mahayana Buddhism, the great path, the great vehicle. Mega, which MAGA riffs off, but mega meaning big. Magnus. Again, Mannus, that M-N- name, the first name in the Germanic areas. And that reached the tablets of Sumer as a loan a scholar can date, because we have got the libraries, we have got the deconstructed cuneiform texts, which we will get to in later episodes. And there Enki’s deep-water realm sits behind Manannán’s sea and Neptune’s sea.

Beyond what Anatolia already gave, the Mitanni, whose rulers were Indo-Aryans, who were Indo-Europeans whose ancestors had emanated from Ukraine, through the Sintashta, through the Andronovo cline, and become the Mitanni. And that waits too: the Hurrian kingdom, where Indo-Aryan gods were sworn into a treaty, part of the contact traffic that reached as far as Egypt. All of it is a road which I have driven a little bit, but will go through on more and more journeys.

The Eastern Cline: Sintashta, Andronovo, the Kurgan and the Mandala

So, the eastern cline. Moving back from Iran, up through the Caucasus, up through Armenia, Georgia, into Russia, across into Kazakhstan. That is the kind of area we are in at the moment. East of the homeland, the ancient Ukrainian homeland, runs the measurable chariot gradient, the square-in-circle that runs from the kurgan, the burial mound, which began this journey when property developers in Dnipro were trying to destroy, and did in fact destroy, a kurgan built by the Yamna, revealing a stone circle belonging to the Serednii Stih underneath it. So the square-in-circle that runs from the kurgan to the mandala, and the open question of what the family gave Turkic. An entirely aspirational area. I haven’t spent much time in this area, but gradually, as Russia collapses over the coming time, these areas will become more open and free for all of us to visit.

East of the homeland, the family, the Indo-European family, thins out along a gradient you can almost measure. None of it have I yet walked, except intellectually, and I tell the stories. At Sintashta, and out across the Andronovo horizon in the southern Urals, lie the chariot graves that mark the core Indo-European inheritance carried eastward, the founder sound, M-N-, going with the wheel. Further out, at Dashly-3, and the Arzhan kurgan in Tuva, and into the Tarim Basin of China, where the Tocharian people lived and left us an immense number of Buddhist texts written in their Indo-European language, a second, spatial cryptotype surfaces: the square inside a circle that runs from the kurgan to the Buddhist mandala, with the M-N- sage word muni, as in Shakyamuni, who is the Buddha according to the Tibetan tradition, not unlike múinteoir in Irish, meaning teacher. The sage word muni: the sage of the Shakya tribe, which lived in India, on the borders of India and Nepal, around 300 years before the Common Era. They had arrived there from Iran much later than the original Indo-Europeans had arrived in the rest of India, and they brought with them a revised form of the religion, which became Buddhism. In a nutshell, it differs from the Vedic in the sense that in Buddhism one’s subtle energy, which determines one’s karma according to one’s activities in this and all our embodiments’ lifetimes, is open. We are free to determine what our karma is, or becomes. Obviously we cannot have determined what has come before. Whereas in the Vedic, by the time this reform came, you had castes which were set in stone, and your karma was determined by your genetics at birth. The real reform in Buddhism was, and indeed is, that you can free yourself from genetic slavery, from the position that you were born into, according to what you do while you are alive in this life.

So Shakyamuni, the sage word, and Manu, the first man in India, riding east alongside it. In Turkmenistan, on the Caspian Sea, the whole Bronze Age of Central Asia is dated from a mound whose name is a sentence: Namazga, the place of prayer, namaz descending from the same reverence word as namaste. The N-M- mirror stamped on the region’s own measuring stick. We will get to what I mean by the N-M- mirror, but for the sake of today, just think M-N- on one end of an axis and N-M- on the other end of the axis. It is a mirror. It is a reversal.

Kucha, Tocharian, and Xuanzang

At the far end of the road, in the oasis of Kucha, the monks of the Thousand-Buddha caves copied their sutras in Tocharian, the easternmost Indo-European language ever written, whose word for the moon and the month is one word: meñe. The moon-as-measurer collapse, intact, 5,000 kilometres from Mykhailivka, where they used the term mēnōt. Xuanzang, the great Chinese pilgrim whose seventh-century Record of the Western Regions is the footsteps book of all of Asia, waited two months in Kucha for the passes to clear. He is the traveller I will follow through this whole section of the Finding Manuland Atlas.

And of course the idea that China is apart from the rest of the world is quite as enticing and intoxicating as the idea that somehow Russia is different from the rest of the world. But when we understand, for instance, that communism, the archetypal Indo-European emanation from Germany, with all of its fundamental Indo-European elements, which we will get to in later episodes, is of course from the West. That is the party that rules China and identifies itself as communist. Tibetan Buddhism provided the software, the cognitive software, for China over millennia, from Tibet and across the whole of what today they archetype as China. But of course, like Russia, it is actually a hodgepodge of lots of acquisitions and losses and different cultures, which are stamped now with “we are Chinese”.

But the other aspect and element, of course, is this Tocharian inheritance, in the place where the Uyghurs today live. Their genetic ancestors, as I understand it, arrived maybe around the sixth century as foreigners. But prior to them being in this area, of Inner Mongolia I think it is, or maybe it isn’t, in the Tarim Basin, were the Tocharian language speakers, Indo-European. And we have this great book, The Tarim Mummies, by the great Indo-Europeanist J.P. Mallory, which we will get to, in which the mummies, preserved in the particular environment there, are wearing tartans quite close to the tartans of Scotland and Celtic Ireland, as one line of evidence, as well as the linguistic and the textual evidence they left of their Buddhism, which is the archetypal Indo-European religion.

Osman, the Türk Contact Zone, and a Message of Unity

And on the Iranian steppe and the Türk contact zone lies the open question I have not yet gone to test on the ground: whether the M-N- and the R-T- sounds inside Türk words are inherited or contact-borne. A melting-pot problem. But the evidence which I will put forward, and which I have already gathered, suggests to me that the M-N- in Osman, who would be the main inheritor of the Turkic-language-speaking peoples’ occupation of Anatolia and transformation into Turkey, the modern state of Turkey, the Osman who emanates from Kazakhstan, and whose name traditional etymology traces to the Arabic. And when you look at the Arabic Uthman, it turns out there is no etymology in Arabic for Uthman, which is the perfect manifestation of what I maintain anyway, for other reasons, is a loan from Indo-European.

So the Turkic-language-speaking peoples’ ethnogenesis, the formation of their language and identity, happened about five or six hundred years into the Common Era. So this is 2,600 years after we have evidence, in the form of the Sintashta culture, of Indo-Europeans and Indo-European burials in what would become Kazakhstan. So we have the archaeological, linguistic and cultural evidence that those people who would become the Turkic language speakers, in the area of Central Asia today covered by Kazakhstan, and the Indo-European descendants of the Yamna from Ukraine, were in contact for millennia. And this M-N- sound, which transferred from the Indo-Europeans to call Mongolia Mongolia. And their ruling class, the Bogd class, takes its name from the Iranian word baga, meaning the allocator. Often if you meet a Romanian today, sometimes you meet a Bogdan. I have met many. One of my great Ukrainian friends is called Bogdana. So you have this baga, meaning allocator, which is the source of those names.

So the R-T- sound in Türk as well: the R-K, it is a hard K, but R meaning right. That also, I believe, emanates from the Indo-European, and they would not be the first people to be named by outsiders. The Welsh are also. The Armenians call themselves Hayk, but we non-Armenians call them Armenians, with the M-N- in it, and many Armenians are called M-N- names. So we do have this phenomenon, which we will encounter again and again, of outsiders naming peoples and those peoples taking that name onwards. Like the Scots take their name from the Irish migrants into the area now occupied by Scotland, and the original name of Ireland was Scotia, which incidentally is my middle name, Scott, meaning Ireland.

So we have this phenomenon of different cultures borrowing outsiders’ names for themselves, and having names for themselves which outsiders don’t use. And I believe that this is, as in all of the Finding Manuland project, a source of potential unification. Up until now, the existence of language families has often been a determinant of division and difference. You say words more funny than I do, and when I take over your land, I stamp it by getting rid of your names of towns and villages, making you feel alienated. But in fact, where it comes to the Turkic language speakers and the Indo-European language speakers, we are both great linguistic cultures with quite distinct histories and geographies, and different achievements and different religions and different ways of viewing. But we have rubbed up, in a positive sense, like a cat rubbing your leg. We have rubbed up against each other for the past 6,000 years, and our forebears have continually. And if I have one message for Finding Manuland, it is a message of unity.

The reason I moniker, and I archetype, the area between Ireland and India, including this area, Central Asia, as Manuland, is that until we have a name for something, name, nāman, until we have a name for something, then it is hard for us to capture all of its energy into one, to reify it into one thing, one phenomenon. But once we have a name for it, and the name is recognisable because it covers an area between Ireland and India, it covers an area where we traditionally speak Indo-European languages, but where we also speak Turkic languages, and those Turkic language speakers and us Indo-Europeans have lived together in harmony again and again and again over the millennia, then we can begin to develop the same kind of identity that Herder wanted to create among the ten Germanic tribes, which led 90 years later to a unified German state for the first time in world history.

Similar movements went on in Greece, using folklore and ancient Greek lore as a means of uniting a 19th-century culture of disparate areas ruled at that time by the Ottomans. Osman’s name became Ottoman in English, but the M-N- is still there 800 years later. And in Ireland we had the Irish literary revival in the late 19th century, the celebration of Celtic language culture. Then, as the Irish state was established, and became the Free State, and became a sovereign entity, even though it was extremely poor at the time, massive amounts of resources were dedicated to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, upon whose work I rely a lot in mine: the great scholars of Celtic culture in Ireland in the early years, and continuing until today, who took what is now the last and the only nation state which speaks a Celtic language, the remnant of a great culture which, 300 years before the Common Era, ruled and existed and dominated the territory between the Hercynian Forest in Czechia, all the way down to the south of Spain, through parts of Italy, Austria, Germany, all the way across to what would become, under the Romans, Lusitania, as they beat back the Celtic-language-speaking peoples. The whole of the islands of what I call the Irish Sea states: the island of Ireland, the Isle of Man, the island of Mona, which is Anglesey in English, and the island of Britain. These were all Celtic-language-speaking places. And out of that, 2,300 years later, we just have Ireland, and Wales really. Wales, the Welsh: Cymru, Cymraeg, the Cymry, that is the word the Welsh call themselves. Welsh, of course, in Germanic languages means foreigner. So when we talk about the Welsh, we are saying foreigner. That was the perspective of the English, a bit rich coming from them, because they are Germans occupying Celtic lands in England, which were once ruled by those speaking what would be left as Cymraeg, the Welsh language. But anyway, these phenomena recur everywhere, and go in different directions, and switch around, and are just wonderful artefacts of our history, and great little signposts we can carry on. But the main message of Finding Manuland, and of this Atlas, is unity. We’re all one people. We’re unified in our diversity.

Continued from:

First in series:

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 MN sound, which is imminent — one of the three cryptotypes we look at, the others being RT, Rit, that sound, and DN, the DN sound of the Danube, the Donets, the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester — 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 Urgency

So 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 MN 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 Be

So 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 — MN 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 MN Founder

The Hittite founder monarchs carry no MN — 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 MN founder-monarchs. But the Anatolian branch is dead — that’s why I talk about living Indo-European languages. The Hittite founder monarchs carry no MN. It’s a miss the Finding Manuland method keeps on the page: the one branch with no founder on the frame — the MN frame, the continental frame, the continental skeleton, imminent in so many words, including imminent, which Finding Manuland is exploring — is the one that split first.

Ankara: Tarmana in a Glass Case

I 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 — MN 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 MN 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 Karum

Then 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 imminent 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 an amazing museum; go to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. The karum merchant suburbs: some 23,000 cuneiform tablets, and among the traders’ names, the diagnostic -uman suffix that marks an Indo-European name, and proves the method — the Finding Manuland method — on the ground. I did not know, before I read Kanišite Hittite, the preeminent book by the preeminent linguist and specialist in Hittite linguistics, that this was how you could determine it. So that was a huge moment: to determine that the MN sound was imminent in the dead Anatolian branch. We will come back to that.

Hattusa and Mound W at Gordion

At Hattusa, the Hittite capital — the Indo-European Hittites, at their height around 1300 years before the Common Era. And 400 years before their empire rose, this trading colony — Assyrian and native Anatolian — was just a city a couple of hundred kilometres, which I’ve driven, from Hattusa. And little were they to know that the people who wrote those tablets, which I was then to see in the Ankara museum, were to found a great empire — their descendants. None of us know what is going to come next, and that’s part of the sense of urgency I have with Finding Manuland — and in all of our lives. If you have ever wanted to go to any of these places: go. And you can. Go. If you can’t go, I’ll bring you there in these podcasts.

I photographed the Royal Palace ruins in Hattusa, where 8,000 cuneiform texts, from about 400 years after those Kanišite Hittite texts where Tarmana featured, were dug out. And on a foggy January day, I walked to Mound W, the oldest burial mound in the whole of Anatolia, and the first built in the Yamna tradition — the steppe surfacing in Phrygia, via Bulgaria, via a totally other route. And Gordion — where Midas and Gordias were. So you see the sound: deus, dies, god. And when people say someone has died — dies — that literally means they’ve gone to the sky, the bright sky. That’s a word and a sound, a meaning and a sound, that’s been with us since the earliest Indo-Europeans in Ukraine. And we know this because, if you find the same word-meaning in every Indo-European language, and it’s not borrowing — so obviously computer is a relatively modern word, but deus, deus in Dyēus Pater, Dyēus Pater in Jupiter, Dyaus Pitar in India — these words were with us from the very earliest, so they come from this common source.

And so Gordias and Midas, the famously rich — I went to their burial mound, and I tell that story. And I saw Gordias written — written down. It looks like a child wrote it, but actually it was written down at this time, and it was found on a wooden slat inside — not in Mound W, in another mound.

Karatepe: Teššub, Tarhunzas, and the Danuna Trail

The eastern arc of Anatolia is where the DN river-thread runs down to the sea. At Karatepe in Cilicia, I photographed the storm god Teššub, at a site whose resonance rides not its modern Turkish name, but the ancient ones under it: Danuna, Adana — a river goddess’s name became a travelling people’s name. And I read about it first in a great Armenian Indo-Europeanist scholar’s work. And because I was interested in this DN sound, I decided to go there — and that is the Finding Manuland method in miniature. I’m hoping to inspire you to go on actual, concrete, material journeys. If you don’t know what you’re going to do for your next holiday, well, hopefully I can give you some inspiration — not only of places to go, but of trails to follow. And this trail is so rich, and so deep.

Çatalhöyük and Alaca Höyük: The Mother’s Trail

And at Çatalhöyük, which is the first farmers’ settlement, way pre-Indo-European, I followed the trail of the mother, who came into Europe from Anatolia with the first farmers — the symbols handed on towards Ukraine. The paper, which I’ll speak to you about and make into a podcast: Handed On, Not Lost. And when I found the mother goddesses had been moved to Ankara for safety, I followed them there, and photographed all hundred-odd of them — the seated woman of Çatalhöyük, with her hands on two felines, like the cat you might have on your lap as you listen to this. At Alaca Höyük, I photographed my favourite piece of sacred art, from around 1400 BCE.

