Finding Manuland

The gods before the Veda So, we go to the crossroads, in the middle of the second millennium before the common era. The great power of upper Mesopotamia was a kingdom called Mitanni. The M-N- is in Mitanni. Its people spoke Hurrian, a tongue that is, as the handbooks put it, “neither Indo-European nor Semitic.” But the Mitanni kingdom was ruled, and this is the thing, by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy....

The first of the Atlas journeys I introduced you to the Atlas series of Finding Manuland in five podcasts , published over the last while. This is the very first of the Atlas journeys proper. I saved one of the best for it. Radiating out of this one is a series of pathways through the Anatolian side of Manuland. We will use them to show the method, the linguistics and the organising focus for the...

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...

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 t...

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 per...

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, carryi...

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 ever...

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 cours...

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 wal...

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 E...

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 t...

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 Man...

Menua, son of the founder of the Urartian Empire, once lived on the lakeside at Tushpa, whose modern name is Van (Türkiye). Tushpa / Van is the meeting place of many great empires Kura-Araxes, Hittite (Indo-European), Mitanni (Indo-Europeanish), Babylon/Mesopotamian/Assyrian, Urartu, Armenian (Indo-European), Achmænaid (Indo-European) and now, I guess, mainly Kurd (Indo-European) and Turkish! Toda...

Poem of Amergin, Celtic Ireland’s first poet-judge, sacrificing first Monarch and brother of self-sacrificing Donn (who features in much in my work) put to music and video by Arnold Hensman. Reading by Daniella Hensman. Filmed at Newgrange, Ireland. Music: Walking on Clouds, by Tea Time, (ShutterStock Music). This poem by Amergin, preserved in the Book of Leinster and the Book of the Taking of Ire...

My favourite subject, and it all begins in Kherson — whether it’s the UN Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Ukraine or the Yamnaya community. A relatively small number of individuals created the language, the linguistic structures, the words we use in almost every sentence, the religions, the soul’s immanence in many Indo-European religions, including what I would characterise as Christianity...

As some of you might remember, I studied law. I worked as a property lawyer in London for a little while. One of the features in English law is this idea that sometimes, for whatever reason, commercial property is let at a peppercorn rent. Generally speaking, in this day and age, no peppercorn passes between the landlord and the person who’s leasing the property. It’s in all the leases. So that wa...

M-N- sound appears to have many of the same meanings in Turkic as well as in Indo-European languages (Manas is the mythological founder of Turkic Kirghiz culture, Zaman signifies time in Turkish, for example). M-N- might therefore be Turkic rather than of Indo-European origins. Especially where its meanings and immanence’s hover around the same Moon-based metaphorical semantic signalling system of...

This Indo-European, ancient Ukrainian ancestry is in us. When coupled with all of these similarities in the mythological record — and particularly, in the context of today’s episode, MN in Manu and Mannus — we can be very sure that these are separate vectors of evidence all pointing to the same conclusion: that we all come from this Yamnaya community in southern Ukraine in some meaningful sense. I...

The sun god Sūrya — and his mother has an MN sound in her name, which is amazing. Saraṇyū is her name, and she is of Tvaṣṭṛ, which is interesting as well. We’ve got Tuisto in the Germanic and Tvaṣṭṛ in the Indic. She and the sun have three children. There are stories about how she got really hot from being burnt by the sun — a play on words which transmits and transfers between languages and meani...

So you see what I'm trying to do there. I'm expanding our mental models of time from 4100 BCE when Tamana's ancestors left ancient Ukraine to 2000 years later when Tamana's name appears in one of the first texts. The first times Indo-European language is written down in Ankira, sorry, in Kanesh, but then I see it in 2025. So it's written down between 1900 BCE and 1800 BCE in Kanesh, in ancient Ana...

So the Ingaevones, this is the ancestors who then became the English, comes from Ing, who corresponds to the Old Norse god Ingvi, Freyr. And Freyr is actually a pre-Indo-European remnant, we believe. So in this tripartite structure I talked about where we have sovereign, soldier (so sovereign representing, you know, the monarch, the magical aspect of sovereignty, (which is all of the mystical, myt...

So this is the second part of the “Manu or Mannus: Which Came First?” I've decided to try and do these recordings in shorter elements. Then like a Netflix (where they issue the whole series at once)… But instead of issuing a whole series of ten one-hour-long shows, these are going to be much shorter. Then you can decide whether you listen to them all together. So Manu or Mannus… This episode, like...

Here in the manner of a Netflix season, I’m going to drop all six episodes in this ‘Mannus or Manu’ season in one go. Then, on PowerofMana.net or Spotify or Apple Podcasts (search for ‘Finding Manuland’ and subscribe!!), you can binge listen, or eke out listening as you might savour a fine wine. Germany or India: Which came first? Let’s use the Finding Manuland method to see which of these two gre...

⚡️ Kherson today is the future of EVERY single European city. Russians safari hunting individuals with armed drones. This future’s out there, thanks to Zarina Zabrisky reporting. It’s just not evenly distributed. Yet. Killing people going about their daily business every day, on every street. What did you do to halt this inevitable future being realised? @ZarinaZabrisky has been cataloguing this...

Hi there, I’m Decoding Trolls. Welcome to Finding Manuland. This is the “Archetypes” episode. When we are thinking about transforming our own mental models—our entire conception of human culture in our minds—this is hopefully really why you are going to be interested in Finding Manuland. Obviously, you may not accept everything I say, or you may Google it and go, “Oh, maybe this or maybe that,” bu...