Mount Ḫazzi and the Amanos

And on the Mediterranean coast, driving, I turned a corner, and there suddenly was the shadow of Mount Ḫazzi, the holiest mountain in Hittite religion, on the border with Syria — the MN audible in its range-name: the Amanos. I recorded a video there. I made the pilgrimage up it, and was stopped about five kilometres below the summit, at a soldiers’ checkpoint. The day before, I had been down in Antioch, subject of a massive earthquake — and so the museum was closed. So we will return there, because we need to go to that museum; there are things there, collected, which you cannot see anywhere else. And Antioch, which was the eastern capital of the Roman Empire.

At a mountain pass in the old Kingdom of Hatti, I looked down on the whole kingdom at once — the Hittite Empire, the mightiest empire in Indo-European history — and I photographed it, and fed an Anatolian sheepdog. And I watched as a couple in a car, running ahead of me, stopped every few miles to feed these massive Anatolian sheepdogs along this mountain range. I drove by the source of the Euphrates near Mercan, one of the rivers of Babylon — the MN in Mercan — and I reached Myra on the Lycian shore, where St Nicholas, of Santa Claus fame, hung out, a millennium after the first ruins visible there.

The Winged Moon God Men, and Lydia’s Triple MN

What waits in Anatolia could easily fill a season by itself, and I’ll spend the rest of my life going to and from there, and telling you about it. My own files bulge with Anatolia. The winged moon god Men, whom I saw in the Ankara museum, waits on the reliefs of Malatya, Sakçagözü, and Carchemish — where I visited the great mounds — a god with his wings on his head and, on another stone, a crescent on his hat. I’ve pasted that description entirely into my files. His name is not a cousin of the moon word, but the word itself, stood up and given a temple. Worship is attestation of another order: Anatolia takes the asterisk off. I’ve not yet stood where the moon was named god.

Lydia waits with a triple MN: its first king, Manes, whose grandson, Herodotus records the Lydians claiming, gave his name to Asia itself. Homer calls the Lydians the Maionians. Their kings sleep under the hundred mounds of Bin Tepe, by the Gygaean Lake — steppe-shaped tumuli in Aegean Turkey — and the greatest of them climbed and described by Herodotus himself.

Sipylus, Niobe, and Lake Bafa: Selene and Endymion

On Mount Sipylus, above Manisa — a city whose Bronze Age king was Manapa-Tarhunta — the rock figure of Niobe weeps when you stand at the right distance. We will go there, and I will tell you about that place; I will communicate what it means to be there, and why it matters. And Pausanias, who went up the mountain, describes the exact experiment: close up, a mere crag, and from further off, a woman in tears. I will repeat that experiment.

At Lake Bafa, ancient Latmos, the moon herself loved a sleeping mind: Selene and Endymion, whose fifty daughters have been read since antiquity as the fifty moons of the Olympiad — and the prehistoric rock paintings. We are discovering new, amazing things all the time. Some of the statues I saw in the Şanlıurfa museum, from Göbekli Tepe, had only been dug up last summer, and I was able to see them in January — and I cannot wait to see what they dig up this year, and I’ll go and see. And a nice family offered me tea in their house.

Nemrut Dağı and the Oracle Triangle of Mopsos

And on Nemrut Dağı, a king who claimed descent from Persia and Macedon at once — trying to sit on both chairs, but not knowing, not understanding at the time, that both chairs emanated from Ukraine — carved a sacred law, his nomos — NM, the mirror — across the backs of colossal thrones, with a crescent moon on the breast of the lion in his stone horoscope. And a triangle of oracle sites waits on the southern shore — Didyma, Claros, Mallos — tied to the seer Mopsos, after whom my cat is named. If you wanted to signify that you were from Greece, and also from Asia, from the Anatolian side, you would say you claimed descent from Mopsos.

And Mopsos’ name appears on that Rosetta Stone — where I saw the statue of Tarhunzas at Karatepe, which I went to because of the great Armenian Indo-Europeanist Armen Petrosyan saying that here is where the Danuna were — the DN which I was trying to follow, because of the DN from the Don, the Dnieper, the Donets, where I worked for three years; the Dnipro, which I lived by for four years; the Dniester, which I crossed many times; and the Danube, which I also crisscrossed, and saw all the way up towards its source. And we will go to all these places again.

And I wanted to find: could I be going to where the Danaans — who were the first Greeks, according to Homer — the sea people; the Danavas in India; could I find the Tuatha Dé Danann, who were the second wave of Indo-European mythological migrants onto the island of Ireland? Is there something in this DN — Daēna, Danu, Dana — Daēna, who in Zoroastrian religion marks the moment between life and death? Is there something in this DN? So I read about it in Armen Petrosyan, and I went to the place, and I’ll bring you on these journeys.

And Mopsos is mentioned, too, on that Rosetta Stone, written in Phoenician and written in Luwian hieroglyphics — though when they first saw them, they thought they were Hittite hieroglyphics; they weren’t deciphered yet. But even to this day, you can look — and I show you the photographs — you can look at that statue of Tarhunzas: the same Tar in Tarmana from, well, 1,200 years later. Tarhunzas is the storm god, as is Teššub. And Tarmana is that Anatolian in the first piece of writing in an Indo-European language, which I saw. And so I’ll bring you on all of these journeys.

And there I expect the question to grow new branches, because that is what Finding Manuland does. I started by a warehouse called Manuland in northern France — and look where we are now. Every place I’ve ever reached has handed me a new road out. And that is the iterating Finding Manuland method — the third dimension, the voyaging dimension. Those of us who, for however long, who knows, are able, and have the power, to journey, and to go to these places around the world: this gives us an organising focus for such journeys. And that’s the kind of trip that I will bring you on.

Van and Armenia: Menua at the Eastern Frontier

And Van, and Armenia — the eastern frontier. Menua, the great king of Urartu, cut into the rock at Van, which I visited and told you about before — but we’ll go back there; there’s so much more to be seen. I was just scoping it, just like I’m scoping the whole of Finding Manuland in this brief — I think it’s going to be four or five episode — survey, before we go into the micro. This is the macro. And so when I travel around Anatolia, I’m just trying to get the lie of the land.

And in the kingdom under Ararat — the mountain range where Noah’s Ark, in the Bible, rested — here the MN word and the NM name word meet their Irish cognates, at the family’s other end. Now take your map by the corners and stretch it east, past the last place your schooling furnished — because the far frontier of the Indo-European family is people too. Here the founder name turns up again, at the opposite end from Ireland, cut into rock. Menua was the great builder-monarch of Urartu, the Iron Age — so around 800 BCE — kingdom under Ararat, whose successor state, 2,000 years later, is Armenia. He is the eastern brother of Minos and Manu — Minos from Greece, and Manu from India — at the level of the cognate itself, a linguistic term. The second dimension of every Finding Manuland episode is about the language, because the monuments, the remnants, the memories of all of these places, and the people who lived there, are in the words we use today, and the meanings that travel with sounds like MN. Manu, Menua, Minyas, Minos: all lined up on one reconstructed word for man. But why does man mean man?

The state’s chancery wrote Hurro-Urartian, which is not an Indo-European language — and the aforementioned scholar Armen Petrosyan’s case, that the ruling line itself was Indo-European, I hold as strong. And the frame does not wait. The kingdom next door was named Mana by Urartu, Mannai by the Assyrians, and Minni by the prophet Jeremiah — on the record from 829 BCE, two decades before Menua’s reign began. What its people spoke is unknown. But remember: this is 3,171 years after the first Yamna, the first Indo-Europeans, began to forge the sounds and meanings which we still have today in almost every sentence we speak. And the MN stands in that highland before Menua, and independently of him — Van, the great saltwater lake, just west of Urmia, the other great saltwater lake, in Iran. And the Armenian tradition names its own founder on the same MN frame, the cryptotypic frame, in its own literature: Manavaz, of the line of Hayk, whose name the city Manazkert still carries.

Van Castle, the Hakkari Stelae, and Erebuni

I first saw Van Castle the night before, as lights on a cliff in a snowstorm. The next morning was an amazingly blue-sky day, and I filmed myself there, and you can see it — look on powerofmana.net for a previous podcast. And I climbed up through the fresh snow — mine the only footprints — looking for the stables and inscription of King Menua. His rock-cut canal still runs water: 51 kilometres of it, watering 5,000 hectares.

The museum in Van held reference after reference to him. And the museum’s own panel on the Hakkari stelae says the earliest examples of such stelae — naked warriors and hunters cut in standing stone — are found north of the Black Sea, in Ukraine and Crimea. We’ll look at that great book by J. P. Mallory and the great Ukrainian archaeologist Telegin on the anthropomorphic stelae. You can trace the migration paths by where these stelae are found. And so these stelae, which I saw in the great museum in Van, are from two millennia after the latter half of the fourth millennium, where most of them start appearing, in Ukraine. The steppe monument tradition stood in this highland long before Urartu — by the custodians’ own region reading, the custodians being the Turkic-language-speaking current occupants of Anatolia.

At Erebuni — the fortress Argishti, Menua’s successor, his son, raised above what is now Yerevan — Erebuni: that -buni, Van; it’s the same. The Ararat people didn’t call themselves Ararat; they called themselves the Biainili people. And that Biainili is now in Van — the great saltwater lake and city in eastern Turkey — and Erebuni is by Yerevan. So the -van in Yerevan corresponds to the -buni. These are the same sounds, preserved over millennia. So at Erebuni, the fortress Argishti raised above what is now Yerevan, I photographed the museum’s own panel naming Haldi, the supreme god.

Ani: What I Do as a Writer

I recorded my testimony of what it means to be a writer. Please feel free to look at that, and read it, because you’ll understand what it means to be a writer — what Finding Manuland is about, and all my other work at disinfolklore.net and decodingtrolls.net and powerofmana.net; you’ll understand what I am doing here, and my purpose, and the reason I am out there, finding Manuland. I recorded my testimony from a very remote and very beautiful place — the watchtower of the modern Armenian state visible just across a line I could not cross from there. But now the Armenians and the Turkish government have signed an agreement, perhaps, to rebuild the bridge connecting their two great countries.

This is the end of the family, where the MN moon word — the MN moon word in Armenia — and the NM name word meet their Irish cognates. Old Irish mí and Armenian amis, the word for month. Old Irish ainm and Armenian anun, the word for name — NM words, the reversal, the mirror of MN. The two most widely separated witnesses of the family, agreeing.

The Armenian Files: Lchashen to the Kelishin Stele

My Armenian files are full of the next journeys. Twice over I have flagged Lchashen, on Lake Sevan — because when the Soviet engineers lowered the lake in the 1950s, the receding water uncovered a Bronze Age necropolis whose waterlogged kurgans yielded whole wagons of solid oak, wheels and all: the steppe’s signature vehicle, preserved in wood as it never survives on the steppe itself. They stand now in the amazing — amazing — History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan, one of the best I’ve ever visited: the nearest thing on earth to seeing what Mykhailivka’s people actually rolled.

Karahunj waits in the south — the stones my notes call the Armenian Stonehenge. Metsamor waits in the Ararat Valley, with its Chalcolithic citadel. Khndzoresk, a cave town beyond Goris. A village called Kalavan, above Lake Sevan, where my note records the mayor says there are Stone Age ruins. And two stones with Menua’s own name on them wait at the edges: the Kelishin stele, a bilingual he raised with his father on a 3,000-metre Zagros pass, where Rawlinson in 1838 tried to take a paper squeeze at twenty below zero, and the paper froze on the stone. And in Georgia — a non-Indo-European-language-speaking people — the gold disc of Trialeti, dug up in the 1930s and lately read as a lunar calendar: full moons and new moons alternating around a centre. The Caucasus above is a conduit of the whole story — the road by which Mesopotamian metallurgy and ideas reached the steppe world, at Maikop.

Mardin, the Kura-Araxes, and Ararat the Exonym

Travelling through, I saw the lights of Mardin from a distance, in northern Mesopotamia, south of Van, and turned its name over towards Marduk, the great deity of Babylonia. And I passed through the Kura-Araxes — a great archaeological culture, of just around the time the steppe began to return to this land, from which one of its constituent elements had travelled to Ukraine, and then came back as the Kura-Araxes: the great culture that we can see in the same archaeological artifacts between the Kura and Araxes rivers — the Kura river of Georgia, and the Araxes of Armenia. Country thick with Assyrian and Hittite inscriptions.

Above it all stands the mountain I’ve not yet approached from close quarters. I slept for a couple of nights near it, but it was so foggy and snowy, in the middle of winter, I couldn’t see it — so we will return there. The name is the Hebrew Bible’s own for Urartu: an exonym — outsiders naming a people by the sound they seemed to make. Just like Wales: ‘foreigners,’ a foreign word, in the Indo-European and the Germanic — the first English named them as foreigners, Wales; the Welsh call themselves y Cymry. Exonyms are very common across Manuland, and they’re great clues to very interesting information. Ararat is an exonym — outsiders naming a people by the sound they seemed to make — and it belongs to the RT pattern, one of the three cryptotypes: MN, and NM, its reversal; RT, and TR, its reversal; and DN, and ND, its reversal — the ND of Indra and Alexander. The same shape as Turk, named from the outside, or the Hittite tarwanis hardening into the Greek tyrannos. One verse of Jeremiah summons the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz — the rule sound and the founder sound side by side, written down by a prophet with no stake in the Indo-European family. It’s not a moon word, and it stays off the moon axis. The sacred mountain waits.

Urfa, Edessa, and Göbekli Tepe

Urfa, Edessa, Antioch — and Göbekli Tepe: the easternmost stone-circle arc, and the oldest one of all. Foragers who carved a crescent more than 10,000 years ago, and a Roman inscription to the king of Edessa, son of Manu. And the people today, obsessed with the idea — that is the cultural meaning of Göbekli. But we’re interested in Göbekli in Finding Manuland because we look at the stones, and we look at what archaeologists can tell us about the stones. This is the arc where the stone circles are oldest — older than Stonehenge by 6,000 years, older than the Dnipro cromlech, which started this story, from 4000 BCE. Older than the words themselves.

I recorded on site at Göbekli Tepe — so go back to powerofmana.net if you’re interested — just as I was about to enter the first stone circle of them all, and I said so, standing there. If you’ve ever stood on the western shores of the Atlantic and looked at the great megalithic tombs, in southwest Wales or Ireland: they began in Göbekli Tepe. The people from there brought farming, over thousands of years, as far west as Ireland. And this is the story of migrants long before the Indo-Europeans came.

And our story had begun in a stone circle uncovered by the Dnipro in May 2021 — and here was its mirror, at the far end of the road: the crescent, the crescent of the moon. I saw it referenced, carved on a stone bench underneath the painted boar of Special Building D — the painted boar is in the Urfa museum; the bench is not there, but I wrote to one of the archaeologists, and he sent me very clear photographs of the moon, which was referenced in the museum as being on this stone bench. And the Şanlıurfa museum’s own label calls it a half-moon, and dates it more than 10,000 years back: the earliest hard sign of the moon-thread whose other end is the cromlech by the Dnipro. The migration that carried the first farmers from this country towards Trypillia and Ukraine is in the genes, and the pottery, and the reading of the symbols beside it — crescents at both ends — as peer-reviewed, assembled link by link, and published in the last twelve months. This is what I mean on Finding Manuland. I am reporting. We didn’t have the archaeogenetic technology; and since then, the archaeogenetic revolution has unfurled at a dizzying pace. And I’ll bring you through that as we journey to all these places. It adds an extra layer to the languages we use, and the archaeology, the history, the writing, the religions — the patterns which repeat, that sometimes manifest from a common source, sometimes are borrowing, and sometimes are coincidence.

I visited the museum in Urfa, ancient Edessa, and it holds Göbekli’s finds. And the day before, in that same city — an amazing city; if you ever have the chance to go to Urfa, Şanlıurfa in the modern Turkish, glorious Urfa, you must go there; Abraham, the prophet Abraham, either came from there or Ur; it’s an extraordinary place, and the museum there is unbelievable — the day before, in that same city, I saw a Roman-era inscription on the city walls, dedicating columns to the king of Edessa, son of Manu. Everywhere you go, you find MN, the founder name, surfacing on a column — MN in column — at the eastern edge of the arc.

Karahan Tepe, Sumatar, and Harran

An hour east from Göbekli is Karahan Tepe. I think I did a podcast from there — maybe I didn’t publish it, because it was a bit disappointing: I drove all the way there, through the Tektek mountains, but it was closed. A very nice security guard came out and said, sorry, it’s closed. It’s where the pillars grow faces, and the excavators now speak of a settlement, not just a shrine. And nearby, two moon addresses I’ve kept for the journey still to come. Sumatar, also in the Tektek hills — an oasis ringed with standing stones and altars to the moon god Sin — which I visited; and I think I did a podcast on it. We will visit that again. And Harran itself — which, I was so tired at the end of the day, I just drove through it. I could see the mighty city walls and the old city, but I just didn’t have the energy to go through it. But then I went back to my hotel in Urfa, and I downloaded heaps of journal articles. So we will go back there — we’ll go back to these places, among the oldest moon-cult centres in the Near East, where Indo-European gods were once sworn under the moon. Sin is a Semitic god, and a neighbour, rather than a witness, to the Indo-European journey. However, the moon city itself we will return to.

And some journeys I leave on the map. I’m human, after all. And this is the third element of Finding Manuland: the journeys — and I’ll do my best to overcome my mere humanness, and my physical inability, sometimes, to visit these places, because I’m just so tired from these amazing journeys. I’ll take you on that: through the language, through the journeys, and through the exchange of our Mana.

The Iranian-Mesopotamian Crossroads

And this whole area is the Iranian-Mesopotamian crossroads. Here the rule sound — Rit, in right — meets its lie-mirror; an MN horde is named by the scribes outside the family; and the sea god’s realm reaches behind them, beyond, towards Sumer — almost entirely still to be walked, in Iraq. This crossroads I hold almost wholly as anticipation, reached so far only through the Brussels tablet, and the museums west of it.

Behistun: The War of Truth Against the Lie

Under a cliff at Behistun in Iran, Darius carved the war of truth against the Lie. Arta — truth — still in the name Arthur, and in right, human rights: the rule sound, Reich. And its reversal — the same reversal that runs down to what we now call drama, and deception: the same in Druj, Drauga. The same rock carries the mind-word twice. Haxāmaniš — MN — the ancestor Darius the Great, who founded the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled Canaan and Judea for 300 years before Alexander, another Indo-European, arrived there, derives his dynasty from: ‘having the mind of a friend,’ Haxāmaniš literally means. And Ardumaniš — upright-minded; Ard, as in the Ard names we still have in Ireland; upright-minded, MN — stands among the six helpers, with the land written Armina on the same face, three times.

I have not yet stood beneath that cliff. And when I do, I will go in the footsteps of the man who hung from it: Henry Rawlinson, who scaled the rock in the late 1830s to copy the inscription — and his own memoir of the decipherment I will carry with me, as I bring you on that journey. His road to Behistun began, in fact, on another rock — and its importance is: it’s written down entirely; it’s in rock, 600 BCE; we have a memorial of the language, and the MN sound is all over it. At Ganjnameh, in the Alvand gorge above Hamadan — the ancient Ecbatana — where, in April 1835, a young soldier copied the twin trilingual panels of Darius and Xerxes, and teased out his first royal names. Each panel opens on the god whose own name carries the mind word, the MN word — or may not be mind; we will come to that — Ahuramazda: mazdā, the setting-in-place of mind. The MN root of thinking, cut into the mountainside, in the god’s own name, at the spot where a dead empire’s writing first came back to life.

Hasanlu: The Golden Bowl

And south of that great saltwater lake, Urmia, the burnt citadel of Hasanlu waits, in the heartland of the very kingdom Jeremiah calls Minni — MN — a town destroyed around 800 BCE, like towns destroyed today in Kherson, in all likelihood by the army of Menua’s own dynasty: he destroyed a city with the MN frame in its name. Its last hours sealed — and in 1958, an excavator’s brush found the golden bowl of Hasanlu beneath a fallen soldier who had been carrying it: a looter who got his just deserts.

Closing

So I’ll leave it up there for today. I’m Decoding Trolls. You’ve been listening to Finding Manuland. You can subscribe to my work at powerofmana.net, disinfolklore.net, and decodingtrolls.net. I write daily on X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. And my masterwork is disinfolklore.eu. I’m bringing you on this atlas, which is just a very brief survey of what we’re going to go into, in the micro, over the coming years, on the Finding Manuland podcast. And I hope you’ll tune in for the fourth episode — this was the third episode — the fourth episode, very soon.

Continued:

Continued from:

First in series:

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 MN 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 Name

So, 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 Culture

The 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 Brussels

The 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, MN. 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 Surprise

The 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 Axis

And deeper into France waits a field of MN 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 Python

The 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 mythological texts, and a collection of them, which got into the hands of Philip of Alsace, who then gave it to Chrétien de Troyes, via Belgic migrants in southwest Wales, in today’s Pembrokeshire. And from there into European literature and art, from Chrétien de Troyes all the way up to Monty Python — MN in Monty Python. But we won’t dwell too much on certain MNs; others we will just take notice of.

Tacitus Country, Lake Nemi, and Dumézil

And in Germany — MN — the roads bend through the Tacitus country, which I want to visit knowingly, and with intention, mens rea: the Saxon lands whose three nations he derives from the sons of Mannus; and Saxony-Anhalt, the princely mounds around the Nebra find-spot. I want to go back there and explore properly.

And in Italy, at Ariccia in the Alban Hills, Rome kept a figure the great comparativist Georges Dumézil — who is a very important influence and character in these Finding Manuland tales — could not resist setting beside Manu: Manius Egerius, founder of the grove cult of Diana — DN — at Lake Nemi — NM — ancestor of the proverbial multitude of the Manii, with the manes, the ancestral dead, gathered around the same MN sound. The grove of the Rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, waits on that lake.

The Danube Road: The First Road West out of Ukraine

The Danube road: the first road west out of Ukraine, down the great DN river — Don, Donets, Dnieper, Dniester, Danube — through the copper and gold of Old Europe. Before we reach Greece, adjust your mental map once more, because the road that matters runs along a river our schooling never made us look at. It is the DN river sound at its grandest. No one can resolve whether the name emanates from the north or the south; you may guess by now where I believe the name spread from. And it was the first road west — the corridor by which the homeland first reached out of Ukraine towards everything I’ve described so far.

And I’ve stood many times on the shores of the Danube, before I conceived of this project. When I worked in Kosovo, I visited Belgrade, and Novi Sad, and Niš, where Constantine the Great was born, and so many other places in different countries along the Danube. And I’ve stood and sat along the shore of the Danube — where the Russians are bombing every night now — looking across to Romania. But I did this, I emphasise, when I didn’t know any of this. I did not know about Manuland. I did not know our language family emanates from that place, and spread up the Danube.

The copper-and-gold road waits to be driven end to end: down through the Ai-Bunar mines, past the tell at Karanovo, to Varna on the Black Sea shore, where around 4300 BCE the richest funerals in the world were being held — six kilograms of gold in a single grave. Old Europe at its peak, not imagining that what was about to come was the Indo-Europeanisation of a continent — which at the time, we know from archaeological evidence, was basically a unified place, from the megalithic monuments of Ireland to the megalithic monuments of Ukraine, to Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which was built 6,000 years before then, and which I’ve also visited, and which we’ll also talk about; you can look back at my archive to see my visit to Göbekli. So this was Old Europe, the culture before the Indo-Europeanisation. 4300 BCE: they were planting six kilograms of gold in a single grave, and they could not imagine what was going to come afterwards. And yes, I could focus on Old Europe — and we will talk about Old Europe — but my focus is Manuland, and the Indo-Europeanisation of the space between Ireland and India: the 6,000 years that it has taken to get to the point where I am speaking to you in English, a Germanic language.

The Meeting Written in Mounds: Wagon Wheels and the First Carts

And that is the world the steppe, the Yamna from Zaporizhzhia, met and were a part of. And the meeting is written in mounds. Seventeen and more Yamna cemeteries stand in Bulgaria alone. And at Plachidol, a grave held four wooden wagon wheels placed at its corners. The vehicle — the vehicle, and that veh-, that sound, which has been deep in Indo-European language ever since. The first carts — one of the earliest carts in human culture — was hidden away in the Dnipro city museum. I passed by it before I knew any of this, and thought: gosh, that looks old — not realising for a moment that it is a monument, that it was made by the hands of the first cartwrights and wheelwrights, by the people who would forge a language, a culture, a religion, a whole way of seeing. Finding Manuland has identified, and tells you, the story of my journey to understand it — and the continuing journey.

And so each country on that road already has a page in my copious files of millions of words. In Hungary, east of the Tisza, the largest Yamna population outside the steppe raised its kurgans — 3,000 of them by one count — men buried in leather caps with silver temple-rings. And the Bell Beaker bridge at Csepel, by Budapest, is one published account of how the family’s dialects crossed into Austria and Bavaria and became, in time, proto-Celtic. In Slovakia, the old Lengyel world. We will go to these places. We will see if we can feel the energy, and we will tell the story of how these places relate to our lives, and our days, and our language, and our poetry.

The Iron Gates: Lepenski Vir and Trajan’s Plaque

Strabo records that the river was the Danuvius from its sources down to the cataracts, and Ister from the cataracts to the sea — the gorge where the river word runs out. On its bank sits Lepenski Vir, the whirlpool shrine-village of the seventh millennium BCE; and above the water, Trajan’s rock-cut plaque, raised on pylons when the dam came, still faces the traffic of the river.

So let’s think: seventh millennium BCE. Most of us look at these dates and these cultures and we think, ah, ancient Rome is to come. Instead, the Finding Manuland perspective goes 3,300 years before this. So this is late. The seventh millennium BCE is far from where we’re going to begin — and the perspective I’m acquiring, the mental model which I am myself forging in my mind, and have been over the past three years as I’ve been finding Manuland, is what I’m going to communicate into your minds.

The first scientific survey of it all was Count Marsigli’s six folio volumes of 1726 — a book I want to travel with, and bring you on my travels with.

Tărtăria, Gurbănești, and the Kokino Thrones

In Romania, at Tărtăria, clay tablets carry signs of an Old European script that has never been read — we cannot read it. And at Gurbănești, a grave held carbonised hemp seeds, the earliest evidence of cannabis burning, carried in, the scholarship suggests, by the Yamna. The Gumelnița Lovers, a clasped pair of clay figurines from the Lower Danube, wait in their museum for us to visit — to understand the Old Europe which the Indo-Europeans would replace.

North Macedonia — where I travelled a lot while I lived in Kosovo, past Suvodol near Bitola, dozens of times, without knowing any of this, without knowing I was in Manuland, without knowing that my past is connected with these places by my genes, by my DNA, but also by culture, and by the words, and by the art. Flat stone sceptres carved as horse heads have been read as symbols of power — of Mana, imbued with the sacred Mana of the horse. The word Mana; the mane of a horse. The word Mana arriving in the archaeology before I ever reached for it. And on the peak sanctuary of Kokino, which I passed without knowing, cut stone thrones face an eastern horizon whose markers are claimed to track the standstills of the moon. I will sit in one of those thrones; I will film it; I will show you, and test the claim with my own eyes — which is the way to hold a moon hypothesis.

And Kosovo again waits, under a one-word note in my files: crows. When I go, I will see those crows again, that I once saw as night fell, sitting in Film City, looking above the great city of Pristina, as the crows — thousands of crows — came in to the NATO base and settled down for the night, making their noise, giving their names to these places. And I knew none of this then. So none of that road have I driven knowingly, with all this in mind. And the road runs down the Danube, out of Ukraine, and into the whole of the West. And one day you will follow me on that journey, the way the first travellers did.

The Greek and Aegean Shore: The Amazing Daughter Culture

The Greek and Aegean shore — which, Greece, I’ve visited a hundred times without knowing any of this. It’s the amazing daughter culture that Empire and the Grand Tour turned into the founder: a parallel branch, not the root. This is axiomatic in Finding Manuland. It’s a parallel branch, not the root — still entirely to be visited with Finding Manuland in mind. I’ve not yet knowingly stood anywhere on that shore, though it is the shore we’ve been trained to treat as the beginning of everything. Greece is one of the most amazing daughter cultures of the family, but it’s not its mother. It became the founder in our schoolbooks because it wrote early, and because Empire and the Grand Tour chose it — not because it stands closer to the source than any other branch. And I’m quite consciously wanting to upset and replace your mental model of how our culture, the ancient world, came from Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and somehow we relate to it. I want to upset those mental models, using the latest archaeogenetic and linguistic evidence, and bring you to the places, so that you can feel how we are all daughter cultures of ancient Ukraine.

What waits there is a palace at Knossos, belonging to Minos, the founder-king, who carries the same sound as Manannán at the far western edge of the family, on an island Greek speakers reached late. There is the Iliad’s opening word, mēnis, the wrath, which answers to the Vedic Manyu — M-A-N-Y-U. And there is the Mani Peninsula in the south, which I first saw on a map when I first conceived of the idea of visiting Manuland — a stub of land that keeps the sound in its own name, and whose deep Maniot men, the geneticists have found, carry a snapshot of pre-medieval southern Greece in their blood still today.

Manuland is unashamedly a travel book. This is what it is. If you’re lucky enough to be thinking, where am I next going to go on holiday — and then, when you go there, how do I avoid wasting three weeks in this amazing place on a beach; what will I do — Finding Manuland provides an itinerary, wherever you are.

Trophonius, Orchomenos, and the Cave on Mount Ida

And Pausanias, who at Lebadeia did the thing every travel writer since has flinched from: he consulted the oracle of Trophonius himself — drank first from the spring of Lethe, forgetting, then from the spring of Mnemosyne — MN — memory: the one faculty licensed to cross the death-door and come back with knowledge. Odysseus, who crossed into the underworld at the Kerch Strait, where the Cimmerians — the Crimeans — lived. I want to drink at those two springs, in his order.

At Orchomenos — MN — Pausanias ranked the great domed treasury of King Minyas with the pyramids of Egypt, and scolded the Greeks for never mentioning it. Schliemann followed his pages there in 1880, as he had followed them to Mycenae — and the first Greeks are the Mycenaeans, MN in Mycenae. And the grey pottery he dug there, and named Minyan ware, became for most of a century the calling card by which scholars tracked the first Greek speakers arriving: a founder on the MN, a dome to rival the pyramids, and a whole people’s arrival named after him.

On Crete, above the Knossos road, the cave on Mount Ida waits, where tradition sent Minos every ninth year to receive the laws from Zeus. Zeus: Dyēus, Dyēus Pater, the sky god, deity. In India, Dyaus Pitar; in Rome, Jupiter; in Greece, Zeus Pater — Sky Father. It’s the same word we still today have in deus, deity, and dei. Every time you say dei, you’re invoking a deity. When you say Monday — Moon-day — you’re invoking the moon god. When you say Tuesday, as I wrote in that piece you can go back to on powerofmana.net, you’re invoking Tiw, Tiwaz — which was just a development of Dyēus in the Germanic tongue, but emanating from the same common source: not from the Greek, but from the ancient Ukrainian. So Tuesday is two gods in one word — Tiw’s day, but the same word as deus. It’s like saying God, God. The MN king refreshing the RT rule at its source. Pythagoras went down into that cave wrapped in black wool, and stayed thrice nine days.

And Euboea sits there — a drowned city with a name that could have been coined for this atlas: Manika, one of the first urban places of the Aegean Bronze Age, half of it now under the sea. We will go there in Finding Manuland. When the road reaches this shore, I will read all of it as a parallel witness — one more branch downstream from the Dnipro, but not as its root. And that is the essential core idea: recentring — recentring our idea of where we come from, on our culture and our language, according to the latest science. And we have a lot of work to do, because for hundreds of years none of this was known.

The Ukrainian Heartland: The Ground the Whole Atlas Rests On

The Ukrainian heartland, the homeland. This is the ground the whole atlas rests on. The homeland is the territory of Ukraine: Yamna by the Dnipro, around 3600 BCE. It’s territorial, not ethnic — just like Ukraine’s identity today is civic, not ethnic. It doesn’t matter what language you speak: if you were born in Ukraine, you’re Ukrainian. Now put your finger on the lower Dnipro River, the mighty river that divides Ukraine, because everything else in this atlas is measured from there. Open an atlas. Look on Apple Maps. Look on Google Maps. Find the Dnipro. The homeland is not a people but a place: the territory of ancient Ukraine, where the Yamna were living by the Dnipro around 3600 BCE, at the settlement of Mykhailivka on the lower river.

I have passed Mykhailivka, and I did not know this was the origin of everything. And as soon as the Ruschists withdraw, I will return to Mykhailivka. Currently, the Russians are occupying the other side of the river, and sending drones to kill the villagers in Mykhailivka — most of everyone not knowing the importance of this place. This is the ground upstream of every living branch, and it’s where the anchor of the whole project sits. We all emanate from this place. A map on my own shelf counts 150,000 kurgans — these are the burial mounds, Yamna burial mounds, in Ukraine. That is the density of the memory in this ground.

Novooleksandrivka: The Mound Guardians and the 64 Stones

In May 2021, while I was posted as a diplomat to Dnipro, property developers in Novooleksandrivka, a well-off suburb of Dnipro — the city of Dnipro, named for the river, because we name cities for rivers, and the Isle of Man for gods and deities, and we exchange all of these monikers between different places; the pattern repeats everywhere — property developers tore the top off an ancient burial mound to clear ground for a luxury house. The mound was a kurgan, the grave of some Yamna chief. So this was six months before I conceived of Finding Manuland. I’d never heard of the Yamna in May 2021. I couldn’t imagine for a second that it was even known where Indo-European languages emanated from — I hadn’t even imagined for a second it could be known.

So, if you are a new people and a new culture, how do you manifest this? You bury the monuments of the people you replace. This is a pattern we will find across Manuland. And it stands whenever one country today conquers another: they change the names of places, and they eradicate what was there before.

In May 2021 I first heard of this place through a civil society group called the Mound Guardians, dedicated to preserving the Yamna heritage in Ukraine — a civil society group in Dnipro who were protesting at its removal, along with the local community who had lived there for millennia, though most of them didn’t know what lay beneath. So I went out there to see what was happening. And I went to my bosses and I said: look, there’s a story in the New York Times about the protests, community protests, against the removal of this ancient mound. The leader of the Mound Guardians is telling the New York Times that this is cultural genocide. And now there are protests. And my job as a diplomat there was to collect early warning signals — so I convinced my bosses that I should follow this, that this is part of my job. But even at the time, I was interested in this, because I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know what these burial mounds were. And also, I had worked in property law, so I had come across this pattern before, where property developers will do anything they can to overcome any rules which stop them from destroying things.

So the first time I crossed the Sura River to visit the cromlech — Sura, S-U-R-A, a very Indian-sounding name to me the first time I heard it — something about it really affected me. And on every visit afterwards — and I’ve written about this in Finding Manuland, and you’ll find my early posts about this on powerofmana.net — on every visit afterwards, perhaps because it was the only thing I could actually do, I photographed each of its 64 boulders, one by one. And over the visits, they began to resolve themselves into human-like forms: broad-shouldered stone gods. On one of them, one Sunday afternoon, I found a pair of horse teeth, left champing onto a tube of fossilised wood — an offering someone had placed on a deity. I thought about taking it and giving it to the museum, but I didn’t want to be blamed for desecrating heritage. Someone had obviously found it in the mud and the stones after the mound had been destroyed, and they placed it on top of one of the stones, for me to see and photograph — and you can see those photographs. But I left it there, and I contacted my contact in the governor’s office, and I said: look, there’s this here; could someone come out and catalogue it? And no one did, in time.

After the scorching summer and the first winter rains, I watched the stone gods begin to crumble. Touching those stones felt like caressing the Delphic omphalos, the navel-stone of ancient Greece. The burials in that ground span an extraordinary arc, from 3500 BCE, the first Yamna, to 1932 — and the last of them was the head of the local collective farm, under the Soviet occupation, in 1932.

When those stones began to fall down, I had to think — I was just a very minor diplomat — how can I use the little power I have to try and preserve this monument? And so I convinced my bosses to come with me and go and see the governor, to talk about the monument. What I was trying to do was signify to them how important this everyday place was. They had to deal with a hundred different community disputes and problems with property owners — and what was special about this place, and who cares if the stones accidentally-on-purpose fall down, and then the property developer can build their house anyway? And merely by manifesting the interest of the international community, and bringing my boss along to that meeting, and asking them questions — leading questions, because by that time I had learned about the Yamna, and I had learned something about the history, nothing compared to what I know today — I was able to signal that the international community is interested in this monument, and in how the authorities manage to overcome all the bureaucratic hurdles there are to intervening in such situations. And the very next day, teams of bulldozers and diggers went out and half-reburied the monument, to preserve it.

The Bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska: Where the Intuition Began

The other posting in Ukraine came earlier. From 2015 to 2018, I served as a peacekeeping monitor on the wooden and iron bridge over the Donets River at Stanytsia Luhanska — the only pedestrian crossing at the time between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. And I write a lot about the origin story there, on disinfolklore.net, and disinfolklore.eu, and Disinfolklore on X. I crossed that bridge over the Donets River daily, to meet the men I came to think of as the bridge trolls — the Russian occupiers, exacting a toll by trolling the Ukrainians who had to pass between the lands they unlawfully occupied and the rest of Ukraine. And that is where the whole intuition began. A river crossing that judges those who may pass across it is the oldest DN image — the D-N continental skeleton the Indo-European family keeps: the Chinvat Bridge of the Zoroastrians; the Norse Gjallarbrú; the bridge of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, in the 19th-century folktale first written down and translated into English. I did not know then that I was standing on a version of it.

The Rest of the Homeland: Fragments of a Working Life

The rest of the Indo-European homeland I know in fragments of a working life. Knowing the Russians would invade, I did everything I could, with the small power I had, to go and visit, and document, what the elected officials in the areas that are now under a brutal, genocidal occupation were doing. What were they doing to overcome the legacy of the Soviet occupation, where everything was arranged around collective farms — even the provision of water in villages, the culture house? And after the invasion of 2014, the Ukrainian government, with the help of the now-defunct USAID, and thankfully the non-defunct European Union, did everything they could to decentralise power to these villages, and invest large amounts of money — in waterworks, and in community-building projects that the communities themselves decided on. What they did in each of these villages was to create euro-standard schools, as they saw them — hundreds of which Russia has destroyed, and stolen all the computers from — street lighting, and the things which we in the rest of Western Europe, who did not suffer from Soviet occupation, take for granted.

So I travelled and ranged all over this area of southern Zaporizhzhia, without knowing for a second that this was where the Yamna were. This understanding only came to me gradually, towards the end, towards the time before the full-scale invasion. I visited Melitopol, which is under a horrific occupation, often. In southern Zaporizhzhia, I stood at Stone Grave — Kamyana Mohyla — a sandstone sanctuary on the Molochna, the Milk River, whose ritual use runs back perhaps 10,000 years.

I lived in Severodonetsk, where my house was pillaged — and I’ve seen the photos of what it looks like when your home is repeatedly looted. My neighbour there was torn to pieces by a Russian artillery strike, and when his friend went to help him, he was then torn to pieces. These are living places for me, that I lived in for years, that I did not know the importance of — not just in the context of contemporary geopolitics, but in the story of our family, and our language, and our culture. It was in my room there that I read the email telling me that my friend Harry had died — and you can listen to ‘Harry’s Mana and Me,’ about the energy-exchange aspect of how, in those we leave behind, our Mana remains — which is a reason to communicate positive Mana.

From there, when I lived in Severodonetsk, for those years, I would board the overnight train from Rubizhne — another city now turned to biological dust by the Russians; thousands murdered. And when I was living there, standing at that railway station — the photographs which appear on my blog, of me and my cat travelling on that train — I never imagined for a second Russia would turn and vaporise these thriving places. I passed Kreminna — which today marks the limit of the Russians’ occupation; Kreminna, with MN in it, now occupied — and I would wake up in Kyiv.

Usatove near Odesa: The Small Forging Zone

I travelled through the small forging zone, through Odesa — the Usatove country, where Italic, Celtic and Germanic were shaped in contact with the Yamna. Though sadly, once again, at the time I stood on the Danube right there, and at Chornomorsk, just west of Odesa, where the Usatove community met the Yamna, I did not know. The community out of which everything you know about ancient Rome, everything you know about ancient Ireland, everything you know about Germanic culture emanates — from this geographical location. And many of the people living there don’t even know this themselves. The inventor of Claude Code, for instance — Boris Cherny — he is from this place. He bears it in his name. I don’t know whether he knows it. Anthropic’s Boris Cherny. So these are the kinds of journeys we will go on, again, when the war is over, and I can be free to go there — and I want to go to all these places still. And I passed through that area around Odesa before I knew what it was.

And for six years, going village to village across the smallest settlements of the east, for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, I asked every village leader I would meet the same question, once I knew to ask it: do you have any kurgans in your community? And I filed the answers to Vienna. Vienna didn’t care. But what I wanted him, or her, to know was that someone took an interest in the heritage in their community. And this heritage in their community is of importance to everyone who lives in Manuland — because the people who built those mounds built the words, and associated the sounds and meanings — the MN, for instance — that we still use in every sentence today. And yes, you can touch them, through the words you use today, and the sounds and the meanings you use today. But if you want to touch the tactile places, then we must all go there — and I will bring us all there, because not all of us can go there.

The Homeland’s Waiting List: Mykhailivka to Bilsk

And the homeland — the Indo-European homeland’s waiting list is the longest in the atlas, because this is the country where every thread begins and ends. Mykhailivka itself, the settlement the whole dating rests on: I have still to stand in it. I could have gone to it a hundred times, if I’d known. The island of Khortytsia, which I have stood on, at Zaporizhzhia — I’ve been there many times. In its shadow, the Serednii Stih culture got its name — the island flooded by the Soviets, then de-flooded when the Russians blew the dam, the Nova Kakhovka dam. Dereivka, which I went to find in January 2021, and I drove all around it and I couldn’t find it — where the earliest chapters of the horse story were dug; its finds waiting in Kyiv.

The Trypillia — the Old European Trypillia megacities of Cherkasy county: Talianky, Maidanetske, Dobrovody — towns of thousands of houses that no one dug up. A military topographer named Shyshkin read their ring-plans off aerial film in the 1960s, in fields where the surface shows nothing at all. These cities were larger than the cities at that time in Mesopotamia, which we will also visit. You stand in a wheat field and you see nothing. And that is the point — the point of Finding Manuland.

Verteba Cave, in Ternopil oblast — kilometres of gypsum passages that the Trypillians used, and their dead still occupy — dug by Gotfryd Ossowski in the 1890s, and worked today by Alexey Nikitin himself, the great geneticist of the February 2025 paper in Nature. Nearby, at Monastyrok, above the Seret, a rock canopy on three rough pillars shelters a cave temple locals call the Ukrainian Stonehenge — a great slab unlike any local rock. At Bezvodivka, in Chernihiv country, several dozen mounds are laid out across the plain, and the man who surveys them reads them as an instrument: sight-lines fixing solstices and equinoxes, and, he contends, the long cycles that let you predict eclipses. We will test it with our own eyes.

At Bilsk, in Poltava country, a rampart 35 kilometres around encloses the site the field identifies with Gelonus, the great timber city Herodotus describes in Book Four — the oldest travel account in our Indo-European tradition. I mean to walk it with Herodotus in hand. And at Stari Kodaky, where I have walked many times, on the high bank at the southern edge of Dnipro city, the earth ramparts survive of the fortress of the French engineer Guillaume de Beauplan, built above the first rapid in the Dnipro River in 1635. He went on to map the river, and print his descriptions of Ukraine, which carried our rivers into the atlases of Europe. The rapids he counted sleep under reservoir water now; their names survive, ending in Nenasytets — the Insatiable.

Two Journeys Named but Not Made

The homeland still holds two journeys I’ve named but not made. There is the river line itself, as a single traverse: Don, Donets, Dnipro, Dniester, Danube — the five great waters whose Dānu — *deh₂nu*, as the Proto-Indo-European, what I call ancient Ukrainian — names sign the land, and carry the fire-and-water custodian: Nechtan in Ireland, and Apam Napat in India, and Neptunus — all one figure. And there’s the country behind the North Wind, the Sea of Azov, where Apollo on swans would fly each year, and the sources of the Ister — the ground the Greeks half-remembered: a memory of this homeland kept at the far end of a rumour, from where the olive branches for the first Olympic crown came. I have not yet travelled properly those rivers, one by one — though every one of them runs through the argument, and through Finding Manuland.

Closing: A Debt to Pay

And — and this is perhaps important — I could have been to all these places, if I’d known. If I’d taken the chance to go when I could. Even though I anticipated the full-scale invasion, I did not anticipate its brutality, and its disgustingness, and how horrible it has become. And the lesson for us all here is that it’s never too late to make up for lost time. And that’s what Finding Manuland is about.

I have a debt to pay — a debt to pay to the Ukrainians who welcomed me into their homes; the hundreds of elected Ukrainian leaders I met; the historians, the archaeogeneticists, the writers that I met and that I’ve read, and who for decades, for centuries, tried to make their identity known to the rest of the world. But it was drowned by the Russians — by the Bolshoi Ballet, and Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, and all that nonsense — which are great writers, and great art, and great culture. But none of it is worth a single Ukrainian child today.

But the real debt all of us have to Ukraine and to the Ukrainians is that, if you can understand the words I’m speaking in Finding Manuland, then every thought you have, and word you form, is made up of elements — MN and other elements — which emanate from this land. And for that reason alone, I hope you will find Finding Manuland an interesting way of spending time.

I have still a couple more episodes of the Atlas to go through, so please tune in for the next episode. I’m Decoding Trolls. I write at powerofmana.net, disinfolklore.net, and decodingtrolls.net. You can find my podcast on every major podcast platform under those titles: Disinfolklore, Finding Manuland, or Decoding Trolls. I write daily on X, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Feel free to engage, subscribe, pass on to your friends. The important thing is we get the word out. Thank you for finding Manuland with me.

Episode 3:

Continued from:

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 Circle

In 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 Guardians

Now 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 Covid restrictions, I began pulling threads through the online holdings of Oxford’s round stone Radcliffe Camera library - and the threads led, within a month, to a people I had somehow never heard of in six years of driving past their mounds: the Yamna. And behind the Yamna, older, on the same stretch of river, to the people this post is really about. The Mound Guardians were my first teachers in Finding Manuland. Everything since has been an attempt to be worthy of that meeting.

The Memory Code

I did not come to Stonehenge empty-handed. In my bag is Lynne Kelly’s The Memory Code (2016), together with the Stonehenge chapter of her Cambridge monograph, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies (2015). It is an excellent, patient, sceptical piece of work - anchored in the actual archaeology at a site where, as Kelly notes with some restraint, most new theories float entirely free of it.

Kelly’s contention is this. The British and Irish Neolithic was a world of stone circles - more than a thousand of them (her count comes from Aubrey Burl, and who am I to argue with the man who counted them?). Their builders were settled farmers who had given up travelling the landscape but had no writing. A community like that must keep its survival knowledge somewhere: the calendar, the plants and their poisons, the animals, the genealogies, the law. In every documented oral culture on earth, such knowledge lives in structured memory practice - and the simplest machine ever devised for structured memory is a sequence of distinct locations. The Greeks would later call it the Method of Loci. A circle of individually distinctive stones is a Method of Loci built in the landscape: each stone a fixed place in a fixed order, each holding its portion of the knowledge, the walking itself the act of retrieval. Kelly walked Avebury and the Cornish circles and found precisely what the method requires - every stone identifiably itself, easy to bind to a specific portion of a tradition. She notes, citing her Warlpiri advisor Nungarrayi, that bodily movement is itself a powerful mnemonic when chanting the knowledge bound to place.

Bodily movement. Touch. Children connecting with the monuments tactilely. Do you hear it? The Chief Mound Guardian of Ukraine, on a Zoom call from the Dnipro steppe, and a memory researcher drawing on Warlpiri elders from the other side of the planet, arrived independently at the same finding: the knowledge lives in the meeting of body and monument, and a nation that loses the touching loses the knowing. When two witnesses who have never met agree that precisely, a monitor writes it down.

Kelly rehabilitates even the ditch I am looking at now. Not a quarry, not a defence: a flat-bottomed, segmented performance space, cut into white chalk that threw torchlight back at the dancers, where a song performed down in a segment reached listeners on the bank as sound rising strangely out of the earth itself. Ceremonies moved around the circle through the year, segment by segment. Knowledge, performed on schedule, in sequence, for a hundred generations - some thirty million work hours of it by the time the sarsens stood.

Here is my confession, and it is why her argument went through me like a current. When I photographed each of the sixty-four stones by the Sura, visit after visit, learning them the way you learn faces, attaching to each what I knew and what I felt - I was practising, blindly, the exact discipline these monuments were built to serve. I did not have a word for it then. Reading Kelly at Stonehenge, I do, and the word will matter later, so note its skeleton as it goes past: mnemonic.

Kelly ends her Stonehenge chapter with a sentence of nine words that I will come back to at the end, because it is the hinge on which everything below turns.

Who Built Stonehenge and Tara - and Who Finished Them

For the two western circles, the ancient DNA has settled the question of builders with a completeness that would have astonished every previous generation of antiquarians.

Stonehenge, from the first circle in the Aubrey holes around 3000 BCE - which may already have held the Welsh bluestones, making this one of the earliest stone circles known - through the raising of the sarsens around 2500 BCE, was built by Britain’s Neolithic farmers: a population descended from the early farmers of Anatolia, with no steppe ancestry at all. Old Europeans, in the broad sense of pre-Indo-European Europe. That population was then almost completely replaced - around ninety per cent turnover, beginning about 2450 BCE - by Beaker people carrying ancestry from the Ukrainian-steppe world (Brace et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2019, doi 10.1038/s41559-019-0871-9).

But mark what the newcomers did, because here is Ukraine’s presence at Stonehenge, in dressed stone. They did not abandon the old farmers’ circle. While monument after monument across Britain fell out of use in the early second millennium, Stonehenge was the exception: the steppe-descended inheritors kept it, rearranged the bluestones into the settings whose remains you see today, and dug the final rings of Y and Z holes centuries after the turnover. The founders of Stonehenge were Old Europeans; its finishers, its keepers, its last congregation, were the descendants of ancient Ukrainians. When I say I feel Ukraine’s presence here, I am not being mystical. The later courses of this monument were set by hands that carried the Dnipro in their blood - and even Ukrainians, by and large, do not yet know that their ancestors’ children completed Stonehenge. Telling them is part of my mission.

Tara tells the same layered story. The Mound of the Hostages, the founding monument on the hill of the kings, is a passage tomb of around 3200 BCE, raised by the same Irish Neolithic farmer population whose dynasty was uncovered in the great chamber at Newgrange (Cassidy et al., Nature, 2020, doi 10.1038/s41586-020-2378-6). Tara’s fame as a royal seat is later, and belongs to the steppe-descended Irish. Founded by one people; crowned by another.

So: two of my three circles were securely raised by Old Europeans and inherited by ancient Ukrainians’ descendants. The third circle is the one I actually touched. For three years, in my writing, I attributed it to “one of the major ingredient cultures in the Yamna” and left it there. That was a placeholder, and placeholders are a form of forgetting. Time to name the builders.

Serednii Stih

The culture is called Sredny Stog in the Russian-era literature and Serednii Stih in Ukrainian. I use the Ukrainian, for the same reason I write Dnipro and not Dnepr. The island that gave the culture its name sits in the river at Zaporizhzhia - the same Zaporizhzhia in the news for its shelled nuclear plant - a couple of hours downstream of the cromlech. A small settlement explored there before the Second World War by A. V. Dobrovolsky christened the whole horizon.

The foundational text is Dmytro Telegin’s Dereivka monograph (Dereivka: A Settlement and Cemetery of Copper Age Horse Keepers on the Middle Dnieper, BAR International Series 287, 1986), and I confess a purely tribal delight in its production history: it was edited into English at Queen’s University Belfast by J. P. Mallory - yes, that Mallory, who would go on to write In Search of the Indo-Europeans - with the radiocarbon dates calibrated on an Ulster Museum computer and the final copy typed by A. Sheridan. The deep past of the Dnipro, prepared for the world by hands in the north of Ireland. (My first career was in post-conflict Belfast politics; the Monde does enjoy its little arrangements.)

Telegin’s pages give the builders their shape. Serednii Stih was, in his phrase, an “expressly horsebreeding culture”, occupying the Lower and Middle Dnipro and the southern Left Bank up to the Siverskyi Donets basin, with sites out into the Right-Bank steppe and the Lower Don - settlements, cemeteries and single burials. Its most important and prolific monument is Dereivka itself: the settlement and cemetery whose horse remains made it, for a generation of scholars, the world’s first candidate site for the domesticated horse. My horse teeth, resting on the shoulder of a stone god by the Sura, suddenly have a culture to belong to! David Anthony extends the culture’s reach: at Konstantinovka on the lower Don, a late Serednii Stih settlement, around ninety per cent of the ceramics are local Dnipro-Donets cord-impressed wares and the remaining tenth are early Maikop imports from the Caucasus (The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, 2007) - a Dnipro community trading, at the end of its run, with the mountain world that will matter shortly.

And then the crown, from a passage I circled very early in my research into what the Dnipro cromlech was - it comes from the Indo-Europeanist literature answering Colin Renfrew’s Archaeology and Language, which had tried to talk the reconstructed Indo-European king down into a mere village headman. The later Serednii Stih graves with prestige goods, the passage records, are often marked by a surrounding circle of stones - “cromlechs” in the regional archaeological literature - and are best read as the graves of elite persons in a ranked society, their occupants “entirely appropriate candidates for the title *rēg”.

Read that again, standing where I am standing. The Dnipro cromlech is not an orphan or an anomaly. It is a type. A ring of stones around a high-status burial is what the later Serednii Stih did for its greatest dead. The circle at Novooleksandrivka is a Serednii Stih king’s grave-ring - and the “local monarch” of the 2021 news coverage was, in the literature’s own reconstructed vocabulary, a candidate for *rēg.

The builders are named. Now for the fight about what to call their world.

The Gimbutas Problem

I said at the top that all three circles were raised by Old Europeans, and for the Dnipro circle that claim walks straight into the formidable person of Marija Gimbutas, who coined the term and owns its definition.

Her 1979 paper, “The three waves of the Kurgan people into Old Europe, 4500-2500 B.C.” (Archives suisses d’anthropologie générale, 43/2), sets it out. Old Europe is pre-Indo-European Europe of the Neolithic through Copper Age, roughly 6500-3500 BCE: egalitarian, very probably matrilinear, virtually weaponless until its final stage, given to art. Against it come the Kurgan people, in waves around 4400-4200, 3400-3200 and 3000-2800 BCE, and their diagnostic signature is their graves - round stone cairns in the first wave, and in the later waves round earthen tumuli “surrounded by stone walls or rings”.

And on the very same pages, Gimbutas files the early Kurgan culture of the lower Dnipro basin - her Kurgan I and II - under its regional name: Srednij Stog II. Seredni Stig II.

So there is no smuggling the label past her. By Gimbutas’s own equations, the culture I have just credited with building my circle is the first wave against Old Europe, and a ring of stones around a burial is the invader’s calling card, not the victim’s art. If I want to say Old Europeans raised the Dnipro cromlech, I cannot do it by assertion. I have to argue it through her - openly, and on the evidence.

Rassamakin’s Steppe

Three things let me make that argument, and the first two come out of Telegin’s own monograph.

First, phases. Early Serednii Stih is not late Serednii Stih. Telegin divides the culture into periods - the Voloshske horizon early, the Dereivka horizon later - and the cromlech-crowned prestige graves, the *rēg graves, belong explicitly to the later phase, the one already leaning toward the Yamna synthesis. A culture that runs the better part of a millennium is allowed a beginning that differs from its end. Judging the whole of Serednii Stih by its final, ranked, kurgan-adjacent phase is like judging the whole of Rome by the third century.

Second, the ceramics run both ways. Cord ornament - the decoration that would one day name the Corded Ware horizon across half of Europe - appears at Dereivka and its related settlements earlier than anywhere else on the continent, and spreads outward, first of all to Trypillia and Lower Mikhailovka sites. But the traffic is not one-way: channelling, and pinched-fingernail decoration, flow into Dereivka’s kitchens from the Gumelnița-Trypillia world - Old Europe proper - where those manners were long established. These are Telegin’s own observations. They describe neighbours exchanging, intermarrying tastes across a river system - not a wave breaking on a shore.

Third, and decisively for me: the post-Soviet Ukrainian re-reading of the whole steppe Eneolithic. Yuri Rassamakin (in Levine, Rassamakin, Kislenko and Tatarintseva, Late Prehistoric Exploitation of the Eurasian Steppe, McDonald Institute, 1999) dismantled “Sredni Stog” as a single culture altogether and re-oriented the Dnipro Eneolithic westwards - toward the Carpatho-Balkan metallurgical province, toward the Trypillian exchange network, toward Old Europe’s copper and prestige system - against the Gimbutas-Anthony reading of it as proto-Kurgan pressure building in the east. Nadiia Kotova’s work runs in the same direction. On the Rassamakin reading, the horse-keepers of the Dnipro rapids were not the storm gathering against Old Europe’s house. They were the household’s easternmost porch: cousins on the steppe, keeping horses where the farmers kept cattle, taking Balkan copper and Trypillian table-manners upriver, giving cord and horses back.

So here is the open redefinition, in my own words and on my own responsibility. What Gimbutas filed as the first Kurgans, Rassamakin refiled as Old Europe’s steppe partners - and I side with Rassamakin. I contend that the people who levered those sixty-four stone gods into place by the Sura belonged to Old Europe’s world: its horse-keeping eastern cousins, standing in the doorway between the farmers’ Europe and the steppe. Gimbutas, I think, read their end back onto their beginning - because of what their descendants became, she made their ancestors the invaders. That is a pattern I keep testing rather than a verdict; where the ancient DNA leads, I follow. And the ancient DNA, as it happens, has just led somewhere remarkable.

The Mound That Kept the Circle

What their descendants became is the Yamna - the people I call ancient Ukrainians, whose language, what linguists call Proto-Indo-European, is the source of the words in almost every sentence you and I speak.

In February 2025, ninety-four authors published the largest ancient-DNA study yet attempted on the question (Lazaridis, Patterson, Anthony and colleagues, “The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans”, Nature 639, 2025, doi 10.1038/s41586-024-08531-5). From 428 Eneolithic individuals they resolved the Yamna’s formation into two great streams: one running up along a Caucasus-Lower Volga cline, saturated with Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry, and one drawn from the Dnipro side - the Serednii Stih world. The expansion that would reach from Hungary to Kazakhstan, and whose daughters would reach from Ireland to India, began, the paper concludes, with a small community north of the Black Sea. Roughly half of the inheritance from each stream is a fair lay rendering - the exact fraction moves with the model chosen, which is why I anchor the claim to the paper and not to a slogan.

Sit with what that means at Novooleksandrivka. Around five hundred years after the Serednii Stih raised their king’s grave-ring, the Yamna heaped tonnes of earth over it and buried their own dead on top, in the crouched, ochre-strewn manner that marks their mounds from the Boyne to the Swat Valley. Annihilated it, I have written before, and the word keeps its claim: a monument you cannot see is a monument on its way to being forgotten. But the genetics forces a second word into the sentence. The people who buried the circle were, in the most literal sense, burying their own grandmothers’ world - the Dnipro half of their inheritance. A people who mound over their ancestors’ ring may be erasing it. They may equally be enthroning themselves upon it: sealing the old *rēg into the foundation and announcing, in tonnes of earth, that the title has passed.

And now I have to give you a third word, and it was the Mound Guardians who taught it to me, though I did not understand the lesson at the time.

On 22 October 2021, four months after that first Zoom, the Mission spoke again with one of the Guardians for an update. The picture he laid out was bleak in the particular way that paperwork is bleak: the developer’s permits, in the Guardians’ view, had never been properly issued; after the international press coverage, developer, archaeologist, hromada and the State heritage office on Yavornytskyi in central Dnipro all appeared to be regularising documents after the fact; the State archaeologist’s report on the circle was due in the spring of 2022. Meanwhile the circle itself - which had spent five thousand years in the stable dark under thousands of tonnes of soil - was being destroyed by the open air: the summer’s extremes of heat, then the rains, with the snows coming. The mud holding the stelae was cracking. The gods were beginning to crumble.

And so the Mound Guardians reached a conclusion that stopped my pen when I wrote it into the record, and stops it again now. The entire site, they told us, should be reburied - as the only way to protect the cultural rights of the people of Ukraine.

Rebury it. Put the mound back. The people who love the circle most, who chained their movement to its protection, who argue for it from the Constitution of Ukraine, independently rediscovered - in one season of watching the stones crumble - the exact act the Yamna performed five thousand years ago. The mound was not only annihilation. It was not only claiming. It was a preservation technology. The circle exists at all, for us to fight over, because someone buried it; every year it has spent uncovered has cost it more than its first five millennia combined. Erasure, enthronement, safekeeping: at Novooleksandrivka all three readings are true at once, and the stratigraphy holds them the way the mound held the circle.

The State archaeologist’s report was due in the spring of 2022. In the spring of 2022 the missiles were falling on Dnipro. The deadline, like so much else, was swallowed by the full-scale invasion - and the question of the circle’s future waits, with so many other Ukrainian questions, for the peace.

Rí, Raja, Rex

Now the gift hidden in that circled passage, the one I very nearly left on the table.

*Rēg is the reconstructed ancient Ukrainian word behind Latin rex, Sanskrit rājan, Gaulish rix - and Old Irish rí. The kings of Tara were rí Temro, kings of Tara, and at the head of Tara’s line our tradition sets Érimón, first high king of all Ireland, beside Manannán, Ireland’s pre-eminent pre-Christian deity. Which means the man sealed under the Dnipro circle and the kings remembered on the hill in Meath wear, across five thousand years and four thousand kilometres, the same title. The circle-grave by the Sura and the hill of kings above the Boyne valley are joined by one reconstructed word - and it survived the whole journey, from the steppe porch of Old Europe to the wet green edge of it, carried in the mouths of the very people who buried the first circle.

Tara keeps the older layer too, in its own way. Walter Evans-Wentz, tramping Ireland for The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), was still collecting testimony around Tara and the Boyne of the good people living in the mounds - the síd, whose women, the ban shees, wail yet in our folklore. The defeated older people of Ireland, our tales say, were bequeathed the earth-mounds to live in. Strip the enchantment to its foundational beam and it is a memory of exactly the sequence the ancient DNA now confirms: an older people, and a newer people who took the surface and left the ancestors the interior of the monuments. Ireland kept as folklore what the Dnipro kept as stratigraphy.

And say the names slowly, because the sound is about to become the subject. Manannán. Emain Macha. Mane...

M-N-

The ancient Ukrainians’ sound for the moon is spelt by modern linguists *méh1nōt, and it grew out of their verb *meh1-, to measure (the table of its reflexes across eleven daughter branches is in Mallory and Adams - the same Mallory! - The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European, Oxford University Press, 2006). The moon was the measuring instrument; the month is what it measures; the mind is the measurer. And once you get your eye in, the family is everywhere: moon, Monday, measure, meaning, memory, human, money, mana, monument, mnemonic...

Stop on the last two. Lynne Kelly demonstrates that the stone circles of the Neolithic were memory technology - and the English words for what she says they did, memory, mnemonic, monument, all carry the M-N- skeleton of the moon-measure family, forged by the people whose Mane blanket the land between Ireland and India. The circles were machines for measuring the year and keeping the mind of a community. The words we use to say so still carry the maker’s mark.

This might just be a coincidence. So I tested it. Across NorthEuraLex, a lexical database of 43,251 word-forms covering 1,016 meanings, the words for this family of meanings carry the two consonants m and n keeping company in the word, either order, at 20.8 per cent, against 3.5 per cent elsewhere in the lexicon - an odds ratio of eight, at p = 5.60 × 10⁻⁶⁶, the strongest of the 182 sound-frames I tested. In lay terms: replay a draw at those odds once a second since the Big Bang, and you would still be waiting for it to come up. A pattern, then - not a proof of design, and I keep testing my hypotheses rather than resting on them. But it is some pattern.

Meaning Maintenance

Kelly’s nine words, the ones I promised to come back to, close her Stonehenge chapter: “In the end, the monuments simply lost their meaning.”

That sentence is the true mechanism of cultural death, and notice that it is not a sentence about bulldozers. The forgetting comes first; the bulldozer merely arrives afterwards to collect. The Novooleksandrivka kurgan could be torn apart in 2021 because, for almost everyone, it had already become background - a lump in a suburb. Stonehenge itself was, for centuries, a quarry and a curiosity. Tara had a motorway driven through its valley within living memory, by my own countrymen. The monuments do not fall when the stones fall. They fall when the last person who can say what a stone holds stops walking the circle.

Which is why the Chief Mound Guardian’s argument is, I contend, the most advanced heritage thinking in Europe, and it comes not from a ministry but from a volunteer on the steppe: memory as a constitutional duty; touch as the medium of national knowledge; a guardian assigned to every mound. Article 11, applied with hands. And the movement he described - a movement, pointedly, not an organisation - is growing. The Guardians’ network now shares new publications tracing the deep continuities of the Dnipro region for a Ukrainian public that was never taught them; word reached me this very week, at Stonehenge, of the newest. Even Ukrainians, by and large, do not yet know that their ancestors incubated the languages of half of humanity, or that the children of the Dnipro’s people set the last stones of the monument behind me. The re-archetyping of Ukraine - from borderland to wellspring - has begun, and it has begun where it should: at home, at the mounds, with the children’s hands on the stones.

Meaning-stripping, remember, is not only entropy. It can be policy. Russia’s centuries-long archetyping of Ukraine as not a real country - no roots, no culture, “Little Russians” - is the deliberate, industrial version of Kelly’s sentence: strip a people’s monuments and language of meaning, and the erasure that follows can be presented to the world as nobody’s loss. I watched the retail end of that policy for eight years in eastern Ukraine. The answer to it is not only air defence. It is memory work, done with the circle’s own tools - sequence, place, touch, repetition, performance.

Sometimes, when I visited the cromlech by the Sura, there were fresh flowers in the centre of the circle. Someone was still walking it. That is the whole of my politics, really, laid on a stone.

If you have the chance to stand at any of the three - here at Stonehenge, at Tara among the síd, or one day, when peace allows, at the older circle of Novooleksandrivka, reburied and safe under its restored Mane, as its Guardians wish - you must. Walk the ring. Learn one stone. Give it something to keep, and tell somebody what it holds, because a monument is only the durable half of a conversation, and the perishable half is us.

If Mana is what remains of us in others when we leave them, then the Mane are Mana made earth, and the circles are Mana made stone. Mana’s permanent. Monuments only lose their meaning when the meaning stops being spoken. So speak it.

Slava Ukraini.

Stephen Douglas is a writer who publishes on Disinfolklore.eu, Disinfolklore.net, PowerofMana.net, and as Decoding Trolls on Substack and X.

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 Journeying

Every 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 MN 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 Mons in eastern France in November 2021 — which I’ve written about in the first Finding Manuland non-podcast episode.

The Sound the Language Element Follows: MN

The thing the language element follows across half the world is a sound. I began with the sound MN, in Mons in eastern 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 MN 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 Magic

So where does the moon come in? The moon — another MN 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 — MN in month. That makes it a natural picture of the mind — MN 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 MN 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 MN 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, just south of 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 imminence 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, recorded in Finding Manuland on Power of Mana — to actually try and find out: what is this pattern, of what does it consist, and how might it have emerged? Does it mean anything? And if it does mean anything, what does it mean? So there is a mystery. But I’m not talking about magic here, in the sense of: oh gosh, the secret code was embedded in our minds by these ancient Ukrainian Yamna, 4000 BCE, and they sat around a fire and decided, we are going to forge this sound-and-meaning bundle and place it in the language, and then we’re going to go forth and travel to the lands between Ireland and India and plant it, and then 6,000 years later someone will do a podcast about it, which will go on for a very long time, with many episodes, and go through the Mana exchange, the language, and the journey. Now, I’m not saying that happened at all. I’m saying we can empirically see this sound, even in the words I’m using to talk to you. We can see it in the founders; we can see it in the places, in our towns, in our villages, in the names of our friends. And I’m just looking into it.

The Three Cryptotypes: MN, RT, and DN

So, a word for the organising unit. A cryptotype is a sound-frame that carries one shared meaning across roots that are otherwise unrelated. It’s a hidden category the language keeps without ever naming it. The atlas is arranged by three cryptotypes.

The MN founder-and-mind sound is the spine. Beside it runs the RT — the right, rule, and order sound: Rta in Sanskrit, meaning truth; Arta in Old Persian; Rex in Latin; Reich in German. Its dark mirror is TR and DR, the sound of the staged lie — Druj — written into the stone at Behistun in Iran by Darius the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid — again MN, Achaemenid — Empire, around 600 BCE. Arta meaning truth; Rita in Sanskrit; Arta meaning truth in Old Persian. The truth of the sovereign, from whom healthy communities arise. And then Druj, the sound of the staged lie — it’s what usurpers speak.

And DN is the river sound — that’s the third cryptotype we’ll be talking about. DN is the river sound: the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, the Dniester, the Danube. The great waters of ancient Ukraine — the waters that literally sign the homeland from where all living Indo-European languages emanate. And the Don was, according to Isidore of Seville, who was basically the Wikipedia of the ancient world, writing around 600–700 CE — the Tanais, the Don — the limit of Europa’s protection, and after that, Asia began. And until relatively recently, all the lands west of the Don — people spoke Ukrainian. But unfortunately, the Russians don’t like people who speak Ukrainian, so they took them away.

In this atlas, this Finding Manuland atlas, which we’ll be talking about over the next long, long, long time, places gather under the sound their names hold, not under the map square they occupy. West to east — Irish home ground to the furthest eastern reach — is simply the order of walking, and it’s the order the family itself travelled.

The Method in One Line

The papers, and the podcast this programme introduces, are all illustrations of a method — and the method, in one line: recognise the MN frame, trace it back to ancient Ukraine, and vast tracts of the question settle. The recentring of Ukraine in how we think about our origins, on the basis of parity of esteem — territorial, not ethnic: a ground shared by descent, never owned by it; the undermining of the Russian justification for annihilating it; and the repopulating of our own history. This is my method, and it’s what I uniquely offer. No one else is working back from the archaeogenetics to ancient Ukraine, through 6,000 years, across the entirety of Manuland, Ireland to India, and ranging over it like a tiger, like a lion. And I’m going to bring you on this journey over the whole of Manuland.

The three elements land together at every site. So: Mana exchange, language, and journeying. There’s an exchange of Mana, the numinous charge or energy a place carries. There is a linguistic connection — the music discovery, the sound heard inside a place-name as you move through it. And there is the journey’s own signature, a tactile connection: a hand on a stone, footprints in fresh snow, a name read off a museum tablet. Those three together are what turn a vertebra into bone.

And behind this introduction, more than a hundred papers stand already written, which I’ll speak to you — one for almost every place and pattern you’re about to meet. And that house, that house is Manuland: the area between Ireland and India. Some of you, like me, may have had only very sketchy ideas of places and where they were located, and the cultures, and how everything slotted together. The journey I’ve been on is myself finding Manuland, and now, having learned a little bit about it, I’m going to bring you on that journey. And as we travel, I too will be exchanging my Mana with you, with the places, and the ideas, and the concepts, and the ancient humans who forged these ideas, and the great writers, the great researchers, the great archaeogeneticists, the great linguists, the great historians — and the great normal people that we’ll meet along the way, the people like you and me, without whom this sound, this MN sound, would not exist. It’s only because you and I, today, in almost every sentence we speak, use one of these three cryptotypes, that these three cryptotypes actually survive.

So you may have an idea of the space between Ireland and India, and by the end of Finding Manuland — which I hope will be quite infinite — you will populate that space in your mind, as I have, with actual places and names and times and events. This particular podcast will be one of maybe three or four where I’m just doing the whole sketch of the atlas, and then, in ever-decreasing circles of focus, we will move through the area between Ireland and India: Manuland.

So this is the frame as it stands today. Places I’ve already walked, and those I talk about in the past tense plainly, because the visit is the evidence. Others I have visited, but I need to go back there — I only found out after I left, or passed, what their true significance was. And the road runs on to them. So take out your mental map of the world — the one your schooling gave you, or your holidays in Turkey or Greece, if you were lucky enough, or Rome: Rome at the centre and everything else on the edges. We’re going to redraw it together, country by country, west to east — from the Spiti Valley in the Himalayas in northern India, where I’ve travelled several times, which divides Tibet, ancient Tibet, from the limits the Indo-Europeans reached. There’s literally this valley, and on one side is Tibet, and on the other side is where the furthest Indo-Europeans reached. And I found it because I was looking for the MN — and there were many, many, many towns and villages in that area, and the people living in that valley: sometimes you can see in them the Indo-Europeans; at other times they look Tibetan, and they act Tibetan. And so we go from there all the way west, to Emain Macha in County Armagh, near where I was born.

Irish Home Ground: Emain Macha, the Twins of Macha

And that is the family’s westernmost shore, the Irish home ground. A religion died there; its founder’s name lived on in a story; and a childhood of Sunday mounds — burial mounds, ceremonial mounds, MN in mound and ceremonial — first tuned the ear. Home is near Emain Macha — as the English might call it, Navan Fort, but its true name is Emain Macha. E-M-A-I-N: Emain, meaning twin. Emain Macha, the royal mound outside Armagh city, which still is the seat of the Christian priesthood — and a Protestant primate of all Ireland.

The ear was trained there before any of this was a project. As a child, I was taken on Sunday afternoon excursions to see Newgrange, Knowth, and Emain Macha — three of the oldest and most famous mounds in Europe — without any idea that these outings were a schooling, and a premonition of how the rest of my life would turn out.

The mound itself is an MN word — mound, from the old word mund: the hand, and the protection a hand gives, cognate with the Latin manus. A mound is a hand cupped over the dead — a memory technology, a way of keeping the dead present in the land. It is the literal location of the afterworld in Yamna lore and religion, from which we all emanate. And if you speak an Indo-European language — if you understand what I’m saying to you in English — you are an inheritor, if not genetically then culturally, of those Yamna. But most of us, it turns out, since the 2015 archaeogenetics revolution, which was launched with a paper in Nature — which we’ll come back to — then genetically we all are; most of us are also emanations of that community, to a greater or lesser extent.

And Emain holds a further thing. Its name means the twins of Macha, on the Indo-European family’s old word for twin. So the mound keeps the dead twin beside the founder — the shadow that shows up wherever the first man, the first human, is named. NM: named. Mana and name. We’ll come back to how those two concepts relate: MN, Mana, and name, NM, its reversal. I went back to Emain Macha during this quest, quietly, and I’ve not written much about it since. And it’s near a shore I keep returning to. Newgrange and Knowth, with their lunar-marked kerbstones, sit in the same childhood breath — the moon already cut into stone by people measuring their months. And the people who built Newgrange and Knowth were prior to the Indo-Europeans.

East Belfast: The Least Numinous Address in the Atlas

East Belfast is home too. I lived there, on a so-called loyalist housing estate, while I was unemployed after a spell as General Secretary of Northern Ireland’s governing anti-sectarian political party. And I applied from there for diplomatic postings — which at the time was a very unlikely prospect. But then, as sometimes happens in life — and it happened for me one day in September 2014, the 11th or 12th actually, and I’ll never forget that moment — I went from not really knowing what was going to happen next in my life to being offered a job. I had a job with the Irish diplomatic service, in an international organisation called the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. And within two weeks I was on an airplane to the Balkans — to Kosovo, to Kosova, as they call it now, where this journey began. Although at the time I didn’t know any of this; I couldn’t even imagine any of this. It was a job — a job and an amazing interest. And I’m still on that journey that began from that loyalist housing estate: the least numinous address in the atlas, and one of the most important. And that’s the way life works, and indeed how Manuland works.

Tech Duinn and the DN Death-Lords: Donn, Yama, Odin

The road runs on from there to places I’ve not yet stood in, and places which I have been, but not knowingly. I’ve never crossed to Tech Duinn, the House of Donn, the sea rock off Kerry, where the Irish dead were said to gather in the pre-Christian era — the western door of the otherworld. Donn is a D-N name: the death-lord, the Lord of Death, who mirrors the MN founders the way Yama mirrors Manu in India. Yama is Manu’s twin, the first monarch to die. Manu, the first sacrificer; and Yama, the first self-sacrificer, who, like Donn, leads those who come after him into the otherworld, into the mound. And the way Ymir stands against the first man in Denmark and in Germanic culture — Denmark, DN — the death sound rides north to Odin, after whom our Wednesday is named: Woden’s Day, the day of Woden, the god Woden. Odin has a DN in it — or Woden, as the English would call him. Lord of the Slain: another DN name.

And the Irish wrote down where Donn’s people came from eight centuries before the ancient DNA confirmed that the origin of all living Indo-European languages was in Mykhailivka, in southern Zaporizhzhia, on the right bank of the Dnipro River, where I lived for four years. Eight centuries before the DNA did — DN in DNA, but that doesn’t really mean much. The medieval Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of Invasions, makes Donn the grandson of the monarch of Scythia, on the Pontic Steppe: ancient Ukraine. So the death-lord of this far western sea rock is remembered, in writing, as a grandson of the very homeland Alexey Nikitin’s 2025 ancient-DNA paper — seminal, MN in seminal, paper in Nature, humanity’s preeminent scientific journal — would later fix on the Dnipro. DN: the Dnipro.

I have not yet taken the boat towards Tech Duinn off the coast of Kerry, nor have I stood on the coracle-launch shores of the Immram Brain, the voyage-tale that is Ireland’s first poem — and it’s the native shape of this whole search. Bran rows west, and the sea beneath him looks like a plain, a flowering meadow — Bran rowing — and the sovereign of that sea is Manannán.

The Bandon, Ogham, and the Goddess Written as Dea

The estuary of the river — and one of my earliest intimations that there was something going on here was how I read that the name of the Bandon was recorded as a goddess. This was written in one of the first pieces of writing ever found on the island of Ireland, written in an alphabet called ogham. And if you have the luck to go into the British Museum in London sometime — that massive entrance hall which goes around in a circle — there’s an amazing ogham stone there, which was found in Dumnonia, which is now called Devon, which was put there by Irish migrants. So this was a script of its own, and it looks a little like cuneiform of its own kind.

And in County Kilkenny in Ireland was found an ogham stone which characterised the goddess of the river as Dea — dea, the same word in deus, and the same word in Jupiter, Zeus; the same word that is used in god, and deva, across the Indo-European family. And it was this realisation — that the same word, deva, used in India, was also used in Ireland, at a time when there was absolutely no chance of physical contact between the two places, and that it was important enough to be written down — that made me stop and think. But that’s just one of thousands of little elements in this story, which we will talk about.

Fermanagh, Monaghan, and the Manapii

The drumlin counties of Fermanagh and Monaghan wait to be walked, for the MN that saturates them — Monaghan, MN, and Fermanagh — laid down by the Manapii, a Belgic sea tribe who worshipped Manannán and left their name thick across the north. And when I went to Mons village, where this all began, in November 2021, that was Manapii country, where the Manapii reigned, just by the Manche. And so many of the MN names in Ireland, and indeed along the coast of the island of Britain, emanate from the Manapii tribe. So again, the MN reappears, not through some sort of magical influence — you can really find these historical moments. I look through the archives, and I find the people.

Like Mongan — this great researcher, who is now dead. He went to the sky. Dies: dead. He went to the sky — that’s what death really means; dies, it means going to the sky. So that concept that we have, of passing into another world. And Mongan wrote this great book, The Menapia Quest, which solved a lot of my questions — questions about how we ended up with so many MN sounds on the island of Ireland and in England, which persist. So Finding Manuland illuminates the ancient in the everyday — not just the places where we live, and think of, the places we love, but the language we speak. And learning that these emanate from this Belgic sea tribe, the Manapii, who worshipped Manannán, Ireland’s and Celtic culture’s founder figure — as well as Éremón, who was the first High King of all Ireland. Éremón: MN. Sounds very like Airyaman, whom we’ll get to in a bit. Just learning that the Manapii existed, which I didn’t know, and that they explain all these MN sounds in Ireland and Irish places — well, that doesn’t take away from the essential interest and mystery of it. But at the same time, it does provide a mechanical explanation for these places.

Ptolemy’s map of Ireland, drawn around 150 years into the Common Era, marks the first trading colony on the island — Manapia — on the Leinster coast. And there is a street sign in Wexford, whose name in Irish is Loch Gorman — the M-N in Gorman, Loch Gorman, Wexford — that remembers it. The same map names a headland in the south of Ulster, Isamnion, which one careful reading places at the Mourne — again MN — Mountains, MN, and renders, very tentatively, as the people of the underworld: an MN headland named for the dead, on my own coast. And I only learnt of it from a paper in my files.

The Broighter Gold and Arthur Evans: The Man Who Dug Up the MN King

One more Irish destination I owe to a man who never came here for it. In February 1896, two ploughmen at Broighter, on the flat reclaimed land below Lough Foyle in the north of the island of Ireland, struck first-century-before-the-Common-Era gold: a great collar, and a miniature ship, complete with oars, mast, and benches. The standing interpretation, argued all the way to a courtroom in 1903, is that the hoard was a votive offering sunk into the water for Manannán — his domain, MN in domain. Lough Foyle is, in Irish tradition — and in an old Irish colloquy, a mysterious youth, long identified with Manannán’s son Mongán, tells Colum Cille that Lough Foyle was once a flowering plain before the water came over it. Just like the steppe in Ukraine, from where these people came. The sea that is really a plain of flowers — the Immram Brain image — anchored on a shore. And I will stand on it with you, knowingly, because that makes the difference.

Mens rea: the intention, the intention in the mind, which is the element you need in English law to determine guilt for a crime, and for criminal liability — MN in criminal as well. The mens rea, the intention, of visiting these places with you, the listener, in mind.

And these stories now, and the connections between — for instance, this. The scholar who wrote up the Broighter Gold in 1897, arguing it was a deposit to the sea divinity, was Arthur Evans. A-R-T: Art, in Arthur — the same Arta, Rit, in the Behistun inscriptions, the same RT of one of the three cryptotypes which we’ll be talking about over the coming years and months. Three years later, he broke ground at Knossos, and gave the world the palace of Minos. So the discoverer of the palace of Minos also wrote up the offering of the collar to Manannán. The man who dug up the MN king of Crete wrote up the MN god first. And we’ll explore whether he even noticed that consonantal skeleton — MN in Minos and MN in Manannán — as so many of the other greats have missed. And I want to stand at Broighter with his paper in hand, and then go to the National Museum in Dublin again, and look at the little gold oars that Manannán was given to row with.

Manannán, the Isle of Man, and the Isle of Môn

Manannán is worth pausing on. He’s the preeminent deity of pre-Christian Ireland — not just some random figure. Sea lord and sovereign of the otherworld, son of Lir: that much is secure. What is genuinely open is the direction of his name — if the god is named for the Isle of Man, or for the Isle of Môn, which the English call Anglesey, but whose true name is the Isle of Môn. And that was where the Druids took their last stand against the invading Romans; two great battles were fought there by the Druids. And if the god is named for the Isle of Man, which stands between the island of Britain and the island of Ireland in the Irish Sea — if the Man is named for the Isle of Man, why is the MN in the Isle of Man? So maybe the Isle of Man is named for the Isle of Môn. No — but why is the MN in the Isle of Môn? And maybe it does go back to the Manapii. Maybe it does — but why are so many important places called MN?

What matters for the atlas is the plainer thing. When the old religion fell, the founder’s name did not — and Manannán survives. He survives. I can speak of him. Books are written about him. Every generation of Irish writers from the 8th century on, including me, has resurrected Manannán, the preeminent pre-Christian deity. We’re keeping it alive. We’re keeping that MN alive. And it survived in the written canon. And in the old tale, Manannán crossed the sea to father an historical king, Mongán — another MN — whose death the annals set down around 625. The founder outlived his own cult by living on in a story, just like this. That handoff is myth into history — a name, NM, kept when the belief around it dissolved.

Ours is a culture of layers, like a layer cake, and this is one of the layers. We will unpack the layers between today and 6,000 years ago, one after the other, after the other, after the other. In Finding Manuland we look at Christianity and other religions — Buddhism, Islam, and what people call paganism, or numenism. We look at the flamines, who were the priestly caste in Rome; and we look at the Brahmin — again, the MN in Brahmin and flamines — a priestly caste in India; and we look at the fir flathemon, a priestly caste in Ireland. And we look at the MN in all of them, and peel off these layers. And through learning about all of these different layers, we learn something a little more about ourselves, which we can bring into every time we notice we use an MN sound in our daily life — when we talk about a month, or a Monday.

This is the kind of historical handoff I’ve so far followed only on the page. There are papers waiting for us here, and they are among the atlas’s best: the House of Donn, where the monks had the address in writing; the Twins in Emain Macha’s own name; the maimed king; Mongán; the tribe that carried the name.

Britain: The Family’s Later Staging Ground

And Britain. Britain is the family’s later staging ground: Germanic mounds, law schools, the first lawgiver’s hill — lived in by me for years, mostly as a workplace rather than a pilgrimage. Now move your map a little east from Ireland, across the narrow sea, the Irish Sea, into an island — the island of Britain — which contains three of the Irish Sea states: Scotland, Wales (Cymru), and England. Britain I know as a place lived in rather than made pilgrimage to, and the sound turned up in it almost by accident. The island’s very name came from the Pretani, a Celtic tribe.

I stayed for months in a friend’s house in Devon while assembling a university application to Cambridge, where I would study Roman law, and drove down there after his death. Only later did I notice — in that period, the British Museum, the entrance hall that I told you about, this great round place: that is where I saw the ogham stone from Roman Dumnonia, and it carries the MN inside it. So there are imminences in words which don’t appear to carry MN — and you will maybe read my Menzies and Mother Matter post about that.

And I lived some years in East Anglia, the launch region of the Germanic settlement — the son of Mannus whose name is Ing, and the Ingaevones, who conquered the island of Britain and gave their name to the island, according to me. You won’t find that in the folk etymologies, which talk about people with blonde hair. But when you understand that Mannus — whose MN is in German, Germanic, German — Mannus, the founder of the Germanic peoples according to Tacitus, the Roman historian writing in the first century of the Common Era, had three sons: we will come across these manifestations of three sons in so many different places across Manuland. One of his three sons was Erman, MN; one was Ing; and the other was Ist. And it was the Ings — the people who worshipped the son of Mannus, Ing, who identified themselves as the Ingaevones — they were the ones who spread westwards from the Suffolk and Norfolk coasts across the island, giving their names. It’s the launch region of the Germanic settlement of Britain, and the core of England. That’s where the idea of England was invented.

And where I had the privilege of studying, at a college founded in 1350 by the Bishop of Norwich to train lawyers. And I recently went to see some of the earliest Saxon mounds — burial mounds — on the Suffolk–Essex border. These were raised by the Ingaevones, the coastal nation Tacitus derives from a son of Mannus, the Germanic first man.

Not all of the Britain ground is landscape; some of it is law. And it belongs here, because the whole adjudication side of this work was schooled in it. We flicker between geographies and concepts and ideas and knowledge, and also the methods we use to analyse this information — because we’re looking for Arta, and we’re looking for truth. And there are so many truths passed over during the 6,000 years that many of us, including myself, simply weren’t aware of. In that Cambridge law college, Trinity Hall, I studied Roman law and international law, and I worked afterwards as a property lawyer in London, where a small curiosity became a thread I later called Mana as a Gift.

Wandlebury Ring and the Gog Magog Hills: The Moonlight Challenge

And a few miles from those Cambridge lecture rooms stands a hill I have written about but never circled by night: Wandlebury Ring, in the Gog Magog Hills. Gog Magog: Magog, one of the sons of Japheth, son of Noah — and we’ll go into this again. If some of you have seen my Indo-European Imminence in Early Christianity paper, which I’ve recently written — we’ve already touched on it, but we’ll talk about all the different strands in it that demonstrate the imminence of Indo-European culture in the Holy Land at the time the Old Testament and the New Testament were written.

Evidence, for instance: we have written evidence from 1400 BCE, in the Amarna Letters found in Egypt, that the names, the monikers, of the monarchs of certain kingdoms in Judea and Canaan were Indo-European. So at Megiddo we have an Indaruta — that ND, giving their name to India, to Alexander, who reappears then in India. These are Indo-Europeans there. We have the Achaemenid Empire again — Darius, whom I just mentioned, who occupied Canaan for about 300 years. Then we have Alexander the Great — of course, Greek, Indo-European, coming there. Then we have a Roman occupation at the time Jesus dies, and the lingua franca then was Greek — the first scriptures written in Greek and in Roman script. And of course, even the trope of the first self-sacrificing king, who then founds a culture: that trope recurs everywhere from Ireland to India. In Ireland, in the form of Donn, who is one of the sons of Míl, who was the grandson of the monarch of Scythia, according to the medieval scribes. And he lands on Ireland with his brother Éremón — M-N in Éremón — and they conquer Ireland. They win against the Tuatha Dé Danann — D-N in Danann. And there, on the Hill of Tara, Amergin, the first judge of Ireland — the first, and one of the sons of Míl — decides.

Besides — well, we should go back beyond the ninth wave, which is reminiscent of that great album by Kate Bush. Listen to it tonight, if you’ve got access to Spotify or Apple Music. Beyond the ninth wave, which is how — before the Law of the Sea was passed, in whatever it was, 1967 — was determined, in the way modern international law determines, the limit of your jurisdiction. And Donn went beyond the ninth wave and made a very proud speech. But the Tuatha Dé Danann drove up a storm using magic, and Donn became the first self-sacrificing lord of death for the Irish.

And Gervase of Tilbury recorded Wandlebury’s legend: a warrior who rides into the ring at dead of night, in the Gog Magog Hills, by moonlight, and cries out a challenge that will be met by an otherworld horseman. Moonlight is not decoration — it’s the operative condition, the key that opens the door. The one site in Britain where the moon is written into the ritual instructions sits on a hill named for a giant of the island’s foundations. And I never went there — but we will go there, if we have enough time. Who knows how much time we have? So this is why it’s important to put this down, and speak this now, and write it — write it out in verse and in text and in words.

Three More MN and DN Surprises: Clackmannan, Anglesey, Doncaster

Britain holds three more MN and DN surprises I mean to collect. The smallest historic county in Scotland is named after a stone you can touch. And Scotland is named for the Irish who colonised it, the Scoti — which is my middle name, Scott. So I am named for the island I speak about, and where I was born, and where this journey began. And my people, we colonised Scotland, and gave the name to Scotland, and left the name Ireland on Ireland. And that’s a common theme, a common pattern which we’ll come across — just like the which-came-first: Isle of Man, or Manannán, or Isle of Môn; or Kayseri, near where the first Indo-European writing, from 1800 and 1900 BCE, was found in the village of Kültepe — Kayseri is named for Caesar. And so we have this switching of onomastic, toponymic names between people and places and things and ideas, and the MN travels between all of them.

And so Clackmannan is Clach Mhanann — the Stone of Manau — in Scotland, and the boulder itself is the Stone of Manau. The stone itself stands mounted beside the town Tolbooth, where the townsfolk raised it onto a plinth in 1833. Manau was the old district at the head of the Firth of Forth — the same territorial name the Isle of Man carries. And it’s the one place in Britain where the MN survives as a touchable stone — kaminnia, in Ukrainian: a touchable stone with a county wrapped around it.

Anglesey is the second, which I spoke about: Môn, the island of the Druids, the professional keepers of memorised law and lore — which I became an inheritor of, the Romanised version of it, when I went and read law at Cambridge. Whose destruction in 61, Tacitus describes, shore by shore. Many Irish will just think of Anglesey, the Isle of Môn, as somewhere we go through on the way to the ferry to cross the Irish Sea, to go home or to leave home — perhaps to emigrate from. Actually, the Isle of Môn plays a very important role in the occupation of Britain by the Romans, and the de-Celticisation of the island of Britain — which thankfully didn’t succeed, because we still have two Celtic states surrounding England, the Germanic state. And in the 1940s, a little lake there on the Isle of Môn — Llyn Cerrig Bach, excuse my pronunciation; forgive my pronunciation, and I hope we do have some Welsh listeners, because Manawydan is very important to this story — gave up more than 150 offerings thrown into the water across two centuries: chariot fittings and slave chains, plausibly the votive wealth of the Druid island Rome destroyed.

You will not find Rome eulogised in this podcast. This is not like the ancients, where we think the world began in Greece and Rome. Yes, they are great cultures, but they are just some of the great cultures in the land between Ireland and India, and we will explore each of them according to parity of esteem in Manuland. The island, the Isle of Môn, Anglesey, whose treasure went into the water.

And the third is hiding under a railway town: the Yorkshire Don, which carries the name Danu — the river name — as the Don of the Steppe, the Danube, the Dnipro, the Donets, where I worked from 2015 to 2018, three years, over the Donets River at Stanytsia Luhanska; and the Dnipro, the Dniester, the Danube. So the Don, the Yorkshire Don: Rome named its fort there for the river — Danum — after which my schooling, and Doncaster, the land it stands on, was named. So Doncaster is Britain’s own DN river signature — which came first, the fort or the river — and almost nobody says its name slowly enough to stop.

Tynwald Hill and Manawydan Country

From Britain, the road runs on to two places I’ve not yet reached, but mean to. On the Isle of Man stands Tynwald Hill — I was there as a child, but I hardly remember it — the open-air parliament, the MN in parliament, that still meets in the air on a mound. It’s a living version of the oldest idea in the Indo-European family: that the founder is also the first judge. The way Manu shades into the lawgiver, Morann mac Máin. And there is Manawydan country in Wales, where we will visit too, where the Celtic founder name is cleanest of all. Manawydan comes down by regular sound-law from the older Manawydion. That is the ground where the etymology can be shown at its tightest — and I’ve not walked it.

Closing

You’ve been listening to Finding Manuland. I’m Decoding Trolls. I write at powerofmana.net, where you can subscribe to my channel. My masterwork is disinfolklore.eu — disinfolklore, disinfolklore. I write daily on X, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Thank you for being with me. This is the first episode of the Atlas, overseeing the whole series of Finding Manuland that we’re beginning today. I hope you’ll come back for the next episode.

Continued:

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 Eneduana, 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 Nana, 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 MN sound is so common in the English language and Indo-European languages is that the MN 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 MN 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 MN sound. The first person who is appointed as a leader here is Menushur with an MN sound to replace the Armenians, who also have the MN 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 Eneduana 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 Zelensky 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 Diss and Folklore, 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 and what I write doesn’t change. It’s all on this theme of trying to recouple what is right in a moral sense and a legal sense, as defined by the post-World War II legal order. I aim to point out when what is not right is being promoted as being right by the far right, who have their anti-immigrant, anti-human rights rhetoric, pro-discrimination, etc.

From my perspective, the Finding Manuland project and visits like this in Ani to places which are, as you see there, just across is the watchtower. That’s Armenia, the state of Armenia.

One day, hopefully, this border will be open, and people will be able to flow freely again between these two countries, which have had such a complicated crisis history, hopefully sharing the heritage of the MN Sound.

Once Russia is finally defeated and stopped stirring the pot and provoking tumult, we can find a more harmonious means of communicating with Turkic language speakers, Indo-European language speakers, Armenians, Turks, and all the people living in Manuland and on the borders of Manuland because we see that we have more in common with each other. We’re more united. We’re united by this MN sound and by its emanation from the first Indo-European language speakers in Mykolaivka village in eastern Ukraine.

What I believe my hypothesis to be is the moon-based metaphorical semantic signaling system that they embedded in our language and which is still relevant today. As far as I can see, it’s quite embedded in the Turkic language-speaking community. We don’t really have written attestations of Turkic language until much later than Indo-European, maybe three millennia later.

We can certainly see its immanence in, for instance, Osman the Great. In just to hear saying Menesher was the first viceroy of Ani when they conquered it.

MN is everywhere in the Turkic language as well. I think we can use these commonalities to promote harmony between different peoples. That’s partly what my Finding Manuland project is about, and it’s completely consistent with my job as a writer.

I’m Decoding Trolls, speaking to you from a place in southern Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, near the city of Urfa, historically known as Edessa. Yesterday, I saw an inscription dedicating Roman-era columns to the king of Edessa, son of Manu. This inscription dates back to around the third century of the Common Era, confirming that I am in the right place at the right time.

In many ways, my journey to find Manuland has been leading up to this specific moment. I am about to visit a stone circle, the first of its kind discovered in human culture, which dates back around 10,000 years before the Common Era.

For those who have been following my explorations, you’ll recall that our story began with a stone circle uncovered in May 2021, just eight months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In the first chapter of Finding Manuland, I mentioned my travels in eastern France around November 2021, when I was returning to eastern Ukraine from my last leave before my forced retirement from my diplomatic career with the OSCE.

During that journey, I passed a warehouse named Manuland in eastern France, located in an agricultural machinery area. I had noticed the “MN” sound in various places over the years. Upon passing Manuland, I decided it was time to explore what this sound meant. The following morning, I ventured into the village of Maine, without a clear idea of what I was searching for or how to connect the MN sound to a project. I started my exploration at the church and, from there, moved in concentric circles around it. I then went for a run up the mountain and encountered a mound where a farmer was tending to his livestock.

What I discovered there was a method of exploration. Each episode of Finding Manuland integrates three core elements: the MN sound, the concept of exchanging energy deeply embedded in Indo-European languages; expanding our mental models of time and space; and iteratively exploring these ideas.

We began by considering ancient civilizations: Egypt, Greece, and Rome, recognizing how they relate to our current civilization. Recent evidence suggests that Indo-European languages originated in eastern Ukraine, specifically in Mykhailivka village, and spread from there across Europe to India, over a span of 6,000 years. This expansion has reshaped our understanding of space and time.

The third element involves using this iterative method for exploration, which has guided me from Maine village to here, to the cromlech in Novoalexandrivka—a posh suburb of Dnipro, where property developers attempted to build a luxury home on a burial mound from 3,500 years BCE. This site, associated with the Yamna culture, was discovered when developers, in their haste to research it, accidentally unearthed a stone circle built by the Sredni Stog culture, a precursor to the Yamna.

Yesterday, I visited Urfa and explored an impressive museum that showcased artifacts from Göbekli Tepe, including lifelike statues of animals and possibly stone gods.

I have previously discussed the anthropomorphic aspects of the stones in the Dnipro stone circle, and it was a privilege to see these artifacts, which had been buried by the first Indo-Europeans.

While traveling from Lake Van, where I sought Menua’s stables, I faced challenges in my journey.

The museum in Van contained numerous references to Menua, who held significant importance in the region. My travels took me through the historical Kura-Araxes culture, where inscriptions from both the Assyrians and Hittites can be found. Despite their different languages, the Mitanni worshipped Indo-European deities.

During my exploration, I also reflected on the unique aspects of the post-World War II legal order, emphasizing territorial integrity and defined borders—a contrast to the fluid borders of earlier human history. My journey through Urfa and Mardin has been eye-opening, especially in examining the MN sound and its connections to ancient deities such as Marduk.

Mardin, whose name may derive partly from Marduk, intrigued me as I observed its lights from a distance. This exploration challenges us to learn about areas and aspects of life we wouldn’t otherwise encounter. The connection between Lake Van and its Iranian counterpart, both saltwater lakes at high altitudes, draws parallels with the Dead Sea, which is the lowest point on Earth.

The relationship between these lakes is reflected in ancient stories, including the narrative of Noah’s Ark, which is said to have come to rest on the Ararat Mountains, near the region of Lake Van. Interestingly, state-of-the-art DNA analysis has revealed genetic links between ancient populations in this area and modern Jewish communities, reinforcing the interconnectedness of these regions.

In the context of Finding Manuland, we recognize that we are situated in a borderland that was once predominantly Indo-European. This area has witnessed the evolution of various cultures, including the Kurds, who still maintain ties to this ancient heritage. I am currently about 50 kilometers north of the Iraq border, with Edessa serving as a historical crossroads for various empires.

Göbekli Tepe is significant not only for its monumental structures but also as a site where the Indo-Europeans laid the groundwork for modern civilization. This connection is reflected in the ancient DNA evidence linking the Yamna culture, the early Indo-Europeans, to what we see today.

As I prepare to see Göbekli Tepe, I am excited about how this moment connects to my journey that began in Maine Village in November 2021. This exploration of the MN sound continues to unfold, revealing new insights as we embrace various mediums such as video and podcasting. I look forward to sharing more of this fascinating journey with you.

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So, I made it to Van. Amazingly. It’s an amazingly blue-sky day, and I’m climbing up to Van Castle. It looks like I’m the first person to climb up here today because, as you can see, there aren’t many footprints. There are no fresh footprints; I’m causing the only fresh ones around.

This fort was built around... well, people have lived here since 5000 BCE, but it’s of most interest to “Finding Manuland” because we’re in search of stables with an inscription down to and by Menua, who was the son of the founder of the Urartu Empire.

Some of us may remember from the Bible that Mount Ararat is where Noah’s Ark allegedly came to rest—or rather, the Ararat Mountains. This kingdom, Biainili (as they called themselves), which would later become Armenia and the capital of Armenia itself, is the center of what became the Urartu Empire. We’re interested in the truth, the complexity of history, and our ever-evolving mental models.

Our mental model of time really begins around 4100 BCE. The Urartu Empire was at its height 3,200 years after that. As you see, this majestic lake—I once saw it from an airplane, with twinkling lights around it and the blue sky. I first saw this fort last night in a massive snowstorm, actually. I couldn’t work it out because you could just see lights up on what looked like a cliff. I thought it was mountains, but actually, it is a promontory leading out. As you can see on both sides, it’s quite low.

We’re particularly interested in this place from a “Finding Manuland” perspective because the son of the first emperor was called Menua. Here, we’ll find an inscription to Menua, so we’re going to look for that. That “MN” sound in Menua’s name then went into Armenia—into the “MN” in Armenia. I’ve spoken about that before.

In 1856, Russia lost the first Crimean War and ceded what was then Armenia to what was then the Sublime Porte, which became the Ottoman Empire and subsequently the modern state of Turkey. The old city up here was occupied by the Russians in the First World War and destroyed by them. Wherever we go, we find destruction by the Russians. This is why, as a result of the “Second Crimean War” which is currently ongoing, we must do everything we can to ensure that this kind of destructiveness by this state never comes to pass again.

So, we’re going to look at the old city. We’re going to look for Menua’s inscription and the “MN” sound in a non-mythological founder of an Indo-European linguistic and cultural tradition: Menua.

Menua was a historical figure. I’ve seen his inscriptions in Yerevan, and I’ve written about them before in the Menua episode (which I’ll link underneath this). In the Indo-European traditions, we have many mythological founders: Manu in India, of course, and Mannus, the subject of that six-part series I made earlier this year. We also have Manawydan in Wales, a mythological founder, and Manannán, who probably was a historical figure but was the preeminent pre-Christian deity in Ireland—part of the Celtic Indo-European tradition. But Menua was a historical figure, the son of the first emperor of Urartu. It went from being a kingdom to an empire, ruling most of Anatolia.

This area of Anatolia—modern Turkey and Lake Van—is in fact the meeting point of many great empires. It’s part of Northern Mesopotamia, the interaction zone between Babylon, Akkadian, and Ur (which is down in Iraq). But here in Northern Mesopotamia, around where writing first emerged in cuneiform text, we’re going to see some inscriptions in cuneiform.

We also had the Kura-Araxes culture, which was founded in modern Armenia and lasted from about 3500 BCE to around 2000 BCE. At that same time, Assyria is at its height; Babylon is at its height. They’re coming into this area and leaving the remnants of their writing. We also see traces of Kanesh, where the first Indo-European writing was found, which I’ve visited and spoken about before.

Then we have:

* The Hittite Empire: Rules this area from about 1600 BCE to 1200 BCE.

* Urartu: At its height from 800 to 500 BCE.

* The Achaemenid Empire: Darius the Great, who we’ll talk about again—very important in Iran. Today, protests are going on in Iran; we’ll see if the mullahs leave, then I can visit there, God willing.

The Achaemenid Empire dissolves when Darius’s descendants die and Alexander (the so-called Great) takes over. Then comes the great Armenian Empire, which was at its height in terms of land, controlling most of Anatolia all the way to the Levant around 50 BCE. Now, the modern state of Armenia is on 29,000 square kilometers, again having been betrayed by the Russians.

And now we have the Ottoman Empire, and the Kurds are here—Indo-Europeans as well in this area. So what we have here is an amazing interaction zone and Lake Van, an absolutely stunning place.

I’m going to leave it at that for the moment, and we’re going to look for Menua’s stables.

Recall who Menua is:

Who was Menua?

Finding Manuland XVI: M-N- sound in Armenia and Ireland’s first monarchs’ moniker.

Recently I drove by the source of one of the rivers of Babylon: the Euphrates. Menua (790 BCE to 775 BCE) was the third monarch to rule the Biblical era Van / Ararat / Urartu / Bianili kingdom, whose successor state two millennia later is Armenia…

Read on at: https://www.powerofmana.net/p/who-was-menua

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